On this day in 1536, Henry VIII suffered a significant fall during a jousting tournament held at Greenwich Palace.

Henry VIII was a lifelong sports enthusiast, dedicating much of his time to physical activities – until his later years, when obesity and leg injuries began to take their toll (the latter being the focus of this post). It came as no surprise, then, that he participated in the January 1536 jousting tournament. At 44 years old and married to his second wife, the pregnant Anne Boleyn, Henry was still keen to remain as active as possible.

This tournament, however, proved to be a fateful day for the King. During one of the jousts, Henry was struck by his opponent and thrown from his horse. To make matters worse, his horse fell on top of him. The accident resulted in a leg wound that would plague him for the rest of his life.

One of the most persistent misconceptions surrounding this incident is that Henry suffered a head injury and subsequent brain damage, transforming him into the tyrant who would later execute two of his wives. However, primary sources do not support this theory. For example, Eustace Chapuys, the Spanish ambassador, recorded:

“On the eve of the Conversion of St. Paul, the King being mounted on a great horse to run at the lists, both fell so heavily that every one thought it was a miracle he was not killed, but he sustained no injury“¹

As the Spanish ambassador, Chapuys was expected to provide accurate and detailed reports to the Emperor. His account makes no mention of a head injury or the two-hour loss of consciousness that has become a popular myth. Instead, it is far more likely that the fall aggravated an existing leg wound, leading to an ulcer that caused Henry ongoing pain and difficulty for the rest of his life. Chapuys may have omitted this detail simply because it was not a new injury; Henry had long suffered from issues with his legs.²

Another valuable account of the incident comes from Charles Wriothesley, who wrote:

“Three daies before Candlemas, Queene Anne was brought a bedd and delivered of a man chield, as it was said, afore her tyme, for she said that she had reckoned herself at that tyme but fiftene weekes gonne with chield; it was said she tooke a fright, for the King ranne that tyme at the ring and had a fall from his horse, but he had no hurt; and she tooke such a fright withall that it caused her to fall in travaile, and so was delivered afore her full tyme, which was a great discompfort to all this realme.”³

In my opinion, Wriothesley’s account is particularly significant. It reaffirms that Henry suffered no major injury, further debunking the idea that this incident marked a dramatic shift in his personality. Instead, it suggests that the person most affected by this event was Anne Boleyn. According to Wriothesley, Anne miscarried a baby boy, possibly due to the shock of Henry’s fall. Tragically, this would be Anne’s last pregnancy – though, of course, she could not have foreseen this at the time.

It is often suggested that Henry’s supposed head injury, combined with Anne’s miscarriage of “her saviour,” directly led to her downfall just months later.⁴ While I plan to explore Anne’s fall from grace in greater detail in the lead-up to the anniversary of her execution, I will say this: Henry’s jousting accident and Anne’s miscarriage did not, in my opinion, mark the beginning of the end for her. We know that Henry remained committed to Anne as late as April 1536. However, I do believe that the ulcerated leg he sustained contributed to his increasingly short temper, amplifying his already volatile nature and potentially leading to the rash decisions that defined the later years of his reign.

1. ‘Henry VIII: January 1536, 26-31’, in Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Henry VIII, Volume 10, January-June 1536. Edited by James Gairdner( London, 1887), British History Online, https://www.british-history.ac.uk/letters-papers-hen8/vol10/pp64-81. ↩︎
2. Chalmers, C R, and E J Chaloner. “500 years later: Henry VIII, leg ulcers and the course of history.” Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine vol. 102,12 (2009): 514-7. doi:10.1258/jrsm.2009.090286 ↩︎
3. Wriothesley, Charles. A chronicle of England during the reigns of the Tudors, from A.D. 1485 to 1559, p33 ↩︎
4. Neale, John E. Queen Elizabeth I, p. 13 ↩︎