Dr David Starkey CBE FSA FRHistS

David Starkey is one of our leading Tudor historians, and the presenter of numerous TV history documentaries. The author of many bestselling books, including Henry: Virtuous Prince (2008), Crown and Country (2010) and Henry: Model of a Tyrant (2016), he is currently completing a study on the royal finances of Henry VII.

Not Quite a Saint: Henry VI and the Early Tudors

To judge from the number of surviving pilgrims’ badges, the most popular miracle-working ‘saint’ in the decades immediately before the Reformation was not Thomas Becket but Henry of Windsor a.k.a. the murdered King Henry VI. But Henry’s popular status as a saint was never confirmed by formal canonisation. This lecture shows how his path to sainthood, apparently certain when his ‘nephew’, Henry VII became king, lost its way amid doubts about his political utility to the Tudors, the bitter rivalry between Windsor and Westminster as the cultic centre of monarchy and a brilliant, left-field coup by John Fisher which transferred Henry VII’s devotion to his uncle from Westminster to Cambridge and the completion of the chapel of King’s College which Henry VI had founded.