Jack Scarisbrick RIP

Academic and biographer of Henry VIII who led a reappraisal of the English Reformation and went on to form the anti-abortion charity Life, dies aged 97

Wednesday 20 May 2026, 5.00pm, The Times

Jack Scarisbrick had overturned 400 years of Protestant “Whig” history with some success, so reversing the recently enacted Abortion Bill might have seemed doable when he founded the charity Life in 1970.

The perception that Scarisbrick was redirecting his energies into the anti-abortion cause resulted in disquiet at the academic high tables where he was regarded as a rising star. The young historian had, after all, written a bestselling and acclaimed biography of Henry VIII in 1968.

“History is written by the victors,” so said Sir Winston Churchill (though the quote is thought to be apocryphal). Churchill’s own histories of the English-speaking peoples did little to dispel the Whig Protestant consensus. On that basis, the English Reformation had largely been framed as an inevitable part of the country’s evolution into a modern state that was welcomed by the people at large.

Henry VIII was merely circumstantial to forces already profoundly changing the religious order across Europe. Scarisbrick challenged this view, leaning on the theory that force of personality could change history. He argued that the people by and large remained loyal to the old faith and abided by it piously. Change was wreaked by a tyrant who was led by his passions and manipulated by his ministers and supporters, who stood to gain materially from the dissolution of the monasteries and the apportioning of their extensive lands.

Pope John Paul II shaking hands with Jack Scarisbrick and Beth Gray.
Scarisbrick and his wife Nuala meeting Pope John Paul II in 1978
Historians hailed the 1968 book for its rigorous research, elegant and readable prose that presented the king as a far more complicated and calculating figure who acted on his own agency. The Tudor historian David Loades called Henry VIII a “magisterial biography that has stood the test of time and other scholarship remarkably well”.

A devout Catholic, he had been profoundly impacted by the birth of his first daughter in 1966 “and realising that child had been a reality, a human being, for nine months before I actually held her in my arms”. When abortion was legalised in the UK a year later, he found David Steel’s bill “intellectually contemptible”.

Yet he thought an anti-abortion movement that was merely negative and shrill equally contemptible. “It’s so easy just to say ‘thou shalt not.’ … It’s got to be able to always show that it’s a loving, positive thing and not judgmental, not sanctimonious, not on a high horse, but actually out there, rolling up their sleeves and helping people.”

Two years after Henry VIII made him one of the most sought-after historians in Britain, Scarisbrick co-launched Life with his wife Nuala and began to be regarded with a degree of bemusement by other scholars. “They never said I was wasting my talents to my face but I think they would say it behind my back,” Scarisbrick told the Catholic Herald in 2007. Thereafter, he felt like a slight embarrassment. “I was tolerated, seen as a nice chap in many respects, but with this strange bee in his bonnet. You know, that’s his little oddness.”

While serving as professor of history at the University of Warwick, he had turned the family home in Leamington Spa into a crisis pregnancy centre — four expectant mothers, who had been abandoned by their families and boyfriends and might otherwise have had abortions, lived with him and Nuala. Over the course of several weeks Scarisbrick caused a stir at a local maternity hospital in the Warwickshire town by turning up at a ward and presenting flowers to four young women with a newborn babe in arms. “The matron [of the hospital] thought I was the stallion of Leamington,” recalled Scarisbrick, somewhat amused. Over the next five decades the couple would help some 12,000 women in crisis pregnancy to keep their babies.

His wife’s pregnancy at a very inconvenient time of their life had given the couple empathy for women in “trouble”. “We were due to go to a teaching post in America. All these plans [were] in turmoil when we discovered [that Nuala was pregnant]. I realised how easy it was to panic … people were saying we could just quietly get rid of it.”

Instead, the Scarisbricks set up a counselling service inspired by the Samaritans and developed a network of supported accommodation for expectant mothers across Britain. The group would give talks in schools on pregnancy, human dignity and respect for human life, reaching an estimated 50,000 children a year.

While his wife looked after the day-to-day running of Life, Scarisbrick kept up his scholarship. His book The Reformation and the English People (1984) furthered his argument that “the people did not want the Reformation and were slow to accept it”. And while he did not discount “serious weaknesses” in the church, including various abuses, and he acknowledged the fact that there were some people who read the newly translated Bible in English and embraced the reforms of Martin Luther, he argued that they were not many at the time of the Reformation.

Scarisbrick cited the Pilgrimage of Grace, a popular revolt against Henry VIII’s founding of the Church of England and the dissolution of the monasteries. The rising spread from Yorkshire to Cumberland, Northumberland, Durham and north Lancashire before it was bloodily suppressed in 1537 and its leaders executed for treason. Other historians characterised it as a Spanish plot. Scarisbrick called it “the largest rebellion in English history”.

Reviewing the work in the London Review of Books, Peter Gwyn wrote: “Scarisbrick’s book puts a bomb under this by now rather complacent view of the English Reformation. What it argues — for the most part successfully — is that the Reformation was disliked by the vast majority of the English people, and strongly resisted by all manner of them in all manner of ways, though in the end the power of the state was too great for them.”

The book exemplified Catholic revisionism, a growing academic movement that would be taken up by Professor Eamon Duffy among others and would lead to a more balanced historiographical representation of the subject.

John Joseph Scarisbrick was born in London in 1928, the youngest of five children to a father who had lost a leg in the First World War and died of longstanding shrapnel wounds when Jack was five. Three uncles had been killed and another three badly wounded. The Great War “hung like a pall over the whole family,” he later recalled. Hearing one of the priests at John Fisher School in Purley (now in south London) talk about the war inspired his love of history.

After two years of National Service in the Royal Air Force he read history at Christ’s College, Cambridge, under its regius professor of modern history, the Benedictine monk Dom David Knowles, whom he described as a “spellbinder”. He also studied under JH Plumb and Geoffrey Elton — Elton championed Thomas Cromwell as a brilliant administrator who created the modern state, and portrayed Sir Thomas More, the lord chancellor executed in 1535 for refusing to take the oath of supremacy recognising Henry VIII as the head of the Church of England, in a much more unfavourable light.

After completing his doctorate in 1955 Scarisbrick taught history at Queen Mary College, London, for 13 years, writing his magnum opus Henry VIII over eight of them. In 1969 he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and became professor of history at the University of Warwick in the same year.

In later years Scarisbrick focused his historical research on the colonisation of Africa, the history of the slave trade and Jesuit missionary history. As Life grew it developed a campaigning wing, helping to organise a two million-signature petition against the use of human embryos for stem cell research and cloning in 1985, but failing to prevent the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority in 1990. Indeed, critics said that he undermined such campaigns with increasingly intemperate interventions. “His style was, at times, abrasive,” wrote the Catholic Herald. “Even sympathisers conceded that his rhetoric could be absolutist and his temper quick. He was capable of describing opponents as ‘idiots’ or ‘buffoons’, and critics argued that Life never fully escaped its largely Catholic and evangelical base.”

In 1995, a year after he retired from Warwick University, Scarisbrick founded Zoe’s Place Hospice, providing palliative, respite, and end-of-life care to babies and infants aged from birth to five years suffering from life-limiting or life-threatening conditions. He was appointed MBE for his services to vulnerable people in 2015. His wife, whom he married in 1965, died in 2021. He is survived by their two daughters.

On first acquaintance the tall and rosy-cheeked Scarisbrick was a modest and kindly figure but he never compromised on his anti-abortion beliefs, even though they clearly made him old-fashioned and seemingly out of step. “It is a very strange thing, which I have puzzled over for a long time,” he once said. “How is it that the lefty-liberal ethos has won over the universities? The products of this culture are now in high places: in the judiciary and the media, especially the BBC. It requires heroic courage to stand out against it.”

He retired as chairman of Life in 2017 after 47 years of service. “I think there is a deep sense of justice still lurking in the human being. We are creatures who have a response to the transcendent moral law; and a society which professes human rights is living a lie if it denies the fundamental right to life.”

Jack Scarisbrick MBE, historian and co-founder of Life, was born on October 6, 1928. He died on February 28, 2026, aged 97