Henry VIII’s Wives

Here’s a review of Ant­o­nia Fraser’s The Wives of Henry VIII (there also seems to be an updated ver­sion, The Six Wives of Henry VIII (Women in His­tory)), which the book­club picked, par­tially because I’d read it before and thought it was inter­est­ing, par­tially because most of the book­club mem­bers knew a little about that peri­od but not much and wanted to learn more, and par­tially because one book­club mem­ber will read any­thing and everything about the Tudors. Every­one enjoyed the book, but with some caveats.

To go with it, I read Alis­on Weir’s Henry VIII: The King and His Court. Read­ing both books at much the same time was good, I found they com­ple­men­ted each oth­er and helped me under­stand more of what was going on.

The Henry VIII book mostly con­cen­trates on the King him­self, what he was like as a young man (incred­ibly gif­ted, hand­some, and strong, if the records are all to be believed), how the court func­tioned, what all the people around the King were meant to do, how much things cost, what the fash­ions of the time were. It then goes into the King’s life, and how, to quote Alis­on Weir, Henry began his reign in a medi­aev­al king­dom, he ended it in a mod­ern state. I found the first part of the book to be the most inter­est­ing, per­haps because I got rather lost with all the people who kept chan­ging names as they were pro­moted and demoted, and the King him­self became less sym­path­et­ic as he became more dic­tat­ori­al and averse to being crossed.

The Wives book (and Alis­on Weir has also writ­ten one on that sub­ject, which I haven’t read) con­cen­trates on the wives them­selves, their per­son­al­it­ies and their his­tor­ies. Ant­o­nia Fraser, unlike Alis­on Weir, gen­er­ally uses the same name to describe the same per­son through the book, which makes fol­low­ing along who did what when much easi­er. I also found her fam­ily trees to be of more use. She brings up a lot of inter­est­ing points about the expect­a­tions placed on women in those times, that people genu­inely believed that Henry ruled by divine right (which makes it easi­er to under­stand some of what happened), and that Henry towards the end of his life was driv­en by the need for a male heir (iron­ic­ally) and saw his daugh­ters, just like his sis­ter, as pawns to be used to prop up his king­dom by means of alli­ances. Even though Henry saw that his own mar­riages should also be use­ful (polit­ic­ally and reli­giously), he had a great tal­ent for con­vin­cing him­self that God wanted him to do what he wanted to do any­way and thus he could always con­vince him­self that the woman who cur­rently attrac­ted him was the one he had to marry.

It’s inter­est­ing to note the dif­fer­ences in the books. Alis­on Weir is obvi­ously a fan of Cath­er­ine of Aragon, and does­n’t much like Anne Boleyn. Ant­o­nia Fraser is sym­path­et­ic to Cath­er­ine, but seems to admire Anne, des­pite her sharp tongue and lack of dis­cre­tion. They both sym­path­ize with Henry’s pre­dic­a­ment, though not with how he chose to solve it.

The main prob­lem with both books is that there is a lot of detail, and they mostly seem to be aimed at an audi­ence that already knows some­thing of the era and the people involved. So those of us who did­n’t study his­tory at school in Eng­land are at a bit of a dis­ad­vant­age. Over­all, how­ever, both books are worth read­ing, you might just need to have some ref­er­ence mater­i­al at hand (or be pre­pared to skim a bit in the long con­fus­ing passages).