Six Wives

Family Trees vii 

Introduction
x

HENRY'S WEDDINGS
1

PART ONE: QUEEN CATHERINE OF ARAGON

1. Parents: a power couple 11

2. Education for power 15

3. Power weddings 18

4. England 21

5. Negotiations 24

6. Arthur 26

7. Preparations 28

8. Delays 31

9. Dogma 33

10. The journey 38

11. Arrival 40

12. Meeting 44

13. Hubris 48

14. London 52

15. Wedding and bedding 58

16. The morning after 62

17. Nemesis 73

18. A new marriage? 79

19. Hard times 87

20. Harder times 93

21. Hope and despair 99

22. Queen 106

23. Honeymoon 114

24. A son 120

25. War 123

26. Regent 135

27. The breach with Spain 149

28. The quest for an heir 155

29. On the shelf 160

30. Mary 164

31. Marrying Mary 179

PART TWO: RIVAL QUEENS

Divorcing Catherine

32. The preliminaries 197

33. Trial in secret 205

34. Between trials 212

35. The legate 221

36. The Brief 225

37. Trial in open court 232

38. The aftermath 248

Anne Boleyn

39. Beginnings 257

40. Debut 264

41. Henry in love 278

42. Sole mistress 284

43. Henry and Anne: 'Our Matter' 285

44. Mistress and Minister 294

45. Anne's envoy 304

46. Wolsey reascendant 313

47. Co-operation? 317

48. Wolsey's triumph 325

49. The sweat 330

50. Turning point 335 

51. Disillusionment 339

52. Wolsey's fall 355

53. Injurious remedies 367

54. Cranmer 384

55. The Royal Supremacy 408

56. Wolsey's end 421

57. Attacking Catherine 433

58. Preliminaries to marriage 445

59. Anne's marriage 462

60. Archbishop 467

61. Divorce Absolute 477

62. Coronation 489

63. Christening 503

64. Resistance 510

65. Hearts and minds 524

66. The death of Catherine of Aragon 541

67. Reaction 549

68. Fall 554

69. The Tower 569

Jane Seymour

70. She stoops to conquer? 584

PART THREE: THE LATER QUEENS

71.
A Conversation
611

Anne of Cleves

72. From Queen to sister 617

Catherine Howard

73. 'Virtuous and good behaviour'? 644

74.
Interlude 
685

Catherine Parr

75. A courtier's daughter 690

76. Queen Catherine 711

77. Queen Regent 731

78. The test 752

Notes 766
Index 819
About the Author
Other Books by David Starkey

Cover Copyright

About the Publisher

I have put all English names, including Catherine, into their modern form. I have anglicised French ones (on grounds of familiarity) and put those in all other languages into their modern form in the relevant language (Juana and Juan and Sebastiano). Foreign titles (Duke, Archduke, Commander) are also anglicised. A few names, such as Ferdinand of Aragon and Catherine of Aragon, have breached the rules, once again on grounds of familiarity.

David Starkey

T
he Six Wives of Henry VIII is one of the world's great stories: indeed, it contains a whole world of literature within itself. It is more far-fetched than any soap opera; as sexy and violent as any tabloid; and darker and more disturbing than the legend of Bluebeard. It is both a great love story and a supreme political thriller.

    It also has an incomparable cast of characters, with a male lead who begins as Prince Charming and ends as a Bloated Monster with a face like a Humpty-Dumpty of Nightmare. While, among the women (at least as conventionally told), there is almost the full range of female stereotypes: the Saint, the Schemer, the Doormat, the Dim Fat Girl, the Sexy Teenager and the Bluestocking.

    Finally, it evokes, like the best historical novels, the peculiarities of the behaviour and mind-set of another age – the quirks of sixteenthcentury etiquette and love-making; the intricacies and passions of religious faith and practice; the finer points of heraldry, genealogy and precedence; the gleaming stiffness of cloth of gold and the unclean roughness of the hair shirt. But it also touches the timeless universals of love and honour and betrayal and death.

    What is strangest of all, it is true.

* * *

    Once, historians – who imagined that England was somehow 'naturally Protestant' – thought there were profound social and religious reasons for the change. It is now clear there were none. Instead, it came about only because Henry loved Anne Boleyn and could get her no other way. And he stuck to what he had done, partly because it tickled his vanity, but also because no succeeding wife was able to persuade him out of it.

* * *

It is, of course, a story that has often been told before. It was given its classic shape as long ago as the nineteenth century by Agnes Strickland in her immensely influential
Lives of the Queens of England.
Within this vast work, the number and importance of the Queens of Henry VIII made them, as Strickland herself recognised, virtually a book within a book. Strickland's historical discoveries were equally important. She used all available printed sources. She charmed (she was very pretty, especially for a scholar) her way into the national archives of both Britain and France. And, unlike the male historians of her time and long after, she realised the importance of cultural history and made effective use of buildings, paintings, literature and the history of manners.

    The result was that she invented, more or less single-handedly, the female biographer as a distinctive literary figure, and established the lives of women as a proper literary subject.

    It is a formidable achievement. But there is almost as great a drawback to Strickland's work. For she was undiscriminating and credulous and, as a true daughter of the Romantic Era, loved a legend – the more sentimental and doom-laden the better. Such stuff seeps through her pages like a virus. Like a virus, it risks corrupting the whole. And, like a virus again, it has proved almost impossible to get rid of – with consequences that linger to the present.

    Everyone 'knows', for instance, that Catherine Parr, Henry's last Queen, acted as nurse to her increasingly lame and sickly royal husband. But there is no mention of this fact in the earlier, classic characterisations of the Queen. Herbert in the seventeenth century focuses on her age – she had 'some maturity of years' – and Burnet in the eighteenth on her religion – she was 'a secret favourer of the Reformation'. But neither mentions her supposed nursing skills. The first to do so, indeed, seems to be Strickland herself, who paints a bold and vivid picture of Catherine as a Tudor Florence Nightingale. She was 'the most patient and skilful of nurses', Strickland claims, and she 'shrank not from any office, however humble, whereby she could afford mitigation to the sufferings of her royal husband'. 'It is recorded of her', Strickland continues, warming to her theme, 'that she would remain for hours on her knees beside him, applying fomentations and other palliatives to his ulcerated leg.'
¹

    But curiously, despite the claim to evidential support, Strickland cites no sources. And, in fact, there are none. Instead, the idea of Catherine as her husband's nurse is a fiction and rests on a wholly anachronistic view of the relations of sixteenth-century Kings and Queens. Henry had male doctors, surgeons, apothecaries and body servants. There was no need for his wife to act as nurse. Indeed the notion would have been regarded as absurd, even indecent.

    But that has not stopped modern historians. To a man and a woman, they have repeated Strickland, and they have sought to go one better by finding evidence. Their search has turned up the accounts of Catherine's apothecary for 1543. These indeed note innumerable 'fomentations and palliatives'. But they were all for Catherine herself or for members of her Household. Henry's name, however, despite the explicit assertion of Neville Williams, does not appear.
²

    Strickland's power is therefore considerable: it turns assertion into fact and makes respectable scholars see things.

* * *

    Nor was this book intended to be any more ambitious. I had a few new points to make. But I thought I could fit them into a short, vivid retelling of the familiar story.

    It was only once I began work that I realised I had to start from scratch. For, as I wrote, the conventional story started to come apart in my hands. The result is the present book: which is both very big (which my publishers have come to love) and very late (which gave them many a headache).