Lately I’ve been reading David Starkey’s newish book on the wives of Henry VIII, inspired, of course, by the trashy Tudors series playing on Showtime. David Starkey is one of the best living historians in Britain, as far as I’m concerned; he’s done many books on the Renaissance and he knows what he’s doing. Here he claims to have unearthed new letters overlooked by centuries of scholarship: a letter from Catherine of Aragon, for example, lying about the date of her miscarriage in order to fake her pregnancy for a few more valuable months with Henry. Catherine, Starkey argues, was not the saint she’s been made out to be, but rather a savvy politician who knew how to manipulate her way around court. And while we're on that subject, Starkey scoffs that she most certainly had intercourse with her first husband, Henry’s older brother, despite her lifelong protestations to the contrary. (Because, well, why wouldn't she?) There’s lots of new evidence about Anne Boleyn, too, whose betrothal to Lord Percy was not annulled before her relationship with Henry, as famously claimed, but almost definitely consummated. All good stuff.
The driving question for me with Henry has always been why he beheaded Anne. What makes a man turn so violently and with such hatred on the woman who by all accounts was the great passion of his life? I’m not sure Starkey has an answer for that one. But he has a good one for Henry’s many marriages: “Henry,” he says, “took [marriage] too seriously….Like us, he expected marriage to make him happy, rather than merely content, which is the most that sensible people hope for.”
Love that anti-heterosexual last line there. But then, Starkey is famous for his dismissively rude remarks. It’s what makes reading him fun.
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