In a Tudor Frame of Mind

[bibliogramma]

The Six Wives of Henry VIII, Alison Weir

I have a fascination with the Tudor and Elizabethan periods of English history. And I know I’m not alone in that. You only have to look at all the film and TV treatments of various key periods and people of the period to know that I’m far from the only one to obsess over this particular time and place.

However, while I’ve read a fair amount about the real Elizabeth I (as opposed to the various dramatic and fictionalised versions of her), I haven’t been quite so drawn to the more scholarly views of Henry VIII’s court until now. A recent re-viewing of the 1970 BBC miniseries about Henry VIII and his many wives made me want to dig a little deeper into the reality behind the various depictions of Henry’s women – Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves, Catherine Howard and Catherine Parr.

Weir’s book seems an excellent place to begin. Covering the lives of all six women – and of Henry himself in relation to them and to his dynastic ambitions - The Six Wives of Henry VIII provides well-researched pictures of each woman, her family and upbringing, the circumstances that brought to into Henry’s life, the nature of her relationship with the king and with other political and religious figures, the end of her marriage, and for the few who survived life with Henry (Anne of Cleves and Catherine Parr), their own later years.

One thing that I liked about Weir’s take on these women was her willingness to look at them as people who were trapped by the limitations placed on any woman, and especially on women of politically significant families, whether royal or noble, how this affected all of them, and most notably those – Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn and Catherine Parr –with extraordinary gifts of intellect and, in the case of Catherine of Aragon, leadership.

I suspect that one of these days I’ll follow up with a few more historical interpretations of the lives of these women (I’m particularly interested in an alternative view of Catherine Howard, who has always seemed, to me, to have had the worst reputation and the least defense), but this has certainly been an excellent and entertaining beginning.