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Three Wives of Henry VIII
Sep. 21st, 2018 08:29 amI seem to be having another of my Tudor binges. It is my favourite period of English history, and having just recently finished the excellent cultural history, The Creation of Anne Boleyn by Susan Bardo, I find myself looking through my massive TBR list for historical fiction set in the Tudor era. As it turned out, I was in a mood for more of the tempestuous reign of Henry VIII and the ways his wives have been interpreted. There’s a lot out there about Katherine of Aragon, and of course the enigmatic and iconic Anne, buy his other wives have seemed to get less attention - though I’m seeing more about, and have in my TBR pile, a few new histories of, Katherine Parr. Anne of Cleves and Katherine Howard, though, don’t appear to be inspiring figures fir historical fiction - especially poor Katherine. I have’t anything that focuses on her in my library, fiction or history. But I do have some treatments of the other three later wives.
My eye first fell on Margaret Campbell Barnes’ My Lady of Cleves, a novel about the often neglected fourth wife of Henry VIII, and really, the only one who managed a good life post-Henry. To be sure, Katherine Parr survived Henry, but came to a sad end not too long afterward, marrying Thomas Seymour, who would engage in a concerted attempt to seduce her step-daughter Elizabeth under her very nose, and leave her to due alone of post-partum fever. Anne of Cleves not only got out alive, but she remained on good terms with her difficult former husband, wrangled a decent financial settlement out of him, and had a comfortable and relatively long life. Without the passion, tragedy and death associated with most of his other queens, Anne’s story of life with Henry is often overlooked. But she’s one of my favourites, because she was a survivor.
Margaret Campbell Barnes gives us a picture of the Princessof Cleves that is both sympathetic and engaging. Her Anne is a woman who loves little things, is kind and generous, but knows herself to be too tall, large-boned and plain of face, much less attractive than her married older sister Sybille, or her younger, pretty Amelia. She is shocked when Hans Holbein paints her as an attractive woman, and surprised when Henry chooses her rather than Amelia to be his wife.
But on meeting her, Henry is not pleased - he calls her a Flemish mare - and though he goes through with the marriage, his eye is already in the pretty little Howard girl newly arrived Court, and his mind on how to get rid of Anne. Perhaps because she is, after all, a foreign princess, perhaps because she has become beloved of the people of London, perhaps because of her motherly care of his three motherless children, he offers her the option of a quite divorce on grounds of non-consummation, and in his guilt, makes a gift of the royal palace of Richmond and a suitable income to maintain it.
In Barnes’ story, Anne flowers after the divorce, finally free to live her life as she desires. She enjoys keeping Richmond House in good condition, managing her household, being a hostess to her neighbours and those who befriended her at fourt, and doing good deeds in the surrounding area. She is allowed to have Edward, Elizabeth and Mary visit her, and she tries to give them the nurturing that all have lacked. In Barnes’ novel, Anne and Hans Holbein develop a mutual attraction that is acknowledged but never consummated, giving Anne a chance to be a romantic of a sort, but never being impractical about it. The world-wise and cynical Holbein is a source of support and information for her, as he explains the secrets and plots at court that threaten her, marvelling at her ability to remain good-hearted and somehow innocent in the midst of political power plays and corruption. Barnes gives Anne the gift of making people feel comfortable with her - over time, people from Mary Tudor to Thomas Cranmer come to see her as a friend and confidante. The overall picture that emerges is of an intelligent, warm, generous woman who deserved a better life - a loving husband, children, a home - but who made the best of the hand she was dealt, and found ways to be happy and to give of herself to others despite being deprived of the things that might have fulfilled her most.
Elizabeth Fremantle’s The Queen’s Gambit, the first novel in her Tudor trilogy, is the story of the sixth and last wife of Henry VIII, Katherine Parr. Fremantle begins Katherine’s story with the death of her second husband, Lord Latimer (or, as she has it, Latymer), giving Katherine a tragic past beyond the fact of having buried two husbands. Lord Latimer had been involved in the northern rebellion, but unlike many other lords who participated, he was simply no longer welcomed at court, rather than executed. Many believe that Latimer gave information to the King’s forces near the end - certainly, there was enough suspicion that some of the rebels captured the Latimer seat at Snape and held Katherine and her step-daughter Margaret Neville prisoner. In Fremantle’s interpretation, both women were raped, and Katherine bore a child who died at birth. There’s no historical record of this, but then, there wouldn’t have been, with the Latimers neither at court nor involved in the social life of the peerage. Fremantle also presents us with a woman who, watching her husband slowly die in agony, and being skilled in the use of herbs, is persuaded by him to hasten his passing - a mortal sin in those times. While unprovable, these additions certainly give Katherine a traumatic but interesting backstory.
Fremantle uses two very different women as viewpoint characters, Katherine herself, and the young servant Dot, who was with Katherine and Margaret during their captivity at Snape, and who is Margaret’s devoted companion. It’s a clever, ‘upstairs, downstairs’ approach that allows the reader to experience life in the courts of Henry VIII in greater detail.
The development of the romance between Thomas Seymour and Katherine seems a bit forced and overdone. Initially, We meet Seymour as a friend of Katherine’s brother, Will Parr, and Katherine takes a dislike to him, seeing him as a womaniser and flatterer. He quickly persuades her of the sincerity if his passion for her, and awakens a similar response in her, one that is threatened by the King’s growing interest in her as one of the few attractive women at court who is also honest, intelligent, and - though this is only seen in undertones - experienced in dealing with illness and age in a partner. The account of Katherine’s marriage touches on most of the known and agreed upon issues - Katherine’s support of the new Protestantism, Henry’s preferences for Catholic forms within his new English church, the antipathy of Archbishop Gardiner, the dangers Katherine must face in being heretically inclined, in Gardiner’s view. Interpretations of the marriage have varied as to the degree of its physicality - Fremantle envisions the aging Henry as a crude and desperate sexual partner, leaving bruises in his attempts to maintain his self-image as a masterful, powerful, lover.
Fremantle does an excellent job of portraying the tension and fear that rise as the king, more and more under Gardiner’s influence, and in increasing pain from his ulcerous leg, withdraws from Katherine, who waits for her turn in the Tower - when Henry’s death saves her. Once Katherine is free of the political machinations at court and installed in her dower property at Chelsea, Seymour re-enters the picture. Always portrayed as ambitious, he now seems more sinister than before, but Katherine still loves him and they are secretly wed. As the story of Katherine’s final year of life unfolds, Seymour’s selfishness, greed and ambition come clear, and then, his seduction of the young Elizabeth - in Fremantle’s version, fully accomplished - which destroys Katherine’s spirit just as she has finally found herself pregnant at last. The end comes swiftly.
All in all, an excellently written novel, and Fremantle’s liberties with certain events and her inventions for the most part add texture to the ultimately tragic story of the sixth of Henry’s queens.
Keeping to the theme of Henry’s wives in my Tudor binge, the next novel I turned to was the third volume in Alison Weir’s series on the queens, Jane Seymour, the Haunted Queen. The novel opens when Jane is a young girl of ten, and uses the occasion of her older sister Catherine’s marriage to introduce the readers to the large Seymour brood - seven living siblings, Edward, Harry, Anthony, Jane, Thomas, Margery and Elizabeth - their ancestry, wealth and connections, and the feel of life in the Seymour ancestral home of Wulfhall. At ten, Jane cherishes the idea of becoming a nun when she is older, and her indulgent parents seem inclined to at least consider this as a possibility, though they insist that she may not become a novice until she is 18. However, when Jane is 18 and begins a probationary period to test her vocation, she discovers that the religious life opens up questions that shake her long-held desire. While the physical constraints - much more severe in this era than a modern nun would face, being forbidden to heat their rooms or touch another human except in emergencies, among others - are difficult to adapt to, it is the way that the abbess violates the vows of poverty that the ordinary nuns must follow that bothers her. Though she is no longer sure of a religious calling, she is also not sure she wants to be married, watching as her brother Edward’s marriage sours and he seeks out other women, leaving his wife deeply unhappy.
Watching her brothers entering the service of various lords temporal and spiritual, Jane aspires to a position at court as well, and a well-placed relative negotiated a place for her as one of the queen’s maid of honour. She arrives at court during the early days of King Henry’s pursuit of Anne Boleyn, who is also a maid of honour, and his search for a way to end his marriage to Queen Katherine. As one of Katherine’s maids of honour, she is a close witness to the actions of both women, and the swirling loyalties of the court. But once the tide is clearly moving toward reform, and the King’s divorce, her family withdraws her from Katherine’s service - much against her will - and secures a position for her among the women serving the Lady Anne. But Jane develops a lingering illness, and before she can take up her place, the split from Rome is complete, the divorce final, and Anne is Queen - and in confinement, awaiting the birth of the child who will be Elizabeth.
As Anne slowly falls from grace, failing to provide a male heir and, in Weir’s interpretation, becoming increasingly flirtatious, petty, jealous and anxious, Henry begins to notice Jane, quiet, gentle and virtuous. His courtship of her is a prolonged one, and she resists his advances for some time, but in this version, she does eventually yield, and is drawn into the plans if those at court, from her brother to the Imperial ambassador Chapuys, to try to influence Henry in his behaviour toward the princess Mary. By now, Jane has left Anne’s service, and lives at court with her brother Edward, an officer of the king’s household, and his wife. Weir passes quickly over Queen Anne’s last days, focusing more on the secret plans for a wedding between Henry and Jane once Anne is dead.
The year of Jane’s queenship was also a year of great trouble in England. There was an outbreak of the plague, which forced the postponement of Jane’s coronation. The closing of the monasteries and other reforms distressed the people, especially in the north where Catholic sentiment was strong, provoking a rebellion which lasted several months before being crushed. Jane, whose religious tendencies also lay with the old religion, walks a delicate line, trying to mitigate some of the worst reforms while keeping the king’s favour. Jane is influential, though, in bringing about a reconciliation between Henry and his estranged daughter Mary. And - though Weir has Jane miscarry twice in the early months of the marriage - soon Jane is pregnant and past the dangerous periods at which she lost those first pregnancies. The days of her pregnancy move swiftly, with Jane hoping, and the King assuming, that the child will be the long-awaited male heir. Jane goes through the thoughts that authors have, and probably quite rightly, put in the minds of most of Henry’s wives, the prayers that their child be a healthy boy, the fears of what might happen if the child is a girl, or is stillborn. Weir’s interpretation of Jane’s final days, following the birth of the desired prince, are based - as she records in a historical note - are based on a modern medical evaluation of Jane’s condition. Rather than dying of childbed or puerperal fever, Weir’s research suggests that, weakened by a difficult labour followed by a severe bout of food poisoning, Jane succumbed to an embolism. Whatever the real cause of her death, Jane slipped away less than two weeks after the birth of the only male heir Henry would ever have, the future Edward VI.
While I was less than wholly pleased with Weir’s interpretation of Anne Boleyn, I quite enjoyed her picture of Jane and her brief career as Queen of England - though I was a bit irritated by the whole ‘haunted queen’ conceit, which had Jane experiening spectral visitations from the venegful ghost of Anne Boleyn. Given the way that Anne is reported to have treated Jane, and the general horror of the accustions against Anne, which were generally believed, I have trouble thinking that Janr’s conscience woukd have troubled her overmuch, especially as there’s no record that she gave incriminating evidence against Anne. But other than that, I found Weir’s novel good reading. Looking forward to seeing how she handles Anne of Cleves.
I’m going to have to look around for some decent writing about poor young Katherine Howard, though.
My eye first fell on Margaret Campbell Barnes’ My Lady of Cleves, a novel about the often neglected fourth wife of Henry VIII, and really, the only one who managed a good life post-Henry. To be sure, Katherine Parr survived Henry, but came to a sad end not too long afterward, marrying Thomas Seymour, who would engage in a concerted attempt to seduce her step-daughter Elizabeth under her very nose, and leave her to due alone of post-partum fever. Anne of Cleves not only got out alive, but she remained on good terms with her difficult former husband, wrangled a decent financial settlement out of him, and had a comfortable and relatively long life. Without the passion, tragedy and death associated with most of his other queens, Anne’s story of life with Henry is often overlooked. But she’s one of my favourites, because she was a survivor.
Margaret Campbell Barnes gives us a picture of the Princessof Cleves that is both sympathetic and engaging. Her Anne is a woman who loves little things, is kind and generous, but knows herself to be too tall, large-boned and plain of face, much less attractive than her married older sister Sybille, or her younger, pretty Amelia. She is shocked when Hans Holbein paints her as an attractive woman, and surprised when Henry chooses her rather than Amelia to be his wife.
But on meeting her, Henry is not pleased - he calls her a Flemish mare - and though he goes through with the marriage, his eye is already in the pretty little Howard girl newly arrived Court, and his mind on how to get rid of Anne. Perhaps because she is, after all, a foreign princess, perhaps because she has become beloved of the people of London, perhaps because of her motherly care of his three motherless children, he offers her the option of a quite divorce on grounds of non-consummation, and in his guilt, makes a gift of the royal palace of Richmond and a suitable income to maintain it.
In Barnes’ story, Anne flowers after the divorce, finally free to live her life as she desires. She enjoys keeping Richmond House in good condition, managing her household, being a hostess to her neighbours and those who befriended her at fourt, and doing good deeds in the surrounding area. She is allowed to have Edward, Elizabeth and Mary visit her, and she tries to give them the nurturing that all have lacked. In Barnes’ novel, Anne and Hans Holbein develop a mutual attraction that is acknowledged but never consummated, giving Anne a chance to be a romantic of a sort, but never being impractical about it. The world-wise and cynical Holbein is a source of support and information for her, as he explains the secrets and plots at court that threaten her, marvelling at her ability to remain good-hearted and somehow innocent in the midst of political power plays and corruption. Barnes gives Anne the gift of making people feel comfortable with her - over time, people from Mary Tudor to Thomas Cranmer come to see her as a friend and confidante. The overall picture that emerges is of an intelligent, warm, generous woman who deserved a better life - a loving husband, children, a home - but who made the best of the hand she was dealt, and found ways to be happy and to give of herself to others despite being deprived of the things that might have fulfilled her most.
Elizabeth Fremantle’s The Queen’s Gambit, the first novel in her Tudor trilogy, is the story of the sixth and last wife of Henry VIII, Katherine Parr. Fremantle begins Katherine’s story with the death of her second husband, Lord Latimer (or, as she has it, Latymer), giving Katherine a tragic past beyond the fact of having buried two husbands. Lord Latimer had been involved in the northern rebellion, but unlike many other lords who participated, he was simply no longer welcomed at court, rather than executed. Many believe that Latimer gave information to the King’s forces near the end - certainly, there was enough suspicion that some of the rebels captured the Latimer seat at Snape and held Katherine and her step-daughter Margaret Neville prisoner. In Fremantle’s interpretation, both women were raped, and Katherine bore a child who died at birth. There’s no historical record of this, but then, there wouldn’t have been, with the Latimers neither at court nor involved in the social life of the peerage. Fremantle also presents us with a woman who, watching her husband slowly die in agony, and being skilled in the use of herbs, is persuaded by him to hasten his passing - a mortal sin in those times. While unprovable, these additions certainly give Katherine a traumatic but interesting backstory.
Fremantle uses two very different women as viewpoint characters, Katherine herself, and the young servant Dot, who was with Katherine and Margaret during their captivity at Snape, and who is Margaret’s devoted companion. It’s a clever, ‘upstairs, downstairs’ approach that allows the reader to experience life in the courts of Henry VIII in greater detail.
The development of the romance between Thomas Seymour and Katherine seems a bit forced and overdone. Initially, We meet Seymour as a friend of Katherine’s brother, Will Parr, and Katherine takes a dislike to him, seeing him as a womaniser and flatterer. He quickly persuades her of the sincerity if his passion for her, and awakens a similar response in her, one that is threatened by the King’s growing interest in her as one of the few attractive women at court who is also honest, intelligent, and - though this is only seen in undertones - experienced in dealing with illness and age in a partner. The account of Katherine’s marriage touches on most of the known and agreed upon issues - Katherine’s support of the new Protestantism, Henry’s preferences for Catholic forms within his new English church, the antipathy of Archbishop Gardiner, the dangers Katherine must face in being heretically inclined, in Gardiner’s view. Interpretations of the marriage have varied as to the degree of its physicality - Fremantle envisions the aging Henry as a crude and desperate sexual partner, leaving bruises in his attempts to maintain his self-image as a masterful, powerful, lover.
Fremantle does an excellent job of portraying the tension and fear that rise as the king, more and more under Gardiner’s influence, and in increasing pain from his ulcerous leg, withdraws from Katherine, who waits for her turn in the Tower - when Henry’s death saves her. Once Katherine is free of the political machinations at court and installed in her dower property at Chelsea, Seymour re-enters the picture. Always portrayed as ambitious, he now seems more sinister than before, but Katherine still loves him and they are secretly wed. As the story of Katherine’s final year of life unfolds, Seymour’s selfishness, greed and ambition come clear, and then, his seduction of the young Elizabeth - in Fremantle’s version, fully accomplished - which destroys Katherine’s spirit just as she has finally found herself pregnant at last. The end comes swiftly.
All in all, an excellently written novel, and Fremantle’s liberties with certain events and her inventions for the most part add texture to the ultimately tragic story of the sixth of Henry’s queens.
Keeping to the theme of Henry’s wives in my Tudor binge, the next novel I turned to was the third volume in Alison Weir’s series on the queens, Jane Seymour, the Haunted Queen. The novel opens when Jane is a young girl of ten, and uses the occasion of her older sister Catherine’s marriage to introduce the readers to the large Seymour brood - seven living siblings, Edward, Harry, Anthony, Jane, Thomas, Margery and Elizabeth - their ancestry, wealth and connections, and the feel of life in the Seymour ancestral home of Wulfhall. At ten, Jane cherishes the idea of becoming a nun when she is older, and her indulgent parents seem inclined to at least consider this as a possibility, though they insist that she may not become a novice until she is 18. However, when Jane is 18 and begins a probationary period to test her vocation, she discovers that the religious life opens up questions that shake her long-held desire. While the physical constraints - much more severe in this era than a modern nun would face, being forbidden to heat their rooms or touch another human except in emergencies, among others - are difficult to adapt to, it is the way that the abbess violates the vows of poverty that the ordinary nuns must follow that bothers her. Though she is no longer sure of a religious calling, she is also not sure she wants to be married, watching as her brother Edward’s marriage sours and he seeks out other women, leaving his wife deeply unhappy.
Watching her brothers entering the service of various lords temporal and spiritual, Jane aspires to a position at court as well, and a well-placed relative negotiated a place for her as one of the queen’s maid of honour. She arrives at court during the early days of King Henry’s pursuit of Anne Boleyn, who is also a maid of honour, and his search for a way to end his marriage to Queen Katherine. As one of Katherine’s maids of honour, she is a close witness to the actions of both women, and the swirling loyalties of the court. But once the tide is clearly moving toward reform, and the King’s divorce, her family withdraws her from Katherine’s service - much against her will - and secures a position for her among the women serving the Lady Anne. But Jane develops a lingering illness, and before she can take up her place, the split from Rome is complete, the divorce final, and Anne is Queen - and in confinement, awaiting the birth of the child who will be Elizabeth.
As Anne slowly falls from grace, failing to provide a male heir and, in Weir’s interpretation, becoming increasingly flirtatious, petty, jealous and anxious, Henry begins to notice Jane, quiet, gentle and virtuous. His courtship of her is a prolonged one, and she resists his advances for some time, but in this version, she does eventually yield, and is drawn into the plans if those at court, from her brother to the Imperial ambassador Chapuys, to try to influence Henry in his behaviour toward the princess Mary. By now, Jane has left Anne’s service, and lives at court with her brother Edward, an officer of the king’s household, and his wife. Weir passes quickly over Queen Anne’s last days, focusing more on the secret plans for a wedding between Henry and Jane once Anne is dead.
The year of Jane’s queenship was also a year of great trouble in England. There was an outbreak of the plague, which forced the postponement of Jane’s coronation. The closing of the monasteries and other reforms distressed the people, especially in the north where Catholic sentiment was strong, provoking a rebellion which lasted several months before being crushed. Jane, whose religious tendencies also lay with the old religion, walks a delicate line, trying to mitigate some of the worst reforms while keeping the king’s favour. Jane is influential, though, in bringing about a reconciliation between Henry and his estranged daughter Mary. And - though Weir has Jane miscarry twice in the early months of the marriage - soon Jane is pregnant and past the dangerous periods at which she lost those first pregnancies. The days of her pregnancy move swiftly, with Jane hoping, and the King assuming, that the child will be the long-awaited male heir. Jane goes through the thoughts that authors have, and probably quite rightly, put in the minds of most of Henry’s wives, the prayers that their child be a healthy boy, the fears of what might happen if the child is a girl, or is stillborn. Weir’s interpretation of Jane’s final days, following the birth of the desired prince, are based - as she records in a historical note - are based on a modern medical evaluation of Jane’s condition. Rather than dying of childbed or puerperal fever, Weir’s research suggests that, weakened by a difficult labour followed by a severe bout of food poisoning, Jane succumbed to an embolism. Whatever the real cause of her death, Jane slipped away less than two weeks after the birth of the only male heir Henry would ever have, the future Edward VI.
While I was less than wholly pleased with Weir’s interpretation of Anne Boleyn, I quite enjoyed her picture of Jane and her brief career as Queen of England - though I was a bit irritated by the whole ‘haunted queen’ conceit, which had Jane experiening spectral visitations from the venegful ghost of Anne Boleyn. Given the way that Anne is reported to have treated Jane, and the general horror of the accustions against Anne, which were generally believed, I have trouble thinking that Janr’s conscience woukd have troubled her overmuch, especially as there’s no record that she gave incriminating evidence against Anne. But other than that, I found Weir’s novel good reading. Looking forward to seeing how she handles Anne of Cleves.
I’m going to have to look around for some decent writing about poor young Katherine Howard, though.
