Only the first two mattered
Raymond Carr
SIX WIVES: THE QUEENS OF HENRY VIII by David Starkey Chatto, £25, pp. 852, ISBN 0701172983 Few historians would question David Starkey's assertion that the Protestant Reformation of Henry VIII was a 'turning point in English history second only to the Norman Conquest'. Some of his professional colleagues might jib at his second assertion that it came about 'only (my italics) because Henry loved Anne Boleyn and could get her no other way' than by marrying her and divorcing his first wife, Catherine of Aragon. Other historians have emphasised the Reformation's roots in the widespread anti-clericalism that found its target in proud prelates like Cardinal Wolsey, whose ill-gotten riches allowed him to found Christ Church in Oxford. My tutor at Wolsey's college, the labour politician Patrick Gordon Walker, saw the Reformation as a by-product of the rise of capitalism. After my tutorials with Gordon Walker, I often dined alone with the then sadly decrepit Hilaire Belloc. Like Starkey he had no doubts. Henry replaced the Pope as Supreme Head of the Church in England with himself as king because he lusted after Anne Boleyn, 'a stick of a girl' as he called her.
Given their importance, it is natural that Starkey's biographical studies of Henry's six wives, a tome of over 800 pages weighing 1.4 kilograms, devotes some 600 pages to his marriages to Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn. Catherine was the daughter of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castille whose marriage had made them joint sovereigns of Spain. In a typical dynastic marriage, to cement the alliance between England and Spain, she was married to Henry VII's heir. Arthur, Prince of Wales. On his death, in order to keep the alliance in being, she was betrothed to Henry, then a boy of 12. When they began living together as man and wife all went well. Starkey portrays her as deeply religious. Henry, though he fancied himself as a theologian, was not. She fulfilled her ceremonial duties as Queen Consort. But to Henry and his subjects the first function of a queen was to provide a male heir in order to secure the succession when the Wars of the Roses were still a fresh memory. As a brood mare, Catherine failed. After a pathetic false pregnancy and repeated miscarriages, she produced only Mary. In the process, she grew fat and lost her looks, and the king, Starkey asserts, fell in love, whatever that may mean, with Anne Boleyn. Brought up in the French court, 'by her late teens she had become the quintessentially French cocotte'. Henry had already enjoyed her sister as a mistress, but Anne insisted on marriage as the price of her body.
Thus began the 'Great Affair', codename for the divorce of Catherine. Henry became convinced that his marriage with Catherine was invalid and that the failure to produce a male heir was his punishment for living in sin. Did not Leviticus prohibit marriage with a deceased brother's wife? Catherine insisted that her marriage with Arthur had not been consummated and that she had married Henry as a virgin. Starkey leaves the question open. Catherine refused to enter a nunnery or accept the authority of the Blackfriars court to decide her case. Starkey notes that the London public, in spite of its notorious xenophobia, sided with the foreign queen, presumably because they had a soft spot for royal wives given a hard time of it by their husbands. Henry's attempts to parade Anne in public, as the french ambassador put it, 'to accustom the people by degrees to endure her', were a failure. She was hissed in the streets.
Starkey describes in great detail the long-drawn-out legal and theological battles of the Great Affair. In short if Pope Clement VII, 'a wily Florentine who turned prevarication into an art form', had granted Henry his divorce, the king might not have declared himself Supreme Head of the English Church. As such he got from Cranmer, whom he appointed Archbishop of Canterbury, the divorce that Clement VII and his successor had rejected out of fear of offending the Emperor Charles V, Catherine's uncle. If Anne had died in 1528 of 'the sweat', a virulent form of influenza, Englishmen and women might still be celebrating the real presence of Christ in the mass.
Starkey recognises that reform of some sort would have come about — Thomas More was an anti-clerical in the Erasmian tradition — but it might not have come in the clothes of Henry's caesaropapism. Protestantism, in the long run, underwrote England's emergence as a great power and, more remotely, the home of the first industrial revolution. But in the short run it was the brutal imposition of a minority who believed that worshippers who read their bibles had a direct line to God and did not need priests of the old faith to administer the sacraments necessary for salvation. The great wealth of the Church, confiscated by the Crown, was not employed to finance educational reform or the relief of the poor. It found its way into the pockets of the servants of the Crown. When Tory backwoodsmen complained that Lloyd George's modest taxes would imperil their standard of living he reminded the Cecils that their fortune was based on the spoils of the Church.
Anne, according to Charles V's ambassador, was 'la putaine', the Protestant whore who had prodded Henry to break with Rome. But her triumph was shortlived. She, too, failed as a royal brood mare, producing only a daughter, the future Elizabeth I. Anne was condemned and executed on a trumped-up charge of adultery and incest. Henry's roving eye had fallen on Jane Seymour. She proved a dutiful wife, a relief after Anne Boleyn's hysterics. She fulfilled her function, producing a male heir, the future Edward VI, only to die a few days later. It was a love match of sorts. Henry was not the sexual libertine of popular imagination. Anne told her brother that the king 'was no good in bed' and his biographer, Professor Scarisbrick, asserts that, compared to his fellow monarchs, he was chaste, even puritanical. What he wanted was a submissive wife who flattered his massive ego, preferably sharing his mania for building (one of Starkey's specialities), his taste for music and theological discussion.
Starkey has well crafted sketches of Henry's last three wives. Anne of Cleves failed to give Henry an erection and was pensioned off; Catherine Howard was a good-time girl whose indiscreet adultery cost her her head; Catherine Parr, given to writing devotional handbooks, had married Henry out of duty to the Protestant cause.
What is interesting about Starkey's portrait of Catherine Parr is his demolition of the myth that she was a Florence Nightingale, binding up Henry's ulcerous leg. Kings lived their private lives in public and the protocol of the English court, 'one of the most pompous and ceremonialised' of Europe, prohibited displays of domestic intimacy. Starkey pays detailed attention to court life and his exposition on television of the dramatic rise and fall of court factions has made him a multi-millionaire. But this long book replete with numerous quotations from contemporary sources reveals that court factions were complex structures peopled by a host of minor characters and hangers-on. Starkey might have saved his readers the weary task of tracing their careers in the index by providing an appendix with brief notes on their functions in the court jungle. Moreover, court factions were not, as Starkey implies, the be-all and end-all of Tudor political life; if they had been the country would have been ungovernable. Sir Thomas Gage, who died in 1556. served three monarchs as a civil servant and soldier. He kept his head down and survived the vicissitudes of court politics, building up his estate centred on the manor house he built at Firle in Sussex. His descendant, a foxhunting peer, lives there today.
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