Krishna
What a brilliant piece of work! The historical research is astounding and the narration is pitch perfect. History should be told like this, in order to keep your interest from the beginning to end. I know almost all of Alison Weir’s books show these characteristics but this was the first book of hers that I have read. Personally, I find this one of the best historical narrations ever.
The preface itself draws you in powerfully and promises a reading delight like very few other books give. She talks about the position of women in the society at the time of Henry VIII and how these women had the double burden because their husband was also the King of England, the most powerful person in the entire country!
Adultery by a woman was punishable by death. If a wife killed a husband, she was accused of treachery and was sentenced to death by burning. If a woman was disobedient to her husband the law allowed him to turn her out of the house with just the clothes on her body and she had no course for redress.
Wife beating was not only legal but taken for granted as punishment for disobedience. Women were not expected to be educated as ‘girls taught to write will only waste their time in writing love letters’. By the time of the reign of Henry VIII women’s education was accepted but only available to the rich and only to ‘produce future wives schooled in godly and moral precepts’. Royal marriages were never for love but political privilege or to gain wealth or influence. It was often that a king saw the face of the wife for the first time after marriage.
Women were never allowed to choose the husbands. When in 1464, Henry’s grandfather Edward IV married Elizabeth Woodville, a commoner ‘for love’, it caused a scandal.
And the negotiations for marriage! It took thirteen years to arrange the marriage of Katherine of Aragon and Arthur Tudor but “fortunately” negotiations began when they were both toddlers! Because nobility and royalty often married foreigners, they had to rely on the accuracy of the description sent by ambassadors or the skill of painters to know about the beauty of the said bride. Henry himself was taken in by the portrait of Anne of Cleves, painted by a wildly enthusiastic painter and was bitterly disappointed when he saw her after the wedding!
Women, even queens, had no independence and were subject to the whims of the husbands. Women, after their marriage had to wear their hair under a veil at all times. Women also cut their hair only if they wanted to enter a cloister but otherwise wore their hair long. Sleeves were required to reach the wrist and gowns were to be long, sweeping the floor. Their chief function was to bear their husbands male heirs.
Pregnancy and childbirth were extremely hazardous and killed many woman. It was customary for pregnant woman to make arrangements for their children in case they died during childbirth. After all these hazards, most children died. Katharine of Aragon and Anne Bolyn had ten pregnancies between them; only two children survived.
The author then zooms in on each of the wives. Katharine of Aragon was a princess of Spain. She was beautiful as a baby with big blue eyes and red gold hair.
Henry VII won the English throne by defeating the last Plantagenet king Richard III. He was Henry Tudor then, and was trying to claim legitimacy to the throne that he was not really entitled to through lineage alone. There were other Plantagenets alive. So he figured an alliance with the royal house of another great power, Spain, would seal legitimacy. (Remember Katharine was just two at that time!)
Though France and Spain were the big powers in Europe, England had bitter battles with the French and so decided that alliance with Spain was the way to go.
The history lessons are fascinating. Apart from France and England, Spain was the only other big power in Europe then. Also, until 1479, Spain was a cluster of tiny kingdoms fighting each other. It was the Moore conquest and the reconquest by the Christians that made it whole. Since Spain was fully focused on retrieving the lands lost to the Moors, they kept out of European politics in general and were not seen as a threat by any European power. Even the marriage of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile which unified almost the whole of released Spain paled before the necessity of driving the infidels out of Europe.
By 1488, only Grenada was under the control of the Moors. As a token of alliance, the youngest daughter of Ferdinand, Katharine, was promised to the young son of Henry VII for the sake of alliance against the French, which the Spanish desired. Katharine was just three years old at that time!
Ferdinand was a wily king who was manipulative. He even abandoned one of his girls to penury and had another declared insane in order to grab her kingdom.
Alion Weir is absolutely fantastic in building a portrait of life as it was in Henry VII’s times. To list all the interesting pieces here would be replicating the book, which is not fair. But it is a delight to read, as, I suspect, any other book of this talented author.
For instance we learn that Henry, who usurped the throne of England, was of a bastard stock from Wales. He descended from John of Gaunt (of Shakespear play fame) but from his illegitimate affairs. His father was born from a queen’s affair with Welsh groom of her wardrobe! But for all that Henry provided the stability needed for England after incessant wars and ruled well.
Prince Albert, to whom she was betrothed was handsome and well educated. He was captivated by Katharine’s beauty. He was also younger to her by a few months.
They married but Prince Albert was sick from the start and got sicker. He died soon after of a ‘virus in the air’. Katharine too fell sick but recovered. Later Katharine claimed that they never consummated the marriage and she was still a maiden.
Meanwhile, with Isabella’s death, Ferdinand was reduced to Aragon as a king and Henry VII was having second thoughts about the marriage.
Finally, in his deathbed, Henry VII relents and Henry VIII marries her. She is now the Queen of England.
Henry VIII himself seems to have had it all. Great knowledge, erudition, good looks, strength a sense of style in his attire. He was the most famous in his time of all the monarchs and he also was vain and had a quick temper.
He knew fluent French and Latin and knew passable Italian. He was also deeply religious and interested in theology. He could play many instruments. He also sang and composed his own verses to music. But initially he was not interested in statecraft at all. Having led a cloistered life and, suddenly at 19, having all the power and wealth must have been bewildering.
Katherine aged rapidly with several pregnancies and disappointments and lost her beauty whereas the king stayed young and handsome.
Katharine had seven pregnancies in all and six children were either stillborn or died soon after birth and the one remaining child was female. Henry seems to have been loyal (but never trusting Katharine’s political advice as she was partial to Spain to the detriment of England). She was soon judged too old to bear children and lost her youth and beauty. Her body was ravaged by the multiple pregnancies and the King stopped having sexual relationship with her towards the end. He of course had mistresses galore in the fashion of those times.
By this time he had bedded many mistresses, Mary Boleyn among them. Her sister, Anne, played hard to get, which inflamed Henry’s passions so much that he married her, after separating from Katharine. Anne was not traditionally pretty but was highly read, cultured, and could play instruments expertly and sing and dance. She was self conscious about her swarthy appearance, an alleged adams apple like a man and also a sixth finger on one hand. She turned out to be so independent minded and lacked social skills that towards the end she antagonized the entire household of Henry VIII.
But in th beginning, she rejected his advances to become the King’s mistress and he was dumbfounded but his ardour only grew! He resolved to marry her and kept that a secret, asking the Pope to annul his marriage with Katharine on the grounds that she was his brother’s bride. (Yes, after getting her pregnant six times!). The pope was a prisoner with the French king Charles and was Katharine’s nephew. She managed to convince him that the Pope should grant no such annulment and the Pope demurred, much to the anger of Henry VIII who was desperate for a male heir to the kingdom (Out of Katharine’s six pregnancies, only a girl, Mary, survived).
Now, the papal representatives tried to ‘persuade’ Katharine that the best way to end this impasse was if she voluntarily took the veil. Katharine flatly refused and said that the only way she will accept the annulment was if the Pope decreed it. He was a prisoner of her nephew and was reluctant to do so.
At this point Henry seems to have gone a bit mad in frustration. He complained that after knowing that he wanted to wed Anne, Katharine still remained ‘obdurate’, ‘dressed well’ and was cheerful in public! She was therefore plotting to kill him and/ or incite the public to rebellion! (And remember, this was well before Henry turned tyrant, as he would later.
She accused Wolsey the Cardinal of plotting against her because she, Katharine, will not influence the Pope to make him the Pope! (Which was partially true since Wolsey did indeed entertain papal ambitions in addition to a weakness for amassing wealth. He was also hated by Anne who was constantly working to pour poison about Wolsey in the willing King’s ears!
The Privy Council, upon the King’s urgings, sent a letter of censure and accusations to the Queen which devastated her. This would be mental abuse by today’s standards. The queen bore it all stoically, but the pressure seems to have prematurely aged her.
Wolsey is vilified daily Anne Boleyn and the King finally sends men to arrest him and then sends him to the Tower. The very sick Wolsey dies enroute, saving the King the trouble. Meanwhile Anne seems to treat the King shabbily but his ardor only increases.
Finally, a traveler who has learnt the scriptures asks the King why he needs the Pope to arbitrate on whether his wedding was legal; the university theologists can themselves rule. With the Pope’s prevarication, King Henry is already upset and the reformation – making himself the head of religious clergy and denying the influence of the Pope becomes attractive.
Meanwhile the King turns slowly tyrant and does not even tolerate people arguing on behalf of the Queen. He banishes a Duchess who was sending notes from the Queen to her nephew and severely warns an author who wrote a book in support of the Queen – after banning the book.
Meanwhile. Thomas Cromwell, the son of a blacksmith rises to power and takes Wolsey’s position. He is all for English religious reformation and turning Protestant. He was bright but utterly unscrupulous and established an enormous spy ring in the service of the King and became indispensable to the King. The King proclaimed that he was the supreme head of the state religiously. The Pope will henceforth be referred to in England as ‘The Bishop of Rome’.
John Fisher, the Bishop of Rochester was openly critical of the move and lost a lot of people in his household (but not himself) in an attempt to poison his food in a feast. Fisher’s cook Rouse was arrested and accused, even though most knew that he was just a pawn in this attempt! Rouse was boiled to death in a gruesome punishment.
If what Henry meted out to Katharine is sad, it gets worse. He stopped inviting her to the Christmas pageant and when she sent a cup as a present, he returned it saying ‘You are not my wife and you know it’. He ordered her to move to another (albeit well furnished) accommodation.
Anne was behaving more and more like the queen and was so unpopular that she was nearly lynched when she went for dinner to the house of a friend, escaping through the backyard where a river was flowing!
Anyone who criticized her openly was prosecuted of ‘treason’. Cromwell’s agents watched all such rabble rousers. When Friar William Peto preached against Henry marrying Anne, sitting right next to him, both Henry and Anne walked out in rage and then had one of Peto’s subordinates preach against the friar as ‘dog, slanderer … and traitor’. Peto was banished from England soon thereafter.
Anne started antagonizing even her erstwhile supporters by her haughty and imperious behaviour and unprovoked insults. Lord Chancellor Sir Thomas Moore resigned her Chancellorship in disgust about Henry’s religious reforms and treatment of the Queen.
Katharine adamantly refused to acknowledge Anne, whom Henry had married and forced his local priests to declare as the ‘legal queen’ because ‘his earlier marriage was null and void in the eyes of the clergy’ and suffered mounting humiliation, poverty, banishment to a damp castle in an isolated spot. Then Anne and Harry descended to threats that she and her daughter Mary (who was separated from her for good and also refused to recognize anyone but her ‘birth mother’ as the Quen) will be killed. All without railing against the King and also advising her entourage not to publicly slander the ‘new queen’. A great soul and brave, as told by the author.
Anne got pregnant before marriage and was hurriedly wed to Henry. The girl, the future Queen Elizabeth was a disappointment to both because ‘it was not a boy’. All the astrologers in his court had confidently predicted ‘a son’ and Henry was angry with them. But the relationship between Anne and King started developing cracks because Henry started having mistresses again, now that he was married to Anne and she did not take it ‘in as docile a manner as Katharine did earlier’.
Though Anne’s charms palled now for Henry and he was straying constantly, she still had clout. Her pregnancies after Elizabeth all went stillborn. But people who defiantly supported Queen Katharine or those who refused to swear an oath to Henry as the religious head of the English churches were put to gruesome death in front of the populace. While he was starving a group of clergy to death in a public square, he was feasting. Anne supported all this but was not satisfied. She wanted the senior clergy Fisher should be killed. The King gave way and England became a terrible place to live with the King going berserk at any imagined slight.
The Queen Katharine dies – of what is now suspected of cancer but then suspected of poisoning. She was courageous to the last, never talking ill of Henry who so cruelly cast her aside and winning the admiration of the nation. The description of her last days in relative penury and isolation are heartrending. In contrast, Henry was joyous to hear of her death because now, the French Emperor, her nephew will not attack England on her behalf. Anne Boleyn’s faction only regretted that Katharine’s daughter, Mary, did not ‘die with the Queen’.
Meanwhile two things happened to Henry. He started courting Jane Seymore. She played the same game as Anne, refusing to be his concubine and refusing sex until marriage. Anne’s days were sealed. Meanwhile, the King became bald and fat, and he had a fall from a horse and was insensate for a few hours. Though he recovered, his leg wound reopened and suppurated, an affliction that incapacitated him more and more throughout his life thereafter. But he became a megalomaniac, gloating about his good looks, virility and divinity.
A monster of a King started taking shape. After yet another aborted fetus (ironically male!) was born to Anne, her marriage was doomed. King Henry was looking for a way to ‘get rid’ of Anne and marry Jane Seymour. Jane, however, was sympathetic to Queen Katharine and her daughter Mary and the French were hoping that if she became the next Queen, perhaps Mary, ahead of Elizabeth, can be restored to her ‘rightful’ succession has the next in line to the throne after Henry.
In a chilling plot, Cromwell suggests to the King that the best way to get rid of Anne Boleyn is to accuse her of adultery (in desperation to beget a male heir to the kingdom) and plotting to murder the King, which was cause for execution. They all pretend to believe this and Anne had no clue until close to her execution. She bravely went to her death, her last speech very gracious and moving, and made many think of her well for the moment.
Jane Seymour’s marriage was brief. She was not even crowned officially as Queen but then died right after childbirth, after giving birth to a boy called Edward, who was immediately proclaimed as the heir to the king. In that brief time, she managed to effect a full reconciliation between Katharine’s daughter Mary and the king. She was also in favour of the Catholicism but knew that she had no power to get the king to reverse his command to move away from the Pope and create England as a Protestant nation.
She gave birth to Prince Edward, much to the delight of the King but died soon after childbirth due probably to infection arising from the unsterile practices then followed.
The King mourned her death but realized that he had but one male child, and if something should happen to him, the dynasty would have been left without a heir. (Mary and Elizabeth, of course, being girl children were not under consideration. More interestingly, Elizabeth was not even considered the prime subject for succession while Mary, restored to favour by the King, was alive!)
So he chooses Anne of Cleeves. Now Thomas Cromwell, his chief and powerful aide was being physically and verbally abused almost daily by the King growing irascible and intolerant every day and thought he’d redeem himself by choosing the next Queen. He finally succeeded in piquing the King’s interest in Anne Cleeves of Germany – a protestant girl and therefore cause of much angst among the remaining Catholic retinue, including Mary. She was praised for her beauty and the King ‘viewed’ through a portrait painted by an artist commissioned by Cromwell (with instructions to make her look pretty in the portrait) her and fell in love.
Of course it all backfired the moment the King set his eyes in Anne Cleeves. He knew he loathed her and what he saw was so very different from the portrait he had been shown. The anger found its focus on Cromwell, who had engineered this union and it was not too late to back out!
Some time later the King was still not touching his bewildered wife. In fact Ann of Cleve was so innocent that she thought the King being nice to her and then sleeping next to her formed a normal marital relationship. She had a long nose, very angular features, ‘not very fair’ and on top of that had a strong body odour, which repelled the King. He now was paying court to a very young girl, Katharine Howard, and his anger at his entrapment found focus – in Cromwell.
Cromwell was arrested and sent to the Tower, as he had done many times to enemies in the King’s service and the case of treason and heresy, again a ruse invented and used by Cromwell to harass countless enemies in the past! The law was passed in the pliant Commons and so now Cromwell was a traitor who forfeited both his position and his possessions.
In fact, Katharine Howard, having been sexually experienced from age thirteen onwards, played the ‘first wedding and then only bedding’ card used so successfully by both Anne Boleyn and Jane Seymour and the infatuated King did not realize that he was being manipulated.
Anyway Ann of Cleves meekly agreed to be divorced and was richly rewarded by the King and lived on in England.
Katharine Howard turns out to be an airhead. Frivolous, fond of expensive things but does not have any interest in anything complex. When her infidelities come out, initially Archbishop Cranmer was afraid to relay it to the King. The protestants were happy to have the Queen impugned in the hope that someone like the reforming Anne Boleyn would be the next queen, strengthening their cause. However, in the end, Cranmer writes it in a letter and leaves it with the King.
The King reads it, confines the Queen with a single serving lady ‘until her name is cleared’ and asks Cranmer to do a more thorough investigation. He seems to deflate visibly and according to the excellent author Weir ‘at that moment, he became an old man’. He was bitterly disappointed to hear of this with his favourite queen with whom he was so much in love. She is finally put to death.
Now Henry is old, very fat, and stinks due to his leg injury which is suppurating. People also know that he has killed two wives and had banished a third. Katherine Parr is in love with a man and King Henry fancies her for the queen. First the man is packed off to Norway as ambassador and Katharine Parr dare not refuse the offer and attention from the King, though she is terrified and is not definitely in love with him.
They marry, she not daring to refuse him and a great relationship springs up between them. King Henry enjoys debates on religion with his intellectual and highly educated wife and the Catholic faction, knowing that she has hidden Protestant tendencies, tries to get rid of her. When the King was particularly irritated by her obstinate arguments, Chancellor Gardiner sows the seeds of doubt in his mind, and even gets her execution order signed by the King. Katharine Parr was destined for the Tower.
By a huge slip, the order was dropped in the palace and found by a maid of Katharine Parr, who took it straight to her. After a couple of days of uncontrollable grief, Katharine rallies and resolves to get rid of all heretic books. When Henry invites her to debate next, she says only things that will please him and his doubts seem to be removed and he is reconciled to the queen. When the Chancellor comes in with the soldiers to take the Queen away, he finds her talking to the King merrily and he is banished summarily from the service of the King. Reads like a thriller! (And clearly demonstrates the absolute power of the King as well).
King Henry dies soon and then the drama of the wife continues. Edward is crowned as the King and he is only nine years old and the real power is with the Privy Council.
Katharine Parr is now a wealthy widow and eligible to remarry. Her old flame, Thomas Seymour is now ambitious. Not being able to get any ladies of nobility, he pays court to Katherine and wins her heart. In unseemly haste they marry very soon after the King’s death bypassing the Privy Council (which would have withheld approval since if a baby was born too soon, there would be doubt if it was a royal issue) and in secret. Later, they get approval. Having got his way, Thomas now plots to marry his ward, a young Jane Seymour, to the King and control the throne from behind! He gets the King’s goodwill by giving him ‘spending money’. The King, being a minor, is not given unlimited funds by the Privy Council, and before he could fulfill his plan, destroys himself with his roving eye.
Meanwhile a young Elizabeth comes as stepdaughter to live with Katharine and Seymour pursues her and wins her heart! It is discovered in time by Katharine who feels totally betrayed by her ‘loving husband’. Elizabeth is banished and moves away, and seems to have realized the danger into which he had almost dipped into and is henceforth more in control. She never imagined herself as the Queen, with Edward, and then Mary ascending the throne ahead of her. But her time comes and she is one of the most recognized sovereign of her times.
The book ends with the death, shortly after Katharine Parr’s catching the Admiral red handed.
A brilliant read, and even after reading through it, I stand by my initial impression that this is a great historical book.
9/10
— Krishna