Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - How Hot Was Henry VIII?

Episode Date: August 22, 2025

With SIX wives, Henry VIII must have had something going for him, right? Was he handsome? Charming? Intelligent? Just plain powerful?In this episode, Kate is joined by Professor Suzannah Lipscomb, host of our sister podcast Not Just the Tudors. They discuss the vanity of Henry VIII, his sporting prowess, and his injuries. Listen to discover just how terrible this Tudor king smelt.This episode was edited by Tim Arstall and produced by Sophie Gee. The senior producer was Charlotte Long.Please vote for us for Listeners' Choice at the British Podcast Awards! Follow this link, and don’t forget to confirm the email. Thank you!Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, my lovely betwixters. It's me, Kate Lister. You are you, I am me, and you are listening to Bedwixter sheets. But before I can let you go any further, before I can let you proceed, unwarned and unarmed, I do have to tell you, this is an adult podcast spoken by adults,

to other adults, about adult things, and an adulty wake-offing a range of adults and books and you've been adults too. And if you can't say yes to all of those things, you have no business being here. You're just holding up the show. Right, let's get on with it. On the wall, who is the fairest of them all? Well, if you had been knocking around in the early 16th century,

the answer to that question might well have been, King Henry VIII. No, I'm not joking you. When he first came to the throne, he was a hot tea. Over six foot tall, a strapping lad worked out pretty much all day long, Auburn hair and beard. Even the people that didn't like him were forced to concede how good looking he was. He was a straight-up royal beaer. He knew it, everyone else knew it, and what's more importantly for the time, they thought that God knew it as well.

Henry was a very, very vain man. And that's fine if you have the goods to back it up, but as Henry grew older, things began to go downhill quite rapidly. His health was seriously affected, his weight ballooned. He was not the strapping beefcake that he was in his youth. And how did he handle that? Well, joining us today to talk all about Henry the Apes Vanity is the one and only the utterly marvelous Professor Susanna Lipscomb. So let's get our cod pieces at the ready betwixters, and let's find out just how vain Henry was. What do you look for a man?

Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning a knob and pushing it. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, my beautiful time. Goodness had nothing to do with it, dearie. Oh, and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets History of Sex Scandal and Society with me, Kate Lister. What do you think of when you think of Henry VIII? Do you think of a well-built man, a sturdy man, an imposing man?

Well, he was all of those things and more. I mean, a king is supposed to be impressive, and Henry was. He really was. He cultivated that image very, very carefully. He had only the finest clothes, the finest perfumes, the most flattering portraitures, and of course, the biggest codpiece. But underneath all of that, Henry was only human. He can't be a divine god all of the time, and as all of us get older, we have to let go of that first flush of youth. And that's hard enough when you're a regular person,

let alone when you have an entire world telling you that God is your best friend. So how did Henry make that transition? Not well, betwixters, not well. Hello and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's the one and the only, the utterly fabulous, Susanna Lipscomb. How are you doing? Hello, Kate. I am very well. Great to see you. It's always amazing to see you. How are you doing? How's life treating you? Life is great. I've been away most of the last month filming, including some exciting new projects for history hit. But now I'm back and podcasting like mad. I love it. And we're here to talk about the daddy himself. Henry the 8th.

Can you remember when you first got interested in the Tudors? That's your main area of expertise and what you're known for. Do you remember when you first met them, the Tudors? Was it as a small child in a history book somewhere? It was when I was 11 on 12. So in our history class, we were allowed to put stickers on our book. And I had Henry the 8th that was both the first, you know, from small beginnings. And also, I lived very close to the site of non-such path.

So the school I went to at that point was called Nonsuch School right next to where Henry had built Nonsuch Palace. And I kid you not, I had to walk down a road called Ambulin's Walk to get there. There you go. So it's destiny. Subliminal messaging the whole way through. Some of that things really interesting about Henry is his vanity. And I suppose really what that boils down to is his own estimation of himself. because he is a man with a huge reputation, well-deserved.

And I often think it must have been such a strange environment growing up and having people going, right, God's chosen you. Like you are God's representative on earth, kind of. Please have a normal-sized ego. That was never going to happen. Yeah, although I think he was probably cut down to size a bit when he was very young, because of course he's a second son. Yes.

And so he's not destined to become king until his overall. older brother dies. And then when his brother dies, Henry's 10 or 11, although even at that point, I have to say, at his older brother's wedding, there's this amazing occasion where Henry gets so into the dancing that he throws off his outer layer and everybody is sort of charmed by this 10-year-old boy, like really getting down. But he's kept confined after that by his father. And Henry the 7th is a kind of control freak. So he keeps Henry. read really under lock and key, he's like not allowed out. You know, he's not allowed to joust, which becomes one of the absolute joys of his life.

Like he's deeply controlled. Even though he's like supposed to be marrying Catherine of Aragon, they're barely allowed to meet. So I think there's a period of what looks like coercive control to me in his teens. And so it's kind of no wonder when he becomes king, when he's 17, 18 years old. I mean, he goes slightly mad. Because you would, wouldn't you? You would. And that's the very young Henry.

And I was quite surprised to learn that this was a period of his life where he was regarded as very generous, almost generous to a fault, very kind. Everyone's super excited about him, this young hot, and he was hot. We'll talk about that. But this guy suddenly arrives and he said he rebels against his dad. Was that what he was doing there? Yes, I think so. His dad was, by the time he died.

Yeah. really a miser. I mean, it's hard to pick out the truth here because, of course, everybody's praising this young king. Yes. Because they're telling him what they want him to be. So they're describing him to himself so that he will be this wonderful king. And that's true also about his looks. Like, we have to allow for a certain amount of exaggeration. But there is also consensus. And one of the things that comes out is that he is so affable. Thomas Moore talks about his charisma, his way of making each man feel that he's enjoying his special favour and the fiery power in his eyes. And people do talk about his generosity. And so I think there's this kind of

conviviality about him. Like he was a natural leader. He's kind of has this incredible personal charisma and beauty, as you say. Let's talk about that then. Because I know that you said that people exaggerated. Of course, it's the king. Who's going to say the king's actually a bit of a minger. But you do sort of get a sense when they're almost surprised by how good looking he is. Some of the ambassadors who meet him they're like, wow, wow, he really is the handsomest portentate of

Christendom and all of this stuff. Do you think that he was as good looking as they say? Okay, so we've got two sets of different sources to go on here. Like if you look at the portraits from this period, it isn't the first thing you think, right? So you look at some of the pictures of 1509

or 1520 and he looks kind of insipid, but Beauty standards do change and also portrait artists change. So this is the beginning of the kind of great age of portraiture from the 1520s. We get the first miniatures and then we get Holbein's portrait in the 1530s. So we don't really see it in the pictures, but the descriptions are absolutely effusive. And, you know, one man talks of him having a round face so very beautiful that it would become a pretty woman. He's unusually tall.

Like he's six foot two when the average height is five foot seven. think of a rugby player. He has like a waist of 32 inches. He has a big chest. Like he's a man to reckon with. And he's physically strong. He's a real sportsman. And he's got this auburn hair, blue eyes. People like talk about twin roses in his cheeks. I mean, he is good looking. And the key thing about this, I suppose, is that they're at this point where they really reckon that physical appearance is linked. to kingship. So the beauty and strength of the king represents the kind of material, moral, spiritual wealth of the kingdom. Like, he looks like a king, therefore he must be a king.

He must be a king. It must be a great king. I mean, I'm not a Tudor scholar, but for what I have read about this, it seems that quite a key thing to understanding Henry's character, if we can do such a thing from this distance, is that a lot of it was rooted in the chivalric tradition of stories that he read when he was a boy,

about King Arthur and the Round Table and what it meant to be chivalrous and what it meant to be a good knight and a good leader and he absorbs all of that and takes that with him. Yes, and also about Henry V. So stories about Agincourt

and being king of France and he dedicates quite a lot of time in his reign and loads of money to trying to take back the ancestral lands in France. And this is all tied up with that. because to be a good king at this time, you had to be a warrior. You had to be a champion.

And so risking your life is a kind of required part of kingship. And Henry's really, really good at jousting, which is the way that they practice war, essentially when they're not at war. They don't know that muskets are coming and they're going to completely transform military battles. At this time, you go on with a lance and you're trying to hit something. They've got cannon, of course. But this sense that he needed to demonstrate his physical strength to earn the respect of those around him is absolutely key. He must have terrified the people around him.

Like the king, you've got one of them. And in these early days, he doesn't have a bear yet. And he's got up on his horse and he's going off jousting. That must have absolutely terrified people. Yeah, and he does it all the time, any excuse, basically. So, like, you know, it's Pentecost, a joust. It's New Year, a joust. And these things are wildly expensive, these tournaments.

And as you say, the dangers are real. I mean, there's wildly violent occasions. But he loves them because it gives him a chance to demonstrate his courage, his daring. I mean, his horsemanship, his agility and skill, his stamina. As you say, it's chivalrous. It's all this kind of story from of old. And he gets to have all the women, his wife, with whom he's madly in love, Catherine of Averagin, in these early years.

is watching him and this sort of adulation and its spectacle, fabulous ostentation. There's a story from 1517 where he goes out to joust and it requires dressing up. So the king emerges with his immediate company, maybe 10 of them or so, and they're all dressed in purple velvet, decorated with leaves of cloth of gold, which is basically a fabric made from the metal thread of gold. So it's really heavy and it glistens in the light. and then others of gold damask, all of which are bordered with bits of gold bullion. So he's literally dripping with jewels.

And then behind them, there were about 20 lords and knights in yellow velvet and another 30 on foot. And then behind them, another 40 in yellow satin. And this is the company with which he enters the jousting field. So there's like a hundred of them in purple and yellow and dripping with gold. I mean, it's insane. How could you not be impressed with that if you saw it? I mean, that is a flex, isn't it? That's a hell of an entrance.

And he's 25, 26 and good looking. When you think about what you're doing at 25, 26, and just like how reckless you are and how kind of dumb you are and now imagine that you were also the king. But he's making good and he does actually go to war. We're not going to get too much into the warfare at the moment. But was that a success? Did that live up to his image of the,

heroic chevalric knight? I mean, they take what they can get, really. I mean, he gets the little town of Terreau. He takes the bigger town of Tournai, and there are paintings that are made of this as one called the Battle of the Spurs, because they call it that because the French flee so quickly and so all they can see are they spurs.

And Henry's depicted at the centre of fighting, but of course they won't actually let him fight the council because, as you pointed out, he doesn't have an air at this point in time, far too dangerous. But he hangs on to Tournai for five and a half years, and he claims it as king of France. And so it goes a little way towards satisfying his ego. Yeah, yeah. But, you know, in 1523, in Parliament, Thomas Cromwell refers to these two little places as ungracious dogholes.

I mean, they're basically nothing. So he hasn't taken Paris, you know. Oh, Henry. But I'm sort of getting a sense of like, you could have. understand why somebody like Henry would have a very high estimation of themselves at this point? It's not unfair, yeah. He's a scholar. He's a musician. He can play every musical instrument in the room to entertain a visiting French embassy in the 1520s. He writes music. Speaks languages. He speaks a whole number of languages. He is quite intelligent. I'd probably

like second-rate mind. He, and he's this great sportsman. He can tire out eight or more horses on a day is hunting. Wow. And so he's quite extraordinary and then everybody thinks that he's wonderfully good looking. I mean, this is a recipe for disaster, isn't it?

But there's this brief moment where I think he does actually have the goods to back this up. He is the young, dashing, heroic figure and he's married to Catherine of Aragon who's beautiful and Spanish and he's madly in love with her. And it's like, tick, tick, tick,

everything we want from a dashing king. Yeah, and she has a better claim to the English throne than his father did because of her Lancasterian blood. She is associated with related to all the major royal families in Europe. Wow. She is a very impressive queen to have at this time. And she's learned and brilliant as well.

I mean, she puts him to shame, frankly. So when it comes to Henry's estimation of himself, we can kind of get a sense of it in the things that he's doing, but his own personal appearance and grooming. Some of the records that we have, when he actually is king, of what he's spending on clothes and perfume, what kind of monies are we talking about here? Is this a man who looked after his physical appearance

as well as working out? Yes. I think it's fair to say that. He's spending about £8,000 a year on clothes. Holy, wow. Which is definitely over a million pounds today. And we've got descriptions of some of these things. So first of all, like, I want you to imagine

what male clothing at this time looks like. So you've got this white linen undershirt, which is the bit that can be cleaned, long sleeves. You have a doublet, which is a bit from the waist up, that's long-sleeved as well. And that can be decorated or embellished or pinked, you know, slashed in various ways. You've got the hose, which are basically tight-fitting stockings attached to like upper stocks, the breeches, which are the big kind of onion shape bit. And that's tied up to the doublet with ties, which are called points. And the front is closed with the codpiece.

Let's come back to that. Then there's the gown, which is the most expensive a man can afford. And so Henry's are obviously, you know, decorated, embellished. They're in velvets. They're fur-lined. And so we've got one description of a doublet that, from 1521, where it's purple cloth of gold tissue. This is purple in colour. The silk is purple, but it's made with these spirals of actual gold.

So imagine that in the candlelight. It's lined with black satin. And then it's covered at the edges with silver tissue. And he has hose that match. And this cost the equivalent of £25,000 today for this one outfit. And he loves to wear these really incredible colours. He loves purple. He loves yellow.

He loves crimson. So it's sumptuous and it's opulent. But the thing is that clothes are not just trivial. They're not frivolous. Their power. And one of the things I think we were saying earlier about exaggeration, but the other form of report that we have of what he looks like and how he's dressed are those ambassadors' reports.

And those are written for a reason. They're written to inform the king of France, whose Francis I first, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, of what's going on so that they know how much he's rivaling them. Because to be able to spend all this money on clothing is to say, I can go to war as well. It's an assertion of power in himself, but it's also an assertion of the wealth of his kingdom.

Like he's dressed every day as if he's going to go to the Metball. Like it's just full-on bling. Wow. Absolutely. I mean, to be fair, there's no sort of unostentatious way of demonstrating your wealth. after this period. It's not like you can just put on Patac-Philippe. You know, it's like, it's very much,

it's very much getting in your Porsche every day, you know. It's showing off. So what I'm trying to get a sense of here is just, I don't want to say how far he falls, but I get a sense of the height of where he was in terms of physical fitness, physical appearance, reputation, his, what we might say of women, accomplishments,

because it doesn't last. And it sounds like he has an, awful lot to lose here. Like this is a man who values being physical and being strong and being admired. And that is going to be taken away from him in quite a brutal way. Yeah. It lasts quite a while though, Kate. I mean, it's like at least 20, 25 years.

20 years of being a hottie is quite good going. It's pretty good going, isn't it? I mean, so like late into his 30s, early 40s, still looking pretty fine. I mean, he's the down snow. of kings and then it all goes horribly wrong and he has this accident in early 1536 he falls from his horse whilst jousting

it's not a tournament we don't have any records of a tournament so he's probably just rehearsing and we don't know exactly what happened we don't know if the horse landed on him but even the weight of his armour would have been really great and we have reports saying it was a miracle he wasn't killed and he's unconscious for two hours, which is a huge amount of time. That would be a hospital job today, without a doubt.

Absolutely. Still no air, no male air. I mean, he has Mary, and Catherine of Arrigan is absolutely certain her daughter can reign, but Henry is quite a chauvinist and thinks he needs a male heir. And to be fair, there hasn't been a successful ruling queen by this point, so he has legitimate grounds for thinking that at the time. And from this moment onwards, he doesn't joust again. I mean, he continues to hunt.

He's not that athlete that he has been. And you know what happens if you're an athlete who continues to eat after you cease being an athlete like you did when you were. And Henry's diet is not one of moderation. So it's all meat and bread and alcohol. And he gets really big. And it's big by Tudor standards. He's not actually exceptionally obese by modern standards. He ends up with a chest of fash.

57 and a waste of 54. But that is within five years. He's gone from a waste of 37 inches to a waste of 54 inches in five years. So it's a really steep decline. That really is. This accident that he had, I mean, whether he sustained some kind of brain injury that impacted his health going forward, but it also seems that his legs were badly damaged here. And there'd been a couple of warning lights on the dashboard about Henry's legs already because he'd had some tennis. injury and an ulcerapid. Do we have any information about what happened to his legs in this jousting accident? Yes, so he's had earlier ulcers.

He's had earlier accidents. I mean, you know, he's playing sports so much, it makes sense. And he had a sergeant surgeon called Thomas Vickory, who had healed his legs in 1528. Fun fact, Thomas Vickory is the man who discovered the clitoris. Another one. The women knew about it already. It's the best mansplaining in history. And it's called the Tentigo.

He calls it the Tentigo. Anyway, there you go. Just in case you ever need that for a pub quiz. Fabulous. 1528 is when men discovered it. But then the jousting accident of 1536, he opens up this ulcer that never heals. So it gives him constant and debilitating pain for the rest of his life.

You know, so we have occasions a year later. reports are saying that the king does not go abroad because his leg is somewhat sore a year after that. He's in great danger of dying. He goes black in the face because he's having basically DVT. I mean, his blood clots in his legs is what kills him in the end. 1541, there's another attack. And this is an ulcer that's separating. It's pus-filled. It stinks.

It's an open wound. It must have so deeply painful. We don't have antibiotics. God. God, no. You know, just imagine, I don't know about UK, but I get a little bit more irritable when I'm in pain. Tremendously, so.

Just imagine that over a decade, you know. I often think that about Henry, because if there's one man who's been diagnosed with just about everything posthumously, it's Henry, from syphilis to bipolar disorder, to Cushing's disease, to also. I think he was in pain. Like, eight years ago, I ruptured two back discs

and I eventually had to have them surgically fixed, But they don't take you to the hospital straight away. They leave you to see if it heals itself. So it's about 12 months of not being able to walk properly, not being able to do any of the things that I wanted to. And this is with modern painkillers, and it's not at the kind of pain that Venus ulcers would give you. I was a ratty, irritable, nasty person to be around.

That pain is awful, sustained and constant. It doesn't surprise me that it changed him, quite frankly. I wrote about this year of his life some years ago because 1536 was a year in which he also had numerous emotional wounds. So, you know, he may have been waiting for his first wife to die, but I actually think it probably hit him quite hard when she did. Yes. He then, as a result of the jousting accident, at least Amberlin blamed the news of the jousting accident on the miscarriage that she had thereafter, which was of an infant. fetus that they could at that point diagnose as male. Oh, God.

Then, of course, she's accused of adultery and I believe that Henry fundamentally was convinced that she had committed adultery and this is the woman he has moved heaven and earth to be with and she's accused of

sleeping with five men including her brother and the shock of this, the blow, the public ridicule. Then in the summer his illegitimate son, who's 17 by this point in time, it looks like Henry's lining Henry Fitzroy up to be his legitimate heir. And Henry Fitzroy dies. And then there's a massive rebellion against him in the north of the country, people who are turning against the doctrine of Henry being supreme head of the church, which is something he's really attached to following the break with Rome. And so there are these multiple occasions across this year where he feels betrayed or let down.

So you add all of that to the physical decline, and you can see why he changes, I think. I'll be back with Susie and Henry after the short break. Just think about the trial that Anne Boleyn goes on for. And I think you're right. I think he probably did genuinely believe this, or at least was telling himself this. But something that's not spoken about a lot is just how humiliating that must have been for this dashing, chivalrous knight prince is that now his wife is on trial. saying that he was crap in bed or words to that effect.

Yeah, so this is what gets out at the trial. So the context for understanding this, I mean, obviously this would be terrible at any age. But in the 16th century, they associate a man's potency, his ability to satisfy his wife with him being a man, like him demonstrating his manliness. And, you know, your ability to control your wife is the ability to demonstrate your wife. strength of personality. And Henry's governing a realm. Like if he can't control his wife, how can he govern a realm? And so the idea that she has been so unsatisfied by him

that she needs to sleep with five men. In fact, he actually composes a ballad where he says she slept with upwards of a hundred men. Oh, Henry. I don't know. What are you doing there, mate? You're making it worse. That's not helping. In the trial, her brother is given an accusation, given a piece of

paper, he's told to read it and not read it out loud, but he does in his trial, George Willindle, Lord Rochford. And it says, and we have this only in an ambassador's report of the trial, it says that Anne had laughed with her brother about the way the king dressed. She'd laughed with him about the king's terrible poetry. And she'd said that Henry has neither vigor nor potency and is not good at copulation. And this is said. in front of 2,000 people in the Great Hall at the Tower of London. You can imagine how insanely humiliating this is for Henry. Completely undermining.

Absolutely devastating. I don't think it's any surprise that we start to get portraits of him with a massive codpiece. With a massive cock. Tell me about the codpiece. What is that? It's such an odd item of clothing. The first time I saw when I thought it was going to be like a little cup that rugby players wear.

little emphasized area. It's not. It's a full-blown fallace hanging off the front. Yeah, it's the facsimile of an erect penis. For about 60 years, men sport these things. I mean, like, there's a practical function, obviously. This is what they let down to go to the loop, right? So it's like, but why they shape it like this, it's clearly designed to draw the eye. And Henry's are often differently coloured to the rest of his hose. And, you know, obviously bigger. It doesn't take Freud, does it, to work out what's going on here? It doesn't at all. Could anyone have a bigger codpiece than the king?

Did everyone come in and check theirs wasn't bigger than Henry's? I love the idea that there's a kind of yardstick at the door. Oh, go change it. You're going to be unpopular. Stop showing off. I mean, the portrait of Henry from 1537, by Holbein, first four-length portrait of an English monarch, is the one where we first see this in a portrait, because most of the portraits are kind of what we would call headshots.

And so we've got this picture where Henry is framing it with his hands. It's differently coloured. There's a bow above. Like the whole shape of his broad shoulders and his splayed feet is designed to kind of make his body into these two triangles. That focus the gaze on the bulging cod piece. And this is painted in a massive mural. It's sort of three by four metres at the Privy Chamber at Whitehall Palace. And I think it's designed to be seen by exactly the piece.

who'd been in that great hall at the Tower of London. The ones who'd heard, he can't get it up. He's like, here's some visual evidence that I can. Because also it's painted when Jane Seymour is pregnant. Oh, wow. In all ways, it's testifying to his manliness. And it's so interesting, we're so used to it. We don't think about the fact that actually this is Henry as a man.

I mean, he's a king, but he's not painted as a king. We don't see a crown. He's not holding an Auburn sceptor. This is Henry as a man. With full-on rock stamps as well, legs played. Yeah, which is really sort of on odd pose for portraits at the time. You only ever paint men in that kind of straddle position if they're a legendary hero, I guess, or, you know, we've got this sense. I mean, the art historian say about it, it speaks of martial glory because it's a bit, Clint Eastwood.

It looks a bit like he's still aching from getting off a horse. It absolutely does, doesn't it? And, of course, his legs feature very prominently in that one, these sore legs that he's got. No sign of them being sore there. No sign of them being sore. And he loved his legs, didn't he? He used to tie like garters around them to really emphasize his calves and his youth. Well, yeah, I mean, that's also because he's a knight of the garter.

Oh, yes, okay. But certainly he loved his legs. You're absolutely right on that because there's a story about the King of France having slightly spare legs. And Henry did not miss leg day. So he takes the moment to open up the front of his double. because sometimes the doublet's going to have these kind of skirts. And he shows off his thigh. He places his hand on the thigh.

He's like, look at this. Look at my meaty eye. And I have a goodly calf as well, he says. Oh, my God. So I end up with cod pieces, isn't it? It's just this is Willy waving. It is. I mean, I find so fascinating nowadays.

It's women who show off their legs. That's true. But good legs are a real masculine asset in this 16th century. There was a piece of research published by two varicus vein surgeons in London. It was in 2009. They published it and they suggested that actually the leg sores might have been caused by the garters that he tied around his legs because that can inflame deep vein thrombosis

and that ultimately the infection gets into the deep tissues of the leg and that's what caused the ulcers. But that's a horrible irony that it might have been his love for his legs that actually did it in. Yeah, it's possible. I'm slightly sceptical of the medical diagnosis from this. distance because you'd think that scientists, medical people, would have a kind of sense of the scientific method and use a certain amount of, I don't know, they'd be cautiously speculative,

but actually they tend to write with such certainty. And we just don't have the medical records from the period to justify that kind of certainty. They are very, very certain. That's absolutely true. It's as if he's there in front of them. But it seems that whatever was going on, like they're called Venus ulcers. I was talking to a nurse about Venus. and she said that they do smell so bad that when someone's in the hospital with them, you can smell them from three rooms away. And that seems to track with whatever was going on with Henry. And I often think that must have been one of the most humiliating things to know.

Not only do you not smell good, but you stink. Yes. And one of the things I liked about the film Firebrand, where Jude Law played Henry VIII. I mean, historically it goes all over the place. But I thought his interpretation of Henry VIII was really interesting. And one of the things he did was he had this really very very very very, vile concoction of things made for him to wear as a kind of perfume. Oh, God, wow.

And he told no one about it in advance so that he would appear on set smelling like Henry did. And everyone's like, oh, God. So you see them doing it in the film and they're not pretending. They are just like, oh, my word. Generally gagging. That's commitment. Although that's a really interesting experiment to do because how do you mask that?

Like, imagine you're meeting the king. This is your king, anointed by God. the king and you just like, Jesus Christ, that must have been awful for everyone concerned. And I think it puts such a different spin on the Anne of Cleave's story. Because the story we're told is that he sees her and doesn't like the way she looks and he's rude about her pendulous breasts and thinks that she's not a virgin, etc. But the truth of the matter is he bursts into the room that she's in in Rochester with a company of men.

They're all dressed in the same thing. Because one of the games at court has been, the king appears in disguise. This happened back in the day of Catherine of Averigan. And he's dressed the same as five or six of his courtiers. And how can you tell which one is the king? It's so embarrassing. Oh, no.

And, you know, obviously he's at that early point. He's the best looking, the tallest. So he appears in 1540, dressed up like a jester, effectively, and kind of motley. And he grabs hold of her. And everybody else, of course, knows he's. the king and perhaps could have warned her that he might appear or that he might smell or that he might be a little portly and he grabs hold of her and kisses her and she is just frankly and

obviously disgusted. Oh no. And I think it's that moment. Everybody's been pretending all the time and now someone holds up a mirror and shows him what he really looks and indeed smells like and that is his complaint. He says she's fat, smelly and not a virgin. Like he's talking about himself. You see, really what he is. When you put it like that, like she hasn't been informed that she needs to pretend this stuff.

Like it's proper emperor's new clothes time, isn't it? Exactly. She's the little boy saying, but he's not wearing any. He's not, and he really smells. So as he's getting older and he's going through his wives, he can't exercise the way he used to. So his weight is increasing exponentially, as you said, in just five years. He starts to suffer really bad bouts of ill health,

like repeatedly taken to his bed for weeks at a time. He's black in the face. He's like, he's dangerous stuff. Yes, it's all of these ulcers in his legs, whether it's one ulcer or multiple, we don't really know. In the end, that will be what kills him. It's a pulmonary embolism. It's probably a blood clot from one of these ulcers that is what kills him.

And he becomes severely disabled. He puts on a lot of weight. and he walks with a stick and then after some time he needs to be put in the equivalent of a wheelchair to be moved around his palaces. He has a kind of device that pulls him up from one floor to the next. I mean, he's really disabled by the end of his life. And actually, there is one other point about his appearance

that we should mention that's quite important, which is about his beard. So in his youth he doesn't have a beard. Amblin likes him with a beard. Catherine of Avarigone doesn't. He has two portraits, painted miniatures in the 1520s. One is clearly for Anne, which is like with the beard and one without for Catherine.

But from 1535, he says that he will be no more shaven. And the significance of this is that beards at this time are considered signs of manhood. So they're linked to the ability to produce semen. So if you want to advertise your virility, you do it with this growth on your face. And so from 1540 onwards, there's amazing piece of research by Will Fisher that says out of, I think it's like 350 portraits that he's looked at in the century after 1540, 320 of them show men with a beard. They only don't have a beard if they're a cleric or they're a youth because they're such a powerful testament to manliness. There are styles of beard. There's the sugarloaf or the stiletto or the hammer beam.

There are these extraordinary beards. The last piece of evidence for how important beards are at this time is this. When in the 1530s, Henry's exerting himself as king of Ireland, he orders that in Galway all men's upper lips should be shaved because he understood the power of stripping a man of his beard is to masculate him. Wow. So one of the things we really see, even as he's declining, even as Hunter, is now him sitting on a horse and then driving the deer in front of him.

Even as he's unable to walk, he's sporting this massive beard. God, his beard. Oh, Henry. I'll be back with Susie and Henry after the short break. I know that he was, well, the historian say he's complex. He killed so many people. He just seems to have been utterly, utterly vile in so many ways. But there's always a part of me that feels this pathos for this former warrior king, this champion, this erudite.

man of learning this everyone's loved him and he's kind of just been reduced and reduced and reduced and there he's got his beard and he's clinging on to his beard and I guess it sort of makes sense him getting involved with Catherine Howard because he was so ridiculously excited about his young sexy wife it's all classic midlife crisis stuff yeah I mean he's apparently unable to keep his hands off her this is what the ambassadors say he touches her more than he did the others oh nice Oh, really, because she's maybe 18, maybe 20. And he's 50-odd. So, yes, he's very pleased.

And of course, he thinks that maybe she's going to give him an air at that point as well. So that's important. And he has Edward, but Edward's very young and children die a lot before the age of five or ten at this point in time. So he needs to make provision for another air. But, I mean, I think you can certainly extend him some degree of sympathy. He goes through a lot. But I think we're also responsible for how we react to trauma. There has to be a limit.

So one of the things that I learned about Henry recently that I hadn't realized that kind of again, it gets me. He had to wear glasses later in life, or was it glazers, as they called them imported from Germany. Obviously nobody saw him doing. As he's becoming sicker and sicker, he spends more and more time because the question is, rooms reading stuff. He has to wear glasses to read stuff. And it's all this hiding this from the outside world and trying to present himself as I'm still manly. I might be fat, but I'm big. I'm married to this young woman. I'm super virile. But the reality is there's this man who's in pain and his body's failing and he's wearing glasses and he's trying to grow his beard out to look tough.

And it's just as a huge contrast. There is. I think what we could say is, I mean, he's still spending just as much or even more on his clothing. in these later years, and he still has his hands on power very firmly. I mean, so even in the last month of his life, when Henry Howard Earl of Surrey, the poet, is accused of treason, Henry VIII, takes the questions to be asked of this young man, and he annotates them, he writes all over them. So he's personally involved in all aspects of rule.

He's still managing everything. He's still really deeply engaged with theology, for example, like ideas about faith dominate his thinking, some of the big questions of his reign. And he actually very cleverly annotates books that are written by his bishops and adds one or two words that completely change the meaning of a sentence or completely rethink the theology that they've asserted. So he is engaged.

I feel like we could possibly focus, too much on the exteriority when there's a lot going on at an interior level. And sure, he shows periods of depression and, you know, we can't excuse him his bloodthirstiness in his later years. But like he's not just all decline, is what I'm saying, I suppose. No, no, that's very true. So as a final question then, again, I know it's a difficult from this kind of a distance. Do you understand Henry to be someone that's supremely confident or somebody that's supremely

insecure. I think that those two things kind of go hand in hand. I think in his youth, he demonstrates that extraordinary confidence at egotism and his egotism is shown off by him doing a thousand or jumps on his horse or tiring out all those horses or being particularly wonderful at tennis or joustice or whatever. But that reality does not continue. And so he's trying to grasp to something that he's losing. And at the same time, he has all these attacks on him for good reason, for things he's done, like the break with Rome. There's a moment where the Pope says it's legal for anyone to invade the country and take

his throne. There's a moment when Francis I first and Charles V are ganging up to do just that. And Henry builds all these fortresses along the south coast to defend England from invasion. There's a moment in 1545 where a bigger fleet of. than the Spanish Armada arrives on the South Coast, the Battle of the Solent, and tries to attack. That's when the Mary Rose sinks. So Henry is subject to threat, and he begins to see threats amongst those around him. But his response to that is so egocentric.

He has treason laws passed that expand the definition of treason. It becomes treasonous to call the king a tyrant, which is about the most tyrannical thing you can imagine. It becomes treasonous to a treasonous to a treasonous. imagine the death of the king in words, to even think it really. And so he tries to sort of pin down everything around him. He's trying to secure himself, which to me speaks of deep insecurity. Oh, Henry. But also, oh, Henry. Susanna, you have been fascinating. You always are. And if people want to know more about you and your work, and frankly, they should. But where can they find you? Well, they can, of course, find me on your sister podcast, or not just the Tudors.

Fabulous. And we've got a couple of documentaries also on History Hit. There's one out already called The World Torn Apart, which is about the dissolution of the monasteries. There's lots there about Henry the Eighth's Queens. And we've got some coming up about things like Henry the 8th on film, Lady Jane Grey, Catherine Howard, the wife we've been talking about. So everybody should be dwelling on History Hit all the time and obviously subscribed.

Thank you so much. You have been fabulous. It's been great to talk to you, Kate. Thank you for listening. and thank you so much to Susie for joining me. And if you look what you heard, please don't forget to like with you and follow along whatever it is that you get your podcasts.

Coming up, we are back on the hunt for more historical fuckboys. Can Charles II, Raphael or the Emperor Nero outdo Henry VIII, Byron and Caligula? Well, there's only one way to find out. If you'd like us to explore a subject or maybe you just wanted to say hello, then you can email us at betwixt at historyhit.com. This podcast was edited by Peter Dennis

and produced by Sophie G. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again, Betwixt the Sheets, History of Sex Scandal and Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.