Forbidden History - Private Life of Henry VIII

Episode Date: June 5, 2025

In this episode of the Forbidden History podcast we explore the surprisingly private and complex life of Henry VIII beyond his public image. From his refined tastes and athletic pursuits, this episode reveals a lesser-known side of the Tudor monarch. Cast List: Tracy Borman: Chief Curator, Historic Royal Palaces  Tony McMahon: Author & Journalist  Hallie Rubenhold: Author, ‘The Scandalous Lady W’ Dominic Selwood: Author & Journalist  Rebecca Rideal: Author, ‘Plague, War & Hellfire’ Dr. Matt Green: Historian  Lesley Ronaldson: Guide Lecturer, Hampton Court Palace  Eleri Lynn: Chief Curator, Historic Royal Palaces Eric Meyers: Narrator  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Forbidden History Podcast. This program is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. It contains adult themes. Listener discretion is advised. Henry V. 8th. Probably the best-known English king in history. We're all familiar with the popular image of Henry. The ruthless, bad-tempered monster who had six wives,

a spectacular falling out with the Pope in Rome, and an obsession with fathering a son and heir. All of this is certainly true. But was there more to Henry than that? Henry VIII started with a lot of promise, this kind of youthful chivalric king. He's centralized power in the country. He made the government fantastically wealthy

and most importantly he prevented England from becoming Catholic. He was this great energetic youth. He had so much going for him. But throughout his life he sustained knock after knock after knock. knock. He'd risk so much in the pursuit of this male heir and it had all really come to nothing. Henry the eighth's big problem was he comes to power and the dynasties still didn't feel as if it was legitimate. You know, and his big struggle to have a son is to make the dynasty legitimate. He has to go to six wives to get there basically.

I mean in terms of himself, in terms of his personal life, he's a disaster. He was monumentally self-obsessed and disdemeanct. He was monumentally self-obsessed and disdemeanor. to the extent that his reign left nothing but division in the country. And his one goal, his one aim that motivated all of his murderous activities failed in itself, in that his dynasty lasted no longer than his children. In this episode of the Forbidden History podcast, we discover what made Henry the 8th so popular during his early reign, delve into one of the king's favorite pastimes,

and explore the fashion that made Henry because of his early reign, Henry become one of the most iconic British monarchs. Joining us for this episode is royal historian Tracy Borman. On the 7th of June 1520, nearly 10,000 Englishmen and Frenchmen met in a field in northern Calais with their respective kings. Henry VIII of England and Francis I of France. In the past, this would have signaled yet another war. But this time, they had an altogether different purpose.

However, kings will be kings, and the Anglo-French rivalry wasn't going to disappear overnight, although this time it took a slightly different form. Cannons were swapped for quail's eggs, plate armor for plates of food, and hand-to-hand combat for cheek-to-cheek dancing, as each king attempted to outdo the other in a lavish battle of wealth. The field of the cloth of gold was this incredible moment in history where Henry VIII took a huge entourage

thousands of people across the channel over to France and created this tent city slash palace. There were glass windows in the tents, there were fountains of wine. The French did a similar thing. They had parties, they had feasts together. that this was all to show solidarity with the French king. This was Henry doing what Henry did best, putting on a show. He nearly bankrupted the English treasury in an effort to outdo Francis, with tents and clothing made from the expensive cloth of gold.

In fact, there was so much of the stuff that the site was named after it. However, all this opulence wasn't enough for Henry. He had to show his physical strength as well. So naturally he challenged Francis to a wrestling match. With the honor of their respective countries at stake, the French Chronicles give much more information about the outcome than the English ones, because Henry lost. So you have to imagine the field of the cloth of gold. It's supposed to be like, you know, what we'd have now as a leader's summit, you know,

it'd be terribly formal, you know, TV crews and very sensible meetings, but it wasn't like this in Tudor time. So you have basically King Francis at the first of France and Henry VIII wrestling each other and being terribly good chaps. And all around them, people are getting drunk out of these wine fountains. And then the backdrop to all of this is an artificially constructed palace, you know, that's supposed to look like the real thing. But it's basically a stage set for this event.

And it's constructed at enormous cost. I mean, completely pointless, taken down and burnt afterwards, never used again. Henry didn't really have a concept of the country and what it needed or what it thought. Henry and the country were the same in Henry's mind. They were Henry. That meant that in effect he had a country-sized ego. What was good for him, he thought was good for the country. The whole thing costs hundreds of thousands of pounds. This is a man who had an enormous ego.

He wanted to be seen as this young, youthful, chivalric prince. And I think it was all about chivalry. And although it seemed to be a man who had an enormous ego, he wanted to be seen as this young, it seemed as though there was antagonism between Francis and Henry. In fact, it was a clever form of diplomacy as well, because they were showing that they were meeting each other on a level. They were both these kind of masculine forces, and perhaps it warded off a war which otherwise could have been much worse.

But did the three-week extravagance achieve its aims of uniting England and France? Not quite. A couple of years later, they were at war again. So the field of the cloth of gold is destined to be remembered simply as a massive show of one-upmanship. Although there is nothing left from the grand spectacle in France, Henry VIII also lavished money in a way that we can still see today. He was the most prolific builder of the Tudor period, and during his reign, the number of palaces increased from 12 to a staggering 55.

These included St. James's, none such, and perhaps the most famous of all, Hampton Court Palace. Hampton Court was not actually built by Henry, but by Thomas Woolsey, his closest advisor. But as he started to fall out with the king, Woolsey very wisely handed it over to him. Under Henry, Hampton Court became the most important palace of his reign, and it was said to be the king's favorite residence. Hampton Court was just complete splendor and opulence, and it was all mod cons in the Tudor era. It was beautiful, it was beautifully furnished, ivory and velvet furniture.

The kitchens were magnificent. You could feed about 600 people. You had multiple ovens, fireplaces for spit roasting. There were cellars for, for wine and cellars for ale and a room for spices, spices that came from the Orient and Europe, which were essential in the preparation of food because you had to cover any sort of taste of things going off. So you've got this incredible advancement in Tudor technology. Once Hampton Court Palace was his, Henry began a huge program of expansion.

He redecorated the Great Hall and added a curious architectural detail. Henry had small carved wooden figures built into the eaves, and they're called eavesdroppers, which is evidently where the word comes from. He wanted to discourage gossip and to demonstrate that everything said at court eventually reached his ears. Henry started with amazing promise. This was the Renaissance. This was the age of humanism.

This was a time when rulers like Henry in England had these glittering courts of intellectuals and artists and they were exploring and discovering the world anew. And Henry was part of that. He was intellectual. He liked books. He liked learning. He was a great sportsman. He was a musician.

He was an attractive, handsome man. He had great bang. Henry had everything. And it was expected that his court would be the defining Renaissance court of Europe. It was during the reign of Henry VIII. of Henry VIII that one of the most unusual jobs in history was created, the groom of the stool. The role entailed monitoring and assisting in the king's bowel movements. You'd think a job like this wouldn't be sought after, but actually it was most often the sons

of nobleman and the gentry. So the bodily functions of a medieval monarch of a Tudor monarch were something that was surprisingly open, and that includes going to the toilet, basically. And there was a kind of a prestige attached to being the aristocrat who was selected to basically clean up after Henry. Now, this might sound like it was the least desirable job in the whole of Tudor England,

but in fact the opposite was true because that gave you, you know, unrivaled, untrammeled access to the king, and you could influence him, you know, when he was kind of at his most vulnerable, That was all part of the kind of mechanics of Tudor power. It was all about getting the king's ear and factions formed, and usually the rival factions would try and recruit the current groom of the stool so that they could kind of pour ideas like down the ear of Henry

as he was sitting on his beautiful kind of velvet toilet. But while Henry gave the impression that he was all knowing, that didn't mean he wanted everyone knowing his business. After arriving at each palace, for example, all he wanted was a little privacy. So after traveling to Hampton Court on a royal barge, he'd use a specially built Watergate, complete with a covered walkway that led right to his private apartments. That way, no one could see the king come and go. This sense of privacy carried through to his relationships with women.

Royal historian Tracy Borman tells us more. While other monarchs, such as Charles II and George IV, paraded their mistresses and flaunted them in front of their wives, Henry was different. He was actually an intensely private man, and so his extramarital liaisons were kept under wraps, known only to a small circle of loyal intimates. Henry's relationship with women was really no different than the standard Tudor relationship

between a man and his wife or men and women. Women were just vessels for a man's seed. That was a woman's job. Produce a legitimate heir. That was it. And Henry looked at each woman and each wife as a potential for that. And that's it. There was no necessarily any great amount.

in all of his relationships. He loved Anne Boleyn. He probably loved Jane Seymour as well. But how men and women related to one another was in a very different context than we imagine it today. Tracy Borman again. Tudor attitudes to love and sex were rather complex and contradictory. One view had it that sex was an incredibly healthy thing to do,

provided it was good, bad sex. however, was bad for the soul. Another view held that having sex shortened a man's life by a day, so he should only do it to produce children, and certainly not for enjoyment. Henry tended towards the pro-sex point of view, and accounts suggest he was an affectionate lover,

albeit rather a conservative one. Anne Hastings, the married younger sister of the Duke of Buckingham. Henry took her as his wife, mistress in 1510 while his queen Catherine of Aragon was pregnant. She was the cause of the first argument in the royal marriage. Not that Henry really understood why. After all, he'd been free to indulge his passion for women during his youth. Why should he stop? Now he was married. Elizabeth Blount, known as Bessie, made of honour to Catherine of Aragon. She gave birth to Henry's child in June

1519. We're not sure if Catherine knew about this, as Henry kept Bessie's pregnancy very secret indeed. The healthy boy named Henry Fitzroy was the only illegitimate child that Henry openly acknowledged. But there was a reason. It proved that the king was capable of fathering a son. The affair ended soon afterwards. Nobody is sure why. And Bessie was married off to the courtier Gilbert Tallboys in 1522. It's hard to underestimate Henry Leight's desire for a male heir. He was only the second of his dynasty. It was important to secure an heir for the future.

And his desire for this male air did have implications on the women that he chose. And it was a driving force behind the break with the Church of Rome, behind the marriage to Anne Boleyn and behind all the subsequent beheadings, divorces that came after that point. It was all in pursuit of this male heir. Now we get to the Berlins. Yes, that's Belins, plural. First up was Mary Berlin.

She gave birth to her first child in 1523, and it was almost certainly Henry's. This was made slightly worse, the fact that Henry had been the principal guest at Mary's wedding to his courtier William Carey only a few years before. But Henry lost interest in Mary once he'd got what he wanted. Keeping it in the family, next of course was Anne Boleyn, Mary's sister. Henry and Anne's relationship developed more gradually as Anne was determined to be more than just another of Henry's mistresses. So she teased him and led him on slowly.

Henry's lust and I think it's fair to say love just got stronger and stronger. And well, the rest, as they say, is history. The severing of ties with Rome was followed by the severing of Anne's head from her shoulders. Well, there's a rumour that Henry bedded not just Anbelin but her sister

and her mother as well, which does sound far-fetched, but Henry could really, you know, take his pick. He was the king, and no one's going to say no to him. The Berlin family are massively ambitious. She's arguably the wife that he loved the most because she was very intelligent, and she had French manners she'd spent time in the French court.

But they are an ambitious family. The girls vie for his attention and is the one who succeeds. But oh my goodness, how she must have wished she hadn't succeeded when she faced the execution block. Henry clearly found plenty of ways of filling his spare time. But he also found another, real tennis. This was the forerunner of tennis as we know it today,

and Henry had a court built at Hampton Court Palace so he could play his favorite game. The first tennis court at Hampton Court was built for Cardinal Woolsey between 1526 and 1529. As a young man, Henry VIII was a keen and talented tennis player who spent hours on court. Leslie Ronaldson has agreed to show Tracy the court where the king regularly played. Wow. So we're standing on Henry the 8th's court? Yes. He played on this site.

And he was hugely keen, wasn't he? Oh, massively. He would have played it as a child because Henry 7th, his father was a was an addict as well and it was a way of showing off as well as keeping fit and he obviously did many things to keep fit Henry had interests in a number of fields he was a very accomplished sportsman dancer he excelled in physical pursuits and the physical pursuits of royalty horses falconry prowess these were things that he achieved immensely well and at the same time he had a life of the mind he's a renaissance man he He writes, he paints, he jouts, he hunts, he plays tennis, he's sporty, he's, you know, he writes books on religion.

You know, he's a great guy. What I am interested in is Henry himself as a tennis player. So did people let him win or was he actually pretty good? He was very good, even with the sycophants around him. He probably was world-class and he performed a lot in front of people. The galleries that you see today around us are actually made because people wanted to watch. So Henry's courtiers would have been lining the court here up in the galleries. The ladies, presumably, would have been watching Henry.

Yes, and ambassadors. Lots of the court would have played against him. A lot of players, actually, he played with. He lost a lot of money too, and they lost money to him because you could play off handicap as well. So they always gambled on the outcome? Always gambled. It was very much a gambling game. And, of course, Ambelin was watching a game of tennis

when she was taken to the council and then arrested. Oh, really? She complained that she hadn't won her bed. She had a priorities, right? So it seems to me that Henry's putting on a bit of a show. Absolutely. It's extraordinary that so many ambassadors can report on his tennis even though they weren't playing themselves. Obviously, a lot of people were watching.

Although he used it for energy and athleticism as well. He was a great athlete. It's far more than just a game to Henry, isn't it? Oh, absolutely. A, money, and B, to show off that he could win and beat these other guys. Sadly, the athletic, even-tempered Henry was about to have his life turned upside down by an event that helped transform him into the monarch we all recognize today. On the 24th of January 1536, when Henry was 44 years old, an accident occurred during a jousting tournament at Greenwich Palace.

Henry was thrown from his horse, which then landed on top of him. One report claimed he was unconscious for two hours, and it was feared his injuries would prove fatal. The accident caused serious leg problems which plagued him for the rest of his life. The fact that he was in constant, often acute pain brought about profound changes in his personality. Henry was becoming the brutal, cruel, paranoid man that he is remembered. as today.

One thing that comes out of the accident is this horrendous injury on his leg, which becomes ulcerated. It's an open gash. And there's all sorts of barking mad medical treatments about draining the humours and sticking red-hot pokers in it. It's supposed that they were exacerbated by the tight garters he wore around his leg, which may have cut off circulation. But they seem to be incurring. One of the ways we can clearly see how Henry changed over his lifetime is in the clothes he wore.

Eleri Lynn knows all about Henry's dress sense and has agreed to show Tracy what he would have worn in his later years. The room would have been absolutely full of gentlemen ready and eager to dress the king. Would his dresses have been under pressure to get a move on, given the king's so uncomfortable standing? I imagine so. We know that he was in a conceivable standing. We know that he was in a considerable amount of pain, and we know that his leg was not in a good state a lot of the time. So I imagine it must have been quite difficult to dress him. And we know that he got quite bad tempered.

The evidence suggests that there was a shift in the way that his personality was working after the jousting accident. He seems to become moodier. He seems to be, to have a shorter temper. He seems to not tolerate as much as he had done before. And of course we know the famous stories about Henry VIII and his wives. This all happens on the other side of that weird hinge in the middle of his life, which was the jousting accident.

We can't not mention the Henriian codpiece. And so it was a very fashionable item in the 16th century, but for Henry probably more so than at most other royal courts because he really had something to prove, because he didn't have a son for the majority of his reign, and then when he did, only one. And so he was really at pains to show his virility and his masculinity. As Henry's leg really immobilized him,

he started to put on enormous girth, which exacerbated the leg even further. And he became so awkward and difficult to maneuver. that there needed to be several people who helped him do anything that he wanted to do. So Henry did like to promote his own name at court. At Hampton Court, we know there are lots of H's and then also the letters of his various wives decorating the building. But here we have the H chain and also the symbol of the order of the garter.

The highest military order in the lab. Absolutely. So he is projecting himself as a warrior and a member of that class. Henry was an immensely tall man. He was physically imposing. He was six foot two, which in the age with the diets that people had them, was head and shoulders above most people. But by the end of his life, his dissolute life,

he also weighed around 28 stone. If you're a king or a queen, then there's always going to be the option to gorge yourself on food. Now you don't have to take up that opportunity, but it was only after his accident, accident when he could no longer really take exercise, his metabolism was slowing down, and also his whole psychology had changed by that point. He was an angry man, and this was a

perfect storm, which meant that instead of picking, he'd actually pick up the whole kind of tray of food and pour the whole thing into his mouth and just eat. It became something of an addiction, which is why he became morbidly obese, just like George IV, did, and kind of in a similar way to Queen Victoria as well, who put on a lot of weight in her later years. In October 1537, Henry's third queen, Jane Seymour, died of postnatal complications, just a couple of weeks after giving birth to their son, Edward. It is said that Henry wore black for three months following her death. However, spotting an opportunity, Thomas Cromwell, Henry's chief minister, played matchmaker.

He proposed a political marriage between Henry and Anne, the daughter of the Duke of Cleves. Their match was confirmed with a treaty signed on the 4th of October 1539. Anne arrived in England on New Year's Eve, and in true chivalric tradition, Henry, in disguise, hastened to meet her. Anne of Cleaves is often the skipped-over wife, you know, because Henry basically has a very nice portrait sent of her by Holbein, and he feels that he's pressured into marrying her. She turns up.

He sees her in the flesh and goes, oh my God, that's not what I was expecting. That's not what I ordered. But that picture of, you know, the Flanders mayor, the ugly woman who Henry Spurns before he goes on to his next wife, that's all being challenged now. When Henry VIII and Anne of Cleves met initially, he was in disguise because he wanted to see what she thought of him. And she wasn't impressed with what she saw. And so he was obviously, you know, had his feelings hurt and decided that he didn't like her either. So this is a myth that Anne of Cleaves was unattractive and unappealing to Henry as a wife. It would have caused a major diplomatic incident if Henry decided to revoke the treaty,

and England could not afford to lose allies. So very begrudgingly, Henry married Anne six days later. While the royal wedding was celebrated publicly in its usual pageantry and splendor, the relationship between Henry and Anne was apparently. Apparently a disaster behind closed doors. In July 1540, less than a year after her arrival, Henry, Cromwell, and other eyewitnesses, testified to an assembly of archbishops that the marriage was to be annulled. Their reason?

According to Henry, their marriage was non-consensual and unconsumated. Anne wasn't even invited to testify. So that was that, and Henry went on to marry the more desirable Catherine Howard and got out of his marriage to Anne of Cleaves. But was that really the whole truth? Tracy Borman shares her thoughts. I actually think history has been rather unkind to poor Anne. In fact, I'd go further.

I'd say she could justifiably claim to be the most successful of all Henry's wives. And as for Henry's inability to consummate the marriage, well, perhaps it was his fault and not hers. He was twice his bride's age and had become increasingly immobile in recent years. Besides, Henry had already fallen in love with Catherine Howard by the spring of 1540 and was keen to get rid of Anne, inventing all sorts of reasons why the marriage couldn't stand. of Cleves, fearing the same fate as her namesake, Anne Boleyn, complied and was rewarded with a string of properties, Richmond Palace and Heva Castle to name just two. She managed to dodge the axe and outlived all of Henry's other wives. By this stage, Henry is ailing, he's got

this gaping wound in his leg, he's nowhere near as virile as he once was. He was impotent. He couldn't have sex with her. So in order to protect his kind of manly status, the story was put out by his courtiers that she was too ugly for him to bear the sight of. She was a Flanders mayor, as he put it. And that was expedient for both of them. Like she got out of the marriage and he didn't have to suffer that indignity any longer. Actually, Anne of Cleaves probably got the bestial out of all of his wives because she managed to detach herself from Henry the 8th at a time when when he probably wouldn't have been the best husband to be around anyway. And she lived a fine life.

He thought of her and referred to her as being like his sister. And Henry then went on to marry his subsequent wives. So she was probably a lot more intelligent and canny than we've given her credit for. Anna Cleaves was clearly a very intelligent woman and in fact, may have been a very good-looking woman. And indeed, Henry might have actually got on quite well with her. there is the suggestion that actually Henry's underlying problem was impotence that he moved on from him

because he simply, as with his other wives, he stopped performing very well in the bedroom. Whatever his feelings, I mean, she is allowed to retire, she's referred to as his sister, she has very good relationships with the children. You know, she's a wife actually who he seems to like having around even after he divorces her. So clearly everything wasn't quite as bad as poor Alanna Cleaves has been depicted. Whether or not Anne was the Flanders mayor history paints her as, it certainly seemed that Henry liked her enough not to chop off her head. And since his accident, he was going through wives at an incredible pace.

I mean, it's very telling, if you look at the timeline from the jousting accident, where he clearly not only injures his leg, but he injures his head as well, it probably affected his ability to perform in bed. It certainly seems to have impacted his memory. I mean, his last wife, he sentences to be put on trial for treason. Then when the soldiers turn up, he can't remember that he did that. He can't remember people who've been executed. He's sort of appalling temper tantrums.

So he becomes a very different person. He becomes cantankerous, unbearable, very volatile, and most importantly of all, he goes through five wives after this jousting accident. I mean, Anne Boleyn is executed six months later. I think Henry's been misrepresented in some ways. He wasn't a serial wife hater. He was married to Catherine of Aragon for over 20 years, and it was fine. It's only when she can't bear him a male heir.

That's the main concern. That's paramount in his mind. And when that's not happening, that's when he begins to look to divorce them. Towards the end of his life, the king had endured many years of agonizing pain from the sore on his leg. It was a constant reminder of his lost years. and made him a bitter and angry monarch. Henry had become less mobile, overweight,

and was so unwell that even walking upstairs had become too much for him. So he had a stair lift made to haul the royal body between floors. Towards the end of his life, Henry cut a very pathetic figure. He was sorry for himself. He was the victim in his own eyes of all these things. It was terribly sad he'd had to execute these women,

but that was their fault not his. And yet he was still incredibly proud. He still wanted to project this image of being the man that he wasn't. That amazing Henry ego meant that he wasn't going to let anyone know about or see the fact that he couldn't walk up the stairs. The trouble with Henry, and the reason I think he ends up

as a very bitter old man and very bitter on his deathbird, he basically betrays everybody who loved him. who loved him or respected him. I mean, you can include the Pope. Pope Leo actually bestowed an honour on him, defender of the faith for his defence of Catholicism. Then he portrays the Catholic Church. You know, the wives who loved him,

Catherine of Aragon, a faithful wife, divorced. Anne Boleynne loves him, executed. You know, Thomas Cromwell, faithful servant, executed. By the end of his life, you know, nobody wants to be Henry's friend because you know what happens to Henry's friend. The image of Henry the Eighth is one that's almost laughable. You know, it's the big fat man eating the turkey.

And the reality was, to a certain degree, something apart from that. You know, he was not comical. He was a tyrant. He was an unreasonable man who executed hundreds of people during his reign. Who was ruthless, who was not a good leader. but he started out with a lot of promise and a lot of potential, but he ultimately was destroyed by his own ego. Henry VIII died on the 28th of January 1547 at the age of 55.

The young handsome Henry is now long forgotten. He is instead forever remembered as a cruel tyrant. Thanks for exploring the past with us today. If you like this episode, please be sure to follow for more. We post new episodes every Tuesday and Thursday. Don't forget to leave a comment below, and feel free to leave us a rating or review. Your feedback helps us reach more listeners like you.

And for more from the Like a Shot Network, check out Where Did Everyone Go, Histories of the Abandoned, a deep dive into the incredible stories behind Forgotten Places, available now on your favorite podcast platforms. Thanks for listening.