The Rest Is History - 74. The Six Wives of Henry VIII

Episode Date: July 12, 2021

Henry VIII had the most notorious marital relations of any king in history. Tom and Dominic discuss the six women who became his queen. How did they influence the course of the Reformation? And which one would have done best on Love Island? A Goalhanger Films & Left Peg Media production Produced by Jack Davenport Exec Producer Tony Pastor *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. O death, rock me asleep, bring me the quiet rest. Let pass my weary, guiltless ghost out of my careful breast. These lines are attributed to Anne Boleyn. She supposedly wrote them in 1536 in the Tower of London as she was awaiting execution at the hands of a French swordsman who had been brought over specially for the purpose by her erstwhile husband, King Henry VIII,

whose marital history has inspired another poem, Divorced, Beheaded, Died, Divorced, Beheaded, died divorced, beheaded, survived and Dominic Sandbrook with me probably the most famous the most famously disastrous sequence of marriages in English history in English history, in world history probably the whole of history definitely

it's an irresistible subject isn't it it's the stuff of soap operas it's the stuff of costume dramas um it's the stuff of about a thousand channel five documentaries well it's amazing i mean you know we're so we're well into the 70s i think we've done over 70 episodes it's kind of extraordinary that we haven't haven't really done one before yeah we've shown herculean self-restraint i think i guess if if we were you know if we were a tv company we'd have done six on the already if we would actually the reason why we have delayed it doing the six wives of henry the eighth obviously there have been many many great scholars over the years who have written about the reign of henry the eighth one thinks of sir jeffrey J.G. Scarrisbrick, David Starkey but these scholars have now been

joined by a new kid on the block Dominic Sandbrook. Dominic your book The Six Wives of Henry VIII. Tom I don't like the slightly ironic way in which you're... No but to explain this is this is written for children. and absolutely fabulous i read it last night and i'm not in any way just saying that i hugely enjoyed it um and i guess so your other book is on the second world war henry henry the eighth and second world war those are the two big topics but henry the eighth really i mean it's a it's a timeless classic isn't it it is and actually i was always a bit suspicious of it i was never a great aficionado of the Tudors or of the Six Wives of Hymn of the Eighth. I was slightly bridled at the sort of,

oh, I don't know, the sort of soap opera-y nature of it. But then when I started getting into it, I actually found it irresistible. And it's partly the court politics and the sort of Game of Thrones style kind of bed-hopping shenanigans and all that stuff. But the fact is it happens at an absolute hinge moment of history

against the backdrop of these colossal religious changes, which mean that this is without question the biggest political and cultural break in England's history. And it's all snarled up with Anne Bovil and sex appeal exactly henry's lust so the weird thing is that that all these things that it's very easy to dismiss as froth and gossip and the stuff of kind of some tudor tackler they really matter they change the lives of millions of people and that's what makes it so enduringly fascinating well i i remember i um the first time i went to the loire must have been I don't know 20 or something

um and visiting all these kind of incredible chateaus that had been built by Henry VIII's exact contemporary François Premier Francis I of France who was king of you know a much more much richer in many ways much more sophisticated country than England um and I felt kind of quite intimidated looking at these glories to Gallic civilization but then I thought yeah but how many wives did Francis I have Henry VIII is a much much better character yeah and I felt a kind of patriotic glow oh that's good to hear that's very good to hear well well Francis I mean Henry did measure himself against Francis I of France And he also measured himself against... So there are basically three big kings, aren't there, at this point?

Well, there are two big kings, aren't there? Well, there are two big kings and one kind of... And Henry kind of tried to join the clans. That's right. So there's Francis, or François, and then there's Charles, or Carlos V of Spain, who is also the ruler of the Holy Roman Empire, is just unbelievably rich and has this massive dominion.

You know, he's got South America and he's, I mean, he is by far the most potent monarch of the day. And poor old Henry, you know, he just rules England and he's desperate. He's absolutely desperate to be taken seriously by these two guys. And he's changing his wives all the time. And there's this sort of farcical, comical element element to him as well as the sort of terrifying and more sinister element well he yeah i mean i i i think he only seems comical if he does seem comical and of course

he was played by sid james in the carry-on film so i guess there is a slight element of the comic but but up close i mean he's, he's a very frightening figure. And the fact that he is actually able to go toe-to-toe with the great kings on the continent, I think are a kind of measure of the swagger and the power and the charisma that he does have. And that even non-English people experience. I mean, he's a very, very intimidating.

But you don't get Henry right, I think, unless you emphasise exactly what you just said about his charisma so when he becomes king i mean he's a very impressive person he plays tennis he writes music he writes songs he speaks physically impressive isn't he i mean he's very very good looking he's very muscular very large handsome i mean everybody says he's handsome he looks like a king and and he actually behaves he he plays the part of a king very well i mean that's one thing i think that sometimes people forget is that actually to people at the time what strikes them is not oh he's a complete monster and he's so fat and all this sort of stuff what strikes them is he looks and behaves exactly

as a king should and if he is sometimes cruel and capricious i think to a lot of people in the 16th century those things were sort of perhaps slightly lamentable but they were better than being weak and dithery and pious and sort of a bit sanctimonious and waffly like henry the sixth for example always praying when he should have been killing people right they like a strong ruler and and and the context for henry's reign is exactly the wars of the roses where henry the sixth of lancaster is so useless that he ends up kind of being deposed twice basically yes by one of yeah and then you've you've got well actually you begin your book with with bosworth don't you with with um yeah because i think that's really important to understand his context. So that he, first of all, he doesn't know he's early modern rather than late medieval. You know, he, at the back of his mind are the Wars of the Roses.

And secondly, he doesn't know that the Wars of the Roses are over. So we conventionally say, well, they ended in 1485 when his father, a Welsh adventurer from a little branch of the family, basically is the last man standing after this great Game of Thrones style bloodbath but Henry VIII doesn't know that that's all over I mean neither of the two Henry's do for them they think there could be a revolt at any moment that the old kind of guard the old nobility could be plotting against them which actually frankly a lot of the time they are um so they there's that sort of insecurity and that fear, and that lies behind this whole business of the son.

He has to have an heir, because he knows if I don't have an heir, then basically everything my dad and I have done will be for nothing, and those bastards will get the throne back again. And that's at the back of his mind the whole time. That fear, you know, that people are... This stuff about him being paranoid which you often read oh henry was paranoid he was like stalin or whatever i mean he's only paranoid in the sense that he takes it a little bit further than you or i might have done

but frankly he lives at a time when if you don't kill people first they probably will kill you although i mean fair enough but if you're marrying him i mean well yes i suppose it's definitely a consideration to bear in mind isn't it and also i suppose the other consideration to bear in mind as he gets older is that he gets fatter and fatter uh and less attractive and he starts to get smelly pus ridden ulcers all up his legs uh and ultimately he ends up so fat does he not dominic yeah that he has he has to have enemas he does the enemas you may conceivably mention in your book i know you love this detail about the enemas um basically anyone who ever encounters my book thinks this is the either the best thing or the only or the least worst thing in it which is this description of how

henry's doctors would push this grease tube up his bottom, which was then attached to, I think it's kind of a metal tube, and it's attached to a pig's bladder that's filled with honey and milk and herbs and stuff, and they squirt this. I mean, imagine being the person who does the squirting. They squirt this. This is the kind of top historical analysis that I'm afraid you just don't get with Sir Geoffrey Elton. I was about to say, does Geoffrey Elton go in for the list i mean maybe he does i don't know no no david stargay dreary stuff about parliament i'm sure david stargay goes in for all this yeah antonio fraser

um but yeah i mean it doesn't make him any more even-tempered i think and probably for the wives certainly towards the end of the reign this is a kind of slightly unpleasant aspect of marital relations so the first the first catherine of aragon yeah who is the she is the aunt of um charles v that she is the emperor the king of spain um and she herself is the daughter of um ferdinand and isabella who are the kind of the great dual monarchs castile and aragon who um usher spain into her golden age so 1492 they capture granada which is the last kind of muslim outpost complete the the rey conquista they uh expel the jews from spain and they serve as patrons for uh columbus's discovery of the new world. Yeah, exactly. So they're heavyweights.

Yeah, that happened when she's seven. I mean, she's born in 1485. But in that sense, I mean, it's quite a coup for Henry VII, who's, you know, a bit of a parvenu, a usurper king of a rather marginal kingdom, to bag their youngest daughter, who I think is Ferdinand's favourite. Yes, that's right. that's actually absolutely right and i think it is a bit of a coup for him um the english are delighted with the match so he lines this up for his eldest son who's called arthur who ends up not becoming

king because he dies um so catherine of aragon is quite a catch and the reason i think that they both want the marriage is because they they're both anti-french such a theme of apocos actually loathing of the french so the french are the by you know incredibly powerful very rich country ginormous army um they're obviously a rival to the newly united castile and aragon so it makes sense to ally with the country on the other side the country to the north which is england i mean england is you know it doesn't have a great reputation it is war-torn rainy kind of miserable not not colossally rich um but it it kind of works as an alliance and so poor katherine of aragon as a teenager is basically shipped off to a country that she's never been to she doesn't speak the

language well and this kind of amazing advice that she gets from um henry the seventh's wife elizabeth of york what she should do to get get ready for life in england is that she should learn to drink wine because the water is so horrible and poisonous and she should learn to speak french which is odd that is weird because yes because elizabeth york says no one here speaks spanish so don't come here with your your your lisping ways you know you're gonna have to speak something else so why don't you have to french but it doesn't occur to anybody english is just such a kind of um de classe language yeah english what's the point of learning it even if you're going to england yeah in france french is

the language of romance and chivalry and and and high culture so i suppose that makes sense it is kind of weird that she pitches up without a word of i mean she basically doesn't even have the burlitz phrasebook um um and it goes very well doesn't it she she marries um arthur it's all very glamorous wedding in st paul's yeah it goes that's all a great and she's a great hit actually with the crowds. I mean, the one thing about Catherine of Aragon that people really get wrong is we always see her, the sort of late period,

a bit like as we do with Henry VIII. We see them at the end rather than the beginning. At the beginning, she's a teenager. She's pretty. She's quite short. She doesn't look especially Spanish. She's got kind of fair reddish hair. People do say she's got a very fair reddish hair um people do say

she's got a very deep voice and a sort of very heavily accented but you know she's she's so young tom she's in her mid-teens she's just say goodbye to her parents i mean it really is the kind of trajectory of a children's story the girl separated from her family who goes away to this weird country um and she acquits herself at first brilliantly you know she marries arthur off they go to ludlow castle in the marches kind of arthurian legend yeah i mean it is she's living at that point she is living a fairy tale she's gone off to be camelot she's very popular she's gone to a camelot the the fire burns in the hearth they're drinking cups of kind of warmed goblets of warmed wine and then disastrously after a few months when they've been very happy

arthur drops dead of the sweating sickness and then she has this terrible time she comes back to london and basically no one really wants anything to do with her but she can't go back to spain the spanish don't want her back henry doesn't want to send her back he sort of keeps her as a it's not doesn't have any money does he yeah she's got no money she's quite exactly because he's just piling up taxes in his coffers um so she's she actually clearly goes into a very deep depression she's i mean think about it she's a girl in her late teens and then early 20s she doesn't speak the language she has very few friends most of her servants who've come with her go back to Spain

she has been cut off from her family her husband um her teenage husband is dead um she spends all her time praying and she basically starts writing letters she writes letters to her father to the pope and so on um And they write back. I mean, at one point the Pope basically writes to her and says, you've got to start eating. So it's clear that she's starving herself or got some kind of eating disorder. And there's people who are really worried about her. And so she's sort of sunk in this utter misery for years.

But then her handsome prince, her second handsome prince, comes to the rescue. But that's exactly what happened. So she'd met Henry at the wedding, and he'd been leaping around like a lunatic. Taking his shirt off. Taking his shirt off and dancing inappropriately or whatever, and everyone thought it was very funny. He's the sort of classic younger brother, you know,

who kind of, he's the James Holland. Well, he's literally Prince Harry. Yes, he is literally Prince Harryry except without the the compassion and kindness um so his early period prince harry i think it's better he's yeah he's he's this sort of japester um he becomes king 1509 uh he is i think he's um about to turn 18 or so so he's young he's very handsome very accomplished and he decides straight away i must have a wife and as luck would have it there's one there's there's a perfect candidate waiting right there in in london his brother's widow um now the question, even at that stage, there's the question about,

is it really legit to marry your brother's widow? Because there's a bit of the Bible that says, don't do it. But there's another bit of the Bible that says, you really ought to marry your brother's widow. So they get a dispensation from the Pope. The Pope basically says, it's absolutely fine. Go for it. They get married.

And Catherine is living the life of Riley. you know she's she's emerged from her depression she's she's deeply in love with her husband he seems deeply in love with her they're very happy they're having tournaments they're having these ridiculous masks where he at court where he dresses up as kind of robin hood or something comes in with his mates, and bursts into a bedchamber. I mean, you can just picture the scene. Bloody good bloke. Yeah. We had a great laugh.

We had a really good laugh. We all dressed up as the... Yeah, okay. I mean, you can absolutely... This is why Damien Lewis was perfect. Because you can absolutely see all these kind of old harrovians or something like i mean prince harry is completely the model they're bursting in they're all dressed up as the merry men in kind of colored hoods or something and then the catherine and the girls say oh gosh i didn't recognize you come for a kiss

and all this i mean they think it's there... They think this is the height of... And also, when Henry goes off to attack the French, which he's always doing, she helps to guard the northern frontier against the weasel Scott. She does. The Scots attack us. And the Battle of Flodden, disastrous defeat for the Scots.

So she's doing well. But, of course, there's one drawback. She gives Henry a daughter, Mary, but no son. and as you said this is a a catastrophic failure yeah of course i mean it's a failure i mean it's incredibly harsh that's exactly how that's how it's seen how it's perceived you're right you're you're dead right that is how it's judged um it's very harsh and of course the failure is seen as hers rather than henry's exactly exactly they do have a son um henry uh but he dies very young um only after i think actually dominic having said that having said that the failure is hers of course actually henry does come to think the failure might be his as

well doesn't he because he comes to see it as being the judgment of god he does and what's clear is that you get to the 1520s everything seems to be fine henry has been king for more than 10 years he's secure he's very handsome everybody's very impressed with him you know he he cuts a just a generally very impressive if slightly scary figure um but what clearly happens by the 1520s is she's a bit older than he is so there's partly that classic kind of psychological thing of the the husband with the with the older wife and he's you know there's an element of a sort of i don't know would you call it a midlife crisis he kind of fancies a younger model um but also the son thing is is is clearly she has got used to it whereas it is weighing on his mind

okay so the younger model yeah probably i mean probably the most famous of henry's wives i would say yeah i think so so and berlin and seen as the most romantic weirdly in my mind and and she didn't need to be told to learn french because she'd spent most of her life in France. So she's the daughter of one of Henry's most trusted diplomats. Sir Thomas Pym. And she is kind of laden waiting to the Queen of France. And she comes back to England and she's fashionable in the way that someone who spent lots of time in France is. She's not, I mean, she's not a sensational beauty, is she?

No, she's not. I mean, that's one of the things that people... She has a sixth finger. Well, I'm not sure. I think the sixth finger is... There's a lot of details about Anne Boleyn. And the third nipple is definitely not true. That's Scaramanga from The Man with the Golden Gum.

No, no, I'm not confusing it. Very rarely Christopher Lee. She, yes, people say she has sallow skin and she kind of, a very thin face and she's dark and, you know, people sort of disapprove of her looks. But people at court say she is very witty and she's clever and she's sharp and she's kind of charming and if you like that kind of thing and and she clearly represents to henry just the

complete antithesis of catherine who is so dutiful and serious and and is turning more and more to god and basically spending a lot of time praying although ann is also very religious but inclining towards this kind of radical new understanding of christianity that will come to be called protestantism that's right she's read books in france she's read like french translations of the bible and things so she's full of all this stuff and i think to henry all of this is kind of intoxicating megan quality perhaps yeah i think that's not a bad coming yeah coming from another country bringing a kind of radical exciting dramatic new way of understanding things and and it also really suits henry by the way this new way because the new way makes him more powerful because obviously the pope is colossally powerful and the new way basically involves

saying oh the pope doesn't really have power over you you know she's basically giving her amberlin is giving henry all these pamphlets by william tyndale and simon fish and these kind of reformation theologians which conveniently for him say oh the pope has no jurisdiction in your kingdom at all you can do what you like so from his point of view it's kind of win-win pile in yes so so he does he decides he wants to divorce catherine and decides he wants to do it because of the biblical injunction against brothers marrying their brothers' wives. But Tom, that's just not a decision that we should just dismiss lightly.

I'm not. I'm not. That is a colossal... Are you saying that I'm downplaying the significance of biblical injunction? For once, yeah. Heaven forbid. The shame of it. No, of course.

I mean, it's incredibly important. But it's also the fact that Anne, this is Anne's extraordinary role in history, actually. Kings had had mistresses since time immemorial. Henry had had mistresses, including anne's sister mary and is and the really remarkable thing is that anne says i will not be your mistress i must be your wife does that mean and obviously this is not a detail that you went into in your children's book yeah does that mean that henry does not sleep with anne until they marry um historians have discussed that i mean no one knows i mean the truth of that

what makes the six wives so so fascinating i think for people writing popular history books is there's actually so little that we do know that you can fill in a lot with your because it's i mean it's it's what it's kind of six years isn't it six seven years i mean i can't remember somebody like great matter somebody like david starkey or somebody like that says at some point she didn't sleep with him but she may have satisfied him by other means what's the sex act yeah exactly sort of some sort of bill clinton style you know um okay we're going to get distinction this is going to be an adult rated episode so we should rain back on that um yes okay so of course this then gets ground dragged into the great mangle that turns out to be the reformation yeah which hemorrhage has been against actually

early because of course he'd written in defense of the seven sacraments against luther yeah and he had this luther called him a mad fool with a frothy mouth so i think i think we should do another episode on the reformation in england of course we should of course multiple episodes so let's keep the focus on on on the wives yeah okay so basically the problem is that um the pope has just been taken prisoner by the emperor yeah charles v troops yeah have stormed rome so the Pope is in no position to allow Henry to divorce the Emperor's aunt. No. The Emperor would be livid about... Yeah.

There's a kind of deadlock. And the Pope plays for time. And Henry's getting increasingly frustrated, perhaps in every way. Who knows? Yes. And so, with the help of Thomas thomas cromwell as in um wolf hall yeah henry finds a way to cut the gordian knot which is basically to repudiate papal supremacy to declare himself um basically in charge of the church in england and in this way he's able to marry anne exactly

and poor old catherine gets shoved off to a succession of country houses um you know basically again she like anne as with anne the remarkable thing is she doesn't take the easy option either so the easy option would be to say fair enough you know we shouldn't have got married in the first place it was against the laws of god i'm off to a nunnery you know where i'll probably live in very you know i'll be well looked after and properly treated and stuff and but she basically says no i haven't come all this way and put up with all this thomas cromwell who who's whose maneuverings basically kind of back her out i mean, he's terribly impressed by her, isn't he? Yeah, he says she should have been a man.

If she'd been a man, she'd be one of the greatest figures in Christendom. Because basically, she defies him in public at this incredible trial. I mean, no wonder Channel 5 commissioners like this. The trial scene where this aged cardinal, this sort of Italian mafioso has come from, been sent from Rome, cardinal campeggio

and uh he's sitting there with cardinal woolsey and she basically stands up and humiliates henry in front of the whole all this audience and then when when when it becomes obligatory to swear the oath yeah uh you know i mean this is this is what does for Thomas More. He goes to the block over it. Both Catherine and Mary, her daughter, refused to swear it. So, I mean, there's kind of slight sense of jeopardy there. I mean, obviously, Henry, you know, he's not going to execute the emperor's...

No, he can't execute her. He can execute other people. But it's so telling, you're dead right, that he doesn't. And there's absolutely no question, really, that there's no danger of him executing Catherine so so Catherine so Catherine gets um she she kind of gets retired doesn't she um Mary so she and she basically kind of wastes away and and dies gets buried in Peterborough Cathedral yeah and to this day flowers are laid about her graves and

pomegranates the the symbol of Aragon. She's very, very popular with the British, with the English people. Yes. So she is seen as the queen. She is. Anne Boleyn, for that reason, is not popular. I think we should take a break at this point. Sure.

And I think that when we come back, we should look at the rise and fall of Anne Boleyn and then have a canter through the remaining four queens. Yeah. Jolly good. See you after the break. We tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. Hello, welcome back to The Rest Is History. We're talking The Six Wives of Henry VIII.

We've only got on onto the two first ones. Catherine of Aragon, who died just before the commercial break. And Anne Boleyn, who is now Queen Dominic. But not popular. No, people used to sort of mutter. They called her, what do they call her, kind of naughty strumpet and all this kind of stuff.

A naughty goggle-eyed witch. That's my favourite son. My favourite voice of the people. about it's getting after her yes exactly she's not popular she's not seeing some but her unpopularity wouldn't have mattered if she'd given henry a son yeah once again she gives him a daughter elizabeth yes um mary has been uh kind of cast aside so elizabeth is now the heir but obviously henry wants a son he's got to have a son he's obsessed with it now and gets pregnant again henry's in a tournament yes fall briefly it looks like he's dead yeah so but he comes around but he sustained a serious sporting injury. This is the ulcer. I know myself how demoralising sporting injuries can be.

So a bit of sympathy for him there. But Anne is so upset by this that basically she miscarries. Exactly. That's exactly what happens just after the tournament accident. OK, and so what happens then? Well, then it's a slightly confusing and and murky series of events where basically what really happens is anne and henry have always had a very tempestuous relationship completely unlike his relationship with katherine of aragon so there's been a lot of quarreling um and he's sometimes said to her you know i can kind of drop you as quickly as i

picked you up because she's spiky and she's acerbic and she's very quick with the kind of put downs and she's hot tempered herself so war war war that's all you ever think of Henry Tudor very good so yes she's um there's a lot of bickering and in the midst of all this she falls out with his chief minister Thomas Cromwell and it's partly because Cromwell what really wants an alliance he wants he's basically Think of him as a kind of prime minister. He really wants an alliance with Charles V, with the Empire, against the French. But basically Anne is an obstacle to that because the Emperor will never do a deal as long as he has to recognise Anne as the Queen.

Anne is also a threat to Cromwell's spending plans and his ambitions. He wants to be the man and she basically thinks she should be in charge henry i mean henry is basically inventing whitehall palace at this point isn't he yes i mean he's a massive development luxury development spending money that he doesn't really have that's exactly cromwell is about to serve it up to him by dissolving the monastery by dissolving the monasteries so there's a sort of internal power struggle and i think cromer effectively orchestrates the whole thing he basically realizes that if he can say to if he can play on henry's fear and he and the fact that he's always falling out with that and basically say do you know what anne is

plotting against you she's been betraying you with all these blokes including her own brother a court musician some of your own friends all of this and this. And the amazing thing is that Henry just swallows it. I mean, that's a sign maybe of his deep insecurity. That when Cromwell tells him this stuff, there's no question of, you know, he'll have a little meeting with Anne to talk through their marital troubles or he just says, fine, you know, killer. And I think that's the point at which the story crosses over from, frankly, the usual, you know,

because a lot of this stuff before that is, it's not that unprecedented. But I think the point at which Henry says, fine, she's got to go, we'll kill her, that is the point where this becomes a really extraordinary story. Yeah. Okay, so Anne goes to the tower

and then she goes to the block yeah um and henry meanwhile has um he's got a new crush yes who is a wiltshire girl uh yes so probably your favorite yeah absolutely yes so uh jane seymour um who who grows up in wolf hall as in as in the novel um and she's very much, she's very much a Wiltshire girl. So she, she loves ponies. She's got a dog. Dogs.

Basically, do you know what we know nothing at all about? No one knows anything about Jane Seymour. So the stuff about dogs, I find this hilarious. Actually, the six wives of him, the eighth historiography,

there'll be a source that basically says once she was in the same room as a dog. And then if you sort of, if you trace that through through the books by the time you get to sort of books published in the 1990s they're saying the most famous dog lover in english history invented dogs just because people are desperate to flesh out these kind of bodice ripping kind of histories of the tudors she's a wheelchair girl who loves ponies and loves dogs i'm not no one's going to change my view on that. And she's sweet, kind, marries Henry, gives him a son, Edward VI. He dies.

But dies. Very unlucky. I mean, Henry's very unlucky. He's gone for Jane Seymour, and actually that would probably work out completely fine. She clearly knows exactly what's expected of her, which is basically it's been little more than a sort of pretty accessory. There's no reason to believe they would have fallen out. It would have all been fine.

It's just incredibly bad luck that she dies just after giving birth to Edward VI. Okay, and now we come to my favourite queen. Everyone's favourite queen, surely. Everyone's favourite queen. Who you, in your book, she was bland she was boring she was german well well those things are those things are all true i mean apologies to her um she's not bland well she's seen as bland by henry she is german so we're talking anne of cleves anne of cleves who is thomas cromwell trying to find who wants so the problem is henry by this point, is he's burnt his bridges with Catholic Europe.

And so essentially Thomas Cromwell, a devout Protestant, wants to find him a Protestant bride. Anne of Cleves comes. I mean, actually, her father's not Protestant. No, but they're very close. They played a kind of cunning middle game. They're very close to the sort of protestant league of of german states and so famously yeah um they send holbein the great painter over to to paint her comes back

henry looks there goes yeah that's very nice yeah she comes over and and everyone thinks she's very pretty you know this is the thing the flanders mare stuff people call it the flanders is totally untrue she comes over and everybody says she's absolutely fine. She's not a stunner. She's not a kind of Victoria's Secret model in waiting. But she is absolutely, utterly inoffensive and fine. The problem is Henry, the one thing that, so we had some questions and people said about Henry being a sex addict.

He absolutely wasn't a sex addict. What Henry was was a child almost childish romantic he he was sort of utterly raised on all this arthurian romance stuff he wants an aguinovia he wants somebody that he will he can be feel swept up with so he he does this disastrous yeah absolutely laughable introduction to her when she's come to england and he and his mates do they go back to the old prince harry tactic well it's it is that kind of woof woof thing they dress up as they literally dress up as robin hood and the merry men and they pitch up and i think rochester isn't it it's in rochester at the bishop's palace in multi-colored hoods they burst into her room and she's sitting there with a german idea what's going on and they're watching bear baiting and and she's looking

out the window so these clowns burst in in these hoods and she just kind of looks at them and mutters in german and won't even look them in the eye and is embarrassed by it and henry never ever forgives her for that i mean from, from that moment, he basically says, she's no good. I don't like her. I've taken her against her. Cromwell says, I can't, you know, you've got to go ahead with it. So he goes ahead with it.

They postpone it by a day or something. Goes to bed with her. The next morning he says, out of the question. He goes to see the doctors. This is the hilarious thing. He goes to see his doctors and he says, what should we do? I can't, I can't, you know, can't do anything. And they say and they say not much we can really do about this you're not going to get a son unless well but but so so not good enough she has to go brings down cromwell who goes to the block

yeah i mean all these kind of great figures of the the tudor court who who basically every time the wheel turns and another wife goes, they go as well. Yes. So Cromwell goes out. And, but the thing I like about Anne of Cleves is that she, she, she plays her hand well.

Very well. So she comes with a deal, doesn't he? So essentially she, she stays in England. She doesn't have to go back kind of humiliated and broken to her, to her father. She stays in England.

She gets a brilliant, she kind of gets two palaces and loads to her father she stays in england she gets a brilliant she kind of gets two palaces and loads of properties so dominic i the sussex archaeological society have you come across this um i'm aware you're very enthusiastic well it's a wonderful organization it's it's um britain's oldest county archaeological society 175 years this year um and basically most of its properties at some point were owned by anna of cleves were they so all over sussex and actually all over i mean all over south southeast england you come across you know some beautiful tudor property and the guidebook will say it was well she was open the equivalent of tens and tens of millions of pounds um but the weird thing is

she then stays in england all this time but then she runs out of money so basically having been a good girl she clearly just sort of went mad went wild didn't she and just spent all this money on something i don't know what um and because but then by then sort of later on she's constantly complaining that everything in england is too expensive yeah it's that classic thing of yeah i love her a european person who's moved to england but basically just whinges the whole time about the weather the everything's too expensive she's really don't pay her enough respect even her even when she dies much later on she's the longest lived of all the wives when she dies um there's a heat wave and so the government says to people don't go to anna's funeral so nobody has a state funeral doesn't she so nobody but nobody goes

because it's too hot so i mean i would have gone i would have gone she's the queen of my heart of his funeral so nobody has a state funeral doesn't she so nobody but nobody goes because it's too hot so i mean i would have gone i would have gone she's the queen of my heart um but meanwhile talking of good girls and bad girls yeah um henry's fixed his eye on a young teenager called katherine howard yeah um so this is this is this is quite badly this is this is a this is a slightly tragic story isn't it he marries Catherine of Howard sorry he marries Catherine Howard there's a big age gap at this stage and this is the point at which he has definitively become a whale so he's very very fat and um he just takes a fancy to her and at this point he's in ridiculous

kind of midlife crisis um stage she so she is basically the marital equivalent of buying a bright red sports car absolutely she and she's sort of pushed in front of him by the howard family they notice him looking at her and they push her in front and they basically coach her oh well you can woo the king this way you know always laugh at his jokes always admire his ulcer whatever hot and uh she marries him and uh everything is fine for a while and he dotes upon he gets up early and goes hunting to try and lose a bit of weight and and sort of try to impress her but basically he then discovers because um the archbishop of canterbury cranmer gives him a note that says i've got very bad news about your wife she's a she's been carrying on with men like a

music teacher and stuff before she married you which henry can kind of forgive but then it turns out that she's been carrying on with other men while they were married thomas culpepper a man called thomas culpepper who's a very bad man indeed he's basically a rapist um and thomas culpepper is one of henry's sort of prince harry style he's he's a bougies habitue who um yeah yeah exactly he's been carrying on with k Howard and again you know Henry again because he can because she's not royal she's not from a foreign you know dynastic house or something he just basically he's humiliated and there's these dreadful scenes in front of his council where he's sobbing like a child yeah you lied to me you told me she was oh I'm so unhappy oh

and she has to go she gets at Hampton Court doesn't it because you've already sneered at this story that Catherine Howard's ghost still haunts Hampton Court she's executed at the Tower of London she gets arrested at Hampton Court and she's trying to get to Henry in his chapel and her screams

to this day can be heard echoing around this is another good example this is another brilliant example of the inflation of Tor history all right so um come all elton she's um there's a story the one source that describes this says that uh the the dancing instructors arrive at her rooms and are sent away by the guards who say there's no more time to dance basically she's been arrested but that's become inflated in all the sort of various popular biographies of katherine howard that she was dancing one day when the guards burst in and drag her by her hair through the door or something but all i mean anyway she she dies it's actually a dreadful dreadful scene you can imagine it she's so young she's a teenager she's shaking you know

they have to help her up to the scaffold the guards because she's shaking so much and she's so tearful and see the block before she died didn because she's shaking so much. And she's so tearful. She wanted to see the block before she died, didn't she? Yes, she did. Horrible kind of detail. She's clearly utterly traumatised. So that's actually, although I think David Starkey possibly describes her as a sort of, in his account, she's a sort of strumpet and all this stuff.

I mean, she's just a teenager. It's a very, very harsh. She's posted something un strumpet and all this stuff. I mean, she's just a teenager. You know, it's a very, very harsh... Who's posted something unwise on TikTok. Exactly. Who's been cancelled. Well, it was literally cancelled. Okay, so, and then the very last one, the one who survives, Catherine Parr.

Yes, often regarded as a bit boring, I think greatly unfairly. She's a very impressive person. She's married twice. She's made two very good marriages. Once to a weedy but rich fellow who dies wants to a rich um older man called lord latimer a widower who's very kind to her and leaves her money and houses and stuff um she really wants to marry somebody else at this

point but henry basically has his eye on her he wants an old widow well not old i mean she's not old but he wants somebody a bit more experienced. He's not going down the teenage route again. And she's very Protestant. I think that's one reason why she does it, is that she thinks, I will be able to advance the cause of the true religion. And obviously, although we don't have terrific sources for this,

you can well imagine that there are people at court who are Protestants who sort of encourage her, say, you should do this and so she survives and she and she survived she's very clever because there's a point a couple of points at which it looks like henry might get rid of her as well for arguing with him about religion but she's very quick she always goes into his she goes into his room and she says oh i only talk to you about religion to take your mind off your leg um i just love having instruction from you please mansplain to me a bit more about indulgences and purgatory and henry loves all this you know he he has no sense of irony clearly so he just sucks all this up and then after and then after um henry dies she marries her true love

doesn't she yeah thomas seymour and then there's some very strange kind of rape elizabeth very strange business so yeah he tickles he's tickling elizabeth and then one day and she joins in she holds elizabeth down and they both tickle her but then later on one morning she gets up and she finds him trying to kiss elizabeth so elizabeth poor elizabeth has to go um not then she dies a couple of years after right so so that's that's those are the six wives now i i was talking about this yesterday to my daughter eliza and her friend anna um who are in the midst of watching love island i imagine you're a big love island massive love yeah yeah so they they they kind of they got to wondering um which of them basically which of them would

win love island yeah so shall i tell you the so explain to me i i'm lying when i say my love which of them, basically, which of them would win Love Island? Yeah. So shall I tell you the... So explain to me, I'm lying when I say I'm a Love Island fan, and Love Island, do you get voted off by the public? Or do you have to... I think so. I've only seen it occasionally. But I think you go in, and the idea is that you go into the, what is it, the Casa Amor.

That's how it's called. Yes. And basically, you have to get off with someone. Right. You have to stay a couple. And all the other ones are trying to break you up and that kind of thing. So it is quite tutor court.

Yeah, very tutor court. But obviously, part of it is that you then come out and it's about your media profile. So it's not just about doing well within the show. It's also that you then come out and it's about your media profile so it's not just about doing well in the within the show it's also about whether you come out and you're an influencer and yeah and and how you're remembered like you're an influencer tom like i'm an influencer so yeah so i feel a lot of kind of fellow feeling um so they thought the best shall i do it in ascending order do best contestant on on love island so they

they dissed katherine parr they they had well so anna yeah who is actually spanish so you can guess who's yeah she she said she was a devout protestant who spends a lot of time reading and um she was also voted the least likely to sport fake tan i think katherine parr but katherine parr has been married twice before i mean she knows her way around men i think she's she's got a track record i think she would i don't think she'd win but i think she'd quit herself do you think she'd wear and also the fact that she has this fancy yeah i do because the fact that she has the fancy for this you think she'd wear fake tan? Yeah, I do. Because the fact that she has the fancy for this Thomas Seymour, and Thomas Seymour is a very rakish, roguish sort of fellow.

He would be an excellent Love Island contestant, and I think the fact that she has this mad obsession with him suggests to me there's more to Catherine Parr. You can't have too mad an obsession, because if needs be, you might have to... Anyway, that was Eliza and Anna's verdict. i think they're being misled by her protestantism without they've they really thought protestantism and love island didn't go together clearly to argue um number five is jane seymour just because she was very they said she was very boring yeah she'd just go

around being nice to people people do say this people do say this but that's only i think people just say that she's boring because they don't, we know so little about her. I mean, she might have been. Well, yeah, but that's no good on Love Island. You don't know anything about her. You're not going to vote to keep her on, are you? I suppose so. She'd blame the editing, wouldn't she?

She'd blame the. Yes. She'd say they cut out all my best bits. Yeah, but I think that's fair enough. So, and then number five is Anne of Cleves. Right. Which I'm surprised she got that. But the reason for that is that they said she was quite,

she leveraged it quite well. Yeah. So, you know, contestants come out and they get kind of, you know, column in the sun or whatever and sponsorship deal or whatever. And so basically that's what she does. I suppose so you're saying she's a sort of Katie Price figure. She'd constantly be in Hello Magazine or, um yeah yes um did you say did you say that's right granddad i did i did because of my knowledge of katie price is that move on move on

honestly uh number three catherine of aragon number three yeah but i mean she only ever well go on a lot of sympathy yeah um a lot of sympathy for her she'd she'd be um a voter's favorite so people would feel sorry for her yeah there's all the drama with the two brothers that that would play well apparently i suppose um and uh according to eliza very amy and curtis i have no idea what that means what does that mean maybe i don't know what that means either probably lots of listeners i don't see her anyway i can't even see her going on love island maybe she was sent by ferdinand none of them would go on love island that's a ridiculous thing to say that's a bit like when my dad went to see the

lord of the rings um when it came out the cinema and the first film and i said to him afterwards how did you get on with it he said i thought it was good but i just thought it was implausible but which bit is quite implausible the ring the the backstory with the dragon golem right well the giant eye floating equally it's implausible that dead tudor queens would appear on love island but just for the same run with me run with me uh i think katherine of aragon would get a lot of audience sympathy yeah so she's an audience favorite but i don't see her i just can't see her copping off with people kind of willy-nilly as it were okay so on that for that reason that's why ahead of her

yeah who do you think it is amberlynn or katherine howard i think it's i think it's amberlynn no it's katherine howard it's katherine howard so she would be you they said she would be used by the producers so she would be massively exploited by the producers she'd be the one on the front page of the sun wouldn't she yeah so the producers would kind of edit the footage to make it look like she was you know a cheat kind of love rat yeah they would um and also they would feed her lines to say and she'd probably be naive enough to say them she would yeah but that would obviously make her a great contestant she would be very good but you think the public would you see that i think it would she would possibly bring out your writing that she would probably bring out the more censorious and the sort of

more vicious side of the british public who would turn on her yeah wouldn't they yeah and so i think that that's why she's at number two behind anne boleyn so comments on anne boleyn yeah feisty and vocal a fan favorite i mean that's indisputable i think amberlynn is the fan favorite i think she is the one that the wife that people are most fascinated but not a fan favorite at the time though tom no but now it's all about capturing the zeitgeist so that's apparently the key to winning love is about capturing the zeitgeist which she certainly did with her Protestantism um she's iconic yeah but not then and she's even more than um Anne of Cleves she is the most likely to have been a successful influencer well she was a very successful influencer as we know I mean you could argue she's one of the most

successful influencers in in English history um I think that her unpopularity the naughty goggle-eyed witch issue um would cost her with the audience you see i think she's so unpopular with the audience i think i think that we should watch love island and we should do um we should do a historical couples love island episode historical couples maybe wait for the next season yeah I'm trying to think of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and Cleopatra let's not do the fellow who got married in the bunker I think that would be inappropriate

that would indeed be inappropriate and I think on that note we've done Henry VIII it wouldn't be an episode of Henry VIII without a mention of Hitler we should end at that point. Thank you for your forbearance, everyone in listening to... This took a very unexpected turn.

Yes, it did. It did. But I think quite a fun one. Because I think part of the fascination of the wives, of the six wives of Henry VIII, is that they are... Even people who care

nothing about history know about them they do well they're archetypes aren't they the good girl the the strumpets the sort of long-suffering wife they're absolutely they're sort of almost slightly comic archetypes which is why if he owns properties owned by the archaeological society exactly the classic archetype the german the. Okay. Right. So thanks very much for listening. Our next episode coming out on Thursday is the East India Company with Willie Dalrymple. So I hope you enjoy that. I hope you've enjoyed this. We will be back soon.

Thanks a lot. Bye-bye. Bye. Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com. That's restishistorypod.com.