History: 'Divorced, beheaded, died, divorced,beheaded, survived." To the mnemonic that older readers among us learned at school, David Starkey adds his own gloss: saint, schemer, doormat, dim fat girl, sexy teenager, bluestocking. Frank McLynn reviews David Sharkey's Six Wives: The Queens of Henry VIII.
It is typically provocative Starkey stuff, and he soon justifies his "rudest man in England" tag by dismissing the recent books with a similar title by Antonia Fraser and Alison Weir as mere epigones to the immensely influential 19th-century study of Henry VIII's queens by Agnes Strickland.
Starkey has clearly learned the Muhammad Ali lesson: you get nowhere by being modest, but you can bring the crowds in if you are deliberately outrageous. There is an echo of A.J.P. Taylor, too (like Starkey, a controversial and contentious "telly don"), when he claims that there were no profound reasons for the Reformation in England and that it would have remained a Catholic country but for Henry's lust for Anne Boleyn. Add Starkey's love of being "agin things" and his relentless use of the demotic - Catherine Howard is "a good-time girl", "Madge Skelton was a bit of a goer", and so on - and you have the ingredients of a "man-you-love-to hate" bestseller.
Actually, Starkey is better than the persona he feels the need to adopt. His study of the unfortunate six wives of that egregious Tudor monster and tyrant is a work of sound scholarship and shrewd insights, and he has something new to say about each of the women.
Catherine of Aragon's case against the king when he tried to divorce her was that she had been a virgin when she married him, since her marriage with Henry's older brother, Arthur (who died young), was never consummated. Arguing against the traditional image of "Saint Catherine", Starkey adduces evidence that she may have been lying and that Arthur probably did achieve full intercourse with her. He also stresses Catherine's erudition, which links her with Anne Boleyn and Catherine Parr.
Anne Boleyn in this account emerges as a Protestant zealot, deeply influenced by the French reformist Catholic, Jacques Lefevre, who emphasised the primacy of Paul's epistles over the gospels. The key to Anne Boleyn, Starkey suggests, is that she was always in love with Henry Percy, whom she intended to marry until the lecherous king intervened. Henry VIII set Cardinal Wolsey to get rid of Percy, and Anne never forgave the corpulent cardinal for destroying her love match; she waited for her revenge, and finally got it.
Wolsey is portrayed in these pages as an even bigger villain than we previously thought. Henry could have got a papally recognised divorce in 1527-1528, but Wolsey double-crossed him with the pope in order to cling on to his own power. Prelates of all hues do not get a good press in this book. The duplicitous Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, accepted a position as papal legate while simultaneously supporting Protestantism and the royal supremacy. As Reginald Pole rightly remarked about the despicable Cranmer: "Other perjurers be wont to break their oaths after they have sworn; you break it before."
Four-fifths of Starkey's text deal with Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn. On wives three and four, Starkey has less to say that is original, stressing that Jane Seymour was the king's favourite wife, and Anne of Cleves an object of revulsion and execration. The sheer monstrosity of Henry VIII, England's Nero, already evident in his disgusting treatment of Anne Boleyn, is raised to a new height in the case of the second executed queen, Catherine Howard. When he discovered that his fifth wife was not a virgin at marriage and had had a wild and promiscuous youth, the crazed Henry had Parliament pass an Act of Attainder, with retrospective force, making it high treason for a woman not to be a virgin when she married the king of England.
The king's insane and psychopathic self-regard invaded areas far removed from the bedchamber. Catherine Parr, wife number six, had literary abilities and theological pretensions that irritated Henry and made him madly jealous. In danger of the headman's axe, Parr had to execute a rapid volte-face and pretend that she had had religious arguments with Henry merely to distract him from the pain of his ulcerated leg and so that he could show his "effortless superiority".
Starkey has fashioned a highly readable,often page-turning story from this much-told history. My main complaint is that he often evinces a "little Englander" sensibility and does not sufficiently excoriate Henry for his almost unparalleled evil at every level. But striking hard at an English icon is not the stuff of which bestsellerdom is made.
Frank McLynn is an author. His latest book, Wagon's West, is published by Pimlico
Six Wives: The Queens of Henry VIII. By David Starkey, Chatto, 852pp, £20