King of England Henry VIII - The Six Wives of Henry VIII

PRAISE OF THE SIX WIVES OF HENRY VIII

Enthralling ... The panorama of royal family life as it meshed with politics, dynastic needs and history is rich, vivid and ... gripping.

Chicago Tribune

At last we have the truth about Henry VIIIs wives. This book is as reliable and scholarly as it is readable, and thank goodness, it is unpartisan. It does justice to these very different ladies with varying fortunes. A. L. Rowse, The Evening Standard

An exquisite treatment, sure to become a classic. Booklist

A story that has been reviewed before, but not with the depth of this coverage. New research and details enrich a comprehensive yet lively survey of not just Henrys wives, but the Tudor periods colorful figureheads. Bookwatch

Informative, erudite and entertaining ... Steeped in the Tudor Courts pageantry, politics and sexual intrigue. Bookworld Reviews

The scope and depth of Weirs research provide a wealth of detail missing from many other narrative histories about the Tudors.

Publishers Weekly

Well researched and at times beautifully written ... [This] work unquestionably is the finest exercise in collective biography focusing on Henrys wives. Library Journal

A handsome and well-researched study of an endlessly fascinating period. Kansas City Star

by the same author

ELEANOR OF AQUITAINE
THE LIFE OF ELIZABETH I
THE CHILDREN OF HENRY VIII
THE PRINCES IN THE TOWER
BRITAINS ROYAL FAMILIES: THE COMPLETE GENEALOGY

_________

Alison Weir

Copyright 1991 by Alison Weir

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic
or mechanical means, or the facilitation thereof, including information storage and retrieval
systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may
quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to
photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain
permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to
Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

First published in Great Britain in 1991 by The Bodley Head, London

Printed in the United States of America

Due to limitations of space, permissions and acknowledgments appear on page 644, which
constitutes an extension of this copyright page.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Weir, Alison.

The six wives of Henry VIII/Alison Weir.
p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-10: 0-8021-3683-4
ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-3683-1
1. Henry VIII, King of England, 1491-1547Marriage. 2. Great
BritainHistoryHenry VIII, 1509-1547. 3. Great Britain
QueensBiography. 4. WivesGreat BritainBiography.
I. Title. II. Title: 6 wives of Henry VIII.
DA333.A2W45 1992

942.052092dc20 91-29522

Grove Press
An imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
841 Broadway
New York, NY 10003

Distributed by Publishers Group West

www.groveatlantic.com

06 07 08 09 10 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8

This book is dedicated to
my parents,
Doreen and James Cullen,
my mother-in-law,
Margaret Weir,
and in loving memory of
William Blackwood Weir

The reign of Henry VIII is one of the most fascinating in English history. Not only was it a time of revolutionary political and social change, but it was also dominated by one of the most extraordinary and charismatic men to emerge in the history of the British Isles the Kings contemporaries thought him the greatest man in the world and such a king as never before. He ruled England in unprecedented splendour, surrounded by some of the most intriguing personalities of the age, men and women who have left behind such vivid memorials of themselves that we can almost reach out across the centuries and feel we know them personally.

Six of these people were the Kings wives. It is and was then a remarkable fact in itself that a man should have six wives, yet what makes it especially fascinating to us is that these wives were interesting people in their own right. We are fortunate that we know so much about them not only the major events and minutiae of their public lives, but also something of their thoughts and feelings, even the intimate details of their private lives. Henry VIIIs marital affairs brought the royal marriage into public focus for the first time in our history; prior to his reign, the conjugal relationships of English sovereigns were rarely chronicled, and there remain only fragmentary details of the intimate lives of earlier kings and queens. Yet, thanks to Henry VIII, such details became a matter of public interest, and no snippet of information was thought too insignificant to be recorded and analysed, a trend that has continued unabated for 450 years, and which has burgeoned in the twentieth century with the expansion of the media.

Thanks to the wealth of written material that has survived in the form of early biographies, letters, memoirs, account books and diplomatic reports, unprecedented in any preceding reign, we know a great deal about, and are able to make sense of, the lives of these six long-dead women. That such material was for the first time available to any sizeable extent was thanks to the humanism of the Renaissance and the widening interest in learning it engendered. There was a dramatic expansion of educational facilities, with the founding of many new colleges and schools, and literacy was now seen as being of prime importance, not only for men, but to an increasing degree as the Tudor period progressed for women also. The development of printing gave rise to a growth industry in popular works and tracts, which coincided with a renewed interest in history, leading to a succession of books by a new generation of chroniclers. Greater care was taken, both in England and abroad, to maintain public records, and with the evolution of intelligence systems, such as that established by Thomas Cromwell, more detailed information than ever before was accumulated.

Much of the source material for the reign of Henry VIII was collated by historians and published in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, giving rise to a succession of biographies, learned and otherwise, of the King, his courtiers and his wives. Yet while there have been several excellent recent individual biographies of the wives (see Bibliography), there has been no serious collective biography since 1905 when M.A.S. Humes scholarly book, The Wives of Henry VIII was published. This present book aims to fill that gap for the general reader, with information drawn from only the most reliable of the original sources.

What were they really like, those six wives? Because of the nature of the source material for the reign, nearly all of which has a political or religious bias, a writer could come up with very different assessments of each of them, all of which might be equally valid. But this would be abdicating some of the responsibilities of an historian, whose function is to piece together the surviving evidence and arrive at a workable conclusion. What follows are the conclusions I have reached after many years of research into the subject, conclusions that, on the weight of the evidence, must be as realistic as anything can be after a lapse of 450 years.