The last decade or so has seen some very challenging re-examinations and reinterpretations of some of the wives of Henry VIII, most notably Anne Boleyn and Katherine Howard. However, our picture (literally at times) of Anne of Cleves, short-live wife number four, has remained static and flawed.

Anne appears on the English scene after the longest gap in Henry’s matrimonial career- a full two years, three and a half months. Prior to this, Henry was last single thirty years before. Her predecessors were an indomitable Spanish princess, a sexy and ambitious French-styled Englishwoman, and the woman who finally produced the longed-for son. Henry, who harboured chivalrous, romantic ideas had high, perhaps unrealistic, hopes for wife number four.

1. She was pretty

Anne may forever be “the ugly one” to those looking at Henry’s marriages. Henry reported that she was so unattractive and her “body in such disorder” that he was unable to force himself to consummate the marriage.

However, what do other sources say? Our primary source is Holbein’s portrait which now hangs in the Louvre. There are two things to bear in mind when looking at this painting. Firstly, Holbein tended to be (sometimes brutally) frank in his portraits. The notion that all the portraits of the period were all flattery doesn’t stand up to challenge. Have a look at these paintings by Holbein of Henry and Jane Seymour. These are honest depictions, not soft-focused sycophancy. The second is, simply, that’s she has a pretty face which her unusual dress and headwear distract from. It’s certainly not a face one would expect anyone to be horrified by.

Anne’s journey to England was slow. Cleves insisted she travel over land rather than by sea (as Henry impatiently wanted). As she travelled, there were many occasions for Englishmen to see her on her way. Several of them reported their impressions of her back to their countrymen. All of their reports were flattering. We must, of course, consider that no one is likely to have written that she was ugly, even if they thought it, but it’s quite another thing to be fulsome in your praise of someone’s attractiveness to someone who would see for themselves in a few weeks if you were disingenuous. Letters never likely to have been seen by Henry described her as pretty.

The real disadvantage Anne had were her odd German clothes. The English court trailed some way behind the French court for sophisticated fashions (which Anne Boleyn had used to her advantage 15 years earlier), but German clothes were considered very unflattering. However, this was a problem which could have quickly been solved with the purchase of some new gowns, and Henry was rarely loath to indulge his queens.
It seems more likely that the myth of her unattractiveness had its roots in Henry’s unrealistic expectations and his impotence, which we know had been gossiped about since George Boleyn’s trial in 1536, if not before.

2. She was a Catholic

It is assumed that because the Cleves marriage was designed to ally Henry with the Schmalkaldic League of German Protestant lords, that Anne must have been Protestant. In fact, she was traditionally Catholic in her beliefs and through this formed a close bond with her step-daughter Mary, well after her marriage was dissolved.

3. She outlived Henry and all his other wives

Katherine Parr is typically known as the survivor wife, as per the mnemonic “divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived.” However the seconded divorcee also outlived her one-time husband. Not only that, she outlived both Katherine Parr and Edward VI. She died a little over a year before Mary and so never saw the bloody excesses of the end of her reign, or the accession of Henry’s second bastard daughter, Elizabeth.

4. She was shrewd

Although she was reported as being distraught when she learned that Henry was to divorce her, she quickly regained her composure. When she realised that Henry would not be dissuaded, she adopted a more pragmatic approach to her situation. She negotiated the terms of her divorce. She did not want to return to Cleves where she feared her brother would kill her (it is not clear if she meant this figuratively or literally) and so set about securing herself a place in England. She became the king’s beloved sister and received from him a household and properties (including the former Boleyn family seat, Hever Castle though she never lived there).

Perhaps she knew of Catherine of Aragon’s fruitless intransigence and learned a lesson there, or perhaps she was simply a more practical person. Either way, she left her marriage in a far better state than any of her three predecessors did.

5. The most successful wife?

It’s difficult to gauge Henry’s wives in terms of success. How would we measure it? Probably not in Henry’s terms (were we able to adequately assess them, beyond producing a son). Here are my suggestions.

Sons: Both Catherine of Aragon and Jane Seymour gave birth to living sons, but only Jane’s son Edward survived infancy. Jane was the most successful in this respect, but this must be tempered by the fact that doing so cost her her life.

Time served: Catherine of Aragon was successful in terms of the sheer longevity of her marriage to Henry. She clung on for almost 24 years. No other wife lasted more than four years (the closest was Katherine Parr at around three and a half).

Survival: Anne and Katherine Parr both outlived Henry. Katherine, however, had a position at court after Henry’s death as the dowager queen. She was guardian to Elizabeth and had good relationships with all of her royal step-children. However, she jeopardised all of that in her uncharacteristically unsanctioned and hasty marriage to Thomas Seymour only a few months after Henry’s death (though one might note here that there was a longer gap here than Henry himself typically left between spouses!). This, her fourth marriage and the only one she made for love, was marked by betrayal and scandal. Katherine died of childbed fever the following year.

Anne on the other hand, secured a generous settlement from Henry with regular visits to court for the rest of his reign, even getting on well with her former husband. She never remarried (though whether that is a success or not I leave for you to decide!) and seems to have lived a contented and full life in England. She reputedly loved feasting and entertaining at her home at Richmond Palace.

Certainly, her life after her marriage seems to have been a happy one, which cannot be said for poor Katherine Parr. I would, therefor, posit that Anne of Cleves was the most successful of all of the wives of Henry VIII*.

*Well, perhaps a dead heat with Katherine Parr as she had some particularly notable achievements which I will post about soon!

If you’d like to follow my adventures in academia, have a look at my M.Litt blog, The Fife Renaissance  where I’ll be charting my progress and discussing my work, research and postgrad life in general.

View of St Andrews from St Rules Tower

There are big changes afoot at Harlot Towers. In what could easily be confused for a midlife crisis, I have dyed my hair bright red (pictures to follow), quit my job and in a few weeks I will be moving to a wee coastal town in Fife. This makes slightly more sense with a little context, of course. Earlier this year, I applied for a place on the University of St Andrews M.Litt in Early Modern History. After a nervous two or three weeks, I was thrilled to be offered a place!

Ambrosius Benson (c 1495-1550), Young Woman in Orison Reading Book of Hours 1520s

As is abundantly clear from this blog, the Early Modern period is where my main interests lie. After doing a General Arts degree which featured an awful lot of history courses, I got “back” into history when I picked up a copy of David Starkey’s Six Wives  on a whim. It reminded me of everything that got me excited about history and from there, I became particularly interested in the sixteenth century. It’s an especially fascinating period, with religious upheavals; global exploration; new ideas about education and important challenges and developments in women’s roles.  Initially, my interests were in England, later France, during the period.

I admit to suffering from Tudor fatigue now, with the current proliferation of generally poor quality books, tv series and films about the dynasty. It’s a shame as there are lots of really exciting things to be studied around the Tudors (as this article on The First Black Community in Elizabethan London, published today on the BBC News website, demonstrates) but it has all been drowned in a sea of soap opera pseudo-history. Happily, French history at the same period is even more interesting, and has so far slipped under the radar of the makers of trashy tv.

Mary Tudor and Louis XII

It was St Andrews provision for Early Modern French history which first made me consider applying there. They have several very well respected scholars in the field. However, in the last six months or so, I’ve seriously reconsidered the areas I want to focus on. Instead of the glittering courts of England or France, I’m more interested now in the far less glamorous world of women’s social institutions and women living on the periphery of society in late Renaissance Italy. This encompasses convents, as well as some incredibly forward-thinking refuges set up in Florence and other cities to help poor women, widows and abandoned or orphaned girls. I’m also interested in prostitutes and courtesans at the time who faced often ambivalent attitudes from the authorities, and attitudes to diseases like plague and syphilis. I told you it wasn’t glamorous!

So, in early September I will be upping sticks and moving into halls in St Andrews. Happily, I was offered a place in my first choice of residences, very close to the History Department and the university library (and if I am extremely lucky my room might look out over the water). I am quite beside myself with excitement. It’s only just starting to properly sink in though. It’s such a huge life change that I don’t think it’s felt real up to now.

As far as blogging goes, I will do my best to get back on track (and keep it up) but I’ll probably start a separate blog to talk about Masters business, postgrad life and the like which isn’t relevant here. I’ll post a link when it’s all set up for anyone interested.

Wish me luck!

The Venus of Urbino, Tiziano (Titian), 1538

The Suspicions of Mr Whicher is a fascinating account of a murder which took place in England in 1860. In a well-to-do house, a little boy is taken from his bed in the middle of the night and brutally murdered. The book details the investigation which followed and illustrates the development of Scotland Yard’s new detective branch, and the increasing (and often ghoulish) public interest in and the sensationalism of murder. I was hooked from the start. Summerscale’s weaving of the story of the murder itself and that of the much wider issues which it illustrates is masterful. Most of the poor reviews on Amazon seem to come from people who fail to understand the difference between non-fiction and a novel.

Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace is about a scandalous divorce trial from the late 1850s. The eponymous Mrs Robinson kept a diary, as did many ladies of the time, but what was unusual about hers is that in it she recorded details of her unhappy marriage and infatuations with male friends. Inevitably, her husband discovers the journal and sued for divorce.

As with Suspicions, the central story is compelling. Isabella Robinson is fascinating. She is not immediately likeable, but her unhappy situation and the impossibility of escaping it engages the reader’s sympathy. Summerscale uses the story to explore the wider historical issues. The Robinsons’s case was one of the first heard before the newly-established divorce court which was not controlled by the church. The book also tackles some of the issues surrounding the fundamental inequalities of marriage and divorce of the time. For example, a man would usually be successful in procuring a divorce if he could prove his wife’s adultery. A woman, on the other hand, would not have been able to get a divorce from her philandering husband on the basis of his infidelity. Indeed, Mr Robinson himself not only had a mistress, but had two children with her- these facts were not considered relevant at the time.

This may sound like a dry subject. I can’t say that I would have thought that nineteenth century divorce an inspiring subject, but I’d have been wrong. In Summerscale’s hands, it’s gripping. The diary in question is now lost, but much of the content was reported in newspapers and a legal journal and from these the author has pieced much of Isabella Robinson’s inner life back together. She has also drawn out fully fleshed personalities for all the main protagonists. Modern audiences will find the inherent, unashamed double standard of the legal system pause for thought, an insight into what life was like for even well-to-do women of not all that long ago.

But most importantly, it’s a thoroughly good read. I read it on my Kindle and was glued to it at every chance I could steal to read a little more- on the bus, on my lunch break. It’s utterly compelling and highly recommended. Isabella Robinson may have been all but forgotten before Summerscale’s book, but she’s been restored to her place in the annals of infamous women now.

I rather suspect that subsequent books were trying to grab the coat tails of Gregory’s success by emulating the covers of her amazingly popular The Other Boleyn Girl and other titles, to the extent that the Headless Woman has become a visual cliché.

Of course, the easy response from publishers for this, at best, lazy designing is that people prefer to imagine the characters and find a face on a cover off-putting. I would be slightly more inclined to buy this if it were not for the likes of this:

For starters, Catherine of Aragon was real. We have authenticated portraits of her: we don’t need (nor should we want) to invent or imagine her face. Additionally, we are presented with a Henry VIII full-frontal below. Why do we see all of him but only a gigantic chin for Catherine, the supposed subject of the book? This argument is further weakened by the sheer number of fiction titles which feature a face, sometimes even an entire head:

There are also lots of covers which either don’t feature a figure at all, or feature an image from the art of the period (Italian Renaissance art seems to be popular, likely due to how recognisable it is). There are a wealth of options which wholly circumvent the “problem” of faces.

Wolf Hall sold an obscene number of copies without the help of a headless woman

I don’t think I am unusual in finding that I don’t pay a great deal of attention to the cover of a book. Yes, it may intrigue me enough to pick it up off the shelf but I am more looking for indications that the subject matter is history, in some form or another, than dazzled by a pretty frock and awkward sideways glance. Besides, I find most of my new to-reads through Amazon’s recommendations and there the cover is less important than the title and author. Once I’ve bought a book (often on Kindle where I don’t even see the cover after purchasing), I scan the cover only momentarily, to identify the book. I don’t expect the person on the cover, should there be one, to match my mental picture of the character. I pay so little attention to the cover that I can’t imagine this mismatch is problematic. Does anyone focus so hard on a cover that it can alter their appreciation of the contents?

So if not to protect our fragile imaginations, why the head lopping?

It must be recognised that covers are not the work of authors. In fact, few authors have any say at all in how their book is packaged. This is left in the hands of marketers, who work to  (from what I can gather) a set of preconceived rules about what people want, what sells and what doesn’t. It seems to be an incredibly conservative environment.

An example: my partner was looking to buy a new TV. After looking in several shops, he asked an assistant in a well-known UK department store if there were any black ones, since everything he could see was silver. The assistant was quite certain that nobody wanted black TVs nowadays, that they wouldn’t sell. Well, we wanted a black TV and we’d have bought one. There was a clear implication that we were in the wrong for not following the received wisdom that silver TVs were what sold. That was only true in the sense that you could buy a silver TV or no TV so yes, only silver TVs sold.

My point is that marketing isn’t always right. The response that “this is what sells” is feeble.

The usual way to market anything to do with women is to use a scantily-clad model (which marketers must presume is “aspirational”). Now, until fairly recently, in historical terms, underwear wasn’t very sexy (at least not in marketing terms) and there were not a wealth of opportunities for women to pose about with lots of skin on show. So far, no one has tried to put a cover girl in a velvet and brocade swimsuit.

The headless women are no less troubling because they are covered up, though. Surely we have to consider that a woman with her head chopped off is no less objectified than one inappropriately dressed for sunbathing. Head removal instantly dehumanises: she’s now just a body. She has lost her brain, senses and, in most cases, her voice. She may be clothed, but she’s been stripped of the things which make her a person.

This betrays the contents of the books, which typically feature strong women. Many of the central characters are, in fact, improbably strong for the times they live in. None of us want to read about brainless, senseless mutes. Where would that story go? We want to imagine how life might have been like in the past through the eyes of a fictional someone. Therefore, we need her to have eyes. We need her to have other senses too and a brain with with to understand what her senses tell her and a mouth with which to tell us. We need her, in short, to have her head screwed on.

So, I suggest we call time on the publishers’ headless women. I, for one, am not buying it. How do you feel about the headless women? Do you think it’s harmless, or more problematic?

Miniature identified as Katherine Howard

A Frivolous Teenager
Well, probably not. We don’t know Katherine’s date of birth but scholars are increasingly in favour of an earlier date than was previously thought. Until recently, her year of birth was thought to be as late as 1525, making her only 17 years old at her execution. It seems more likely that it was 1520-1. This would mean that she was a mature, by Tudor standards, 21-22 years old at her death.

Of course, even 22 is horribly young to die, but in the sixteenth century, 22 was a lot more mature than it is now. By her early twenties, a Tudor woman could expect to be married and have had one or more children. Katherine’s youth is put more sharply into context by the relative age of her husband- Henry was 49 years old when they married. This too, though, was not unusual. Noblewomen in particular were likely to marry an older man. A woman would marry for the first time in her mid- to late teens, a man in his late twenties or early thirties. If it was the man’s second marriage, he would be older still. For example, Catherine Parr’s second marriage took place when she was 20 and her husband 40.

No Better Than She Ought To Be

Katherine’s reputation suffers from a rather unjust assessment of her character. We are encouraged to believe that she was involved in a sexual relationship with Thomas Culpeper during her marriage because she admitted to a sexual relationship with Francis Dereham prior to it. Katherine’s past was laid out for all to see in a way which would make horrible modern gossip magazines rub their hands with glee. What is revealed is an unsupervised childhood during which she was involved in a relationship with her music tutor. It was the sort of “relationship” we would now call child abuse. She then became involved with Francis Dereham, a young man with far better breeding and prospects than her creepy music teacher. It is likely that she and Dereham intended to marry and this might indeed have come to pass had not the king shown an interest in her.

Katherine’s letter to Culpeper shows that she was indeed in love with him in 1541 but David Starkey’s research in his 2004 Six Wives: The Queens of Henry VIII demonstrates that the physicality of their relationship was far less certain. It appears from the detail of her confession that all the couple got up to was some hand-holding and earnest sighing.

This fact- the fact of Katherine’s essential innocence- is often overlooked. She oddly, naïvely, believed that her husband was some sort of semi-divine being and she cautioned Culpeper not to speak of their relationship even in the confessional lest Henry find out that way. It may have been that she suspected the priest would inform Henry, but she may had simply believed that as Supreme Head of the Church, Henry would know the way that God knew.

Manuscript of Katherine Howard's letter to Thomas Culpeper, 1541

“I die a Queen, but I would rather die the wife of Culpeper.”
There is a romantic story that on the scaffold, Katherine announced that she would have been married to her supposed lover, Thomas Culpeper, than Henry, with the above words. However, the etiquette of execution made such a statement unthinkable. The victim was permitted to address the crowd gathered to see their end, but it was expected that they would speak of their regret, ask for forgiveness and the prayers of those who would survive them and generally be contrite and uncontroversial. Neither Anne Boleyn nor any of the men executed for adultery with her protested their innocence from the scaffold, although they were all almost certainly innocent. It just wasn’t done.

It’s therefore unthinkable that Katherine would say such a thing. Her actual words are far more dignified than the romantic nonsense would give her credit for. This is a woman who was so keen to meet her maker with some grace that she asked for the executioner’s block to be brought to her room the night before so that she could practice placing her head on it.

A Restless Spirit

Visitors to the splendid Hampton Court Palace are often treated to the tale of poor Katherine’s ghost which is said to linger in the Haunted Gallery. On her arrest, Katherine broke free from her guards and ran down the gallery looking for her husband in order to plead for her life. She was quickly recaptured by the guards and dragged screaming back down the gallery and into imprisonment. Or so the story goes.

Aside from the supernatural question, there are several holes in this story. Firstly, is it plausible that Katherine could have slipped her guards, even for a moment? Royal guards were not in the habit of relaxing their grip on accused traitors. The story also ignores one rather pertinent fact: by the time of her arrest, Henry had already left Hampton Court. He was not in the habit of lingering once he had put his plan to be rid of a wife into action. Anne Boleyn, for example, never set eyes on Henry after the May Day joust, the day before her arrest. He was said to be so bitterly disappointed in Katherine that he could not stand to see her again and he fled the palace so as to avoid any such scene.

I also thought I’d join Rachael Harrie of Rach Writes in her Fourth Writers’ Platform-Building Campaign.

Rachael’s campaigns have been going for a wee while now and all the participants seem to have had a great, and productive, time. If you’re interested in joining in, registration is open until 15 Feb and is really easy- just follow the link.

In the letter, Mary claims that she is to die for her faith, that she is innocent of any crimes and asks Henri to provide for her servants. She also wishes him a long and healthy life. He would follow her to the grave less than three years later at the age of 37.

First off, I should say that I am a rampant abandoner of books which I’m not enjoying. I know a lot of people will plough on to the end no matter how much they dislike a book but I’m not one of them. Life’s too short. If I’ve got to the end of a novel, that in itself indicates that I liked it. Having a Kindle makes that even easier- I can abandon a book on my way to work and have another to read on the way home.

Fiction-wise, I tend to read historical novels- a wide genre covering some wonderful depictions of the past and a whole lot of trash too. I also quite like a bit of European crime.

The Ground Is Burning, Samuel Black

Another highlight featured the notorious Cesare: Sarah Bower’s Book of Love (entitled Sins of the House of Borgia in the USA). It’s mostly set in the much neglected Este court in Ferrara. Although enjoyable and clearly well researched, the central romantic relationship of the novel (though it’s by no means a romance), I found somewhat unbelievable. It was a bit rushed- the heroine falls in love within about 2 minutes of having met the man in question and the reader can’t quite understand why. If you can get past that (and I did), it’s a great read.

Secret of the Sands, Sara Sheridan

My non-historical favourites were Sarah Dunant’s Mapping the Edge, an account of a woman who goes on holiday to Florence and doesn’t come home. Dunant’s my favourite historical fiction author but her contemporary novels, though often neglected, are well worth a look too. This one is unsettling and disturbing but absolutely addictive. Fred Vargas’s most recent novel was translated into English in 2011 too. An Uncertain Place is another outing for Commissaire Adamsberg. A good novel though let down by poor translation. I was, for example, surprised to find out that the translator is a native English speaker.

I’m currently back in the fifteenth century, Venice specifically, with Michelle Lovric’s The Floating Book.

Michelle Lovric, The Floating Book

My non-fiction star of 2011 was Lost Girls, which I’ve written about before so won’t do again. I love it though.

My other non-fiction highlights have included Giovanni and Lusanna: Love and Marriage in Renaissance Florence by Gene Brucker which I found second hand. It was first published in the 1970s after the author experienced one of those strokes of luck historians dream about: he uncovered previously unpublished records. Buried in the extensive Florentine archives were records of a marriage trial from the 15th century. His book is a fascinating account of the case brought by a widow against the young nobleman she claimed had married her. He did not acknowledge the alleged marriage and had married another woman. It may not have quite as exciting as Martin Guerre but it is a wonderful insight into marriage and sexual politics in the Renaissance.

I am currently reading Paul Strathern’s new book, Death in Florence: the Medici, Savonarola and the Battle for the Soul of the Renaissance City. I was thrilled that this one is available on Kindle (none of his others are). The book looks at Florence, the Medici and the radical Dominican preacher Savonarola. Strathern depicts Lorenzo and Piero de’ Medici and Savonarola as complex individuals when it is easy to portray them as caricatures- Lorenzo the Magnificent, Piero the Unfortunate and Savonarola as the “mad monk.” Despite knowing where this story is leading, I’m hooked.<

Christmas presents have also added to my already long list of books to be read, including Lauro Martines’s Scourge and Fire: Savonarola and Renaissance Italy which might be a good follow up to Death in Florence. As a leaving present from my old job, I was given a lot of book tokens and have so far bought Italy in the Age of the Renaissance (john Najemy, ed.) which is an academic introduction to the period. I am eying up Nuns and Nunneries in Renaissance Florence by Sharon T. Strocchia

St Catherine of Siena