Divorced. Beheaded. Died. Divorced. Beheaded. Survived. Nearly 500 years after the death of Henry VIII, what new can be said about his queens: Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves, Catherine Howard and Katherine Parr? Do we need another book about this sextet?
As this elegantly written and lavishly illustrated book makes clear, the answer to both questions is a resounding yes. Published to coincide with the National Portrait Gallery’s exhibition of the same name (20 June – 8 September), Six Lives is a concise, easy-to-read collection of essays written by experts on a variety of subjects, including Tudor painting, music, jewelry, manuscript illumination, and bookbinding. What makes this book fascinating and rewarding is the real sense that Henry’s queens were individuals with their own lives and afterlives.
Among the nearly 200 illustrations are some well-known images, but perhaps the most famous is Hans Holbein the Younger’s 1539 half-length portrait of Anne of Cleves in rich attire, with her hands folded demurely at waist level. This portrait convinced Henry to take her as his fifth wife, but when he saw her in person he cried out in dismay: she was not as beautiful as he had believed her to be. This event led to the downfall of Thomas Cromwell, but Holbein, unlike Cromwell, kept his cool.
One of the many pleasures of this volume is the juxtaposition of well-known and lesser-known paintings — Holbein’s Anne of Cleves, for example, is juxtaposed with copies by later artists, including the Pre-Raphaelite Richard Burchett and the Impressionist Edgar Degas — and a direct line is drawn from Holbein’s meticulous descriptions of Anne of Cleves’s clothing and jewelry to the costume designs of her characters in several semi-fictionalized plays, from the BBC’s Anne of Cleves to Anne of Cleves. Henry VIII’s Six Wives (first aired in 1970, when colour television was becoming more widespread) to Hilary Mantel and Ben Miles’s 2021 RSC production. Mirror and Light.
Portraits are the book’s primary lens through which to examine the lives and legacies of Henry’s queens. But many other types of cultural artifacts, from jewels to maps to musical instruments to furniture, are also mined for what they reveal about these women. For example, the hymnal associated with Catherine of Aragon is shown to be a moving testimony of the “cruel cycle of hope and despair” that Henry’s first queen fell into after the death of her son, as she desperately tried to give birth to a boy after multiple stillbirths and miscarriages. The hymnal includes not only a motet by Jean Mouton invoking Saint Anne, the patron saint of mothers and pregnancy, to grant her a child, but also, in its elaborate decorative paintings by Fleming’s Petrus Alamir, rather suggestively, flowers whose stamens are replaced by the initial letters “H” and “K.”
Similarly, a letter that Katherine Parr wrote to the King just over a year after her marriage helps to unearth the experience and character of Henry VI’s queen. Like all her namesakes as queen, this letter is signed “Queen Katherine KP.” The use of the “KP” monogram is a clear attempt by Katherine, the third queen consort, to assert a distinct identity for herself in just a decade. If so, the strategy was only partially successful. Katherine Parr may have distanced herself from both Katherine of Aragon and Katherine Howard, but until recently, her image has often been confused by posterity with that of her former protector, Jane Grey.
Divorced. Beheaded. Died. Divorced. Beheaded. Survived. This collection of essays freed Henry VIII’s queens from the abbreviated tyranny of pithy six-word verse.