Divorced, Beheaded, Survived by Karen Lindsey

Perhaps this is the reason Ann holds us in her spell even today. Pursued by a king whose advances she at first resisted, she turned the lust from which she could not escape into a means of achieving power for herself: captured, she became herself the captor. Even in defeat, she was never fully Henry's. Like the falcon she chose as her emblem, she was a wild creature used, curtailed, but never truly tamed; she was a sexual woman whose vitality belonged only to herself. For years Henry tried vainly to control that vitality; finally, unable to mold it to his purposes, he killed her.

If you know anything about Henry VIII, you know he had six wives. If you know two things, you know that his divorce from one, unrecognized by the pope, led to a schism with the Catholic Church and the formation of the Church of England, which pushed the Protestant Reformation into hyperdrive. For Henry, as with all his European royal contemporaries, marriage could not be separated from geopolitics, which meant it could not be separated from religion. But at the center of Henry's political and religious turmoil were six women, drafted into Henry's life with various levels of willingness and with various stratagems for keeping their own safety and autonomy. Karen Lindsey's Divorced, Beheaded, Survived tells the story of these six women through a "feminist" lens, meaning, perhaps, it tries to cut through some of the more aggressive propagandizing that surrounded Henry's wives and find the truth of the women beneath, who were constrained by the standards of their time, as well as their husband's monstrous ego and greed.

Catherine of Aragon, as Lindsey depicts her, was a loyal and shrewd woman who was in many ways a perfect wife for Henry: she loved him deeply, and was a capable politician and even military leader. She held her own while Henry tried for years to rid himself of her, never accepting the idea that she was anything less than the queen of England. (One thing I didn't know is that Henry married Anne Boleyn well before his marriage with Catherine was officially over.) For her part, Lindsey depicts Anne as a woman who did her best to repel Henry's lust for her, then, when she finally realized he could not be kept at bay, turned it to her own advantage. Lindsey doesn't claim that Henry's wives were without flaw: Anne has none of Catherine's stolidity, and becomes hysterical as her attempts to bear Henry a son unravel; Katherine Howard is exceptionally foolish. But for the most part, Lindsey makes it clear that part of the project of the book is to see these women in the best possible light, constructing inner lives that reveal their best personal qualities. The wives who come off best, perhaps, are Anne of Cleves and Katherine Parr, two practical and modest women who did not have the challenge of being primarily objects of Henry's lust.

Henry is the other side of the coin: to make the wives sympathetic, Lindsey constructs a description of Henry as an absolute monster, a cruel, fickle man who used religion to justify his immense lusts and obsessions. There's a real limitation to this method, I think. It's almost certainly entirely true; you don't have two of your wives beheaded because you're a good person. I'm less convinced that the portraits of the wives are always accurate, though they are very plausible. Lindsey's description of Jane Seymour, for example, founders against this personal touch, because we know so little about her: she was briefly married to Henry, gave him the son he wanted, and died. At times, Lindsey seems to reduce the story of Henry VIII's wives to one of powerful personalities in conflict. This method gives it a kind of pulpy readability, but it lacks any kind of larger analysis of the role of women in early modern society, or in the Protestant Reformation. A "feminist reinterpretation" ought to demand more than heroic women and a vile man, shouldn't it? Still, it had the effect of bringing these very remote figures into convincing reality, which I enjoyed.