TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/122192/12219941.000

Text File | 1993-04-08 | 3.7 KB | 85 lines

                                                                                REVIEWS, Page 74

BOOKS

Days of Blood And Roses


By BONNIE ANGELO

    TITLE: THE WIVES OF HENRY VIII
    AUTHOR: Antonia Fraser
    PUBLISHER: Knopf; 512 pages; $25

    THE BOTTOM LINE: A historian with fresh feminist insights
gives a Queen's-eye view of England's Bluebeard King.


    When Ladt Antonia Fraser was growing up, she always
attended costume parties as the tragically romantic Mary Queen
of Scots. From the time she was 22, fresh from Oxford, the
budding historian was immersed in English monarchs. In the 38
years since, she has published biographies of, among others,
James I, Charles II (her ancestor) and the Scottish Queen of her
girlhood fantasies. She is also a committed feminist. Could any
author be better suited to chronicle the Crown's raciest
chapter? The Wives of Henry VIII, Fraser declares, is "the book
I was born to write."

    In less scholarly hands the story might have read like a
bodice-ripping romance novel, but Fraser brings to it fresh
insights -- and a keen feminist edge -- based on meticulous
research. In her view, the six women who married Henry were
central to the sex, politics, intrigue and gore that were the
foundation of the house of Tudor. They were also intelligent and
fascinating people who were variously misused, abandoned and
executed.

    In a time when women of noble pedigree were consigned to
roles as breeders or bargaining chips for power, Fraser notes
that most of Henry's half-dozen would have been saved by
producing a surviving son. Succession of the Tudor line
obliterated all other concerns. Fraser argues it was the lack
of a male heir that prompted the King, still firmly bound to
Rome, to seek theological loopholes to justify divorcing
Catherine of Aragon, his Spanish princess wife of 22 years. And
it was the same concern that led him, three years later, to
bring charges of adultery, incest and treason -- trumped up,
Fraser maintains -- as cause to behead the tempestuous,
black-eyed Anne Boleyn who had so beguiled him.

    Sweet Jane Seymour, wife No. 3, obligingly gave Henry a
son and died after 18 months of marriage. The child, Edward VI,
died at 15. Anna of Cleves was too ugly to love (the King's
verdict after the wedding night: "I like her not"). And there
was little hope for Katherine Howard after her steamy letter to
her lover found its way to the King (much as tapes turn up in
the wrong royal hands today). Her paragraphs led to a sentence:
the chopping block. The last of the lot, twice-widowed
Catherine Parr, prevailed by shrewdly mothering, and outliving,
her cantankerous, aging husband.

    But Henry was not always the ogre. Fraser describes him at
his first marriage in 1509 as a 6-ft. 2-in. golden youth, a
"wildly charming'' monarch who loved music, dancing and
jousting. He aged badly, corrupted by power. Those who offended
him, even loyal friends, were banished, beheaded, disemboweled.
An errant cook was boiled in oil. The royal visage, writes
Fraser, "grew more like a vast potato marked with eyes and mouth
to resemble a man." From Kenneth Branagh to Charles Laughton in
38 years on the throne.

    Playing history's tantalizing game of what-if, Fraser
posits that English history would have been rewritten had
Catherine of Aragon's infant son lived to maturity. There would
have been no divorce; Henry would have remained Catholic and the
course of the English Reformation would have been profoundly
altered. And there would have been no Elizabeth I, Anne Boleyn's
daughter, depriving England of a monarch who far outshone her
son-obsessed father.