Review: Henry VIII: The King and His Court by Alison Weir

[megwrites]

Title: Henry VIII: The King and His Court
Author: Alison Weir ( AlisonWeir.org.uk)
Genre: History/Biography/Non-fiction
Page Count: 656 pages
Publisher: Random House




Basic Plotline Premise: Weir details not only the life and reign of Henry VIII, but that of his court by exploring both the king and those around him, the places they lived, how they lived, and what they did.

The Positives : I'm a fan of Weir, and even though this is definitely my least favorite of her books, I definitely still enjoy her as an author and historian very much. I suppose some of my dislike comes from the fact that I really cannot and never will find Henry VIII sympathetic. While he may not be a complete villain, I don't tend to feel warm, fuzzy feelings for someone who killed two of his wives, abandoned and humiliated a third and also treated his oldest child really rather cruelly, and also executed people who had served him very well (Wolsey, Cromwell, More) and also old ladies (Margaret Pole, a 68-year-old woman he executed in order to get some kind of revenge on her son who remained beyond the king's grasp). I think Henry VIII does deserve to be maligned, but as another historian said (of U.S. President James Buchanan) "we've got to get it right".

That said, this is Weir's most accessible book as well, and this is something I'd recommend to those with only passing familiarity Henry VIII. In fact, I'd hand this to people who are only really sure that he was a king and had a lot of wives and was very fat.

Likewise, this is a good read for those who want to know more about the history of this time period but who aren't familiar with Weir. Here, she does not go into the more nitty, gritty details of comparing individual sources. Rather she focuses a lot on basic material culture of Tudor times, everything from how the king got his food to what they drank, what they wore, how the court lived and what made up their daily lives. She even talks about the fact that such things as dogs (save the small pet dogs of noble ladies) and people relieving themselves in corners and on walls was a chronic problem. Let it not be said that mediaeval Europe was a terribly sweet smelling time and place (Europe in general owes a lot to outside influences when it comes to cleaning up). At this time, hygiene of the kind modern folks would appreciate is to be found elsewhere in the world. Though Weir makes it clear that they weren't totally backwards - for instance they were well aware that raw meat should not be prepared, cooked, or stored in the same places as vegetables and other food stuffs and had entirely different facilities for meat. Something we still practice today.

I can't fault Weir's basic research or what she lays out in the book, and others may get more mileage out of this book than I did. She certainly lays out very clearly how factions and intrigue worked in Henry's court and does a superb job of keeping Henry in the spotlight while making the supporting cast very, very vivid. In fact, this in many ways is a good book to learn the basics about other Tudor-era personages than it is about Henry, especially if one is planning to do deeper reading later on.

Also, I commend her for being consistent about calculating and keeping track of money spent by the king and it's modern equivalent, which she does at every turn. Even I was surprised to learn that during Katherine Howard's brief tenure, her household cost the king £2.9 million in modern terms.

The reader also learns from this very subtly not only how much money the king had, but how much he spent on displaying his magnificence. If anything actually sources and proves that Henry VIII deeply invested in impressing people, that does.


The Negatives: My two biggest problems with this book:

1. The book suffered from disorganization, because while Weir goes in chronological order, mostly, it feels meandering and the in depth information about material culture of Henry VIII's court and times and exploration of the background information isn't well integrated with the narrative of Henry VIII's life itself. They're both well done, but not seamlessly integrated.

2. I also disagree greatly with Weir's proposition that Anne Boleyn went to her death pregnant and feel that for such a powerful theory, she offered precious little to either argue for it or argue against why it isn't likely. Indeed, a lot of her theories here, even the ones that are a lot more plausible, seem oddly unsourced and unsupported in this book. Usually Weir not only shows her sources but goes through great trouble to discuss their weight and trustworthiness. Here, she doesn't do that and while at some points it does make the reading go a bit quicker, it weakens this as a sourcebook.

In another book (either Lady in the Tower or The Six Wives of Henry VIII), Weir posits that there's no way that Anne Boleyn consummated her relationship with Henry and been with child before a certain point because Henry would have "moved heaven and earth" to speed up their marriage if she'd been pregnant. Yet here she posits that Henry was willing to send Anne to her death pregnant, risking that he would have also destroyed a potential heir, one that her own theory states he would have known about and been quite pleased about up until Cromwell brought Anne down. The fact that documents were destroyed from the trial may simply be to have preserved some private details of the King's sexual life and that she wasn't examined by matrons may be that she knew she wasn't pregnant.

Weir seems to forget that Anne had miscarried in January of 1536 and was executed in May of 1536 - and Weir shows that Henry had been showing interest in Jane Seymour since the summer 1535. And while she says that during the spring before her execution, Anne was in a "surprisingly strong position" - what she doesn't say is that sexual relations had resumed between them. What she seems to interpret as sympathy and even lingering affection Henry's part could also be guilt and a desire to present a facade that everything was all right until he could get his ducks in a row.

As for the "evidence" that Anne was pregnant again before her execution, it rests on statements that Henry made to other people in order to, as she states, "show the world that he was capable of fathering and heir, and also to justify his marriage to Anne". Basically - her evidence rests on things Henry said to prove his manhood and shore up his position with foreign ambassadors. None of the evidence comes from Anne or people who were close enough to her on a daily basis to have that kind of knowledge for certain.

Weir doesn't even discuss the possibility that Henry wasn't trying to refer to Anne being pregnant, but that when he said to Chapuys "you do not know all my secrets", he meant that he was thinking of a way to dismiss Anne and take Jane Seymour as a wife - but wanting to do so in a way that didn't repeat the headaches he'd had with foreign disapproval when he set aside Katherine and married Anne. What Weir forgets is that shoring up the right of a king to have a married called invalid and then taking another wife by making sure everyone respected and accepted Anne, even up until the very end, would go a long way to making sure that if he took Jane as a wife he wouldn't deal with the same backlash he had before.

Thus it, may have been that Henry made it known that from the time of the miscarriage in January, he had not been with Anne, or that Anne had in someway already proven she could not be pregnant. Thus, he knew for certain that she either wasn't with child or wasn't with HIS child.

More to the point, Anne Boleyn and the Boleyn faction don't seem like they would have let the fact that Henry was executing a pregnant woman go without trying to make something of it. I mean, Anne herself could have screamed on the platform "I am with child!" if she'd been truly desperate, could she not? Why does Weir seem to think Anne would have allowed her unborn child to die with her without putting up some sort of a fight? Weir gives no reason why Anne would have gone to her death so quietly.

I realize that historians often piece together motives from evidence that we have left - documents and letters - but it's easy to forget that these aren't just political animals we're dealing with, but real flesh and blood human beings who do have limits to what they're willing to do (or not do). Weir offers no evidence that Henry would, by this point in his reign, be so persuaded by Cromwell's evidence against Anne and so hardened that he would knowingly let a pregnant woman be sent to her death before the child was born.

Nor does Weir consider that her own logic is belied by the fact that Henry already HAD a disputed succession on his hands. He'd barred Mary from succeeding to the throne, yet kept her alive and knew full well plenty of people considered her his true and rightful heir. He also has an acknowledged bastard son could have gathered a faction behind him (had he predeceased Henry) and there were some mumblings of making that son heir. To say that he would have executed a pregnant woman for that reason seems unreasonable to me. Not to mention that Weir doesn't discuss if Henry truly could have been that much of a - not to put too fine a point on it - cold-hearted bastard who thought nothing of the fallout for him (and Cromwell and others) if they'd been found to have executed a pregnant woman - even a pregnant traitor.

I don't believe that Henry, who did - as Weir points out - have his honor would have done something that brutal. I think it's rather contradictory to on one hand try to present a sympathetic person who's been portrayed as being a womanizing, tyrannical buffoon and then say that Henry knowingly put a pregnant woman to death - a woman who had been his wife.

I think Anne simply wasn't pregnant and there was plenty of proof of it (especially if Cromwell and his faction knew full well their charges of adultery and treason were trumped up), and the documents destroyed were embarrassing (Weir keeps trying to assert that Henry was prudish and private about his romantic liaisons, so wouldn't it stand to reason that he wouldn't want documents detailing his love life to stay intact for the world and future historians to read?).

Citing that it's suspicious that Anne wasn't examined by matrons for signs of pregnancy but Jane Grey was (the ill-fated and tragic nine-days-queen who also went to her death a traitor) seems an extremely weak argument for a normally strong author like Weir. After all, Weir doesn't cite that all women who could possibly be pregnant that were executed - even just the noble ones - were examined for pregnancy. Rather, she says that it's odd that one young woman in a completely different circumstance was examined but Anne wasn't. It feels as if she's arguing that because Jane was given an apple and Anne wasn't that it proves that Anne was allergic to apples.

Either way, Weir's evidence for this theory is not nearly as well balanced, convincing, or well sourced as many of her other theories. As you can tell, this was a big minus with me as a reader.


CoC Score: 0/10. Somewhat a good faith zero. There certainly were non-European (or what we would consider non-white) people at Henry VIII's court and Weir certainly could have written about them, but she seems to want to focus more on those closest to the crown and much of the court is described in broad terms.

Gender Score: 6/10. I'm giving this a lower score because in many cases Weir has shortened the narratives of Henry's wives and the women at the court to focus on him and male courtiers. Usually she's much better about this, even when speaking of courts that are definitely male-dominated. Weir stated that she didn't want to cover material she'd gone over in her book "The Six Wives of Henry VIII", but that seems an excuse to me, especially since it seems like the lives of these women are so often overlooked as seen as being satellites that orbited the bright sun of Henry VIII rather than people and worthy historical subjects in their own right. I think it's worth repeating material, especially since much of what Katherine of Aragon experienced before her marriage to Henry and that early part of his life before he became king gives a lot of insight into the man and why he made the decisions he did. It also helps the reader to better understand the context of Anne Boleyn's entrance into the king's life.

GLBT Score: 5/10. Weir mentions theories about people who were possibly gay, and something about the way she uses the word "homosexual" sometimes makes me frown and grit my teeth. But I also try to remember that "gay" as a term and as a concept is rather contemporary and that, otherwise, she doesn't tend to cast an opinion about someone being homosexual, other than to talk about whether there's historical evidence for it or not.

Ablism Score: 5/10. Hard score to give here. Henry eventually became disabled in later life due to health conditions and needed the help of devices to help him move about. She does go into some discussion of the possible medical aspects of why this was, but I'm not comfortable with the way she discusses Henry's weight in relation to his deteriorating health and automatically attributes his weight gain to his indulgence in rich foods and overeating, especially since it's clear that something changed drastically with Henry's health in his late 30's and continued to worsen until his death. I mention this in the ablism section because there is, in modern times, a great bias towards reading overindulgence and weight as definite causes of bad health rather than the other way around, or being rather independent of each other. Yes, weight CAN affect health, but it goes the other way around and given the many illnesses that Henry suffered and the number of times he came close to death before rallying, it's very probable to me that Weir is overlooking that something else was at play. Also given that his biological children (especially his daughters) were known to suffer from chronic ill health that worsened in their life times (especially as they aged) that there's a genetic condition going on with Henry. Weir tends to have a weight bias in all her books. Many of the women she describes are "unfortunately" or "sadly" given to becoming overweight or "plump" (her favorite word for it) either after having children or getting older and while there may be good evidence of weight gain, Weir tends to do a little editorializing about it with such words rather than giving evidence that this weight change was viewed negatively by people of that time. All of which is cringe-inducing for me as a fat person, because fat people with disabilities (chronic or otherwise) tend to get told that it's our "own fault" and blamed for eating too much and exercising too little when indeed that's often not the case. And even if it is, it's not something to be editorialized or moralized upon, either in the present day or in looking back on historical personages of size.