The Wives of Henry VIII by Antonia Fraser

It was written to tell a story of each queen and their relationship with the king - focusing on the personal lives of the queens rather than just giving you pages of dates and places that you can never remember. Its not very long but I think that works in its favour. This gives extra texture to the narrative and reminds you that we still don't know everything. In these instances Fraser details the evidence and why she has reached her conclusions. The book not only talks about well known and accepted historical facts but also brings forth other aspects that are not as well agreed on. I have read many biographies about Henry's queens and while the facts in this book are obviously the same as those, you do feel you have come out having learned something new. The narrative captures you and you are sucked into the journey of each of these fascinating and very different women. This is a really well written historical biography. What did you like most about The Six Wives of Henry VIII? This is historical biography at its best.

The story Antonia Fraser tells is romantic and cruel, funny and sad, dramatic and enthralling. There was jealousy too: the desperate jealousy of queens who found themselves abandoned, but also the sexual jealousy of the king who discovered himself betrayed. Inevitably, there was great rivalry between them - so high were the stakes in the great game of marrying the king of England. They displayed considerable strength and intelligence at a time when their sex supposedly possessed little of either.Īntonia Fraser deals with each woman in turn with sympathy, the sympathy they deserve for having had the unenviable fate of being Henry's wife. On the contrary, they exhibited remarkable degrees of spirit and defiance, of which women living now might still be proud. They may have been victims of Henry's obsession with a male heir, but they were not willing victims. But, as Antonia Fraser brilliantly and conclusively proves, they were rich and feisty characters. In the same way, their characters are popularly portrayed as female stereotypes: the Betrayed Wife, the Temptress, the Good Woman, the Ugly Sister, the Bad Girl, and, finally, the Mother Figure. So the six wives of Henry VIII (Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves, Katherine Howard, and Catherine Parr) have become defined in a popular sense - not so much by their lives as by the way their lives ended. 'Divorced, beheaded, died divorced, beheaded, survived.'

The Wives of Henry VIII by Antonia Fraser