Books : History : Countries & Regions : Europe : Britain & Ireland : British Heads of State : Henry I

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Books : History : Countries & Regions : Europe : Britain & Ireland : British Heads of State : Henry I

• Six Wives: The Queens of Henry VIII

  David Starkey

  
  
   

• Anne Boleyn: Fatal Attractions

  G. W. Bernard

  
  
   

• The Six Wives Of Henry VIII (Women In History)

  Antonia Fraser

  
  
   

• The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn: The Most Happy

  Eric Ives

  
  
   

• The Reign of Henry VIII: Personalities and Politics

  David Starkey

  
  
   

• Far Away and Long Ago: A Childhood in Argentina

  W.H. Hudson

  
  
   

• Pierrepoint - A Family of Executioners

  Steven Fielding

  
  
   

• Henry VIII to Mary I 1509-1558 (Access to History)

  Dr Roger Turvey, Keith Randell

  
  
   

• Katherine Howard

  Joanna Denny

  
  
   

• The Wars of the Roses and Henry VII: England 1459-c.1513 (Heinemann Advanced History)

  Colin Pendrill

  
  
   

• Celebrating Moore: Works from the Collection of The Henry Moore Foundation

  David Mitchinson

  
  
   

• Six Wives : " The Queens Of Henry VIII " :

  David Starkey

  
  David Starkey's massive Six Wives: The Queens of Henry VIII follows on the huge commercial success of Elizabeth. Like its predecessor, Starkey's latest book mixes its author's scholarly erudition with a mischievous eye for a contemporary comparison or salacious soundbite. Starkey's topic is, as he admits from the outset, "one of the world's great stories"--the lives, and deaths, of the six wives of King Henry VIII. The story has been told before, but as Starkey points out, it has been wrapped in the romantic myth of 19th-century historiography.

  Starkey's virtue lies in his return to the archives to unearth new evidence for his story of Henry's wives. The result is a weighty blockbuster that will annoy the purists but delight the popular reader. Henry is portrayed as a fairytale prince gradually transformed into a "prematurely aged and bloated monster". Starkey concludes that "like us, he expected marriage to make him happy", but this simple desire had increasingly disastrous consequences.

  Henry worked his way through a series of wives from Catherine of Aragon to Catherine Parr who, according to Starkey, encompass "the full range of female stereotypes: the Saint, the Schemer, the Doormat, the Dim Fat Girl, the Sexy Teenager, and the Bluestocking". While this tends to flatten out the complexity of many of Henry's wives, there is plenty on the cataclysmic impact of the Reformation, new evidence on Henry's first wife's marriage to his brother, and a reconsideration of Henry's final wife, Catherine Parr, as "the first Queen of the Age of Print", to keep even the most sceptical reader happy. --Jerry Brotton

  
   

• Henry VII (Yale English Monarchs Series)

  SB Chrimes

  
  
   

• Flodden 1513: Scotland's Greatest Defeat (Campaign)

  John Sadler

  
  
   

• The Children of Henry VIII

  Alison Weir

  
  
   

• The Old Order and the New: P.H. Emerson and Photography, 1885-1895

  John Taylor

  
  
   

• Henry Moore: Work - Theory - Impact

  Christa Lichtenstern

  
  
   

• Henry: Virtuous Prince

  David Starkey

  
  
   

• Hidden Treasures of the Romanovs: Saving the Royal Jewels: Saving the Romanov Jewels

  William Clarke

  
  
   

• Henry VIII: King and Court

  Alison Weir

  
  Henry VIII (1491-1547) casts a long shadow over English royalty and biography alike. In Henry VIII: King and Court, Alison Weir takes on this forbidding reputation to produce an admirably detailed, if somewhat cumbersome, biography of a king who married six times and presided over England's cataclysmic split with Roman Catholicism. Weir's main task is to overturn the "caricature" of Henry "as a man who thought of nothing but chasing the ladies, and who threw chicken bones over his shoulder". This seems a rather obvious characterisation to challenge, but Weir proceeds to amass an extraordinary wealth of detail about Henry's cultivated court, from its learning, architecture and political machinations, to how many people handled Henry's bedsheets and the food that his horses ate. The early sections get bogged down in too much detail, and detract from the political drama of Henry's growing estrangement from his first wife, Katherine of Aragon, and his fateful marriage to Anne Boleyn in 1532. The second section is much more convincing in tracing how "the young, idealist humanist with liberal ideas about kingship was giving way to a selfish, dogmatic tyrant", as Henry dispenses with Wolsey, Sir Thomas More, Anne and then Cromwell, and the court increasingly sinks into factionalism and intrigue.

  Weir's biography is a lively recreation of the everyday life of Henry, his court and what he called his "ill-conditioned wives", but it neglects the wider European dimensions of Henry's reign, and sweeps over many crucial aspects of the split with Rome. Detailed and scholarly, Henry VIII: King and Court provides a strangely colourless portrait of the most colourful of English monarchs. --Jerry Brotton