One might object in passing that to be remembered for the manner of one's demise, provided it was spectacular enough, is not an uncommon fate. To keep track of the dizzying list of royal mates, Lady Antonia Fraser tells us in the introduction to her latest work of popular history, people took to counting them off in a little refrain: "Divorced, beheaded, died divorced, beheaded, survived." The six women in question, Lady Antonia observes, have come to be "defined in a popular sense not so much by their lives as by the way these lives ended." She proposes, in "The Wives of Henry VIII," to rescue them from this historical injustice.
When apprised of the news that Henry had repudiated his fourth wife, whom he had married just six months before, to place on the throne an adolescent named Katherine Howard, the King of France shook his head in wonderment and asked: "The Queen that now is?" Renaissance Europe watched aghast as the King of England ordered his second wife, Anne Boleyn, beheaded on trumped-up charges of treason after only three and a half years of marriage, then registered with disbelief the coronation of four more Queens of England in the space of little more than a decade. The divorce (never, of course, recognized by the Holy See) took another six years to orchestrate, but, once accomplished, ushered in a period of marital chaos whose extremes have rarely been equaled - even in our own era of rampant family dysfunction. Just six years later, Henry initiated the divorce that ultimately propelled England into the maw of schism. For Henry's efforts, the Pope granted to him and his successors the title Defender of the Faith. Odder still, given subsequent events, was that his motive in writing "The Defence of the Seven Sacraments" was to refute Martin Luther's heretical challenge to Pope and church. That the King was writing on behalf of marriage, emphasizing the precious and sacred charge involved in such a union, must surely be one of the odder ironies of history. "WHO does not tremble when he considers how to deal with a wife?" asked Henry VIII in 1521. THE WIVES OF HENRY VIII By Antonia Fraser.
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