In Their End Is Our Beginning: the Henrys Tudor

https://shows.acast.com/between-the-stools/episodes/the-henrys-tudor

Introit: Theme from The Tudors by Trevor Morris

Welcome to Between The Stools on 28^th January 2024.

This service is the culmination of a year of mostly British (I aptly wrote Brutish) mostly history, but I’ve had to hold this final sermon/vice in my head all along.

We have gone backwards in time, ending with the pair of first Tudor kings on the birthday of the first (Henry VII, 1457) and the death day of the second (Henry VIII, 1547). Note that the middle digits of those dates are reversed. Given the title of this service as well as chronology, usual logical sense would have begun here. But I’ve trusted that by beginning 2023 with the birthday of another king and choosing dates intuitively by month of events in historic people’s lives, especially anniversary years ending in zero, and dates that fell on a Sunday like today, that a progression would emerge.

The point was to always find a spiritual understanding in the stories of historic people, and their understanding of God (and how often flawed it was), trusting that as the year unfolded, we developed towards a better one.

2023 began with seemingly a non-fit, but I found a link between Job and Elvis that also was a kind of prologue to our theme. I concluded that Job’s understanding of God was an improvement on the prevailing ideology, but for me, still ill-(in) formed. From Patricia Cota Roble’s experience of him, I came to see Elvis – although human – as an embodiment of divine masculine, here for a special purpose which continues, not that the two recent movies would steer you to that conclusion. (Film is the theme of the rest of 2024’s services and so it features often today by way of segueway).

Job also set up the notion of finding favour with God…which we soon recognised in the 16^th C.

How do you please God and get him to help you? This implies that God isn’t minded to do so, and you must discern what he wants of you, making it an unequal game of guessing and transactions.

In February, we thought of one trying to live as and demonstrate the divine feminine – Mary Stuart.

I wished to begin the year with what we may wish to forge towards. Today’s title is a twist on Mary Queen of Scots’ saying: in my end is my beginning; or in Scots: En Ma Fin, Git Ma Commencement.

Then we had our Lent ladies. Katherine of Aragon and Mary I’s god was the old god, a god whom you suffered to placate and whom you made others suffer to turn back to. Some wives of Henry VIII (Jane, Anne of Cleves, perhaps Katherine Howard) seemed malleable and tactical in converting to or agreeing with what powerful others thought. Anne Boleyn and Catherine Parr’s God took courage to believe in and involved reforming more than just faith, making this God dangerous. We thought of that more for our July Magdalene service with Jane Grey and Anne Askew.

Henry VIII and all his children thought that you needed firm guidance: the law and, for his protestant progeniture, a single unified prayer book and service. Henry hated extremists – a word we often hear today. Elizabeth wouldn’t ‘make windows into men’s souls’ but expected that you conformed to the church which she controlled on pain of punishment.

Thus we see that for those above, favour is through obedience, giving up, self harm; a God of divisions, where only one side – yours – is the right one.

We went back in time for a trio of special anniversaries, thinking of Julian of Norwich’s radical book, and Etheldreda of Ely who seemed to be more of the conventional way. We looked at Julian’s contemporary Margery Kempe who commendably lampooned the church and beliefs of her day; whereas Martin Luther did too, ‘his’ reformation wasn’t so far fetching. Like Job, for him, rightness with God was based around law, and although different to the status quo, faith following Luther remained hierarchical and established.

At JFK’s anniversary in November, we saw a man who changed, and a man who many think died for the change he wished to implement. We also saw that the Kennedys – a dynasty like the Tudors with an ongoing legacy – may be more complex and less admirable than overt popular opinion.

At Christmas, we considered long range biblical prophecies fulfilled. The Tudors were expecting a boy child – they actually got a female prince – but no-one of that family was a messiah or Christlike. Yet their history can be seen as an expected anointed promised child to lead them; the events of their reign were a watershed for faith and politics. And those events culminate today.

Prayer as we move into our main service.

Henry VII

In August, we thought of Richard III, with a famous play, two museums, and a film last year and a passionate society. Now we consider the other side of the coin. I’m not aware of a dramatised screen or stage adaptation of Henry VII’s life. “I’m the original Tudor,” he sang to an electrified lute, kicking be-breeched legs in York’s medieval Bar museum, trying to draw attention to an oft overlooked monarch. The TV adaptation of Philippa Gregory’s White Queen ended with the boy Henry becoming a man to take the throne in battle, egged on by his mother. Thus Henry was a passive pawn in this adaptation for Margaret Beaufort, the Red Queen, who exemplified the old kind of piety. She’s shown as a religious obsessive, who demands to God that things go her way, and cries at him when they seem not to. She is sure that she has heard that God will put her Welsh-born son on the throne of England.

I pause – is that sentiment true for us or anyone in our time? Is it true for ourselves…both about what we hear God tell us, and how we speak to him?

Margaret’s favour-currying is also about being seen to be outwardly pious, and that meant endowing 2 Cambridge colleges – Christ’s and St John’s. Her symbols of mythical yales and portcullis crown both gatehouses to this day. But being a founder and patron does not make you more holy – it’s lucrative and name-making. She was perhaps also trying to ensure that her soul went quickly to heaven. (We’ll be thinking of the inbetween period via a TV show soon).

Thus The White Queen ends with Henry VII becoming king and the start of the Tudor dynasty – but there’s little of what Henry himself was like. In exile for much of his life, the boy is groomed towards the throne and to the hand of Elizabeth of York, thus ending the Wars of the Roses by uniting the belligerent houses. But this misses the point of marriage and shows another corruption – that a legal contract was the way to create partnerships and heal the wounds of a divided nation.

The 2003 miniseries Henry VIII with Ray Winstone begins with his father is on his deathbed; he has few lines. He tells younger Henry to fulfil one wish: bear a son, literally imprinting on the heir apparent. It drives the whole story, yet we do not see the elder Henry again.

The Tudors TV show with Jonathan Rhys Meyers didn’t show Henry senior at all; despite the title, a generation was skipped. I do not recall the first Tudor in the various other Henry VIII screen offerings. Henry VII, along with his son Arthur, have usually left the world before these stories start.

So what have we missed?

When Henry VII is discussed, in documentaries and history sites, the focus is on 3 questions:

1) Did he have a right to the throne?

2) Were his policies shrewd?

3) What were his battle techniques at Bosworth Field, where he killed Richard III?

These are not matters that I wish to take on in any detail here, for my focus is always spiritual. But, in passing:

It’s often pointed out that Margaret’s claim to the throne (let’s be honest, it was Lady Beaufort’s) was stupendous: several would have to die (they did) before Henry Tudor, son of Edmund son of Owen, could become king. The Tudor claim is tenuous, for there were living Plantagents. Taking the throne in battle is very old style – cf Macbeth of four centuries earlier. Now it was supposed to be passed by birth…except where there’s leeway and interpretation in the family tree.

Either way, the populace had no say in who their sovereign ruler was, except to deny popular support.

I am told by David Starkey and Thomas Penn that what Henry VII did when he failed to gain support created him a tyrant. The latter calls the reign and man ‘dark and chilling…England’s most sinister monarch’. Henry held fines over his subjects, huge unpayable fines that he didn’t even call in….he just liked the power that the threat hanging over them gave. He mostly convened parliament to up taxes for war. He made his second son a recluse who couldn’t be accessed, save by his father’s permission. He abused the law unlawfully, taking power and autonomy and dissent away.

Henry VII is named as paranoid, miserly, and the starter of the longrunning and effective Tudor propaganda machine, creating Richard III as hateful and hideous – and parading him dead and naked through Leicester, dumping his body in a church not fit for a king; he got rid of as many of who might claim his throne as he could (Henry VIII finished off the rest, such as Buckingham). It’s also thought that it’s he who dispatched the Princes In The Tower – they would have been equally inconvenient to Henry as to Richard – but blamed it on the outgoing king.

We could say that cruelty and tyranny ran in the family.

I also see that Henry’s style of controlling his subjects is much like the mediaeval church’s way on behalf of God. It’s a theology that’s continued in some circles; this time, the fine is eternal damnation, and the debt is of sin and gratitude for God’s mercy through Christ’s passion.

I am not aware of anything that commends Henry VII, even if his dynastic marriage was happy.

I can say that this was not how to lead; and it’s a style that, as we see a new world emerging, needs never to return.

Music – I shall reveal what in a minute

Henry VIII

I’ve had my head with Nessie and I thought: not such a switch – I’m still with monsters.

Henry VIII has become one of the people that I most hate in history, one of the most cruel and evil people I can think of.

I have long wondered why he wasn’t murdered. Surely he was more worthy of execution for treason against the people than Charles I? Surely someone would rise up and finish the man, in battle by assassination? He nearly died in jousting – why was he allowed to recover? He had chronic poor health – why did that not claim him earlier? But he reigned for nearly 40 years, crushing the attempts to overthrow him, turning on those once beloved and close.

I did find some satisfaction in the discovery of what happened to his huge smelling corpse. It was laid at Syon House. This country stately home was where 5^th wife Katherine Howard – the teen he could have fathered twice – was imprisoned before her execution. This former priory witnessed another gory death on Henry’s whim as a monk the abbot refused to capitulate at the dissolution, and his remains were hung over the door as a warning to other recalcitrants. Henry’s body rested overnight at his palace (another he snatched, making around 60 – more than any other monarch) on the way to being buried at Windsor castle. (Note that although he’d been laid at state in Westminster, that he didn’t join his father in his fancy mausoleum in the national abbey and lie where his children would, but next to his supposed favourite wife and lifelong friend in a private chapel). Fittingly like Queen Jezebel of the Old Testament, Henry burst open under his own puss-y, gassy weight and was licked by dogs!

Even if apocryphal – please God, let it be true! – it shows a popular wish that this wicked man, who executed 72,000 (often for exercising freedom of conscience) got some deserts on this earthly plain.

I saw Henry VIII as an easy candidate for the hell that I don’t usually now believe in. Surely this kind of tyrant deserves eternal punishment…or at least, being annihilated, or held in a phantom zone (like the villains in Superman we’ll meet in Dec) far from God, and the rest of us enjoying Heaven.

But as I considered Henry VIII, I felt God say: he’s with me. (Did I hear right, Lord?) Surely not, I said. This is not the kind of person I wish to spend eternity with. Neale Donald Walsch said in his Conversations With God that Hitler was in heaven. That was staggering. I see Bluff King Hal on a par. I will say that Neale’s extraordinary statement needs some unpacking and justifying, but it’s a single line after about 20 pages about what hell is not. God has no need or reason to continually harm us in the next world. I thought that he went on (in another book) to explain that Hitler fulfilled some kind of purpose and soul contract, which still doesn’t sit well with me and it certainly does not excuse nor absolve.

What purpose can Henry have served?

As an ecumenical nonconformist, I don’t even see that he brought in the true faith. It can’t be very true if he did so much harm to others who didn’t share it. He was, rather perversely, a lifelong Catholic, just preferring his own head at the top to the Pope’s. His act of 1539 made his stance clear. The reformation was about getting Henry what he wanted – power and a woman.

The 1972 Keith Michell film has Henry not reply to the priest’s final question: do you die in faith?

Did he truly have one?

Henry’s behaviour seems far from what we’d consider as Christian…abuse of every kind, every major sin…

So what could garner Henry an eternal reward other than the great lake of fire?

I realise that this view is common but not universal.

I also realise that my wish says something about me – a need for comeuppance and a belief in punishment.

The tagline for the 2000s TV series The Tudors by Michael Hirst said: ‘it’s great to be king’. Rather than seeing Henry VIII as a disgusting man – note no king has yet used that name again since – they wanted to explore what you’d do with all that power. I know that some people do admire and kind of like him, and yet, seeing him on the par that I do, I cannot understand it, and found it alarming.

However, I was reminded/informed of three facets about Henry. One, that he was a musician; you just heard his greatest hits, as selected and brought to you by Historic Royal Palaces, who care for his most famous home – Hampton Court. (I do rather like his building tastes, as much as I judge his elitist opulence). I listened to a longer collection of his songs and noted that they all seemed secular. (Can anyone find me a religious song?). Whether you personally are touched by and impressed by this music, I will note that he was a composer and musician, and that may suggest some taste and sensitivity; and that my opinion of it has been jaded by others (Joanna Denny, Anne of The 1000 Days).

Second was a surprise: Henry’s Herbalist Charter. In over 20 years of Tudor interest, and as many in alternative medicine, this has not come to my attention before. When seeking proof (I do like to back things up), I was struck by a further two things. One was that some sites ignored Henry’s support of herbalists and that he allegedly created the need for being licensed and the Royal College of Physicians, making medicine about science and not superstition. Secondly, that this Herbalists’ Charter is also known as the Quacks’ Charter and that serious sounding sites call it thus. But what the herbalists say is that Henry VIII protected them, to this day. The charter states that some are abusing the courts to stop other genuine healers from practising – still true. This is forbidden and the right to use medicinal herbs is preserved, without needing permission of others (like those physicians et al.) Henry had plenty of need of medicine and it seems that he was interested in herbs, and had done something for the plebs – motive unclear. I was told it was a sign that he cared about the people; another said that the peasants weren’t getting medical care and thus were unable to work and this affected the country’s food supply. But the charter was a different facet of this man.

The third was recalling Ray Winstone’s portrayal; my response and what Ray said on the DVD extras. Ray is my favourite Henry, and he alone has allowed me to feel pity, and at least once, to cry for him. I felt for his wrangling over biblical verses that seemed to condemn him; and sometimes that he was frustrated, unloved, betrayed, manipulated and lonely. (Ha! I want to say). Ray saw Henry as complex; like Michael Hirst’s earlier essay on the British Borgias Elizabeth (1998), they began with ‘the man’ [Cockney voice] and worked outwards. Ray said that his playing a historic king wasn’t out of character for one we’re used to seeing in gangster roles, for Ray’s Henry is a gangster (mine too). The difference, quoth Ray, is that the king makes the rules, whilst gangsters break them. But this miniseries penned by Peter Morgan recalls that Henry can be fascinating because he’s this multifaceted mix of a monarch. It seems that this is a draw for those who study him, who like to consider the question: how did a good king turn so rotten?

It’s not a question that I’m going to consider tonight, although I will just query the supposition that Henry started well.

I might want to posit, but not answer: is anyone bad to the core and beyond saving?

Is there any aspect of Henry’s life which we might show compassion for?

I also recall surprising myself that I considered the notion that Henry and Anne Boleyn may have been twin flames, and a parallel with a more modern royal with a similar name and look…

I would like to shift into the notion of soul contracts and growth.

Henry seemed to live out various marital permutations and soul contracts – in one lifetime!

What was he trying to achieve?

I want to sit with that…think of what I summarised from my Lent reflections about the relationship with each wife and the kind of God they believed in.

Henry VIII is for me the embodiment of the worst in men: something he shares with Mr Rochester in Jane Eyre. (You’ll be unsurprised to know that I subverted that novel as part of my own…might Henry be up next?). I wrote an essay for my MA: Jane Eyre as Spiritual Autobiography. I realised that the real person developing, especially spiritually in Bronte’s novel, is Rochester. What is Henry’s development – is it downhill? Was there a wrinkle upwards during Anne Boleyn? And the Herbalist’s Charter?

What was he the catalyst of?

I wondered what Henry’s reign shows about kingship, spiritual and temporal:

No other gods before me

A God to placate with terms of his making, sometimes arcane and also capricious

A God who will bestow favour if he’s minded, by serving him (in the bedroom or battle field)

A God who hangs fear of punishment and unpayable debt over you – like Henry VII

A God who values gifts and flattery

A God who values conformity

A God who will have no rivals – How like Herod those Henrys were (it’s Magi season)

A God with a massive ego that needs stoking constantly

A God who knows little about real love

A God who’s a distant parent, and who can change who his favourite is

A God who’s basically misogynistic

A God who has a clear hierarchy – only the select get access to his inner chamber

Like Job’s God, Henry’s God can take and give immediately, no appeal

Henry’s a man who assumes his divine right to rule and his extra closeness to God by birthright

This is all far from who I consider the real God; this feels like an undergod, falsely taking the role and hiding behind a curtain with a megaphone (we might be thinking about that film this year).

As we come close to the Chinese new year as well as the Between The Stools new year, I would like to think of the world as coming towards the end of its hitherto tyranny and inequality. The massive breakdown continues. I hope that we see both these Henrys as leaders we want no more of, on any level. I hope we’re moving – like JF Kennedy allegedly did – away from the hawkish warmongering and creation of superpowers to a different kind of power. Henry VIII attempted a peace treaty with a long term adversary. Let us see more of that as a solution, instead of violence and landgrabbing. Let us not admire ruthlessness or see it as a necessity to survive.

I’ve two brief points to make before rounding off with some music and closing remarks.

One, is that I see this time as the end of defining our relationship with God in legal terms. It was there in early Old Testament Job, in Paul’s New Testament writings, and it is still there at the Reformation. I am still working on a law piece, but I see that writ has hitherto had too much power and is about abusing power. God is not interested in the kind of legally guilt-free ‘righteousness’ that can be credited to us like components towards a certificate. God is not impressed by the size of your army, your palace, your treasury. He’s not interested in prowess and jewels. And he’s not interested in your attempts at immortality (as per Lord Mountjoy quote early in Henry VIII’s reign) and bartering for a better deal posthumously.

God does not lead a world rooted in fear, like the Tudors. He doesn’t want your allegiance on pain of punishment or being legally owned or beholden. His gift is not about birthright, nor something that can be snatched in battle nor the stroke of a sneaky lawyer’s pen.

So finally: what could Henry’s role – both of them – have been? Were they pawns of higher darker forces? What did they help shape? What might their soul contract have been? What was their destiny? What was their role in the overall human journey?

I wonder if they completed what their souls set out to. We can learn from them how not to be.

They may have begun the modern era, the English Renaissance, but what did they really birth?

On the cusp of another such time, what can we birth instead?

Whilst you ponder, I’m going to play some music, which are both special favourites of mine. It may surprise, for it’s clearly a pair of pieces that are anachronistic to these 15^th and 16^th century men, yet these close two films about the Tudors. They were first used at the end of Shekhar Kapur’s Elizabeth, and the Winstone Henry VIII followed suit. Bookending with his own deathbed, the TV show tried to show that Henry had learned something since his father’s death 38 years earlier. His last words to his son and heir were not what he had hotheadedly promised his own father; not about the battlefield glory of his namesake (Henry V), not about full coffers and firm rule… I don’t know that the real Henry VIII had learned any of this. but I like to think that a modern audience wants Henry to have made some kind of positive progress.

Nimrod by Elgar is about a briefly mentioned mighty hunter in Genesis – perhaps the Tudors would like to consider themselves as such. However, Nimrod is also connected to the Illuminati and the beginning of a corrupt world that needed salvation.

The last piece is the introit to Mozart’s Requiem. And this is a requiem to our History year – might we have another some time? – and to this British brutish family that ended in March 1603, to the religious persecution and ‘accept my rule and beliefs or die’ that sadly did not end with them. I hope too that it is a requiem to a world of fear, violence, inequality, misogyny and abuse, of territorial grabbing and acquisition, persons who don’t know how to feel or say sorry or that they are wrong.

I make no apology for the lack of historical sources in this – I also have a requiem for putting empiricism and academia before all else. The film mentions are meant to lead into our new year, and bookend what I said last February and beyond about modes of knowing and real truth.

Do let me know what you thought of the History Year and I may be open to suggestion about films for this year. I’m curating a list. You’ll be hearing from me in Lent, but we’ll definitely meet on Easter Sunday which is the 31^st March, and a special film anniversary. (It’s clock change time).

I send blessings to you all as we enter a new era. Do reach out to me, Elspeth, on betweenthestools@hotmail.co.uk

Here are Elgar and Mozart. Thank you for joining me. Good night!

(Further dates and themes to be posted anon – I’m in a time of flux)

LENT 5: 23/3/23 – Maiden

My weekly Lenten reflections will be on a wife of Henry VIII each week – although not in order

These seek to not retell their stories, but to look at them with a spiritual eye

How would you react if you found a warrant for your own arrest? This lady of the week put it back, but her voluble distress after reading it drew her husband to her. She did not reveal the source of her sobs.

Catherine Parr did not go to the Tower. Perhaps she had learned from Anne of Cleves and Jane Seymour how to at least appear docile and say what the king wanted to hear. Pretending that she did not mean to instruct her husband in faith, only seem to oppose him to draw out his great and superior learning was a very Neck Turns The Head strategy – and one that saved hers. When the warrant she’d no doubt dreaded was served, writhing Wriothesley come to arrest her was turned away by the king.

Catherine Parr’s warrant – which Henry had agreed to – was not for alleged adultery like the other two wives, nor witchcraft, but heresy. Heresy and witchcraft are not far apart – both are beliefs and practices not sanctioned by, and perceived as a threat to, the church and its authority. By authority, it really means the hegemony and solo privilege of that institution.

Catherine may not have begun married life as a heretic – to Henry that is – she was married 4 times. Some historians claim that she was conservatively Catholic when the ever rounder and more irascible king pulled her away from the one she loved – an ambitious man who would try to be de facto king himself, and suffer the fate that she avoided. My interest in Catherine isn’t the relationship that resumed after Henry’s death almost as quickly as his own new spouses. The epithet ‘survived’ – I am bored of that crude rhyme – isn’t just about Catherine 3 outliving Henry VIII – although not for long; it’s that the warrant was not executed. It’s what Catherine believed and was trying to achieve with her reluctant queenship that interests me.

Like next week’s queen and the lens through whom we will view Easter this year, Catherine saw herself as an Esther, alongside the man she called Moses, letting the people go from the oppressive yoke of a man titled P. Catherine felt directed to accept the king – not that it would have been easy to decline (hardly meaningful consent) – because she prayed and felt God reply that this role was divine service to England. Catherine had admired Henry (!) but thought he who had begun so positively in removing the grip of Rome from this country was slipping. Henry didn’t leave the Catholic form of Christianity, just the rule of Rome, which of course, he’d replaced with himself. His 1539 act reiterated Catholicism in all but papacy, creating all other belief as criminal.

I admire Catherine’s courage and the principle of using her queenship – a sacrifice and a risk for her – to further reform, and especially as a spiritual mission. I am not sure that I agree with the content of that mission. Catherine Parr, a published author of theology, is the darling of the conservative reformed modern Christian, such as Lutheran pastor Don Matzat. His synopsis of Henry’s reign is telling: Anne Boleyn and Katherine Howard are guilty of adultery; Anne’s faith and mission are conspicuously absent: the break from Rome was because of Henry’s unassailable wish to marry her. Who actually did the reforming of this new independent national church isn’t stated but it’s implied that it was left to others…such as Henry’s final wife.

On discovery of Catherine’s last book, “Lamentations of a Sinner”, Don speaks in delighted terms of Catherine’s abasing herself to gain Christ, echoing Luther’s belief in self-accusation to come to a state of grace. The abasement was controversial for a queen – hence it was not published in Henry’s lifetime. It was an early spiritual autobiography of the new kind: where the author shows their journey from guilty to justified, from wicked to redeemed. It’s a genre which I grew up with.

I sympathise with spiritual epiphanies and honesty about one’s own journey but I reject the Worm Theology inherent in this work and Don’s glee in it. Why is finding God a see-saw of egoes? Why is accusing yourself of sin the first step in beginning a relationship with Jesus?

Catherine was concerned with the Lutheran doctrine of justification by faith alone, as well as his teaching that all spiritual knowledge and authority comes from scripture alone. They were tenets which I was raised with, and kept with…until relatively recently.

Justification is a legal term – reformed theology, as with the apostle Paul’s, is peppered with it. But I do not agree with basing your understanding of God on the flawed and worldly precepts of a broken and ironic system of justice. It came from an ex-Pharisee early on in Christianity, who was still very influenced by the old religion – that of right practice and rules. Paul began developing radical thought away from traditional Judaism, seeing God’s grace as the means of justification. Crudely in my evangelical upbringing we were told this word meant that we are made ‘just as if we’d never sinned’. It is different to expunged, which means blot out (so a record of wrong is gone) but justify goes a step further: it is almost as if time is reversed and the sin wasn’t committed. Actually, legally today, justification is closer to its normal English usage (often legal terms aren’t): it means that an acceptable excuse is given which prevents the guilty party from being punished.

Theological sources tell me that justification is a once and for all rendering of Not Guilty, effected in Jesus’ death. So Jesus’s overcoming death says: we all did do a capital crime that offends God, but a declaration rather than explanation is made which removes from us, the offender, the liability for that offence, and makes us righteous? How very Job.

And what is this crime we all do that earns us the forever fiery pit in God’s eyes – the judge in a courtroom (these terms require courts) to which we are not invited to defend or explain ourselves? Is it the things we could have done different and need to put right? Does it cover the more grievous acts which we may commit? Or is it missing the mark and falling short, like a weak misshot arrow, of a target that can never be reached by humans? What is perfection? And who is an angry, jealous, vengeful god, behaving like Henry VIII, to hold us to a standard that he misses?

Or is our crime not keeping all the many rules in the Pentateuch?

The reformed understanding is and I think was that those lists of Leviticus no longer applied after Jesus. Protestants preach that they no longer need to keep The Law – just the Ten Commandments, and Jesus’ Double Commandment. Oh, and a few exhortations by Paul (these can vary over time and your exact denomination’s beliefs). One of those which hung around in Catherine’s day, and in my background, still may, is that of women not teaching men. Henry levelled this at Catherine. But as anyone who really knows the Bible can tell you – Catherine was likely one; her contemporary who we’ll meet in July was certainly another – Paul doesn’t exactly say that. I’ll give you a full exposition of what I think he does say in July.

I have started something big here that I’ll continue over the year. My issue with Catherine’s doctrine is not to downgrade faith and to have to work one’s way into Heaven and God’s favour, but that she relies on corrupt, patriarchal legalism for her tenet. It is not that church tradition and law is greater than the Bible, but that text is misused, and that God speaks to us with an inner knowing. I’ll say more about that on here, and in my next novel. I stand with Catherine against Rome, but not against the freedom for Catholics to express their faith, nor for an alternative political institution – especially one with the same hierarchy and tyranny at its heart.

Catherine’s radical friends included the fourth wife of someone in last Sunday’s sermon – Catherine Willoughby, who became Mrs Brandon, duchess of Suffolk, and Marguerite of Navarre who influenced next week and Easter’s subject. What these women believed and fought for, and whether we would or should now, we will continue to explore.

We’ll have Tudor themed Maundy Thursday and Easter online services, at 930pm and 8pm BST.

Both will be about 45 mins. The first will be quite and reflective. Both will feature music

Please email me, Elspeth, on betweenthestools@hotmail.co.uk if you’re interested in coming

I shall also be performing a reading of my novella The Jury In My Mind for the 111^th anniversary of the Titanic the following week – stay tuned for more information

LENT 4: 16/3/23 – Phoenix

My weekly Lenten reflections will be on a wife of Henry VIII each week – although not in order

These seek to not retell their stories, but to look at them with a spiritual eye

Next BTS service this Sunday 19th March, 8pm GMT ** Beware time zone changes** “A Queen and a Duchess”. If you want to come live please email betweenthestools@hotmail.co.uk by Saturday evening. It will be recorded for all on this site after

The daughter of Wolf Hall is on her knees before her husband and king. She is beseeching him as both. Are others in the room? The tableau I’ve seen enacted is yes, but I am unsure of the source. The reaction of this man, over stuffed with jewels as much as pride (was there yet weight?) indicates that there must of have some sort of onlookers. He is flustered by her supplications, her emotion, and lashes out. He will not have any woman influence him on politics again.

Is it a flash to the wife before? Does he know that Jane Seymour is acting out a very calculated role, hoping that her performance before a carefully chosen audience will perhaps cajole Henry into agreeing? If so, Henry is still brutal and misogynistic, arrogant, shocking, unbefitting his office, and…further evidence against a man I have grown to hate as much as any I know in history.

I have wondered what to make of Jane Seymour, the third wife, usually seen as the vessel and the docile one, the one that gave him what he wanted, and thus the good one. Is she truly the wolf (noting the name of her family seat) in sheep’s clothing, playing the submissive kitten to serve her and/or her brothers’ ambitions? Was she biding her time in at least one other queen’s household, insinuating herself, waiting her moment to strike so subtly that the strikee didn’t know they’d been hit? I’m aware that she wedding shopped as her predecessor was chopped; she was married to Henry the next week. Was there hardness underneath the sweet compliant exterior?

But this, this entreaty before Henry is her finest moment. In it, a see a theme that began with last week’s wife and continues – out of order – to the last. Each queen in part was on a mercy mission, and had something honourable and altruistic to ask of Henry. Jane tried a different way to get it.

Jane was asking that Henry’s violence against the northern rebels cease and that he spare the lives of those leaders accused.

This is interesting as the northern rebellions – known as the Pilgrimage of Grace – were a broadly Catholic endeavour. They stood against the destruction of the monasteries, those independent institutions which answered to the pope alone. These religious houses had much wealth and influence. Some encouraged learning and free thinking. Henry VIII was against the Bible being in the people’s tongue and an absolute monarch. Often friars liked to be without city walls as they were then beyond civic control as well as episcopal. They took up much space in every town and had lands well beyond the footprint of their community and collected public produce in their tithe barns. Being outside of the national church, these spoils did not benefit the episcopal hierarchy and thus, under Henry’s new regime as head of the church, him.

One can see therefore Henry’s real reasons for destroying religious houses – I’ve heard that there were 700 in England and Wales – and that such shocking, swift action (in under 10 years, nearly all were dissolved and most swiftly ruined) – would need justification. Perhaps as leader Robert Aske of York stated, the allegations of corruption against them were untrue, part of the Tudor spin which I am becoming increasingly aware of. I was taught as a nonCatholic that monasteries were corrupt; they were greedy and godless and performed fake miracles for gullible spiritual tourists.

But even if one was protestant, as Jane nominally was – was such bloodshed and destruction ever justified? Of course not. Were these rebels so wicked that horrible death was the only outcome? In the mindset of fear and might, perhaps, but not a higher one. Did the nuns and monks have to be treated thus – especially the nuns? Certainly that is in no way justifiable, but despicable.

Although Henry didn’t grant Jane’s plea, we note that she made one. It is oft implied that she dare not do so again, but in the 2003 Henry VIII, Emilia Fox’s Jane (the only one I can picture) goes into labour and is unable to fight off the illness after because of Henry’s violence to her over this plea.

It is not only this television show that implies that he may have killed her – directly or indirectly.

Jane is celebrated as the wife who gave Henry what he wanted – a son. But far less energy is given to Edward’s short and juvenile reign than his sisters’. (We’ll think of one of those on Sunday). It is not through Edward that the Tudor dynasty continued for another 56 years after Henry.

It is oft remarked how Jane left the world so soon after that son: he was born on 12^th Oct; she took ill on 18^th and died on 24^th. This might seem cruel, to Henry, to her. Was her mission truly complete – not just from Henry’s point of view, but Jane’s own spiritual path? Was she glad to be out of the world before Henry could brutalise her further, and give her the fate of two other wives? Jane’s death is picked out as the natural death, and thus a tragic but positive end. She was the lovely wife, loved and lovable, who did what wives do: obey and conceive. She is thus depicted much like how the Virgin Mary has come to us; the submissive boy-bearer that – in protestant thought – stood back and let the son shine. Yet I’m very aware of another way to see Mary – Mother, BVM. Not as the head bowing woman uttering ‘let it be according to your will’. I wonder about Jane’s motto ‘Bound to obey and serve’. Was she bound – as in tied up, forced by Henry or those brothers who used her son as a puppet? Bound as in destined, or bound as in the likely course to unfold?

Jane, on that day on the floor, did attempt a service for her people, remembering that north and south (Tudors often neglected the North), Catholic and Protestant [at last a reluctant P], Jane was queen for all the country, and that she should have a care for their wellbeing and when atrocities are committed against them.

Jane alone is buried with Henry – not in Westminster Abbey, but St George’s chapel at Windsor.

She had a kind of hagiography created round her – imagined portraits of the unholy family after she’d died; speculation about the happiness that Henry could have experienced if she had lived, and how broken he was because she didn’t. His further misogyny and tyranny is blamed on his grief, and thus her death. The good wife – the meaning of the old Hindu practice of sati…when widows, now deemed useless, cast themselves on the funeral pyre of their husbands. Note how spin and pressure can make people do the unthinkable, and how that’s not just in historic India.

What would have happened to Jane if Henry had pre-deceased her?

In this story, we’re tempted to conceive that conception gave Jane’s life meaning and success. But we are more than the children we create, more than who we marry or the family we’re from. We are not rated by God for the kind of obedience which Henry wanted, expected of wives and children alike. God does not value sons over daughters, nobles over commoners, Protestant more than Catholic. God is bigger than our egos, our fears, our ambition, any earthly power, however absolute and tyrannical, and especially those acting in His name.

I want to leave Jane, not confined to her bed, birthing or dying, nor on the floor supplicating for mercy – for mercy implies rightful power and judgement – but celebrating her in daring to ask.

We’ll have a Tudor themed Maundy Thursday and Easter service, both in the evening.

I shall also be performing a reading of my novella The Jury In My Mind for the 111^th anniversary of the Titanic the following week – stay tuned for more information

LENT 3: 9/3/23 – Rose

A teenage girl has two gentlemen visitors to her dorm in one night. One is cast off hurriedly to receive the other – her uncle, the duke. In a celluloid scene I can scarce bring myself to describe or watch, Thomas Howard inspects his niece, roughly exposing her, and decides she is suitable for the role he wants for her. I have henceforth hated Mark Strong for thus portraying Norfolk in the 2003 Henry VIII TV series. O that Emily Blunt as Katherine Howard had plunged a bosom dagger into his heart!

(Some spell her name Catherine or Kathryn)

The 3^rd duke of Norfolk seems to be someone evil who got away with it – in this lifetime anyway. The miniseries ends that Norfolk, at last in the Tower that he had sent so many others to (including two nieces) awaiting trial for treason, was let off when the king died. And then he got his lands and titles back. When I saw his much vaunted, vain tomb in Framlingham church, I wanted to kick it.

Why do the wicked prosper?! Where is their satisfying downfall? I asked it with Job in January.

I’m constantly asking myself that of Norfolk’s king.

Unlike Mary Queen of Scots, where I could gleefully enlist all the evil courtiers who had died before her, quite often violently, I can’t (yet) tell you of this premiere duke’s comeuppance.

He was responsible for three of his own family’s executions, putting the rest of them at risk. One of them is our lady of the week, who’d be considered a minor today at 15*, but was considered then a ripe bride for a king three times her age, a dangerous, unlovely man.

Katherine is oft skipped over as the silly young one who palely paralleled Anne Boleyn. Apart from their fate, family, and reason for treason – adultery – wives 2 and 5 have little in common.

*They also have unknown birthdates, so Katherine’s age fluctuates with accounts; but she’s likely somewhere between 17-21 at the end of the story.

What I garner about Katherine is the huge double standards of Henry: he could have affairs where he wished, but for ‘his’ women to do so was an affront to his ego so great that they must die. Katherine was old enough to be in his bed, but that she’d (allegedly) had other lovers made her promiscuous and precocious. Note that despite her behaviour being fairly common and normative in our times, that many contemporaries continue to judge her.

Rather than being a tart, Katherine can be seen as a woman exercising her sexuality, which seems to frighten many men, especially in previous times. Again, that feminine force is feared, and so it is bound by those who see that they will be undone if it is.

Even if you saw Katherine’s sexual activities as unwise…even sinful….are they so heinous that she must be violently taken from the Earth, along with her two lovers? What harm has she really done, what threat is she? This comes from a deeply misogynous view and Henry’s inflated sense of self and his kingship. It is a very Old Testament – misread Old Testament – view, that God is jealous and avenges all those who disobey his (sometimes quite random and unreasonable) commands. If that were true of the Real God, wouldn’t Henry have been swallowed by the ground several times?

In January, I’ll tell you something I recently discovered about him which I found most satisfying.

The question isn’t: why was Katherine stupid enough to let history repeat, knowing what Henry would do to her and others…but why was he? He’d started a precedent that he seemed unable to stop; one of hatred but also judicially. But it was still his choice – he had others. He was given a similar situation and invited to do different this time: he didn’t.

I wonder if this wasn’t those Seymours at work, who’d lost their sister (read: chance for a puppet on the throne) and now sought another. For a while, they were successful…but they did get their comeuppance, although not during Henry’s reign. Both Seymour (and Pepe – a Muppet reference) brothers were executed. One of them behaved like Henry did when faced with a major rebellion (Aske/Pilgrimage of Grace to Kett/Commotion) – give false promise then butcher them anyway.

But where is justice for Katherine Howard, and Francis Dereham and Thomas Culpeper, the men who died before and for her? Do we gain any satisfaction from the interpretation, as with the 2003 TV series, that Henry was hurt, even devastated, that another chance of love ended in betrayal?

Jane, Lady Rochford, the middlewoman of the affair, also was executed – but many paint her as accessory if not mastermind to the other Boleyn deaths. Is that true and fair? Karen Lindsey says that Culpeper was a rapist and murderer, let free by Henry. Katherine petitioned him that others, including Thomas Wyatt (the only nice man in Tudor England that I’m aware of) were too, successfully. In that way, she is not unlike her cousin. Is there more that we’re not hearing?

I did hear something in my research; it saddens me that if true, it’s not better known, despite all our feminist revisionists. What if instead of freely exercising her sexuality (and thus her sovereignty), Katherine Howard was at the mercy of those exercising theirs on her, against her will? What if Culpeper and Dereham were both rapists? And her music teacher Mannox was committing child abuse on poor Katherine, separated from her family at a young age, to be preyed on ultimately by her supposed sovereign and uncle – even if he didn’t do what Mark Strong did, Norfolk was part of abusing her. What if Katherine didn’t lie, but others did, or felt compelled to acknowledge their knowledge of her alleged early affairs before they were murdered horribly for treason for keeping it secret? My ire burns more against the king and his acts of treason – pun deliberate.

I note Katherine’s motto – ‘No Other Will But His’ and how that reflects the views of kings, husbands and God….all wrongly represented and conflated.

Despite being supposedly the man presiding over the renaissance – a new era, and rebirth – I see Henry VIII as re-birthing the worst misunderstanding of God. I have been able to find out little about what Queen Katherine II understood of God. I hope that she found in Him (or Her) great comfort, especially at her end. I hope that like Mary of Scots, she found in it a beginning.

I am beginning to have an understanding…it concerns the themes of Shekhar Kapur’s Elizabeth films and really, all the Tudor enactments. But my understanding now takes a very different lens, which I will point and sharpen throughout this year. I do not wish to gaze on what so many others behind the camera have, and focus on this or any other monster, excusing their behaviour as of its time, and worst – admiring them.

My theological insight for this week is that Katherine, from a nominally Catholic family, may have like her previous namesake, represented the old way, which frightened the Protestants, who lost their ‘champion’ Cromwell on the day that Katherine married. Yet most of the cast of the Tudors were less interested in a real or right relationship with God – more in how it served them politically.

I want to leave Katherine in a delightful, apparently true tableau – dancing. Gouty Henry’s gone to bed, and ex-Lutheran ex-wife Anne of Cleves and she are romping round the room together, free of that monster, finding enjoyment in what they have endured. Don’t they both deserve a little joy?

And during a time traditionally about curtailing joy and pleasure, I especially like that image. I trust they are dancing in Heaven, where I’m sure they are. I cannot be as generous about their husband.

We’ll have a Tudor themed Maundy Thursday and Easter service.

I shall also be performing a reading of my novella for the 111^th anniversary of the Titanic the following week – stay tuned for more information

LENT 2: 2/3/23 – Escarbuncle

My weekly Lenten reflections will be on a wife of Henry VIII each week – although not in order

These seek to not retell their stories, but to look at them with a spiritual eye

In Rochester’s bishop’s palace, the woman about to wed the head of the church is looking into the courtyard at bear baiting. It appals that a spiritual leader should allow animal cruelty and a bawdy, money-making activity in the grounds of his home. I wonder if the onlooker is unfamiliar with it, for she comes from a land – a part of Germany – which discourages dancing and much music. Might she wonder: Is this the culture of her adopted new country? Anne has endured a long, cold, wet journey. Indeed, the slowness suggests that like Maggie Hemingway’s heroine in The Bridge, that ‘she could not bring herself to arrive’. Anne is on the way to meet her husband, literally – for the first time. He has seen a portrait of her; he may well have had the advantage. But even if Anne has not yet seen Henry’s likeness, she has heard all about him. She is aware that his three previous wives are dead; at least one was executed – rumours say more. Many others have refused this ogrous monarch their womenfolk’s or own hand, he who has also executed not a few friends.

What might Anne have expected even dared hope for?

Suddenly, a band of disguised men burst into Anne’s room. Anne is surprised and affronted, especially by the heavy set middle aged leader, who attempts to embrace her. It may have been a game of courtly love, but Anne of Cleves sees nothing courteous in it. She behaves honestly, betraying her real reaction to the man that is, in six days, to be her royal husband.

Much discussion about Henry VIII’s fourth wife is around whether she was or was not attractive – belying a shallowness at the heart of academic discipline.

We may have an Anne of Cleves wound to heal – of being cast off for not being attractive enough – which I doubt was true. Beauty is subjective; we know of Anne through court opinion, unlikely to be a solid source of information. What did she make of Henry?! Did he repudiate her as he felt rejected? (Karen Lindsey thinks so).

Anne of Cleves is oft portrayed as the short-lived dumpy one, quickly glossed over onto more exciting wives. I confess my preference for the previous Anne – both of which are Annes with an E, Karen Lindsey! I can only find one other aspect that these Annes have in common, although this week’s Anne parallels and reverses his first queen and last week’s subject – Katherine of Araagon.

The Pitkin guides – inexpensive and readily available British booklets – are powerfully influential of popular views. They do not keep to facts (which they never verify) but espouse strong opinions. A telling feature of the Six Wives of Henry VIII volume is that Anne of Cleves’ badge is described not by the main image it bears (these are the titles of my weekly reflections) but that the crown all queens had is her brother’s. In fact, Anne of Cleves’ badge is an 8 armed heraldic device (called an escarbuncle) ending in fleur-de-lys. This stylised lily is associated with French royalty, a key rival.

None of the spouses receive feminist revisions in Pitkin, but Anne of Cleves’ page is the least positive. But rather than being naive and docile, Anne may have played her hand well. I think her comments to her ladies – including the widow of George Boleyn, instrumental in killing him and his queenly sister – are calculated. If Anne seemed not to know what sex is, perhaps she can soon end this terrifying charade of a marriage on grounds of nonconsummation? How awful that this act of union is seen here merely as a legal bond. She may also have realised that in accepting her new title of King’s Sister that she may do well in the English royal family – better than if she’d been sent home. She is alleged to have told Henry that she forwent a prior engagement to wed him – a further legal excuse to annul the marriage, whether true or not. Thus she freed herself without pain or danger.

One might say that Anne of Cleves was the most successful wife, with the happiest ending; she is the favourite for that reason of at least one writer.

Anne C lived in Anne B’s former home, not that the guidebook of Hever Castle gives the second Anne much page space. But Anne of Cleves had it for 17 years, receiving Henry’s children there. Anne C had other property: the town mansion in Lewes named for her, which is a museum, and Richmond Palace! This major royal home was a riot of pinnacles and turrets just outside London. She had her German ladies and a fairly good annual sum. Austere Anne learned cards, dancing and music – and to speak English. Considering that she didn’t when she arrived and was divorced within 6 months, her responses to Henry and his court were pretty nifty.

However, my reflections are not about admiring niftiness, but what we learn spiritually.

Anne may have been cunning, but feigning female stupidity and obedience aren’t especially original or impressive – fuelling these stereotypes was hardly helpful or trail blazing. The outcome was riches and ease and a more than comfortable lifestyle – hardly admirable. I question myself as I’m tempted to judge that.

What I do find interesting is that Anne C is one of only two wives to have outlived Henry. She alone did so by some margin – 10 years. She lived to see the second of Henry’s children on the throne.

I am interested that Anne befriended princess Mary and Elizabeth, and I’ve even heard, a subsequent wife. I hope she was the friend and parent that the young Tudors lacked, and had in them the children which she did not bear.

I was tempted to switch the Escarbuncle and put her last as the culmination as the One That Got Away – not under house arrest like Katherine of Aragon or Mary Queen of Scots, but as a free woman….free as long as she remained in this country, and let Henry read and dictate her letters.

I was intuited to put Anne C now, and as I think on her and research, I feel that she is right to come early on. I see that Henry seemed to live out various marital permutations and soul contracts – in one lifetime! This was his one brief experience of allowing others to choose his wife politically (he was being steered in others) and via 3^rd hand reports, not personal knowledge.

Anne’s is a story of a burden cast off; a life orchestrated by others which you are able to turn to your advantage. There’s a hymn, Words of Praise…‘when the life I wanted gives way to one much better.’ Here, we are shown that a life not wanted can also be the means to a better life.

If Wife 1 was about constance and refusal to be deposed, Wife 4 was about empowerment through acceptance; the husband is the head, but the Wife Turns The Neck policy; freedom via singleness.

Accounts I’ve found don’t make Anne of Cleves a theologian and game changer… if readers know of any, please let me know; for I feel that whereas there is a hopeful lesson in Anne C’s story, it is not an inspirational one. I hope we will find one as Easter (9^th April) draws nigh.

I shall also be performing a reading of my novella for the 111^th anniversary of the Titanic the following week – stay tuned for more information (The anniversary of the launch of Britannic was on Sunday, 26th Feb – I am giving talks on a survivor of the 3 sisters)

LENT 1: 23/2/23 – Pomegranate

My weekly Lenten reflections will be on a wife of Henry VIII each week – although not in order

These seek to not retell their stories, but to look at them with a spiritual eye

The asymmetrical bulk of Peterborough Cathedral rises out of the flatlands today as much as it did in the 1500s. Through one of its three high portals, you are faced with arguably the purest Norman interior of any British greater church, but at the far end of the vaulted aisles, nearest the sacred spot of the high altar, are the resting places of two queens. They are 50 years and almost as many feet apart, parallel as much as their siting. The younger grave – the subject of our last service – is empty, translated by the son who did nothing to prevent the execution of his mother to the crowded mausoleum that is Westminster Abbey, near to the woman who sent her there. On the north side is Katherine of Aragon whose daughter – another Mary – also came to the throne and yet did not have mistreated mum reinterred in the beaver tail-shaped chapel of her grandfather where she herself lies.

But Katherine’s presence, I’m told, and influence helped save this great abbey with its unique facade, and she and Mary of Scots rather have it to themselves, rather than sharing with the jostle of dynasties and curated poets and scientists. I hear that hardly a day passes without flowers being laid.

Mary Stuart and Katherine of Aragon were both royal children who grew up in Europe and came to Britain as teenagers. Both were swiftly widowed, in their teens; but whereas Mary came ‘home’, Katherine stayed in her adopted land. Both were passionately Catholic, and both were wronged by the Tudors, who had them live effectively under house arrest until the end of their lives. Both were called to sham trials; but Mary was murdered – martyred – and Katherine was left to demise slowly; that too is martyrdom of a kind. Both took their leave of the world in the western edge of the East of England, hence their burial at Peterborough.

It could be argued that both were faithful ‘til the end, believing themselves rightful queens but also in adhering to what they saw as the true church.

Yet Katherine’s religious background was different to what I’ve heard of Mary Stuart’s, which was one of finding a path of tolerance and co-existence. Katherine was the youngest daughter of Isabella and Ferdinand, who united the kingdoms of Spain. Their rule was not unlike the Tudor and Stuart aspiration: making a landmass one state under single leadership. They also wished to press one church on that divergent populace, by force. They presided over the Inquisition, under the Pope, trying to make Jews and Muslims ‘convert’, but ferreted out pretend conversions. This is the antithesis of my understanding of conversion and spreading the faith: not by persuasion, example, or the working of the Holy Spirit, but by fear. It predicates that there is not only one true belief, but that no others will be tolerated. You were punished if you erred, but confessing sooner may make the punishment lesser than if you’re found, or ratted out, later. This was a gambling game; a game of conformity; of having to appear to be genuine when you might have been cajoled. This may have influenced Katherine’s daughter, Mary; it is also traceable in her second husband’s Anglicising campaign, even though it ironically was a campaign that excluded Katherine and her Catholic faith.

The blogger The Exploress (Kate J Armstrong) draws out Katherine’s notions of pious paragon to wayward men, and how she looked to the Queen of Heaven as a model of how she as earthly queen should mediate between the people and the king. It’s said that Katherine saw Mother Mary as obedient and chaste, but Katherine – Catarina in her homeland – also saw the BVM as a role model of strength, which she emulated. Katherine’s response to being summoned to court, assisted by her legal education, is pure judicial theatre and brilliance.

Even if you’re Protestant and team Anne Boleyn, it’s pretty impressive.

(Whose team I’m on may well evolve over this Lent and year).

Like so many whom we’ll consider this year, Katherine was seen as a bartering tool. As a toddler, she was engaged to a boy whom she’d not meet until after she married him – by proxy. We’d consider the newly weds minors today. When widowed within 6 months, Katherine had 7 years of waiting for her future, which was being decided over like a long chess game by anyone but her.

Then, says author Karen Lindsey, Katherine made the decision to steer her own destiny.

This is a truly queenly moment, and one-regardless of our family pedigree – we can all emulate.

I wish to emphasise that Katherine’s second marriage – to Prince Arthur’s younger brother Henry – had lasted for almost 20 years, and quite happily, before troubles began.

I’ve thought of the wounds that different historic figures carry: Katherine’s would be that of rejection, being supplanted even after many faithful and happy years. Of course, I’ve just described many others, and the later cruelty of not only being expected to pretend that 24 years of your life didn’t happen (by being known as Princess Dowager – the title she held after Arthur’s death) but being parted from your daughter are deep lacerations indeed.

Katherine had also seen her mother, sisters and maids treated badly by men. Katherine wasn’t just put aside for Wife 2 – who is not next week’s topic – but because of Henry’s wrangling over the lack of children as a possible divine punishment. Katherine’s way of placating God, if I’ve rightly been told and understood her, was to wear uncomfortable hair shirts, fast, and be often at services. Being pious for her seemed to be about having strict rules for yourself and your servants.

Might I gently suggest that Katherine, whom I have mostly compassion for (save regarding the Battle of Flodden), was trying to please God in the way of the Old Religion: and I mean biblically.

The Old Testament way was about keeping rules; being seen to oft be in the house of the Lord; about giving up…and self harm was a way to appease, post animal sacrifice, an angry fickle God. The Catholic church embodied the pre-Jesus teaching, and it is not alone. Perhaps our sacrifices may not include infliction of physical pain but we may still feel that discomfort and going without makes us holy and more likely to have our prayers answered, and if we dare not truly believe in earning God’s love, at least His favour.

God did answer Katherine and Henry’s prayer: they had a living child: a girl. He also answered in the same way in Henry’s next marriage. Henry’s pursuit of what he saw as the only way which God could bless him meant the loss of lives and great pain for several women, and I think ultimately, himself.

That Katherine stayed loyal to this monstrous monarch, refusing offers of rebellion against him, is something which I find hard to comprehend. Accounts I’ve read suggest that she had a misguided trust in her father and her husband. It is hard to find a positive end to this life which ended in January 1536, but I understand that Katherine also loved God – perhaps in a parallel way; I’m sure that he loved her, as it’s claimed that her adopted people did, right until the end – and some still do.

Did Katherine play out an old world trope of female fidelity and piety for the world stage?! Was her role necessary for the transmutation that began during her queendom? I no longer see Protestantism as an improvement, and certainly not a more holy way. What of her daughter, and her royal in-law friends? We’ll be thinking about them on 19^th March’s service.

Anne Boleyn – champion of free thinking

Although Anne is the mother of Elizabeth, for me – Elizabeth begat Anne.

When Elizabeth (1998) became my favourite film, I wondered who “your mother the whore” was, and gradually took a step back in time to the previous generation – and there found an equally, if not even more remarkable woman.

The first time I read about Anne Boleyn was in 2002 and I came to her almost in ignorance. I dismissed people in my lunch hour, saying I was in 1533 and not available. As I read Philippa Gregory’s novel about Anne’s sister, I suddenly remembered the rhyme about Henry’s wives and what was going to happen.

By the time Gregory’s venomous pen had done depicting this conniving, hard, brutal woman, I was willing Anne to be executed; but by the time I picked up Vercor’s book, I wanted to put flowers on her grave.

Vercors is a photographer’s pen name, whose novelised biography says that the evil, grasping concubine did not make sense; and that underneath the deliberately etched layers was a heroine – for women, for  England – but most of all, free thinking believers. And strangely, it took a Frenchman trying to make sense of our independence from Hitler in the second world war to see it.

Just as Joan of Arc was resurrected at a time of resurgent nationalism in France, it seems Anne Boleyn is ripe for a similar rediscovery on many levels – yet she has not really been used.

The harsh view of Anne prevailed over four centuries, but there seemed to be a concurrent re-imagining in the 1980s. Professor Eric Ives, historic fiction writer Jean Plaidy, and Vercors all published in around the same year. Theirs was a different Anne to what had gone before – a maligned woman of sympathy, talent, though complex and potentially with a hard streak. And except for Philippa Gregory, books all have followed this portrayal since – whether they be fiction or academic – but not yet on the screen. Howard Brenton’s recent play is all about the debt that King James  and his Bible owed to the supposed strumpet a hundred years earlier.

Joanna Denny’s focus is summed up by her idea that Anne was a neo-Esther, something Anne herself propagated by having her chaplain preach on this in front of the royal court. Likening Anne to Esther recalls not wicked grasping Jezebel but another Old Testament queen, chosen by the king, which gave her an opportunity to save her minority group of endangered religious people. Denny emphasises Anne’s controversial new beliefs and her daring work to use her position to promote them when such beliefs were persecuted. Denny sees Anne as wooed against her wishes and morals, and argues that the portrait (quite literally) was deliberately obscured by her enemies. The dark features, mole and sixth finger are traits attributed in the 16^th C to diabolism which were invented to destroy the memory of this powerful woman.

Professor Ives and Joanna Denny write about her faith extensively, the latter making it Anne’s principle driving force.

I’ve read in fiction and academic sources of Anne’s forbidden religious book (The Obedience of a Christian Man by William Tyndale) being stolen by Wolsey and given to Henry. Anne uses this opportunity to discuss the book’s radical ‘New Learning’ contents with Henry, and so influence him with protestant beliefs.

Henry was not interested in reforming the church. After Luther pinned his 95 points on that church door, Henry wrote an impassioned, I think quite immature letter to defend the catholic church. It was his advisor Thomas Cromwell who is understood to have used Henry’s marriage and pope dilemma to allow divergence of belief to come openly and safely into England, and I believe that Anne and Cromwell initially worked together on this.

What Anne’s beliefs were and how to term them might need some clarification. She has been called evangelical. The term ‘Evangelical’ – not quite as we understand it –  was less radical than the Lollards, and not really heretical. It was not the same as being Protestant. The key features of evangelicalism, as today, were reading the Bible for oneself; accessing God direct and not through a priest; being against superstition; and one’s personal relationship with God. Anne is said to have exposed the fake miracle at Hailes abbey of Christ’s flowing blood (actually provided thought a duck’s blood dispensing machine). Anne has been spoken of as Lutheran, yet Karen Lindsey and Eric Ives claim that Anne’s faith was not wholly opposed to the established church, and that she had a confessor and took mass, and did not denounce transubstantiation – only its trappings.

It might occur to some that if Anne had a reformed faith, that scheming involving adultery, wealth and power are incompatible with it. Ives says that 16th C didn’t see God’s and personal glory as incompatible, just as some people today feel wealth is part of their spirituality.

Something which is not readily emphasised about Anne is her moral household –  and her generosity to the poor which went beyond the usual royal favour.  She expected her ladies to sew for the poor, and was likely to be behind a Poor Reform Bill of 1536. She was also a patron of schools and universities, and rallied for her patronees. Being a reluctant focus of passion and harassment is very different to pursuing Henry purposely – and she did refuse to be his mistress.

Belief is a choice, and is ultimately, I believe what appeals rather than on argument and proof alone (that subject is another article). So I choose to see Anne as an Esther, a renaissance woman of power, taste and intellect, and I take particular interest in her reformed faith. Anne’s faith was of intellect and heart with practical outworking. And it allowed divergence into non conformism.

I therefore with others think that it was not Henry, and not really William Tyndale that caused the English reformation – but Queen Anne Boleyn of England, the Moost Happy [sic], who was crowned (depending on which calendar you use) this week, 480 years ago.

Anne Boleyn at the Globe

I am having a summer of Tudors. I have had many such summers as I have studied these over a period of 11 years, but I even when I spent a year academically researching their popular depictions, I have never seen so many plays on Elizabeth I and Anne Boleyn in a few months as in these past ones.

I have just seen the production at the neo-Elizabethan Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, London, on its opening weekend – a new play which sold out last year, as was the performance to which I went.

In his introduction to his script, playwright Howard Brenton quotes the views of historians David Starkey and Antonia Fraser, reflecting the likely opinion of the public. He does not mention Prof Eric Ives and Joanna Denny whose prominent books depict a very much more positive Anne. Joanna especially – as does Karen Lindsey – writes of the systematic demonisation of Anne’s character. All three remind that our few historical contemporary sources are chiefly Anne’s enemies, none of whom featured in Brenton’s play. Books – both novels and academic – have been ahead by 30 years in showing Anne as a national heroine, but stage and screen still cast Anne as the ambitious, hard siren. Philippa Gregory’s 2002 novel and ensuing film adaptations have done much to reverse this positive literary view, which has become in vogue again with most recent publications.

Brenton’s 2010 play promised a view closer to the one I adopted: the Reformist queen: ‘Esther not Jezebel’ – the title pf my 2006 dissertation. (I had attributed it to Joanna Denny, but I think it is my own). American author Robin Maxwell had Queen Elizabeth I reading her mother’s words in her novel The Secret Diary of Anne Boleyn; Howard Brenton has King Authorised Bible James reading Anne’s annotated Christian book and realising his connection to the fallen queen of two generations ago who suffered the same fate as his mother. (I never use the phrase that the blurb does – his debt. As you’ll see from my Justice in Banking blog on this site, I have strong views against debt culture). Note too that being executed does not denote failure, but rather a brutal signal of mission accomplished.

I was interested that a play was picking up the religious theme, as often theology is seen as too heavy and dull for entertainment, particularly when we are a multi and often no faith society. But the themes of tolerance and violence and faith recur, and spirituality is again popular though not always in established, orthodox ways. And this 16/17th C period is a seminal one in our history in which the burgeoning of new beliefs is central.

I was drawn to the play because it was written by a man who evidently could see Anne’s merits – significant as I felt Anne appealed most to women. But it was Eric Ives in 1986 who said that Anne was an appropriate vehicle for feminism – though few have picked up that gauntlet – and it’s women who have written many of the works which fuel popular imagination that recast her as Jezebel.

It may seem obvious given its performance setting, but I didn’t expect Howard’s play to feel so Shakespearean, in the rowdy audience, bawdy and earthy kind of way. The experience of the Globe merits a few lines – booking fees, standing without umbrella or stick for £5 or, of if you pay £15-37 for a seat, there’s charges for cushions (and the wooden seats have lips which I think are designed to make you need one – but I managed without); and a foreign group behind me who whispered throughout (translating to a child who was too young to be there) and put their feet on the seats. The atmosphere was closer to comedy than serious theatre, though there were both elements in the play. King James romps in a dress with ‘interesting stains’ with a male courtier whom he kisses; it starts with the ghost of Anne bringing her severed head out in a bag; and it ends with an all cast jig.

James (Garnon/Stuart) perhaps was the most charismatic character on the stage, his strong Scots accent mixed with a tick, his camp manner helped by his shoes and beard. While we’re on accents: I am infuriated that the country folk once again got that generic West Country which is insulting and ignorant. There are many Eastern and southern counties accents, all quite distinct, and they sounded no more convincing than The Worzel’s Combine Harvester song, which was at least meant to be comedic. It’s like getting all North American or Celtic accents muddled. Actors and dialect coaches, take note!

I was not pleased at Anne’s physical appearance. She is famous for being dark, though Joanna Denny believes this is part of the demonisaton programme as ‘swarthy’ skin was seen as a sign of diabolism – appalling as that notion is. Denny believes that Anne was dark auburn, as per the most likely genuine contemporary portrait of Anne – but nowhere have I heard of her as blonde. Couldn’t Miranda Raison have dyed her hair or worn a wig? And couldn’t Henry be red haired? And why did Cardinal Wolsey have a beard?

I did not like the gore lust of the opening but I did like that Anne begins by assuming the knowledge of her death – which we never see – and by establishing a rapport with the audience. I liked the originality and pertinence of linking her and King James and the amount of material covered in an engaging way. Anthony Howell made a positive King Henry, kind instead of raging over the birth of a girl; but the man who had so many butchered in his name is relieved of too much of his violent, cruel and inhuman side. My favourite Henry remains Ray Winstone, whose complex depiction was the first to show me a man whom I could weep for as well as despise. Sometimes in Howard’s version, earthy comments – such as what Henry really wishes to say in his letters to Anne – mar the real point: the vulnerability of Henry’s enduring, consuming passion which must extend further than his tights to have raged so long and moved so much to be with her.

The audience was too quick to laugh at anything. The person who called out ‘ah’ in sympathy with broken Cardinal Wolsey was more correct that those who giggled, but either response turned this into a panto rather than the moment of pathos. When an important theological tenet dawns on Henry – that he could be king and head of the church without need of the pope and thus have his new wife – again, there was laughter. But it wasn’t essentially about being funny, it was the turning point of the play and British history. We spent too much of the play in Caliban mentality rather than the Prospero and Ferdinand.

My gripe had been til this weekend that no-one has explained Anne’s swift demise satisfactorily. Brenton shows something I have not found in my research or other books – I hope to discover where he found it. (I wrote and he told me: Eric Ives). But if it is true, it does account for the scheme to scaffold that in 3 weeks had the most powerful woman in the kingdom’s head in a basket. If Anne knew that Cromwell was embezzling ex monastic funds meant for charity, she had the key in which to bring about his downfall as Wolsey and More. (No temperate, cuddly Mr Northam here; this [absent] More is a torturer). Cromwell would take his advice to Anne earlier in the play, and strike before struck. The charges of multiple adultery and incest – treason in themselves – seem ridiculous, but perhaps an insecure king who could love and hate in equal measure could be persuaded in a very intense period to sign the death warrant.

But the frustration is that Brenton potentially closes one mystery but leaves something else unsatisfactory. The villain we focus on, particularly after Wolsey leaves, is Thomas Cromwell. The slippery faced multi officed politician always features heavily in Tudor plots, and he is usually credited as being the man who brought Anne’s death about. Here he is portrayed as a fellow in faith, aiding illicit Reformist texts and their author’s passage out of the country. Yet his secret Protestant beliefs clash with his vile practices of threats and spying. They also don’t prevent Cromwell’s clandestine bond with Anne turning sour very suddenly and without enough explanation. One moment, they are sharing a prayer; suddenly he’s arresting her, banning her from speaking to or seeing her husband, and making up charges against her. The play – as with many other stories – does not say that Cromwell is executed during Henry’s reign, rather less efficiently than Anne’s French swordsman.

The jaunty dance at the end ruined the power of the ending. It should have ended with the ghost of Anne taking James’ hand – a quiet, poignant gesture. Instead the 150 minutes is augmented by cheering stamping dances that aren’t even fitting, and those final moments are quickly forgotten in their wake.

Ultimately, I am a little disappointed, but that is because it didn’t show my Anne; but that is good, because it leaves the way open for me to do so myself.

Wallis and Edward

It is strange how history parallels itself. Since the Royal Wedding, I have researched our current royal family, about whom I truly knew little. It became like the story of Elizabeth I: I kept hearing about the previous generation and how their actions had a clear impact on the current. In the Tudor story and film Elizabeth, I found that I must know who ‘the whore Anne Boleyn’ really was to understand why Elizabeth’s claim to the throne was arguably tenuous. Understanding Anne actually told me far more than that and introduced me to a woman every bit as fascinating and remarkable.

Reading about today’s royal family is exciting because it is the same kind of epic history, but still unfolding, with the possibility to interact with it. We don’t know the end of the story. I like to read stories where I don’t know the end; it is a shame that classics and history are half known to the general public so that there is rarely the pleasure of complete discovery for the first time. We know the Titanic sinks and that Mr Rochester does marry Jane Eyre. We know that Elizabeth I doesn’t marry and that Anne Boleyn is executed. Those events are best discovered like a film that starts with the end and you have to learn why that end is arrived at.

Reading about Prince Charles – whose story is still being made and whose ending is not known – I kept coming up against warnings about being like Uncle David, whose regnant name was Edward. This seemed to be the ultimate threat, the most dreaded comparison. The shadow of Edward VIII’s abdication was and perhaps is still looming in the memory of the royal family, though many of them were born after that event and even after his lifetime. I previously knew only that Edward abdicated to marry; I knew nothing of to whom, except her name and that she was divorced. However – any books, films and perhaps people are quick to fill in my blank that this was a feckless, selfish couple; she, a crude, loud American siren. And brave old Bertie conquered his stammer and stepped into his shameful brothers’ shoes and gave us the current royal lineage, with the strong Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon at his side, known to us today as the late Queen Mum.

This year, I have seen three films about that era: The King’s Speech, Bertie and Elizabeth, and Any Human Heart. They all add to what the biographies say. David/Edward says little in the films, and neither does Wallis Simpson, but their small parts are almost caricatured in not being flattering. Only in 2001’s Bertie and Elizabeth was there a hint that he carried on with his duties, despite being exiled and stripped of his title, and still had popularity when he met people.

Yesterday, I watched the 2005 film for television, Wallis and Edward. I wanted to hear their side of the story. My instinct had been to wonder if Edward and Wallis were really so dreadful and to feel sorry for Edward. Who else but royalty cannot reject the work our family lines up for us? You can refuse to be a doctor as your parents hoped or to carry on the family business, but this is one firm you cannot leave. I find his abdication speech very moving. He says he can’t be king and do the best for his people without the woman loves. I understand that. Who else has ministers and laws telling you whom you should marry? Why is the anti-Catholic law still in place? The prime minister has no such scrutiny, yet PM Stanley Baldwin felt that he could manipulate his Sovereign on that matter. Easy to deal the duty card to someone else when it’s not your companion that’s being dictated.

Jean Brodie says “…Stanley Baldwin who got in as prime minister and out again ere long”. This has stuck with me – that it’s the headmistress, Miss Mackay, who admires Baldwin and has the slogan near his picture, ‘safety first’. The complex antiheroine loves truth, beauty, art, and esteemed Axis European leaders whose getting in and getting out caused immeasurable suffering. I think that regarding the Windsors, Stanley Baldwin can also be charged with causing suffering – not with the mass torture and execution of fascist dictators, but his prejudice fuelled pressure had an effect on the nation and his government as well as ripples of hurt and stress for the whole the royal family, Edward and Wallis especially.

I wish that Wallis and Edward had ended not with the end notes that they were ostracized for the rest of their lives and that Wallis died a recluse, but that Baldwin resigned and the sympathetic friend Churchill became our famous, perhaps iconic prime minister, and that Wallis and Edward’s lives and duties carried on beyond their wedding day.

Wallis and Edward is well written and the DVD’s interview with writer Sarah Williams is very illuminating. It’s her first made script, inspired by coming across a book on Wallis in America that perhaps indicated another light was possible on the woman so hated and decried over here. In Sarah’s telling, the Queen Mother comes across as scheming and controlling. King George V is not portrayed well in any of the films, always been bombastic and cold and autocratic, a negative force on both brothers. David/Edward is neither hero nor villain, but complicated. Wallis is not grasping at the English throne, but would rather see her love alone on it and lose him than cause constitutional crisis. She is always the one with caution, showing sadness and fear when things escalate. Rather than Wallis leaving yet another husband callously, it’s he who leaves her. She is willing to put her second husband before the king, but it is Ernest Simpson who asks for the divorce. There’s none of the crude, brash presumption in this Wallis, played by Joely Richardson. Joely’s an actress who plays sympathetic protagonist roles and so this casting makes us willing to warm to her and suggests that’s what we are supposed to do.

It’s easy to see Anne Boleyn/Henry VIII parallels in that a man falls in love so passionately that he is prepared to go against his ministers and shake the constitution to do so. Henry, like many kings, took lovers of married women, and this was accepted. Edward VIII was advised to do the same, without marrying her, but this film has Edward refuse to take such a double standard. Wallis, like Anne, is not aristocracy and her husband, like the men of Tudor paramours, angles their women towards the king to reap the benefits for themselves. Ernest Simpson is a nice partner who bravely confronts the King with his intentions – he does not want to leave Wallis unless she is well looked after.

The parallels with the current royal family are also powerful. Charles and Camilla’s wedding was announced during the filming of this drama. Had that happened earlier – or when Charles becomes king – a similar crisis could have emerged. I also recently saw the Channel 4 docudrama series, The Queen. It covers Charles and Diana’s break up and a parallel in living memory with Princess Margaret. Margaret wanted to marry a senior employee, Peter Townsend, but eventually gave him up for duty. I wonder how much of ‘Uncle David’ would have been behind that decision and the Queen’s views on both her sister and her son’s marriages. Being the daughter of the other brother, the one thrown into the limelight by the decision of the abdicator, one can surmise at how that affected Queen Elizabeth’s beliefs. A girl at the time, it may be that her parents influenced her ideas about it as she perhaps can remember little herself; I don’t think she had much contact with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor as David/Edward and Wallis became.

I would like to do further research on Wallis and Edward, and am open to the more sympathetic view. Like Anne Boleyn, it seems she has been demonised, but it is better that she does not remain so for centuries if it not deserved.