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Romantic Renaissance man or wife-slaying psychopath? The truth about Henry VIII

Every inch a king? From left: Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Mark Stanley, and Damian Lewis
Every inch a king? From left: Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Mark Stanley, and Damian Lewis

Divorced. Beheaded. Died. It would be harder to find a more chequered dating history than Henry VIII’s, or one more frequently reenacted on page, stage, and screen. Yet the portrayal of England’s most infamous male monarch varies wildly across dramatic depictions.

From Eric Bana’s gentle-eyed romantic in The Other Boleyn Girl, through Jonathan Rhys Meyers’ perpetually half-naked philanderer in The Tudors, to Damian Lewis’s angst-ridden monster of Wolf Hall, a patchwork of incoherent personalities swirls over our cultural perception. Whenever we try to grasp who Henry was (lute-strumming lover? Bloodthirsty psychopath?), he seems to slip further away.

The latest on-screen incarnation comes via Channel 5’s new drama Anne Boleyn, about the downfall of Henry’s ambitious, reforming, son-bearingly unsuccessful second wife. The casting of black actress Jodie Turner-Smith in the lead role stirred up controversy in the run-up to the release but since the first episode aired on Tuesday, more viewer frustrations and critical eyebrow raises have been directed at Mark Stanley’s Henry than Turner-Smith’s Anne.

The Guardian called him “weirdly wimpy” while The Daily Mail quoted viewers on Twitter who found him “feeble” and unconvincing. Such critiques are, according to Dr Lucy Wooding, historian, fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford, and author of a seminal biography of Henry VIII, revealing of one of the many myths that cloud our understanding of the Tudor king.

“Everyone’s trying to be Holbein,” she tells me, paraphrasing Thomas Freeman and Susan Doran’s study Tudors and Stuarts on Film, in reference to the Tudor court painter’s famous portrait of Henry, broad-shouldered, legs splayed, magnificently robed.

Detail from Hans Holbein's famous portrait of Henry VIII - Getty/Dea Picture Library
Detail from Hans Holbein's famous portrait of Henry VIII - Getty/Dea Picture Library

“That’s our preconception of what Henry was like, the kind of larger than life Colossus-like figure. But I think it’s really important to remember that at the time Holbein was making it, Henry was in freefall, his reign was falling apart. He was facing a huge rebellion, his wife had just been executed for multiple adulteries, he still didn’t have a son after nearly 30 years of trying. So the picture is a desperate attempt to paper over the cracks.”

If Henry was not the powerful and terrifying two-dimensional figure that popular culture so often renders him as, the truth is more complicated.

“He was a fascinating character. Yes, he was unpleasant, and at times tyrannical, but that tyrannical edge was born out of profound insecurity” says Wooding.

Insecurity is something else that doesn’t fit with the image of the Jonathan Rhys Meyers’ model of Henry as a playboy prince. That perception, Wooding argues, is the result of a modern confusion of politics with sex, and tells us more about our own obessions than Henry’s.

“We’re living in the modern world obsessed with sex and so you get this heavily sexualised portrayal of Henry. What we don’t appreciate is that the only reason why he had to have a son was to stop this nation slipping into civil war again. You need to look back to the civil wars of the fifteenth century, the Wars of the Roses and the extraordinary anxiety that pretty much all of the Tudors felt about this question of the succession.”

Far from being the embodiment of masculine sexual voraciousness, “by the standards of the time, Henry was quite shy sexually. If you compare his sexual record with Francis the First of France, who had extraordinary numbers of mistresses, he’s not the kind of sexually profligate figure that he’s usually made out to be.”

Mark Stanley plays Henry as a mild masochist -  Fable Pictures Ltd/ The Falen Falcon Ltd / Sony Pictures Inc.
Mark Stanley plays Henry as a mild masochist - Fable Pictures Ltd/ The Falen Falcon Ltd / Sony Pictures Inc.

Anne Boleyn paints him a mildly masochist, who enjoys relinquishing power to his wife in the political arena and the bedroom. Is there any evidence for such preferences?

“No” is Wooding’s unhesitating response. “And I don’t know how you would tell.” One of the things she finds irritating about dramatic depictions of the Tudor court is the informality of the bedroom scenes. “There was no sense of formality, the reverence accorded to Majesty. I imagine that his sexual partners would have been pretty overawed by the experience.”

Counterintuitively to the modern mind, his marriage record too is evidence of sexual insecurity. Most 16th-century Renaissance monarchs married foreign princesses, who brought with them huge dowries and strong diplomatic ties. But, as Wooding points out, Henry only does that with Catherine of Aragon, who he’s known for years and is his sister-in-law, and Anne of Cleves, with whom he struggled to consummate the marriage. Otherwise, he chooses women from the English court. “He knows these women already so he’s not scared of them,” says Wooding.

'I imagine that his sexual partners would have been pretty overawed by the experience': Jonathan Rhys Meyers in The Tudors - Television Stills
'I imagine that his sexual partners would have been pretty overawed by the experience': Jonathan Rhys Meyers in The Tudors - Television Stills

In the hectic slew of his five subsequent marriages, it’s also easy to overlook the fact that he spent 20 years in quiet domestic contentment with his first wife.

“I think if she had produced a son she would have remained his honoured and his cherished wife. They were very sweet together.” Even as Katherine was being driven into exile and Anne Boleyn’s star was in the ascendant, she was still sewing the collars on his shirts every day. “They were, in many ways, a very devoted couple” says Wooding. “I think people have got Henry’s sexuality completely wrong.”

Given that, it is perhaps surprising that she thinks Rhys Meyers’ turn in The Tudors has something to recommend it.

Damian Lewis 'makes a more plausible Henry than most' - Ed Miller
Damian Lewis 'makes a more plausible Henry than most' - Ed Miller

“He does at least portray Henry as young and attractive,” she says. Henry ascended the throne at the age of 17, at which point he was “a phenomenal sportsman.” He jousted frequently, which was highly unusual for a king at the time, given how dangerous it was – the King of France was killed in a jousting accident in 1559. He also hunted all the time “which was an extraordinary endurance test.” The virility, if not the sexuality, of the Henry portrayed in The Tudors has solid basis in history.

As for Damian Lewis in the BBC’s adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s double Booker-winning Wolf Hall trilogy, who The Telegraph called “mercurial and charismatic”, Wooding thinks he “makes a more plausible Henry than most.”

Still, she has struggled to find any modern embodiment of the monarch “who moves with the dignity and confidence of someone who believes themself to be God’s anointed.” As she points out, the king’s touch was believed to have the power to heal the sick. Henry believed himself more than man; he was a semi-deity. It is an immeasurable challenge for a contemporary actor to imagine themselves into such a head space.

Like his wives, versions of Henry come and go. But when it comes to a definitively transporting, truthful, historically accurate depiction on-screen, we may be waiting a while.