ABSTRACT
Five hundred years after inheriting his throne, Henry VIII, the ‘tyrant’ who famously beheaded two of his wives, remains the most likely of all English kings to appear in various forms of Anglophone popular culture. In recent decades he has been a figure of ever-increasing popular fascination, featured in film, television series and recent historical fiction, including a number of recently reissued novels, such as those by Jean Plaidy and Norah Lofts, originally published during the mid-twentieth century.1 Modern novelists taking Henry as their subject usually view him through the prism of his marriages, especially his first two, to Katherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn. While they tend to agree that he was a tyrant by 1536, the year Katherine died a lonely death and Anne was beheaded, they differ on how he became one. Within that disagreement lies competing portrayals of Henry’s personality and its development that hinge, quite provocatively, on conflicting portrayals of his first two wives (respectively) as either virtuous or sexually compromised, honest or deceitful, or passive victims of a Machiavel or themselves Machiavellian.
