ABSTRACT
For many years after his death the domestic history of Henry VIII, let alone that of the six women whom he married, attracted little historical interest. A century later, Herbert of Cherbury was restating a familiar tradition when he explained why Henry’s wives had little place in England’s history: even if Henry was guilty, as some had suggested, of lust and wantonness, that was historically irrelevant, being ‘rather a personal fault than damageable to the publick’. He also denied that Henry’s imputed lust caused the death of any of his queens, such deaths being more properly ascribed to Henry’s ‘inordinate desire to have Posterity (especially masculine)’. Why that was a better reason for executing two wives and divorcing two others Herbert did not discuss, his point being, as already mentioned, that the domestic life of a king, even one with six marriages, had little historical significance. Herbert dismissed much of the conventional criticism of Henry, one of the ‘most glorious Princes of his time’, explaining that it had originated either with ‘discontented Clergymen (for his relinquishing the Papal Authority, and overthrowing the monasteries) or with ‘offended Women (for divers severe examples against their sex)’. 1
Despite Herbert’s views, there was always some debate about the history of the successive wives of Henry VIII. The divorce of Katherine of Aragon and the career of Anne Boleyn had sparked the most controversy. Anne was either the religiously reformist wife whose daughter became England’s greatest queen, or the immoral wanton who caused the discarding of Henry’s most virtuous wife and who well deserved her own shameful death. That second view, more usually the domain of Catholic writers, was also explored by William Cobbett, as he set out the manner in which Henry’s Protestant Reformation had ‘impoverished and degraded the main body of the people’; his wide-ranging attack on Henry included several references to his marital history, primarily as one more means of
deriding that king. For Cobbett, Henry’s first wife, discarded in those deplorable proceedings that culminated in Henry’s Reformation, was always exceptionally virtuous. On the other hand, in every way Anne Boleyn was Katherine of Aragon’s most unworthy successor. Cobbett also offered a particularly harsh commentary on Cranmer’s obliging role in Henry’s several marriages and annulments: ‘Thus then, my friends, we have seen that the thing called the “Reformation” was engendered in lust, and brought forth in hypocrisy and perfidy.’2 But Cobbett’s interest in Henry’s wives went no further than that their treatment served to reinforce his judgements of Henry.
