Book: Six Wives: The Queens of Henry VIII by David Starkey

Pages: 765/hardcover

My Thoughts: It’s taken me quite a while to get through this book for a couple reasons.  1- the length was an obvious factor, and if you add in the index and bibliography, the book is an astounding 852 pages.  2- it was really tedious, and there was an overwhelming amount of detail in certain parts of the book.  Those two reasons combined made it slightly difficult to read more than a few pages at a time.

I found the introduction to be slightly off-putting because I felt Starkey came across as arrogrant.  I felt like he thought his biography was the best one because he managed to access all these different documents that no one else was able to access and translate some documents that no one else has been able to translate.  In addition to that, he seems to not like any other Tudor historian because they weren’t digging deep enough, and all stuck to the same formula.

Starkey decided to structure the book according to the time each woman was married to Henry as well as the number of materials about each one.  This means most of the book is devoted to Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn, with a few chapters on Catherine Parr, and one chapter each for Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves and Katherine Howard.  Theoretically, it makes sense.  We know more about Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn and Catherine Parr than we do about the other three, so a good chunk of the book is going to be devoted to them.  In practice, it didn’t work out that well.

For one thing, most of the Anne Boleyn section was devoted to the divorce from Catherine of Aragon.  I’m not kidding when I say that Henry didn’t marry Anne until 500 or so pages in, and had her executed a mere 85 pages after that!  Furthermore, he talked about Henry VIII’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon twice- once in Catherine’s section, and once again in Anne Boleyn’s section.

Some of the details were repeated, making it boring.  I get that it’s a very important event in British history, because that was a major factor in the break from the Catholic Church.  But if he’s going to devote several hundreds of pages to the “Great Matter,” he should just write a book on that.

There was so much detail on Henry’s divorce from Catherine- it was all “such-and-such a person went to this place to deliver a letter” and “this group of people went to this one place to figure out how Henry can divorce Catherine.”  It did get better once he married Anne…kind of.

There was barely any overlap between any of the queens, which I thought was slightly odd, considering that there was a considerable overlap between Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn, some overlap between Anne and Jane Seymour, and then some overlap between Anne Of Cleves and Katherine Howard.  I got the definite sense that he was more interested in Catherine of Aragon and her subsequent divorce from Henry, and that everything else was just an afterthought.  I also didn’t notice anything groundbreaking or special about it, despite his “access to special documents.”

Rating: It gets a 2.5 out of 5.  It was more about Catherine of Aragon and The Great Matter than anything else.  For a book about Henry’s wives, it was more about the politcal aspects of his marriages and the important men around his wives as opposed to his actual wives.  I also felt like his marriage to Anne Boleyn and his subsequent wives were an afterthought.  Overall, it was a disappointing book.  I was definitely glad I checked it out from the library.