LONDON — Many British schoolchildren will be familiar with the rhyme “Divorced, beheaded, died; divorced, beheaded, survived.” It was a common mnemonic device to help children learn the sequence of Henry VIII’s six wives.
Tudor-era portraits of monarchs, wives, and courtiers form a key segment of the National Portrait Gallery’s central collection. In its campaign to appeal to younger audiences, the museum has attempted to flesh out these characters, with a vaguely feminist bent. It’s a canny move. Its new show is titled Six Lives: The Stories of Henry VIII’s Queens, as opposed to “Six Wives.” Here, curator Charlotte Bolland seeks to fill in their backstories and present them as individuals rather than supporting players to the main character of the King.
The 16th-century English Tudor king’s initial divorce from Katherine of Aragon to marry Anne Boleyn has the greatest historical significance — it caused the country’s cataclysmic split from Catholicism and the creation of the Church of England — yet the lore of the wives has endured in the popular imagination, as they’ve appeared as characters in television, plays, and musicals.
However, even as Bolland tries to elaborate on the women’s lives she comes up against the dearth of primary biographical sources. The show offers an expanded picture of the court’s workings and the everyday items people used — not a bad thing at all — but adds precious little insight to the queens’ characters beyond what’s already known from existing key texts. Although we can strain to interpret queenly attire and emblems in their portraits, not much concrete information can be inferred. Anne Boleyn’s famous portrait by an uknown artist is actually a posthumous commemorative creation, we learn, while Jane Seymour’s personal heraldic badge, carved from Reigate stone around 1536, details a phoenix rising from a castle, from which Tudor roses bloom; the caption speculates that the phoenix, a symbol of rebirth, may signify her reign “as a new beginning.” There is also Anne of Cleve’s 1539–40 account book detailing lavish purchases of fashionable English-style dress, payments to musicians, and, interestingly, some gambling debts.
With the captions, Bolland earnestly attempts to forge connections between the objects and the wives. For a set of 16th-century playing cards, we are told, “On her way to England … Anne passed the time by learning card games that Henry enjoyed.” But not with these cards; there is no indication that she either owned or used these particular cards. It goes on to describe how cards at the time could represent archetypal or mythological figures — for instance, the Queen of Hearts as Judith, who beheaded Holofernes in Biblical accounts. This detail implies a connection to Boleyn, but does not state it, for doing so would be a dangerous historical invention, undermining the importance of drawing conclusions from empirical evidence in art historical research.
So many unsupported suggestions threaten to undercut show’s historical integrity: for example, the caption for Hans Holbein’s portrait of Margaret, Lady Butts, states that she “spent decades navigating court life since her first appointment to Princess Mary’s household.” It goes on to speculate, “it may have been this experience, as well as her and her husband’s interest in religious reform, that encouraged Katherine Parr to bring Margaret into her circle.”
Where we do have primary sources, the wives neither speak their minds nor express agency: A 1537 letter to Thomas Cromwell, described by the caption as prepared in Jane Seymour’s name, states matter of factly that she had “delivered and brought in childbed a Prince,” while Katherine of Aragon signed a letter to Henry VIII, “your humble wife and true servant.” The size and, in many cases, quality of their portraits also reveals their subservience. Katherine Howard’s 1540 miniature is dwarfed by the nearby panel of Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke of Norfolk (c. 1539), the most powerful peer of the realm and uncle to both Katherine and Anne Boleyn, and all of the portraits are lacking compared to the mighty full length portraits, such as Hans Holbein the Younger’s “The Ambassadors” (1533) or that of Henry VIII himself (1537), from Holbein’s workshop. The wall captions acknowledge the patriarchal convention by noting that “marriage was not perceived as a union of equals in the 16th century, and a queen consort could not forget that she was also the king’s subject.”
Later depictions of the queens illustrate changes in traditions, and reflect wider societal ideals: William Lindsay Windus’s painting “Cranmer Endeavouring to Obtain a Confession of Guilt from Catherine Howard” (1849) drips in Victorian moralizing, for example. More dynamic are costumes from stage productions, which convey the extent to which the queens’ undefined characters has allowed for much dramatic invention. A 1988 costume for an opera about “Anna Bolena,” first performed in 1830, and the hugely anachronistic glitzy vinyl and spandex Katherine of Aragon costume for SIX the Musical, which premiered in 2017, present wildly differing versions of the women.
Perhaps this section’s most intriguing works are a sequence of images by the celebrated contemporary photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto, which juxtapose 1980s waxworks of the queens with attributes such as staffs or musical instruments. Their poses mimic their Tudor-era representations, but Sugimoto includes their lower bodies and arms, shown in action, lending them a degree of apparent agency. These photographs also encapsulate the exhibition’s overarching message, that we “use stories and our imagination to read portraits and bridge time.”
Reductive descriptions opening each woman’s section somewhat weaken the exhibition’s goal of fleshing out their experiences: Anne Boleyn was “the most happy,” while Katherine Parr hoped “to be useful in all I do.” In fact, this emphasizes how much these figures were denied any significant personal traits in the historical record. Given this obstacle, the show demonstrates the importance of historiography, demonstrating that evolving interpretations of the Tudor period have, perhaps, influenced our perception of the time more than historical fact itself.
Six Lives: The Stories of Henry VIII’s Queens continues at the National Portrait Gallery (St. Martin’s Place, London, England) through September 8. The exhibition was curated by Charlotte Bolland.
