Days Of Blood And Roses

By Bonnie Angelo

TITLE: THE WIVES OF HENRY VIII

AUTHOR: ANTONIA FRASER

PUBLISHER: KNOPF; 512 PAGES; $25

THE BOTTOM LINE: A historian with fresh feminist insights gives a Queen's-eye view of England's Bluebeard King.

WHEN LADY ANTONIA FRASER was growing up, she always attended costume parties as the tragically romantic Mary Queen of Scots. From the time she was 22, fresh from Oxford, the budding historian was immersed in English monarchs. In the 38 years since, she has published biographies of, among others, James I, Charles II (her ancestor) and the Scottish Queen of her girlhood fantasies. She is also a committed feminist. Could any author be better suited to chronicle the Crown's raciest chapter? The Wives of Henry VIII, Fraser declares, is "the book I was born to write."

In less scholarly hands the story might have read like a bodice-ripping romance novel, but Fraser brings to it fresh insights -- and a keen feminist edge -- based on meticulous research. In her view, the six women who married Henry were central to the sex, politics, intrigue and gore that were the foundation of the house of Tudor. They were also intelligent and fascinating people who were variously misused, abandoned and executed.

In a time when women of noble pedigree were consigned to roles as breeders or bargaining chips for power, Fraser notes that most of Henry's half-dozen would have been saved by producing a surviving son. Succession of the Tudor line obliterated all other concerns. Fraser argues it was the lack of a male heir that prompted the King, still firmly bound to Rome, to seek theological loopholes to justify divorcing Catherine of Aragon, his Spanish princess wife of 22 years. And it was the same concern that led him, three years later, to bring charges of adultery, incest and treason -- trumped up, Fraser maintains -- as cause to behead the tempestuous, black-eyed Anne Boleyn who had so beguiled him.

Sweet Jane Seymour, wife No. 3, obligingly gave Henry a son and died after 18 months of marriage. The child, Edward VI, died at 15. Anna of Cleves was too ugly to love (the King's verdict after the wedding night: "I like her not"). And there was little hope for Katherine Howard after her steamy letter to her lover found its way to the King (much as tapes turn up in the wrong royal hands today). Her paragraphs led to a sentence: the chopping block. The last of the lot, twice-widowed Catherine Parr, prevailed by shrewdly mothering, and outliving, her cantankerous, aging husband.

But Henry was not always the ogre. Fraser describes him at his first marriage in 1509 as a 6-ft. 2-in. golden youth, a "wildly charming" monarch who loved music, dancing and jousting. He aged badly, corrupted by power. Those who offended him, even loyal friends, were banished, beheaded, disemboweled. An errant cook was boiled in oil. The royal visage, writes Fraser, "grew more like a vast potato marked with eyes and mouth to resemble a man." From Kenneth Branagh to Charles Laughton in 38 years on the throne.

Playing history's tantalizing game of what-if, Fraser posits that English history would have been rewritten had Catherine of Aragon's infant son lived to maturity. There would have been no divorce; Henry would have remained Catholic and the course of the English Reformation would have been profoundly altered. And there would have been no Elizabeth I, Anne Boleyn's daughter, depriving England of a monarch who far outshone her son-obsessed father.