the firebrand who survived henry viii
revisiting katherine parr
Divorced, beheaded, died
Divorced, beheaded, survived
So goes the curiously symmetrical rhyme immortalizing the respective fates of Henry VIII’s six wives. And though she was the sixth wife who famously “survived” her marriage and her husband, Katherine Parr is curiously underrated. Anne Boleyn, for example, looms much larger in our current collective consciousness; even her famous pearl-studded B necklace is on trend again some 450 years later. In contrast, Katherine Parr (or Catherine; she herself spelled it “Kateryn,” so I will stick with the K-spelling) is often characterized as little more than Henry VIII’s nursemaid, despite being one of a handful of published women writers in six decades of Tudor rule. (Ultimately, she published three texts; they were all religious, and all bestsellers.)
However, because of her “meddling” in religious matters, the sixth and final wife to Henry VIII narrowly escaped with her head. A new film called Firebrand starring Alicia Vikander as Katherine Parr and a truly unrecognizable Jude Law as Henry VIII will depict this little-known and genuinely harrowing Tudor drama.
The recently released trailer has gotten me excited for the film, which premiered at Cannes in May of last year. Below, I’ve rounded up a few juicy points to watch for in the movie, which will hit theaters on June 14.
The Oscar-winning (?) transformation
The famously handsome Jude Law will be playing Henry VIII at his most decrepit. By the time she married the king, he was no longer the “handsomest prince in Christendom,” as he was once described by a gushing Venetian ambassador. After a near-fatal jousting accident, the formerly athletic king was sidelined — and no longer had the metabolism to match his prodigious appetite. His weight gain coincided with the worsening of ulcerated sores on his legs, which plagued him for decades, as well as potentially being afflicted by gout. Is it any wonder that the king was so often in a bad mood? As we’ve learned (The Whale, Monster, Vice), the Academy loves a dramatic physical transformation; Jude Law is so unrecognizable in this role that he just might garner an Oscar nomination for it.
The fifth wife
After his fifth wife, Katherine Howard, had committed adultery (and therefore treason) against him — and lost her head for it — Henry VIII added “heartbroken” to his growing list of afflictions. He had married the pretty, vivacious, and teenaged Katherine Howard in the mistaken belief that she was a “chaste and pure maid;” when he discovered that she was not only “impure” before marriage but had actually cheated on him, he was devastated. Henry VIII was accustomed to being the heartbreaker — when he tired of his wives, he left them, often without saying goodbye. Such was the case with Anne Boleyn — and just 24 hours after her execution, the king was betrothed to his next wife, Jane Seymour. Katherine Howard’s betrayal had taken him by surprise, and it was the first time he’d “lost” a wife without having another prospect waiting in the wings.
After the Katherine Howard debacle, deceiving the king as to a woman’s “purity” became an act of high treason — not only for the woman herself, but for “all who knew it.” At the Tudor court, “knowing it” was malleable, and could easily be arranged by forced confessions through an “interrogation” session or two in the Tower of London. For that reason, finding a suitable widow for the king to marry was the only feasible option. No one, even the king, could claim to be deceived upon learning that a widow was not a virgin. Enter Katherine Parr, the twice-widowed Lady Latimer.
The ghosts of Henry VIII’s wives were surely inescapable at court; even today, one can find traces of his disgraced or discarded wives in overlooked carvings in various palaces. Even though they were no longer physically present, the King’s wives were an ongoing topic of conversation across Europe. What is more, they were her contemporaries; Katherine’s mother Maud was lady-in-waiting to Henry VIII’s first wife, Catherine of Aragon. Whether or not she was personally acquainted with all of them, Katherine Parr would have been acutely aware of all of her predecessors and their various fates, most of all that of Katherine Howard. And she certainly would have known about his only living ex-wife: Anne of Cleves.
The fourth wife
Anne of Cleves is often unfairly maligned as “the ugly one,” due in large part to the king’s complaints that he did not find her attractive after they married. In fact, her contemporaries generally found the German princess to be perfectly pleasant-looking — certainly not worthy of the “Flanders mare” epithet that has since been so attached to her name. One French ambassador described her as of “middling beauty,” the same phrase he used to describe Jane Seymour. In contrast, Katherine Parr was not described as a beauty of any degree.
Yet for the king, who was driven by his appetites, his lack of attraction to her was so unacceptable that he had the marriage annulled. (“She is nothing so fair as she hath been reported,” he allegedly complained.) While he smoothed the annulment over by setting Anne up with marvelous estates, jewels, and high rank as “the King’s beloved sister,” the rejection had to sting — and Anne showed that all was not quite forgiven after the King chose Katherine Parr instead of remarrying her.1 The former queen Anne fumed that Katherine Parr was “not nearly as beautiful as me,” and the ambassador who relayed the remark (Chapuys) did not contradict her. Anne of Cleves was still very much present at the English court, and an interesting potential source of tension at court.
The family portrait
During his marriage to Catherine Parr, Henry VIII commissioned an enormous family portrait — but only including his third wife, Jane Seymour. The portrait, which lives at Hampton Court today, showed an impossible reality. It depicts his beloved but long-dead Queen Jane as she was in life; although she died days after giving birth, she is shown alongside their grown-up son Edward, the future of the Tudor Dynasty. Off to the sides are Henry VIII’s elder daughters, Mary and Elizabeth, who against all odds (and often-questioned “legitimacy” due to Henry VIII’s tendency to declare his inconvenient marriages to their mothers invalid) would go on to rule. In the background are two of the actual court jesters, Will Somers and Jane the Fool. And in the center of it all is the enthroned King Henry, ablaze with cloth of gold and jewels.
When viewed in detail, it really is a stunning painting; you can practically feel the carved columns under your fingers, and the assembled family looks as though they’ve just stepped into the scene. Despite its majesty, the portrait is rather heartbreaking when viewed as the family King Henry hoped to have; perhaps because she died before he could tire of her, he always considered Jane Seymour to be his “entirely beloved wife.” In this revisionist portrait, Henry VIII has created a world in which his favorite wife is still at his side, along with his long-desired son. The Henry VIII of this painting has not been betrayed by a faithless wife; his legs are not swollen or ulcerated, but reminiscent of the “extremely fine calf” that the Venetian ambassador praised him for in his youth.
It is extremely intriguing to imagine Katherine Parr’s response to this portrait, painted during her reign as his queen consort. Though she was the king’s wife when this portrait was painted, she is entirely left out of it. Her exalted status as his current wife was entirely overshadowed by the ghost of Jane Seymour, who achieved the all-conquering feat of giving birth to the king’s son.
In an exclusive preview from Entertainment Weekly, we get a glimpse of Katherine regarding the freshly painted portrait. I can’t wait to see the film’s interpretation of how Katherine reacted to the painting — which may not only have been hurtful as a wife, but a not-so-subtle reminder of what made a wife truly consequential in the king’s eyes.
In addition to the portrait, I’m excited to see how the stepchildren themselves are portrayed — all three were genuinely close with Katherine Parr, their last and most affectionate stepmother. Katherine Parr was instrumental in reconciling the king with his daughter Mary (and at least in part in influencing both Mary and Elizabeth’s restoration to the line of succession). All three make interesting characters: Mary, the eldest, deeply affected by her parents’ prolonged divorce, her mother’s death, and her mistreatment at the hands of Anne Boleyn; Elizabeth, her much younger sister, precocious, pretty, and voraciously intelligent; and Edward, the priggish but earnest crown prince who praised his stepmother for her efforts in learning Latin.
The Protestant poetess
Erin Doherty memorably portrayed Princess Anne in The Crown; in Firebrand, she plays the role of Anne Askew, who met a much crueler fate. The well-born Askew was a devout and vocal Protestant (and poet) who preached her views throughout the countryside. (Among her sins: she ditched her married name, Kyme, for her maiden name after her husband kicked her out, likely for her outspokenly reformist views.) Her facility with scripture and English law protected her through multiple run-ins with the law and clergy until it didn’t; when she was arrested for heresy in 1543, she was tortured and burned at the stake.
Fans of Wolf Hall will be familiar with her torturers Thomas Wriothesley (pronounced “Risley”) and Richard Riche. Bent on extracting not only a confession but damning indictments of other women at court — particularly Queen Katherine Parr, who Wriothesley hoped to take down in his ardent campaign against court heretics — Wriothesley and Riche went as far as operating the rack themselves when the Lord Lieutenant of the Tower of London backed out. Despite what must have been unbearably painful torture, Anne Askew refused to talk. She was injured to the point where she had to be carried to the stake, where she was burned alive, and refused to recant her beliefs to the last.
Based on the trailer, Askew plays a prominent role in the film, which is unsurprising, since her arrest and execution signaled mortal danger to anyone who could be painted as a Protestant heretic. Indeed, Wriothesley conspired to arrest Katherine Parr; she was only saved when a loyal councilor dropped a copy of the arrest warrant in her hallway. Therefore, unlike Henry VIII’s other wives, Katherine Parr had the luxury of advanced warning — and she displayed remarkably quick thinking and emotional intelligence by rushing to the king, submitting herself utterly to his will, and proclaiming herself to be only a weak woman who benefited from his teachings and had only involved herself in religious discourse to distract him from his chronic pain. In pleading her case as an inferior woman, Katherine Parr cleverly leveraged the only argument that was uniquely available to women at that time; and, prepared to believe his wife’s admiration for him as a “most learned prince,” Henry VIII bought it. The gambit worked, and when Wriothesley arrived to arrest her the next day, he was thwarted by a roaring King Henry.
While critical reviews have been mixed so far, it’s exciting to see a historical drama that’s about a decidedly unsexy topic like religious reform. We’ve certainly come a long way from The Other Boleyn Girl; based on the trailer and subject matter, Firebrand is more reminiscent of The Favourite, which was unafraid to depict the most grotesque aspects of court intrigues. The film’s use of the royal “we” (which Henry VIII did actually use) indicates an understanding of and appreciation for the bizarre and entertaining elements of its time and place. For a Tudor obsessive like me, Henry VIII’s marriages are an eternally fertile (pardon the pun) topic for discussion, and it’s exciting to see a film focused entirely on this match of wits between Katherine Parr and her enemies — a relatively inconsequential but emblematic moment in history.
Anne was never able to remarry or return to Cleves; however, she ultimately outlived not only Henry VIII but Katherine Parr, too.
I just saw the painting at Hampton Court- truly amazing