The young talking picture industry had a take on Katherine too!

Any look at representations of Henry VIII must include 1933 British film The Private Life of Henry VIII, which veers crazily from being somewhat historically grounded to purely fictitious,  kind of like The Tudors without the nudity. The take on Katherine Howard is basically that Katherine Howard is a been-around-the-block court habituée who has always passed on true love in pursuit of ambition. That the real life Katherine was a teen who arrived fresh but not naive in the ways of love from her step-grandmother's house to become a lady-in-waiting to the ultimately repudiated Anne of Cleves matters not.  Private Life's screenplay take is reinforced by casting of then 30 year old actress Binnie Barnes,  who was not an especially girlish looking woman.  In the Private Life world,  Courtier Thomas Culpepper had been pining after Katherine, presumably for years, and ultimately declared his love for the Queen.  She sent him a note saying "yes" just as he was packing for North America, which would have been an interesting trip since his affair with Katherine began in 1541 and there was not even a failed attempt at English settlement in North America until the lost colony of Roanoke was founded in 1585.  In any event, the affair between Katherine and Culpepper looks like two star crossed and hopelessly smitten adults taking a chance on love...a roll of the dice that came up "off with their heads!"

What was Katherine Howard thinking?

So, at last post I was looking at The Tudors' take on Katherine Howard and how that show's presentation of Henry as a sexually vigorous and (due to casting, wardrobe and makeup decisions) youthfully good looking husband played into her affair with Thomas Culpepper.  After all, would someone who had a somewhat satisfactory husband (Katherine wouldn't be the type to have qualms about Henry's morality, and even if she did the script establishes Culpepper as also a bad person in the rape scene as discussed in he last post) consider an affair knowing that the very same Henry she was married to had caused the execution of her cousin Ann Boleyn on ostensible grounds of adultery? This definitely conflicts with the conventional narrative that she was getting little satisfaction from, and feeling no attraction toward, Henry and was thus, not being very smart, vulnerable to seduction.

Here's how The Tudors addresses the problem:  a scene opens with Culpepper frolicking abed with some happy lady...she doesn't look like Katherine, who can it be...OMG it's Lady Rochford!  Lady Rochford, as will be discussed down the road, was a pivotal character Ann Boleyn's downfall. It is historically correct as far as we know to believe she used her position as chief lady in waiting to facilitate the affair between Katherine and Culpepper.  Her motives there are variously explained, but we know that it didn't end well for her; she followed Katherine to the chopping block.

To get back to The Tudors, though, it seems as if TC keeps going on to Lady R about how he wants to get down with Katherine.  Lady R, who has already been established as finding voyeurism a turnon, offers to talk the Queen, who again isn't very smart and who is clearly already attracted to TC, into throwing caution to the winds. Kind of nuts, but entertaining.

Of the fictions that I've consumed so far, the one that delves deepest into the motives and circumstances surrounding the Howard/Culpepper affair and the role of Lady R is Phillipa Gregory's The Boleyn Inheritance. That book is told in three first person narrative voices:  Anne of Cleves, Katherine Howard, and Lady Rochford.  In Inheritance, Katherine's uncle, the extra-evil Thomas Howard, Third Duke of Norfolk, who engineered the Katherine/Henry match, becomes concerned when, months into the marriage, Katherine has not become pregnant.  His idea is to find a willing courtier whom Catherine likes, trick the two into having an affair, get a secret Howard into the line of succession, and arrange for the boyfriend to sleep with the fishes after he has done the impregnation.  He uses his henchman, Lady R, to get the plot going, and also of course to distance his own snakelike self from the goings on. Ms. Gregory says in the afterword that Norfolk and Rochford trying to engineer a pregnancy was her own invention rather than based on direct historical evidence.  Plausible?

Starting near the end of the story: the quick and alarming fall of Katherine Howard

I'm jumping into the blog with the incident that is Henry at his worst: the fall of Katherine (sometimes spelled Catherine) Howard, his fifth and youngest wife. No fictional representation of Thomas Cromwell comments on the affair; Cromwell had lost the king's esteem, and his own head over Henry's discontent with his fourth wife, Anne of Cleves.  

Katherine's  looks like a simple story by Tudor standards since it doesn't  involve religious or political upheaval,  just the  family-advancement scheming that is de rigeur for any Tudor tale.   A king,  elderly by the standards of the time,  is smitten with a cute and, unbeknownst to him, sexually experienced teenager who likes boys.  He marries her. She giggles at his witticisms and tells him she much prefers him to those callow boys.  She is not telling the truth.  After a while her infatuation with a good looking courtier, which is mutual, overrides any sense of self preservation on the part of the two young folk. They begin a full-on affair. The king finds out and all is erstwhile sweet nothings about how she was his rose without a thorn are worth...nothing. Off with their heads! But...even the simplest Tudor tale has multiple interpretations!

Most Katherine Howard narratives take as a given that the infatuated Henry was much past his sexual prime when he became infatuated with Katherine.  He had become quite obese, with no Lipitor and no Viagra to mitigate the effects. In addition, a wound in his calf refused to heal, had to be constantly drained, and was decidedly not fragrant. Without getting overly medical since I have no qualifications, a non healing wound could be symptomatic of Type 2 diabetes or other conditions which cause poor circulation, and is consistent with the idea that Henry was not quite the sexy beast of earlier days. The Tudors does include scenes with the dressing and  of Henry's wound, but it is shown as being more acutely painful during drainage than disabling until well into their short marriage.

This line of thinking is not exactly adopted by Showtime's lavish but not so accurate four season series The Tudors.  Henry is played by Jonathan Rhys Meyers, who, like virtually all of the actors in The Tudors is insanely good looking.  His strength in playing Henry is the reptillian thousand yard stare that he adopts when it's time to do something ruthless.  A problem with the casting, makeup and wardrobe decisions around Mr. Rhys Meyers is that as the narrative years pass, Showtime's Henry gets  little to no older and  hearvier looking (it looks as though the wardrobe department  put a little padding around his waist that would represent an athletic type overdoing the beer and wings for a couple of months, no more.)  Rhys Meyers' Henry looks about thirty, not the ill preserved fifty or so  that he was during Katherine Howard's time. Also, the moderately explicit representations of their sex life give the impression that Henry was still on his game if not at the very peak.

So, if Henry, by virtue of casting and fanciful writing,  is a generally vigorous and not bad looking husband, how does The Tudors explain that anyone, even someone as foolish and pleasure loving as Katherine undoubtedly was, might decide to take a lover when she knows full well that Henry has already executed her cousin Ann Boleyn on charges of adultery that were almost certainly not even true? The Tudors tells (by showing) that courtier Thomas Culpepper 1) is obsessed with seducing Katherine and 2) is conveniently already the lover of Lady Rocheford, her chief lady in waiting and a principal actor in Ann Boleyn's downfall.  Rocheford is so enamored of Culpepper (or so kinky, or so crazy) that she volunteers to engineer a liaison between him and the queen, who is easily manipulated.

Genesis of this blog

Last year, as I was reading Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel,  I found myself transported by this engrossing historical novel which trumps the genre trap and is widely esteemed as a literary novel. I'd given some thought through the years to movie and miniseries fave Henry VIII (as in...what was up with him? did he really believe his own self serving nonsense? Did he ever get the tiniest shivery sensation in the upper vertebrae when he thought about about having ordered the neck-chopping of not one but two women he'd been madly in love with?!? not to mention the head separations of  his most trusted counselors???) I'd not thought much about Thomas Cromwell, one of the trusted counsellors ultimately axed out by His Royal  Badness.  In assorted movies and  miniseries, he seemed  a second-tier opportunistic baddie, and there are plenty of those in the Henry VIII narrative.  I was in for a change in perspective: you can't read WH without giving Cromwell some thought.  The narration, while technically in third person,  adheres entirely to the author's version of  Cromwell's direct sensory intake and thoughts.  Ms. Mantel quite admires Cromwell, but she does not much care for Thomas More, hero of the widely seen sixties movie (based on the play of the same name) A Man for All Seasons. In WH More, the embodiment of all fine qualities in Man, is sanctimonious and cruel, while Cromwell, a skulking villain in Man, is a  likable prodigy of talent and industry, although nobody, Mantel included,  will nominate him for sainthood.

Reading the new sequel to Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies, I decided to dive into  multiple interpretations of the characters and forces in Henry's drama, staying (mostly) in the realm of fiction, including dramatizations. I doubted other Tudor fictionalizers  would execute at Mantel's level, and they indeed do not, but there are many respectable and entertaining entries in the Realm of Henry.

So, now I've read a few more books, watched a few more miniseries episodes, and I have a long to-do list, and yes, I will blog about it all.