'These women were innocent, and he was a monster': How history got Henry VIII wrong

Inarguably Britain's most famous male monarch, the silhouette of Henry VIII alone is instantly recognisable, from the celebrated portrait by Hans Holbein the Younger. Vast in stature and covered in jewels, Henry stares out at the viewer with his piercing brown eyes. The man behind those eyes however, who discarded two wives and ordered the execution of two others, has been harder to decipher – although books, film and TV have certainly tried.

The latest is the film Firebrand, starring Jude Law as Henry VIII and Alicia Vikander as his sixth wife, Catherine Parr. It's based on Elizabeth Fremantle's 2013 book Queen's Gambit, which is told from Parr's viewpoint. In the film, Henry is obese, can barely walk unaided, and has a rotting leg from a jousting wound suffered 10 years previously (a fact of history). He is also physically and emotionally abusive towards his sixth wife, and jams his fingers into the mouths of women, inspecting them, whenever he feels like it. The film – which reverberates with Catherine Parr's tension – is loosely based on another historical fact: that at one point, Henry signed a warrant for Catherine Parr's arrest.

"I think really the delusion and madness must have started as a young man, when he was told he was second only to God himself," Jude Law tells the BBC. "It is like a madness in a weird way. I'm not trying to excuse him, but if everyone is saying yes to you for 50 years, then it does become a delusion. And it's an unhealthy state of mind for anyone, let alone someone who has the power to wield violence towards those who disagree with him." 

Firebrand's Brazilian director, Karim Aïnouz, says he wanted contemporary inspirations for this version of Henry. "One of the first was Donald Trump," Aïnouz tells the BBC. "But it's not just him. I think Henry's a composite of a man who's been in power for a long time. I was almost trying to do an autopsy on him. It's super-important for me to understand that people are not born like that, that people become a Henry. It was an interesting process because not only was he a huge patriarch, but this Henry has also been compared to a Mafia boss. The way monarchies were organised at that moment in history, I think they were Mafia-like."

This is certainly not the image of Henry VIII who in history was sometimes referred to as "Bluff King Hal", presiding over so-called "merry" Tudor England. One of the earliest depictions of this monarch on film, 1933's The Private Life of Henry VIII with Charles Laughton as the King, shows him enthusiastically chewing on a leg of capon, a nod to another popular legend about how he became the size he did. "He's been reflected in history as a sort of silhouette, almost this Father Christmas – a mean Father Christmas," Law says. "And even his marriages have been made light of in these little nursery rhymes. 'Divorced, beheaded, died. Divorced, beheaded, survived.'"

The earliest on-screen depiction of Henry and his wives also indulges in gendered stereotypes: Henry's fourth wife, Anne of Cleves, makes herself look unappealing so she can be discarded, while fifth wife Catherine Howard, who was a teenager when she was executed by him, is shown as ambitious. Catherine Parr, the sixth wife who outlives him, dominates the King. Other well-known screen interpretations of Henry VIII, such as Robert Shaw in A Man for All Seasons (1966) or Keith Michell in 1970's BBC TV series Henry VIII and his Six Wives, might show him, in the case of Michell, as a large, ruthless and callous figure later in life, but without that sense of visceral fear that Firebrand portrays.

Seeing him through a different filter

The reframing of Henry VIII in culture, according to Queen's Gambit author Elizabeth Fremantle, is due to a re-evaluation of women in history. "Even though we know what had happened to some of those women, I think culturally there was a silent agreement that we would see them as guilty in some way," she tells the BBC. "When I was researching him, I looked at all the depictions of him, but there was a glamour associated with him that I think is gone now. I think we're seeing him through a different filter because it fits the way we are looking at male treatment of women. It's changed as our culture's changed.

"And now a lot of historians are doing fantastic work, exploring those stories and looking at those trials of Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard, and seeing that they faced trumped-up charges. These women were innocent, and he was a monster."

Henry VIII's violence towards his wives has been shown on screen before: in the 1969 film Anne of a Thousand Days, Richard Burton, as Henry VIII, slaps Geneviève Bujold, playing Anne Boleyn. However the tone of the film reflects how attitudes have changed in the years since. By contrast, the physical abuse depicted in Firebrand is designed to provoke a far more emotive response, scenes that Law and Alicia Vikander say were necessary.

"I think it's important to say that this is a piece that's very much about a relationship, a marriage which has domestic violence in it psychologically and physically, and that Henry was the perpetrator of that. And there's no avoiding that," Law explains. "There's no wrapping that up in anything that says otherwise."

We couldn't shy away from the brutal reality of what this relationship must have been like, or often for women in general at that time – Alicia Vikander

"It's hard to grasp Catherine's situation, and her fear of losing her head at any moment. She needs to befriend, love, manipulate the King, everything to make her be able to wake up the next morning," Vikander tells the BBC."I think we were very much in tune with Karim, as director, that we couldn't shy away from the brutal reality of what this relationship must have been like or often for women in general at that time, to be honest."

Telling the wives' stories

Henry's second wife, Anne Boleyn, is the most famous of the wives (she even has a 19th-Century opera bearing her name), and that might be due, in part, to a ghoulish interest in her death (she was executed by him in 1536). But as a collective group, the wives themselves have more recently become icons, partly thanks to the hit musical Six, which doesn't even feature a Henry VIII character on stage. That there's a new appetite for their stories, as opposed to his, is also demonstrated by an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London titled Six Lives, featuring modern photographic interpretations of the women as well as their Tudor portraits.

Yet as individuals, including Catherine Parr, they still remain relatively unknown, as Vikander discovered when she began researching Parr's life. "She was the first woman in British history who had a book published in her own name, The Lamentation of a Sinner," says Vikander. "But even my British friends, and I asked a lot of them, didn't really know she'd done that. That is a point in history that we've chosen to forget."

Firebrand gives Queen Catherine a voice, and presents a new version of King Henry VIII, perhaps in light of his abusive behaviour towards women. He provokes disgust, and makes those close to him to recoil in horror, something that Aïnouz engineered on set by creating an appalling scent for Law to wear to represent what the King's festering leg might have smelled like. "He is literally rotting away," says Law, "and emotionally too, he's bereft because he's sort of unlovable, and he knows death is around the corner."

But there is pathos there too, Law thinks, and that's because part of the King's personal tragedy is that he was once considered a desirable man. That younger, sexier version of Henry can still be seen in depictions such as TV's Wolf Hall, where Damian Lewis plays him, or in The Tudors series, depicted by Jonathan Rhys Meyers, or by Eric Bana in 2008's The Other Boleyn Girl. Indeed, Tudor chroniclers have noted that the young King who succeeded to the English throne at the age of 18 was intelligent, athletic and talented.

"Without drawing on any or trying to get any sympathy for him, he's also still that young man, still that golden boy with so much potential," says Law. "He was musical, a sportsman and a dancer, very well-read and accomplished. And his first marriage, with Catherine of Aragon, was quite happy until he became obsessed with the idea of a male heir to the throne.

"And so to look at those younger images and sense that regret he must have had, that sense of self-loathing, when he looks back and thinks, 'what I was'. I think I wanted to bring that out in him and make him therefore three-dimensional.

"I didn't want to just play the bad guy with a chicken leg in his hand." 

-BBC