The Six Wives of Henry VIII

By Frank Bukowski

In this spoof history, Henry VIII strides through the Sixteenth Century like a colossus. A Tyrannosaurus Rex of a king. More written about, more filmed about, than another other monarch before his daughter Elizabeth, he was England’s first pop-star king. Statesman, philosopher, athlete, musician, in his pomp he could speak several languages, out-joust the best knights, out-write and out-compose the foremost poets, scholars and musicians of his day. He truly was a man for all seasons. The architect of the Tudor Rose also had more skeletons in his cupboard than a Halloween convention at Hogwarts. By modern standards Henry VIII would have been judged a brutal demagogue, serial fornicator and not-so-closet paedophile with a fondness for pubescent maidens. His appetite for women was without precedent in the annals of English royalty. From what we know he was clearly a bit of a sex maniac. Tales of mistresses abound, and many historians have speculated about the number of illegitimate children he may have fathered at a time before reliable contraception existed.

If you like your history straight with all the footnotes, stick to David Starkey. But if you like witty historical fiction that gives you a different slant on an old story, this is a scandalously made up account of the sex life of Henry VIII, and the affect it had on his life and forty-year reign as English monarch. Based around familiar historical characters and events, it imagines what Henry’s bedroom antics must have been like. For the first time ever, this book gives us a glimpse into what terrifying ordeals the women in Henry’s life may have faced, when the great woman-slayer unsheathed his weapon of mass destruction from the silo of his codpiece. As many were to discover, woe betide the fair maiden he pointed it at.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Frank Bukowski
• Release date: Aug 28, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301292790

Frank Bukowski

Frank Bukowski is currently on his thirteenth life. Previous incarnations included a welder, building labourer, trainee civil engineer, barman, burger flipper, sperm donor, call centre operative, body double for Oliver Reed, marketing assistant, advertising copywriter, studio head and creative director. Frank studied at the Universities in Brighton, East Anglia, and Queens’ College, Cambridge. Two of those august institutions he tricked into awarding him degrees: a BA in Graphic Design, majoring in illustration, and an MA in Creative Writing, where he was lucky enough to be taught by Malcolm Bradbury and Rose Tremain. Frank now hides out in Norfolk, UK, where it rains 400 days a year. Since marriage, divorce, and the birth of his son landed like a salvo of missiles in the 90’s, Frank has spent the last two decades helping to raise his kid, who recently graduated with his own BA in History, making Frank the proudest dad on the planet. To keep steam on the table and a roof over their heads, Frank has held down a full-time job for more years than he cares to remember at the hated UK loan-shark company UK Cash Cowboys, where he runs their creative studio. Frank looks after a team of copywriters and designers who churn out oceans of junk mail and advertising. Frank loathes the company and its hideous management team of ruthless corporate cyborgs in human form. He describes working there as a slow death of the soul. He once likened it to a ten year prison stretch for a crime he didn’t do. At weekends he gets out on parole, but Mondays come around all too quick. Frank’s escape plan involves making it as a writer. For over a decade he’s been tunnelling away in secret, writing poetry and short stories in the scraps of time left over. These finally coalesced into his magnum opus, the 700pp collection Sex on the Brain, which he e-pubbed in the fall of 2012. Frank writes earthy literary fiction leavened with black humour, aiming for laughter in the dark. His latest book, hot off the virtual press in June 2014, is a dystopian novella called Reality TV. Toying with magic realism, Reality TV parodies our obsessions with fame, celebrity, and trashy reality shows. When he’s not writing or banged up in Cowboys Penitentiary, Frank likes to watch quality television. Mostly stuff about fame, celebrity, and trashy reality shows.

Book preview

The Six Wives of Henry VIII

Frank Bukowski

The six wives, one hundred and eighty-four mistresses, seventy-two children, three hundred rapes, ninety-eight illegitimate bastards, five incestuous liaisons, one case of bigamy, nine cases of paedophilia and seventy eight thousand murders of Henry VIII

Statesman, scholar, philosopher, aesthete, Henry VIII was also a glutton of a man with terrible appetites. Cravings that turned him into a mass murderer and serial sex-offender with a penchant for pubescent flesh. Finally in this scholarly new biography of England’s own Caligula, the truth about Henry VIII’s dark side is laid bare.

The Six Wives of Henry VIII

Frank Bukowski

Copyright © Frank Bukowski, 2013

Smashwords Edition

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To Hank and Mart, who inspired me to write.

Contents

The Six Wives of Henry VIII

Henry’s childhood

Katherine of Aragon

The other Boleyn girl

Anne Boleyn

The darkness

Jane Seymour

Cock trouble

Anne of Cleves

Katherine Howard

Catherine Parr

The three Elizabeths

Henry’s last stand

End pages

The Six Wives of Henry VIII

They say that truth is stranger than fiction. The story I am about to tell is one you couldn’t have made up. Such is its allure, it has already filled the pages of a thousand history books, and spawned enough films to have invented a genre all of its own. Indeed the tale of Henry VIII’s life has more twists than an Agatha Christie detective story, more sex and violence than your average Hollywood blockbuster. And a plot that out-soaps the most outlandish soap ever written. Harsh has been the judgement of history on Henry, condemning him for his habit of scrapping wives like used cars. But in truth this most infamous of English monarchs was only doing what every married man who ever lived has dreamed of doing, at one time or another. That is, to trade the missus in for a newer, better-looking model with fewer miles on the clock. At the end of the day, whether you are a king or a common car park attendant, when asked to choose between virtue and a beautiful woman, all men are ultimately ruled by their innermost desires. Five hundred years before hormones were invented, they had Henry VIII by the balls too.

And yet, if Henry’s case is different in one signal way, it is the sheer scale of his debauchery that shocks. Even from the perspective of our promiscuous Twenty-First Century - where you can meet someone on a Sunday, fly to Vegas on Monday, get married on Tuesday, honeymoon in New York on Wednesday, appoint a lawyer on Thursday and get an annulment on Friday. Even with our pandemic divorce rates and zeitgeist of disposability, Henry VIII’s callous treatment of his wives has gone down in infamy, and led Winston Churchill to refer to him as ‘a spot of blood and grease on the pages of English history’. Now for the bad news. If you imagined for a moment that Henry’s serious wife habit was the only stain on an otherwise unblemished reign – a reign that echoed down the centuries, placed England on the world stage and laid the foundations for the glorious Elizabethan empire - you would be grievously mistaken. As scholarly research and DNA testing are now revealing, the much married Tudor monarch may stride through history like a colossus, but his amorous misdemeanours both inside and outside the marriage bed reveal less a tortured king who would pawn his country for a male heir, so much as a sex-obsessed tyrant who devoured women like chocolates from a box, and left a trail of illegitimate bastards that would have tested the inquisitors of the Child Support Agency. Henry VIII was the Stringfellow of his day, on a truckload of Viagra. He was Tiger on T-shots. He was Billy the BJ Clinton squared, Casanova cubed. He was, quite simply, the Caligula of the sixteenth century, on industrial strength, under the counter steroids. This story will explode many of the myths about Henry VIII.

Henry’s childhood

The first inkling of Henry’s satyriasis, or sex addiction, surfaced in infancy. As a baby he took an unhealthy interest in the breasts of his wet nurse, Winifred Cornish. In Tudor times a wet nurse was chosen as much for her impeccable health and personal hygiene, as for the god-given gift of an ample bosom, the which provided a never ending source of nourishment for a fledgling prince. At teat the goggle-eyed Henry would run his podgy fingers all over Winifred’s fulsome orbs, squeezing them like squeaky toys and often forgetting to suck in his fascination. Whenever the hapless wet nurse took one from his mouth, the little brat would wail so inconsolably that the entire retinue would rush into the nursery in alarm and Winifred would be forced to gag the smirking face with a nipple. Mark thee well, Henry VIII’s will would be done, even at the tender age of six months. At his christening in the Church of Obedient Friars in Greenwich in 1491 he was said to have spat the water back in the cardinal’s face. A portent, if ever there was one, of things to come.

The young Prince’s lust to possess things also began to emerge early in infancy. At the age of two he uttered his first words, ‘I want’. At a council of war held at Windsor Castle the young Henry, to the consternation of assembled dukes, earls, marquises and viscounts, crawled into the great meeting room, across the vellum map of the realm which had been unfurled upon the floor, pointed to Dover, and cried, ‘I want! I want!’ A week later his father, King Henry VII, appointed him Constable of Dover Castle and Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports. In the following year, as the little prince continued to breast-stroke his way across the map of Europe, decorating it with grubby finger marks and bogeys while exclaiming ‘I want! I want!’, the titles and possessions mounted up. Duke of York. Earl Marshall of England. Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. Not bad for a three year old.

It was in the year of our lord 1494, that the infant prince took his collectomania to an altogether higher level. At some unearthly hour of the morning one chilly November day, the three and a half year old tottered into the chamber of Lady Alice Rochester, one of the ladies in waiting to his elder sister, Princess Margaret Tudor. On the visage beside Lady Alice’s bed lay her dildo. A crude wooden device by modern standards, but for its day a fine piece of craftsmanship, exquisitely shaped and sanded from a curved branch of English beech. As Alice dozed, Henry picked up the glazed toy and popped the end in his mouth, as toddlers do. A smile lit his eyes. The young prince found the texture and taste and shape of the thing much to his liking, and put both hands round the shaft, the better to work it up around his gums, perchance to provide some relief from his teething, which was giving him the devil of a time. Presently Lady Alice stirred and turned onto her side, facing the young prince, still sleeping softly. Being a three year old, and being a prince, and being the future Henry VIII, the toddler took the dildo from his mouth and whacked her over the head with it. Alice yelped and sat up.

‘Thou little...!’ Alice snatched the wooden phallus away from the child.

‘I want, I want, I want!’ he cried.

‘Well thou cannot.’

There was a five second delay, then Henry screwed up his face like a wrung cloth, took a deep lungful of air, and prepared to bawl the palace down. Lady Alice, fearful of incurring the King’s displeasure, thrust the sex toy back into the baby tyrant’s hand. ‘Shhhhhh, run along, take it, shoo.’

For the next twelve months, while Christopher Columbus was sailing to the New World in search of potatoes, Henry went round the palace sucking on the dildo like a dummy, drawing soppy coos from his parents, who remained blissfully unaware of the true function for which the innocent wooden implement had been designed. Whenever embarrassed staff attempted to spirit the woodcock away from the toddler, perchance when the young prince’s attention was diverted for a second or two, it invariably ended in tears, as Henry’s face would acknowledge the theft with an expression bordering on inconsolable grief, until the grubby little dildo was returned to his hand, whereupon he would run to his mother’s arms, lay his head upon her lap, and suck voraciously on the wooden knob while staring accusingly about the room at everyone present. ‘Awww, babykins, he’s such a treasure, isn’t he,’ cooed the Queen, to her nodding, smiling retinue.

‘That’s my boy,’ said the King.

At age five, the fledgling prince was often to be found skipping and hopping astride a long wooden pole with a horse’s head painted on top, along the corridors and battlements of Greenwich Palace, with the dildo tucked into his belt like a dagger. ‘En garde!’ he would shout, wheeling to face the entourage of servants and courtiers which followed him everywhere, their shins black and blue. The King, pandering to his spoiled brat of a son, gave orders that all palace staff were to carry about their persons a thin bamboo cane procured from the palace gardens, to play at sword-fighting. ‘Why peerless swordsmanship plays an essential part in the education of a young prince,’ explained the Queen, assuaging her hen-pecked servants. ‘Thou must all play thy part.’

Henry would delight in laying an ambush for his elder sister, the seven year-old Princess Margaret and her equally sizeable train of ladies in waiting. ‘Tis the battle of Agincourt,’ Prince Henry would whisper to his servants. ‘They be France, we be England.’ Instructing his shivering attendants to lie in wait in gloomy windswept turrets about the palace’s battlements, the boy prince would draw his dildo and leap out, giving the shrieking Margaret the fright of her life. ‘En garde!’

‘Henry, will thou stoppest doing that!’

‘Aha, methinks I spy France! Chaaaaarge!’ he would cry, hurling headlong into the body of women. No one was immune. The hyperactive child slashed and stabbed at everything that moved, wielding his dildo like a sword, now like a lance, now like a giant battle-axe swung about his head. ‘You’re dead, you’re dead, you’re dead!’ shouted the pint-sized Caesar, poking and thrusting his trusty weapon into the ribs and up the backsides of Lady Mary, Lady Constance, Lady Dorothy, and so forth. Woe betide anyone who didn’t lie down dead, or perchance happened to catch the young knight the slightest of unintentional raps across the knuckles with their bamboo canes, bringing forth great floods of tears. ‘Boo-hoo! Thou hurtest me, thou hurtest me! I’ll tell mine father!’

By age seven, perhaps in some dark portent of a precocious but as yet still latent puberty, the young prince began adopting more Machiavellian battlefield tactics. ‘I’ve made up new rules,’ he announced one day. ‘When battle commenceth, any lady touched by my sword has to stand completely still. Dost thou understand?’ The regally dressed ladies in waiting and maids of honour, in their heavy farthingaled skirts with long trains, were no match for the sprightly seven year old, who went around whacking them all with his dildo and reminding them that they were to freeze, on pain of death. To their immense embarrassment the young prince was in the habit of lifting the petticoats of the mortified gentlewomen and disappearing underneath. ‘Your royal highness, really!’ shrieked Lady Elsinor of Stoke, blushing profusely, but bearing her indignity with saintly forbearance as Henry disappeared up her chemise and poked around clumsily with his toy weapon of mass destruction. Each thrust drew a flinch and a little sob of humiliation. ‘Yah, yah, yah, you’re dead!’ cried the young Genghis Khan, emerging from underneath her petticoats like some malevolent leprechaun. ‘I killed thy tuppence, thou art dead!’ Whereupon the Lady Elsinor was required to flap a foppish hand at her brow and fall to the floor in theatrical death throes. Those were the rules. ‘Remember, if I touch thy tuppence thou art dead,’ squealed the future King Henry VIII of England, lifting Lady Agnes Winchester’s skirt and disappearing underneath. In all the utterances of Henry VIII’s childhood years, never a truer word would be spoken.

Henry clearly had some growing up to do. However, this boyhood idyll was briefly interrupted when, at the tender age of seven and a half, his father broke the shattering news one day that he was unlikely to inherit the crown when the King died. The English system of primogeniture decreed that the throne would pass to Henry’s elder brother, Prince Arthur.

‘Waaahaaaa! But I want to be king!’ wailed Henry, turning the colour of a beetroot and throwing himself to the floor in a great tantrum of kicking and screaming.

‘Don’t be like that Henrykins, thou knowest mummy and daddy love thee,’ said the King.

‘No thou doesn’t, or thou would’st let me be king! Waaahaaaa! I hate thee! I want to be king! I want! I want!’

‘But we thought, perhaps a very important career in the Church would be more to thy liking.’

‘I hate the Church! I hate thee and mummy! I hate everybody! Waaahaaaa!’

‘But thou would’st get to wear one of those big pointy hats thou likest, and lots of gold chains and ermine, and live in some of the richest, most sumptuous palaces in all England. It’s practically as good as being king. Better even.’

The young prince’s sobs gradually subsided into sniffles, as his prostrate body quietened on the floor. ‘Is it a very big pointy hat?’ he asked the floor tiles.

‘The biggest in all Christendom, your royal highness. Bigger than the Pope’s!’ exclaimed the King, hamming it up. ‘Far better than a mouldy old crown.’

Young Henry sat up, grinning. He gripped his knees and daydreamed. ‘And will I wear long flowing cloaks embroidered with gold, and have one of those long pointy sticks with a golden crook on top, and own some of the biggest estates and live in extravagant palaces and castles, and have enormous power and influence?’

‘More than the king, I should say,’ said the King.

‘And do I get to tax the poor people and fill all my chests with gold?’

‘Spoken like a true clergyman.’

‘Oh goody. Can I be an archbishop? They get the best hats.’

With this exquisite carrot dangling before him, for the next two years Henry finally knuckled down to his education. And what an education. The list of Henry’s teachers read like a roll call of Europe’s finest humanist scholars, including Erasmus, Sir Thomas More, and the Poet Laureate Skelton. Moreover, the young Tudor prince turned out to be intellectually gifted, proving himself a talented mathematician and astronomer. He became an accomplished musician who could read music and play several instruments, distinguishing himself by composing well-known madrigals and virginals of the day. The precocious young scholar also grew fluent in Latin, French and Spanish, and excelled at poetry and philosophy, and was well seen in theology. Indeed Henry’s intellectual curiosity blazed with such ferocity that Sir Thomas More once complained of being woken in the middle of the night and asked to gaze upon the starlit heavens from the roof of the royal palace while the boy prince recited the constellations from memory. Even the great renaissance thinker Erasmus, visiting the child at Eltham Palace, commented, ‘Prince Henry, now nine years old and having already something of a royalty in his demeanour, is maturing into the archetypal renaissance gentleman’. High praise indeed.

As summer followed summer, England doted on its child prodigy. Yet behind locked palace doors, a darker side to the

Reviews for The Six Wives of Henry VIII

[David white · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I like how the author tells the story. And he seems very pleased on reminding us that Henry was endowed. Lol. Good read though.

[ElisaJohnson · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Interesting review of Henry vii life, seems mostly accurate with some personal thought added, but since much of what happened during this time is unknown, there is always room for personal thoughts. Definitely one of the more entertaining books on his life