Starkey's virtue lies in his return to the archives to unearth new evidence for his story of Henry's wives. The result is a weighty blockbuster that will annoy the purists but delight the popular reader. Henry is portrayed as a fairytale prince gradually transformed into a "prematurely aged and bloated monster". Starkey concludes that "like us, he expected marriage to make him happy", but this simple desire had increasingly disastrous consequences.

Henry worked his way through a series of wives from Catherine of Aragon to Catherine Parr who, according to Starkey, encompass "the full range of female stereotypes: the Saint, the Schemer, the Doormat, the Dim Fat Girl, the Sexy Teenager, and the Bluestocking". While this tends to flatten out the complexity of many of Henry's wives, there is plenty on the cataclysmic impact of the Reformation, new evidence on Henry's first wife's marriage to his brother, and a reconsideration of Henry's final wife, Catherine Parr, as "the first Queen of the Age of Print", to keep even the most sceptical reader happy. --Jerry Brotton

Synopsis
THE QUEENS OF HENRY V111:Divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived: CATHERINE OF ARAGON the Catholic Spanish Princess, who suffered years of miscarriages and still births and yet failed to produce a son...She was the mother of Mary Tudor; ANNE BOLEYN, the pretty, clever, French-educated Protestant with whom Henry Vlll was madly in love.-. for a brief period. She was the mother of Elizabeth I; JANE SEYMOUR the demure and submissive contrast to Anne Boleyn's vampish style. She died soon after giving birth to the longed-for son (Edward VI); ANNE OF CLEVES, 'the Flanders mare': He was horrified because she was so plain and she was appalled because he was so fat...; CATHERINE HOWARD, the flirtatious teenager whose adulteries made a fool of the ageing king; CATHERINE PARR, the shrewd Protestant bluestocking who outlived him.

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