The Six Wives of Henry VIII

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.