How historical past bought Henry VIII unsuitable

In new movie Firebrand, Jude Legislation and Alicia Vikander star as Henry VIII and his sixth spouse, Catherine Parr, reframing how historical past and tradition have offered the monarch.

Inarguably Britain’s most well-known male monarch, the silhouette of Henry VIII alone is immediately recognisable, from the celebrated portrait by Hans Holbein the Youthful. Huge in stature and coated in jewels, Henry stares out on the viewer along with his piercing brown eyes. The person behind these eyes nevertheless, who discarded two wives and ordered the execution of two others, has been tougher to decipher – though books, movie and TV have actually tried.

The newest is the movie Firebrand, starring Jude Legislation as Henry VIII and Alicia Vikander as his sixth spouse, Catherine Parr. It is based mostly on Elizabeth Fremantle’s 2013 guide Queen’s Gambit, which is instructed from Parr’s viewpoint. Within the movie, Henry is overweight, can barely stroll unaided, and has a rotting leg from a jousting wound suffered 10 years beforehand (a reality of historical past). He’s additionally bodily and emotionally abusive in the direction of his sixth spouse, and jams his fingers into the mouths of girls, inspecting them, at any time when he feels prefer it. The movie – which reverberates with Catherine Parr’s pressure – is loosely based mostly on one other historic reality: that at one level, Henry signed a warrant for Catherine Parr’s arrest.

“I believe actually the delusion and insanity should have began as a younger man, when he was instructed he was second solely to God himself,” Jude Legislation tells the BBC. “It is sort of a insanity in a bizarre method. I am not attempting to excuse him, but when everyone seems to be saying sure to you for 50 years, then it does turn into a delusion. And it is an unhealthy frame of mind for anybody, not to mention somebody who has the ability to wield violence in the direction of those that disagree with him.” 

Firebrand’s Brazilian director, Karim Aïnouz, says he needed up to date inspirations for this model of Henry. “One of many first was Donald Trump,” Aïnouz tells the BBC. “However it’s not simply him. I believe Henry’s a composite of a person who’s been in energy for a very long time. I used to be nearly attempting to do an post-mortem on him. It is super-important for me to grasp that individuals are not born like that, that folks turn into a Henry. It was an fascinating course of as a result of not solely was he an enormous patriarch, however this Henry has additionally been in comparison with a Mafia boss. The best way monarchies had been organised at that second in historical past, I believe they had been Mafia-like.”

That is actually not the picture of Henry VIII who in historical past was generally known as “Bluff King Hal”, presiding over so-called “merry” Tudor England. One of many earliest depictions of this monarch on movie, 1933’s The Non-public Lifetime of Henry VIII with Charles Laughton because the King, reveals him enthusiastically chewing on a leg of capon, a nod to a different standard legend about how he turned the dimensions he did. “He is been mirrored in historical past as a type of silhouette, nearly this Father Christmas – a imply Father Christmas,” Legislation says. “And even his marriages have been made gentle of in these little nursery rhymes. ‘Divorced, beheaded, died. Divorced, beheaded, survived.'”

The earliest on-screen depiction of Henry and his wives additionally indulges in gendered stereotypes: Henry’s fourth spouse, Anne of Cleves, makes herself look unappealing so she could be discarded, whereas fifth spouse Catherine Howard, who was an adolescent when she was executed by him, is proven as bold. Catherine Parr, the sixth spouse who outlives him, dominates the King. Different well-known display interpretations of Henry VIII, similar to Robert Shaw in A Man for All Seasons (1966) or Keith Michell in 1970’s BBC TV sequence Henry VIII and his Six Wives, may present him, within the case of Michell, as a big, ruthless and callous determine later in life, however with out that sense of visceral worry that Firebrand portrays.

The reframing of Henry VIII in tradition, in keeping with Queen’s Gambit creator Elizabeth Fremantle, is because of a re-evaluation of girls in historical past. “Though we all know what had occurred to a few of these girls, I believe culturally there was a silent settlement that we might see them as responsible in a roundabout way,” she tells the BBC. “Once I was researching him, I checked out all of the depictions of him, however there was a glamour related to him that I believe is gone now. I believe we’re seeing him by means of a special filter as a result of it matches the best way we’re taking a look at male therapy of girls. It is modified as our tradition’s modified.

“And now a whole lot of historians are doing implausible work, exploring these tales and taking a look at these trials of Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard, and seeing that they confronted trumped-up fees. These girls had been harmless, and he was a monster.”

Henry VIII’s violence in the direction of his wives has been proven on display earlier than: within the 1969 movie Anne of a Thousand Days, Richard Burton, as Henry VIII, slaps Geneviève Bujold, enjoying Anne Boleyn. Nevertheless the tone of the movie displays how attitudes have modified within the years since. In contrast, the bodily abuse depicted in Firebrand is designed to impress a much more emotive response, scenes that Legislation and Alicia Vikander say had been essential.

“I believe it is necessary to say that this can be a piece that is very a lot a couple of relationship, a wedding which has home violence in it psychologically and bodily, and that Henry was the perpetrator of that. And there is no avoiding that,” Legislation explains. “There isn’t any wrapping that up in something that claims in any other case.”

“It is laborious to understand Catherine’s state of affairs, and her worry of shedding her head at any second. She must befriend, love, manipulate the King, every part to make her have the ability to get up the following morning,” Vikander tells the BBC.”I believe we had been very a lot in tune with Karim, as director, that we could not shrink back from the brutal actuality of what this relationship should have been like or usually for ladies on the whole at the moment, to be sincere.”

Henry’s second spouse, Anne Boleyn, is probably the most well-known of the wives (she even has a Nineteenth-Century opera bearing her identify), and that could be due, partially, to a ghoulish curiosity in her demise (she was executed by him in 1536). However as a collective group, the wives themselves have extra just lately turn into icons, partly due to the hit musical Six, which does not even function a Henry VIII character on stage. That there is a new urge for food for his or her tales, versus his, can also be demonstrated by an exhibition on the Nationwide Portrait Gallery in London titled Six Lives, that includes fashionable photographic interpretations of the ladies in addition to their Tudor portraits.

But as people, together with Catherine Parr, they nonetheless stay comparatively unknown, as Vikander found when she started researching Parr’s life. “She was the primary lady in British historical past who had a guide printed in her personal identify, The Lamentation of a Sinner,” says Vikander. “However even my British buddies, and I requested a whole lot of them, did not actually know she’d completed that. That could be a level in historical past that we have chosen to overlook.”

Firebrand offers Queen Catherine a voice, and presents a brand new model of King Henry VIII, maybe in gentle of his abusive behaviour in the direction of girls. He provokes disgust, and makes these near him to recoil in horror, one thing that Aïnouz engineered on set by creating an appalling scent for Legislation to put on to symbolize what the King’s festering leg might need smelled like. “He’s actually rotting away,” says Legislation, “and emotionally too, he is bereft as a result of he is type of unlovable, and he is aware of demise is across the nook.”

However there may be pathos there too, Legislation thinks, and that is as a result of a part of the King’s private tragedy is that he was as soon as thought of a fascinating man. That youthful, sexier model of Henry can nonetheless be seen in depictions similar to TV’s Wolf Corridor, the place Damian Lewis performs him, or in The Tudors sequence, depicted by Jonathan Rhys Meyers, or by Eric Bana in 2008’s The Different Boleyn Lady. Certainly, Tudor chroniclers have famous that the younger King who succeeded to the English throne on the age of 18 was clever, athletic and gifted.

“With out drawing on any or attempting to get any sympathy for him, he is additionally nonetheless that younger man, nonetheless that golden boy with a lot potential,” says Legislation. “He was musical, a sportsman and a dancer, very well-read and achieved. And his first marriage, with Catherine of Aragon, was fairly blissful till he turned obsessive about the thought of a male inheritor to the throne.

“And so to have a look at these youthful photos and sense that remorse he should have had, that sense of self-loathing, when he appears again and thinks, ‘what I used to be’. I believe I needed to deliver that out in him and make him due to this fact three-dimensional.

“I did not wish to simply play the dangerous man with a hen leg in his hand.” 

Firebrand is launched within the UK and Eire on 6 September 2024.