How Hot Was Henry VIII?

With SIX wives, Henry VIII must have had something going for him, right? Was he handsome? Charming? Intelligent? Just plain powerful? In this episode, Kate is joined by Professor Suzannah Lipscomb, host of our sister podcast Not Just the Tudors. They discuss the vanity of Henry VIII, his sporting prowess, and his injuries. Listen to discover just how terrible this Tudor king smelt. This episode was edited by Tim Arstall and produced by Sophie Gee. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Please vote for us for Listeners' Choice at the British Podcast Awards! Follow this link https://www.britishpodcastawards.com/voting, and don’t forget to confirm the email. Thank you! Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here. All music from Epidemic Sounds. Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. Voting is now open for the Listener's Choice Award at this year's Podcast Awards! UK & Ireland listeners please place your vote on the Spotify mobile app here: https://open.spotify.com/s/xhg6PJa Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Kate Lister?

  Do you want even more shocking and scandalous history? Like why the ancient Greek statues had such small manhoods? Or what went on behind closed doors in the Georgian era? Well, sign up to History Hit, where you can see me discover the scandalous side of history, as well as hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, covering everything from prehistoric Scotland to the Treaty of Versailles. Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.

• 0:35Kate Lister?

  Hello, my lovely betwixters. It's me, Kate Lister. You are you, I am me, and you are listening to Betwixt the Sheets. But before I can let you go any further, before I can let you proceed unwarned and unarmed, I do have to tell you, this is an adult podcast, spoken by adults, other adults, but adults, things, and adults who wake up in a range of adults, a person who's been adults too. And if you can't say yes to all of those things, you have no business being here, you're just holding up the show. Right, let's get on with it.

• 1:06Kate Lister?

  Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all? Well, if you'd been knocking around in the early 16th century, the answer to that question might well have been King Henry VIII. No, I'm not joking you. When he first came to the throne, he was a hottie. Over six foot tall, a strapping lad, worked out pretty much all day long, auburn hair and beard, even the people who didn't like him were forced to concede how good-looking he was. He was a straight-up royal beefcake. He knew it, everyone else knew it, and what's more importantly for the time, they thought that God knew it as well. Henry was a very, very vain man, and that's fine if you have the goods to back it up.

• 1:48Kate Lister?

  But as Henry grew older, things began to go downhill quite rapidly. His health was seriously affected, his weight ballooned, he was not the strapping beefcake that he was in his youth. And how did he handle that? Well, joining us today to talk all about Henry VIII's vanity is the one and only, the utterly marvellous Professor Suzannah Lipscomb. So let's get our codpieces at the ready, betwixters, and let's find out just how vain Henry was.

• 2:21Speaker 01

  What do you require a man?

• 2:23Speaker 02

  Oh, money, of course.

• 2:24Speaker 01

  You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you.

• 2:26Speaker 02

  I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning a knob and pushing a button.

• 2:39Speaker 01

  Yes, social courtesy does make a difference.

• 2:41Speaker 03

  Goodness, what beautiful time. Goodness has nothing to do with it, dearie.

• 2:50Kate Lister?

  Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal and Society with me, Kate Lister. What do you think of when you think of Henry VIII? Do you think of a well-built man, a sturdy man, an imposing man? Well, he was all of those things and more. I mean, a king is supposed to be impressive, and Henry was, he really was. He cultivated that image very, very carefully. He had only the finest clothes, the finest perfumes, the most flattering portractions, and of course, the biggest codpiece. But underneath all of that, Henry was only human. He can't be a divine god all of the time. And as all of us get older, we have to let go of that first flush of youth.

• 3:33Kate Lister?

  And that's hard enough when you're a regular person, let alone when you have an entire world telling you that God is your best friend. So how did Henry make that transition? Not well, Betwixters, not well.

• 3:48Kate Lister?

  Hello and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's the one and the only, the utterly fabulous Suzanne Ellipsum. How are you doing?

• 3:56Speaker 04

  Hello, Kate. I am very well. Great to see you.

• 3:59Kate Lister?

  It's always amazing to see you. How are you doing? How's life treating you?

• 4:04Speaker 04

  Life is great. I've been away most of the last month filming, including some exciting new projects for History Hit, but now I'm back and podcasting like mad.

• 4:13Kate Lister?

  I love it. And we're here to talk about the daddy himself, Henry VIII.

• 4:20Kate Lister?

  Can you remember when you first got interested in the Tudors? That's your main area of expertise and what you're known for. And do you remember when you first met them, the Tudors? Was it as a small child in a history book somewhere?

• 4:33Speaker 04

  It was when I was 11 and 12. So in our history class, we were allowed to put stickers on our book. And I had Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, you know, from small beginnings. And also, I lived very close to the site of Nonsuch Palace. So the school I went to at that point was called Nonsuch School, right next to where Henry had built Nonsuch Palace. And I kid you not, I had to walk down a road called Anne Boleyn's Walk to get there.

• 5:00Kate Lister?

  There you go.

• 5:01Speaker 04

  It was destiny.

• 5:03Kate Lister?

  Subliminal messaging the whole way through. Some of the things really interesting about Henry is his vanity. And I suppose really what that boils down to is his own estimation of himself. Because he is a man with a huge reputation, well deserved. And I often think it must have been such a strange environment growing up and having people going, right, God's chosen you, like you are God's representative on earth, kind of. Please have a normal sized ego. That was never going to happen.

• 5:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, although I think he was probably cut down to size a bit when he was very young. Because of course, he's a second son.

• 5:40Kate Lister?

  Yes.

• 5:40Speaker 04

  And so he's not destined to become king until his older brother dies. And then when his brother dies, Henry's 10 or 11. Although even at that point, I have to say, at his older brother's wedding, there's this amazing occasion where Henry gets so into the dancing that he throws off his outer layer and everybody is sort of charmed by this 10 year old boy, like really getting down. But he's kept confined after that by his father. And Henry VII is a kind of control freak. So he keeps Henry really under lock and key. He's like not allowed out. You know, he's not allowed to joust, which becomes one of the absolute joys of his life.

• 6:22Speaker 04

  Like he's deeply controlled, even though he's like supposed to be marrying Catherine of Aragon.

• 6:29Speaker 04

  They're barely allowed to meet. So I think there's a period of what looks like coercive control to me in his teens. And so it's kind of no wonder when he becomes king, when he's seventeen, eighteen years old, I mean, he goes slightly mad. Because you would, wouldn't you?

• 6:45Kate Lister?

  You would. And that's the very young Henry. And I was quite surprised to learn that this was a period of his life where he was regarded as very generous, almost generous to a fault, very kind. Everyone's super excited about in this young, hot, and he was hot, we'll talk about that. But this guy suddenly arrives and he said he rebels against his dad. Was that what he was doing there?

• 7:08Speaker 04

  Yes, I think so. His dad was, by the time he died, yeah, really a miser. I mean, it's hard to pick out the truth here, because of course, everybody's praising this young king.

• 7:22Kate Lister?

  Yes.

• 7:22Speaker 04

  Because they're telling him what they want him to be. So they're describing him to himself, so that he will be this wonderful king. And that's true also about his looks. Like, we have to allow for a certain amount of exaggeration. But there is also consensus. And one of the things that comes out is that he is so affable. Thomas More talks about his charisma, his way of making each man feel that he's enjoying his special favour, and the fiery power in his eyes. And people do talk about his generosity. And so I think there's this kind of conviviality about him. Like, he was a natural leader. He's kind of has this incredible personal charisma and beauty, as you say.

• 8:02Kate Lister?

  Let's talk about that then. Because I know that you said that people exaggerated. Of course, it's the king. Who's gonna say the king's actually a bit of a minger? But you do sort of get a sense when they're almost surprised by how good looking he is. Some of the ambassadors who meet him, they're like, wow, wow, he really is the handsomest portentate of Christendom and all of this stuff. Do you think that he was as good looking as they say?

• 8:25Speaker 04

  Okay, so we've got two sets of different sources to go on here. Like, if you look at the portraits from this period, it isn't the first thing you think, right? So you look at some of the pictures of fifteen oh nine or fifteen twenty, and he looks kind of insin- But beauty standards do change and also portrait artists change. So this is the beginning of the kind of great age of portraiture from the 1520s. We get the first miniatures and then we get Holbein's portrait in the 1530s. So we don't really see it in the pictures, but the descriptions are absolutely effusive. And, you know, one man talks of him having a round face so very beautiful that it would become a pretty woman. He's unusually tall,

• 9:07Speaker 04

  like he's six foot two when the average height is five foot seven. Think of a rugby player. He has like a waist of thirty two inches. He has a big chest, like he's a man to reckon with and he's physically strong. He's a real sportsman. And he's got this auburn hair, blue eyes. People like talk about twin roses in his cheeks. I mean, he is good looking. And the key thing about this, I suppose, is that they're at this point where they really reckon that physical appearance is linked to kingship. Like, so the beauty and strength of the king represents the kind of material, moral, spiritual wealth

• 9:49Speaker 04

  of the kingdom. Like, he looks like a king, therefore he must be a king.

• 9:53Kate Lister?

  He must be a king, must be a great king. I mean, I'm not a Tudor scholar, but for what I have read about this, it seems that quite a key thing to understanding Henry's character, if we can do such a thing from this distance, is that a lot of it was rooted in the chivalric tradition of stories that he read when he was a boy about King Arthur and the round table and what it meant to be chivalrous and what it meant to be a good knight and a good leader. And he absorbs all of that and takes that with him.

• 10:22Speaker 04

  Yes, and also about Henry V. So stories about Agincourt and being king of France. And he dedicates quite a lot of time in his reign and loads of money to trying to take back the ancestral lands in France. And this is all tied up with that because.

• 10:42Speaker 04

  To be a good king at this time, you had to be a warrior. You had to be a champion and so that like risking your life is a kind of required part of kingship. And Henry's really, really good at jousting, which is the way that they practise war. Essentially, when they're not at war, they don't know that muskets are coming and they're going to completely transform like military battles. They, at this time, it's you go on with a lance and you're trying to hit something, they've got cannon, of course. But this sense that he needed to demonstrate his physical strength to earn the respect of those around him is absolutely key.

• 11:23Kate Lister?

  He must have terrified the people around him, like the king, you've got one of them and in these early days, he doesn't have a mare yet. And he's got up on his horse and he's going off jousting, that must have absolutely terrified people.

• 11:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, and he does it all the time, any excuse, basically. So like, you know, it's Pentecost, a joust, it's New Year, a joust, like. And these things are wildly expensive, these tournaments. And as you say, the dangers are real. I mean, there's wildly violent occasions, but he loves them because it gives him a chance to demonstrate his courage, his daring, I mean, his horsemanship, his agility and skill, his stamina. As you say, it's chivalrous, it's all this kind of story from of old and he gets to have all the women, his wife, with whom he's madly in love, Catherine of Aragon, in these early years, watching him and this sort of adulation and it's spectacle.

• 12:14Speaker 04

  Fabulous ostentation. There's a story from fifteen seventeen where he goes out to joust and it requires dressing up. So the king emerges with his immediate company, maybe ten of them or so, and they're all dressed in purple velvet, decorated with leaves of cloth of gold, which is basically a fabric made from the metal thread of gold. So it's really heavy and it glistens in the light and then others of gold damask, all of which are bordered with bits of gold bullion. So he's literally dripping with jewels. And then behind them, there are about twenty lords and knights in yellow velvet. Another thirty on foot and then behind them another forty in yellow satin.

• 12:57Speaker 04

  And this is the company with which he enters the jousting field. So there's like a hundred of them in purple and yellow and dripping with gold. I mean, it's insane.

• 13:07Kate Lister?

  How could you not be impressed with that if you saw, I mean, that is a flex, isn't it? That's a hell of an entrance.

• 13:14Speaker 04

  And he's twenty five, twenty six and good looking.

• 13:18Kate Lister?

  When you think about what you did at twenty five, twenty six and just like, and how reckless you are and how kind of dumb you are. And now imagine that you were also the king, but he's making good and he does actually go to war. And we're not going to get into too much into the warfare at the moment, but was that a success? Did that live up to his image of the heroic Chevalric knight?

• 13:39Speaker 04

  I mean, they take what they can get, really. I mean, he gets the little town of Téhéan, he takes the bigger town of Tournay. And there are paintings that are made of this as one called the Battle of the Spurs. Because they call it that because the French flee so quickly and so all they can see are those spurs. And Henry's depicted at the centre of fighting, but of course they won't actually let him fight the council. Because as you pointed out, he doesn't have an heir at this point in time, far too dangerous. But he hangs on to Tournay for five and a half years and he claims it as King of France. And so it goes a little way towards satisfying his ego.

• 14:18Kate Lister?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 14:20Speaker 04

  You know, in fifteen twenty three, in Parliament, Thomas Cromwell refers to these two little places as ungracious dog holes. I mean, they're basically nothing. So he hasn't taken Paris, you know?

• 14:31Kate Lister?

  Oh, Henry. But I'm sort of getting a sense of like, you could understand why somebody like Henry would have a very high estimation of themselves at this point.

• 14:42Speaker 04

  It's not unfair, yeah. He's a scholar.

• 14:45Kate Lister?

  Yes.

• 14:45Speaker 04

  He's a musician. He can play every musical instrument in the room to entertain a visiting French embassy in the fifteen twenties. He writes music.

• 14:52Kate Lister?

  Speaks languages.

• 14:54Speaker 04

  He speaks a whole number of languages. He is quite intelligent, I'd probably like second rate minds. He, and he's this great sportsman. He can tire out eight or more horses on a day's hunting.

• 15:06Kate Lister?

  Wow.

• 15:07Speaker 04

  And so he's quite extraordinary. And then everybody thinks that he's wonderfully good looking.

• 15:12Kate Lister?

  I mean, this is a recipe for disaster, isn't it? But there's this brief moment where I think he does actually have the goods to back this up. He is the young, dashing, heroic figure. And he's married to Catherine of Aragon, who's beautiful and Spanish and he's madly in love with her. And it's like tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, everything we want from a dashing king.

• 15:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, and she has a better claim to the English throne than his father did because of her Lancasterian blood. She is associated with, related to all the major royal families in Europe. Like, she is a very impressive queen to have at this time. And she's learned and brilliant as well. I mean, she puts him to shame, frankly.

• 15:52Kate Lister?

  Wow. So when it comes to Henry's estimation of himself, we can kind of get a sense of it in the things that he's doing. But his own personal appearance and grooming, some of the records that we have when he actually is king, of what he's spending on clothes and perfume, what kind of monies are we talking about here? Is this a man who looked after his physical appearance as well as working out?

• 16:15Speaker 04

  Yes, I think it's fair to say that. He's spending about eight thousand pounds a year on clothes.

• 16:20Kate Lister?

  Wow.

• 16:22Speaker 04

  Which is definitely over a million pounds today. And we've got descriptions of some of these things. So first of all, like, I want you to imagine what male clothing at this time looks like. So you've got this white linen undershirt, which is the bit that can be cleaned, long sleeves. You have a doublet, which is the bit from the waist up, that's long sleeved as well. And that can be decorated or embellished or pinked, you know, slashed in various ways. You've got the hose, which are basically tight fitting stockings attached to like upper, upper stocks, the breeches, which are the big kind of onion

• 17:01Kate Lister?

  Yep.

• 17:01Speaker 04

  shape bit. And that's tied up to the doublet with ties, which are called points. And the front is closed with the codpiece. Let's come back to that. Then there's the gown, which is the most expensive a man can afford. And so Henry's are obviously, you know, decorated, embellished, they're in velvets, they're fur lined. And so we've got one description of a doublet that from fifteen twenty one, where it's purple cloth of gold tissue. So this is purple in colour, the silk is purple, but it's made with these spirals of actual gold. So imagine that in the candlelight. It's lined with black satin.

• 17:42Speaker 04

  And then it's covered at the edges with silver tissue and he has hose that match. And this costs the equivalent of twenty five thousand pounds today for this one outfit. And he loves to wear like these really incredible colours, purple, he loves purple, he loves yellow, he loves crimson. So it's sumptuous and it's opulent. But the thing is that clothes are not just trivial, you know, they're not frivolous, they're power. And one of the things I think that we were saying earlier about exaggeration, but the other form of report that we have of what he looks like and how he's dressed are those ambassadors reports.

• 18:23Speaker 04

  And those are written for a reason. They're written to inform the King of France, who's Francis the First, the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles the Fifth, of what's going on so that they know how much he's rivaling them. Because to be able to spend all this money on clothing is to say, I can go to war as well. It's an assertion of power in himself, but it's also an assertion of the wealth of his kingdom.

• 18:47Kate Lister?

  Like he's dressed every day as if he's gonna go to the Met Ball. Like it's just full on bling.

• 18:53Speaker 04

  Wow. Absolutely. I mean, and I mean, to be fair, there's no sort of unostentatious

• 18:59Kate Lister?

  No.

• 19:00Speaker 04

  way of demonstrating your wealth in this period. It's not like you can just put on Patak Philippe, you know, it's like, it's very much. It's very much getting in your Porsche every day, you know, it's showing off.

• 19:10Kate Lister?

  So what I'm trying to get a sense of here is just, I don't want to say how far he falls, but I get a sense of the height of where he was in terms of physical fitness, physical appearance, reputation, his, what we might say of women, accomplishments, because it doesn't last. And it sounds like he has an awful lot to lose here. Like, this is a man who values being physical and being strong and being admired. And that is going to be taken away from him in quite a brutal way.

• 19:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, it lasts quite a while though, Kate. I mean, it's like at least 20, 25 years.

• 19:51Kate Lister?

  20 years of being a hottie is quite good going.

• 19:53Speaker 04

  It's pretty good going, isn't it? I mean, so like late into his 30s, early 40s, still looking pretty fine. I mean, he's the down snow of, of kings. And then it all goes horribly wrong. And he has this accident in early 1536. He falls from his horse whilst jousting. It's not a tournament. We don't have any records of a tournament, so he's probably just rehearsing. And we don't know exactly what happened. We don't know if the horse landed on him, but even the weight of his armour would have been really great. And we have reports saying it was a miracle he wasn't killed. And he's unconscious for two hours, which is a huge amount of time.

• 20:35Kate Lister?

  That would be a hospital job today, without a doubt.

• 20:37Speaker 04

  Absolutely. Still no heir, no male heir. I mean, he has Mary and Catherine of Aragon is absolutely certain her daughter can reign, but Henry is quite a chauvinist and thinks he needs a male heir. And to be fair, there hasn't been a successful ruling queen by this point. So he has legitimate grounds for thinking that at the time. And From this moment onwards, he doesn't joust again. I mean, he continues to hunt. He's not that athlete that he has been. And you know what happens if you're an athlete who continues to eat after you've ceased being an athlete, like you did when you were. And Henry's diet is not one of moderation. So it's all meat and bread and alcohol.

• 21:21Speaker 04

  And he gets really big. And it's big by Tudor standards. He's not actually exceptionally obese by modern standards. He ends up with a chest of 57 and a waist of 54. But that is within five years. He's gone from a waist of 37 inches to a waist of 54 inches in five years. So it's a really steep decline.

• 21:40Kate Lister?

  That really is. This accident that he had, I mean, whether he sustained some kind of brain injury that impacted his health going forward, but it also seems that his legs were badly damaged here. And there'd been a couple of warning lights on the dashboard about Henry's legs already because he'd had some tennis injury and an ulcer appeared. Do we have any information about what happened to his legs in this jousting accident?

• 22:06Speaker 04

  Yes. So he'd had earlier ulcers, he'd had earlier accidents. I mean, you know, he's playing sports so much, it makes sense. And he had a sergeant surgeon called Thomas Vickery, who had healed his legs in 1528. Fun fact, Thomas Vickery is the man who discovered the clitoris.

• 22:25Kate Lister?

  Another one.

• 22:27Speaker 04

  The women knew about it already.

• 22:30Kate Lister?

  It's the best mansplaining in history.

• 22:34Speaker 04

  And it's called the tentigo. He calls it the tentigo. Anyway, there you go. Just in case you ever need that for a pub quiz.

• 22:40Kate Lister?

  Fabulous.

• 22:41Speaker 04

  1528 is when men discovered it. But then the jousting accident of 1536, he opens up this ulcer that never heals. So it gives him constant and debilitating pain for the rest of his life. You know, so we have occasions a year later, reports are saying that the king does not go abroad because his leg is somewhat sore. A year after that, he's in great danger of dying. He goes black in the face because he's having basically DVT. I mean, his blood clots in his legs is what kills him in the end. Fifteen forty one, there's another attack. And this is an ulcer that's separating.

• 23:17Kate Lister?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 23:17Speaker 04

  It's pus-filled, it's stinks. It's an open wound. It must have been so deeply painful. We don't have antibiotics, you know.

• 23:25Kate Lister?

  God, no.

• 23:27Speaker 04

  You know, just imagine, I don't know about UK, but I get a little bit more irritable when I'm in pain.

• 23:33Kate Lister?

  Tremendously so.

• 23:34Speaker 04

  Just imagine, imagine that over a decade, you know.

• 23:37Kate Lister?

  It's, I often think that about Henry because if there's one man who's been diagnosed with just about everything posthumously, it's Henry from syphilis to bipolar disorder to Cushing's disease also. I think he was in pain like eight years ago. I ruptured two back discs and I eventually had to have them surgically fixed. But they don't take you to the hospital straight away. They leave you to see if it heals itself. So it's about 12 months of not being able to walk properly, not being able to do any of the things that I wanted to. And this is with modern painkillers and it's not at the kind of pain that venous ulcers would give you. I was a ratty, irritable, nasty person to be around. That I, pain is awful, sustained and constant.

• 24:21Kate Lister?

  It doesn't surprise me that it changed him, quite frankly.

• 24:24Speaker 04

  I wrote about this year of his life some years ago because fifteen thirty six was a year in which he also had numerous emotional wounds. So, you know, he may have been waiting for his first wife to die, but I actually think it probably hit him quite hard when she did.

• 24:41Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 24:42Speaker 04

  He then, as a result of the jousting accident. At least, Amberlyn blamed the news of the jousting accident on the miscarriage that she had thereafter, which was of an infant, a fetus that they could, at that point, diagnose as male.

• 24:57Kate Lister?

  Oh, God.

• 24:58Speaker 04

  Then, of course, she's accused of adultery, and I believe that Henry fundamentally was convinced that she had committed adultery. And this is the woman he has moved heaven and earth to be with. And she's accused of sleeping with five men, including her brother. And the shock of this, the blow, the public ridicule. Then, in the summer, his illegitimate son, who's seventeen by this point in time, it looks like Henry's lining Henry Fitzroy up to be his legitimate heir. And Henry Fitzroy dies. And then there's a massive rebellion against him in the north of the country, people who are turning against the doctrine of Henry being supreme head of the church, which is

• 25:42Speaker 04

  something he's really attached to, following the break with Rome. And so there were these multiple occasions across this year where he feels betrayed or let down. So you add all of that to the physical decline, and you can see why he changes, I think.

• 26:01Kate Lister?

  I'll be back with Susie and Henry after the short break.

• 26:18Speaker 05

  Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt, and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series, Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed: Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hit. There are new episodes every week.

• 27:15Kate Lister?

  Just thinking about the trial that Anne Boleyn goes on for, and I think you're right, I think he probably did genuinely believe this, or at least was telling himself this. But what, something that's not spoken about a lot is just how humiliating that must have been for this dashing, chivalrous knight prince, is that now his wife is on trial saying that he was crap in bed, or words to that effect.

• 27:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, so this is what gets out at the trial. So the context for understanding this, I mean, obviously this would be terrible at any age, but in the 16th century, they associate a man's potency, his ability to satisfy his wife, with him being a man, like him demonstrating his manliness. And, you know, your ability to control your wife is the ability to demonstrate your strength of personality. And Henry's governing a realm, like if he can't control his wife, how can he govern a realm? And so the idea that she has been so unsatisfied by him that she needs to sleep with five men, in fact, he actually composes a ballad where he says she slept with upwards of a hundred men.

• 28:23Kate Lister?

  Oh, Henry.

• 28:24Speaker 04

  I don't know, sorry, what are you doing there, mate? You're making it worse.

• 28:27Kate Lister?

  That's not helping.

• 28:28Speaker 04

  In the trial, her brother is given an accusation, given a piece of paper, he's told to read it and not read it out loud, but he does in his trial, George Boleyn, Lord Rochford, and it says, and we have this only in an ambassador's report of the trial, it says that Anne had laughed with her brother about the way the king dressed, she'd laughed with him about the king's terrible poetry, and she'd said that Henry has neither vigor nor potency and is not good at copulation. And this is said in front of 2,000 people in the great hall at the Tower of London. You can imagine how insanely humiliating

• 29:13Speaker 04

  this is for Henry, completely undermining.

• 29:16Kate Lister?

  Absolutely devastating.

• 29:18Speaker 04

  I don't think it's any surprise that we start to get portraits of him with a massive codpiece.

• 29:23Kate Lister?

  With a massive cock. Yeah, tell me about the codpiece. What is that? It's such an odd item of clothing. Yeah, the first time I saw it, I thought it was gonna be like, like a little cup that rugby players wear, like a little emphasised area. It's not. It's a full-blown phallus hanging off the front.

• 29:40Speaker 04

  Yep, it's the facsimile of an erect penis.

• 29:42Kate Lister?

  It is.

• 29:43Speaker 04

  For about sixty years, men sport these things. I mean, like, there's a practical function, obviously. This is what they let down to go to the loo, right? So it's like, but why they shape it like this? It's clearly designed to draw the eye, and Henry's are often differently coloured to the rest of his hose.

• 30:00Kate Lister?

  Oh, Henry.

• 30:01Speaker 04

  And, you know, obviously bigger.

• 30:04Kate Lister?

  It doesn't take Freud, does it, to work out what's going on here?

• 30:09Speaker 04

  It doesn't at all.

• 30:10Kate Lister?

  Could anyone have a bigger codpiece than the king? Did like, everyone come in and like, check theirs wasn't bigger than Henry's?

• 30:15Speaker 04

  I love the idea that there's a kind of yardstick at the door. Oh, go change it. You're gonna be unpopular.

• 30:21Kate Lister?

  Stop showing off.

• 30:22Speaker 04

  I mean, the portrait of Henry from fifteen thirty-seven by Holbein, first full-length portrait of an English monarch, is the one where we first see this in a portrait, because most of the portraits are kind of what we would call headshots. And so we've got this picture where Henry is framing it with his hands. It's differently coloured. There's a bow above. Like, the whole shape of his broad shoulders and his splayed feet is designed to kind of make his body into these two triangles that focus the gaze on the bulging codpiece. And this is painted in a massive mural. It's sort of three by four metres at the privy chamber at Whitehall Palace. And I think it's designed to be seen by exactly the people

• 31:04Speaker 04

  who'd been in that great hall at the Tower of London. The ones who'd heard, "He can't get it up." He's like, "Here's some visual evidence that I can..." Because also, it's painted when Jane Seymour was pregnant.

• 31:14Kate Lister?

  Oh, wow. Wow.

• 31:15Speaker 04

  In all ways, it's testifying to his manliness. And it's so interesting. We're so used to it. We don't think about the fact that actually, this is Henry as a man. I mean, he's a king, but he's not painted as a king. We don't see a crown. He's not holding an auburn sceptre. This is Henry as a man.

• 31:33Kate Lister?

  With full on rock stamps as well, legs splayed.

• 31:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, which is really sort of an odd pose for portraits of the time. You only ever paint men in that kind of straddle position if they're a legendary hero, I guess, or, you know, we've got this sense, I mean, the art historians say about it, it speaks of martial glory, because it's a bit Clint Eastwood. He looks a bit like he's still aching from getting off a horse.

• 31:55Kate Lister?

  It absolutely does, doesn't it? And of course, his legs feature very prominently in that one, these sore legs that he's got.

• 32:03Speaker 04

  No sign of them being sore there.

• 32:05Kate Lister?

  No sign of them being sore. And he loved his legs, didn't he? He used to tie like garters around them to really emphasize his calves in his youth.

• 32:13Speaker 04

  Well, yeah, I mean, that's also because he's a knight of the garden.

• 32:16Kate Lister?

  Oh, yes, okay, okay.

• 32:17Speaker 04

  But certainly he loved his legs. You're absolutely right on that, because there's a story about the King of France having slightly spare legs. And Henry did not miss leg day. So he takes the moment to open up the front of his doublet, because sometimes the doublet's gonna have these kind of skirts. And he shows off his thigh. He places his hand on the thigh, he's like, look at this. Look at my meaty thigh. And I have a goodly calf as well, he says. So.

• 32:45Kate Lister?

  Oh, my god. That's how we end up with codpieces, isn't it? It's just this willy waving.

• 32:49Speaker 04

  It is. I mean, I find it so fascinating nowadays, like it's women who show off their legs. But good legs are a real masculine asset in this sixteenth century.

• 32:59Kate Lister?

  There was a piece of research published by two varicose vein surgeons in London. It was in two thousand and nine, they published it. And they suggested that actually the leg sores might have been caused by the garters that he tied around his legs, because that can inflame deep vein thrombosis. And then ultimately, the infection gets into the deep tissues of the leg, and that's what caused the ulcers. But that's a horrible irony, that it might have been his love. For his legs that actually did it in.

• 33:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's possible. I'm slightly sceptical of the medical diagnosis from this distance because you'd think that scientists, medical people would have a kind of sense of the scientific method and use a certain amount of, I don't know. They'd be cautiously speculative, but actually they tend to write with such certainty. And we just don't have the medical records from the period to justify that kind of certainty.

• 33:52Kate Lister?

  They are very, very certain. That's absolutely true. It's as if he's there in front of them. But it seems that whatever was going on, like they're called Venus ulcers. I was talking to a nurse about Venus ulcers. She said that they do smell so bad that when someone's in the hospital with them, you can smell them from three rooms away. And that seems to track with whatever was going on with Henry. And I often think that must have been one of the most humiliating things to know. Not only do you not smell good, but you stink.

• 34:17Speaker 04

  Yes. And one of the things I liked about the film Firebrand, where Jude Law played Henry VIII. I mean, historically it goes all over the place, but I thought his interpretation of Henry VIII was really interesting. And one of the things he did was he had this really vile concoction of things made for him to wear as a kind of perfume.

• 34:36Kate Lister?

  Oh, God, wow.

• 34:37Speaker 04

  And he told no one about it in advance so that he would appear on set smelling like Henry did. And everyone's like, oh, God, oh, oh. So then you see them doing it in the film and they're not pretending. They are just like, oh, my word.

• 34:52Kate Lister?

  Generally gagging. That's commitment. Although that, that's a really interesting experiment to do because how do you mask that? Like, imagine you're meeting the king. This is your king, anointed by God, the king. And you're just like, oh, Jesus Christ. That must have been awful for everyone concerned.

• 35:09Speaker 04

  And I think it puts such a different spin on the Anne of Cleve story because, you know, the story we're told is that he sees her and. Doesn't like the way she looks and he's rude about the, her pendulous breasts and thinks that she's not a virgin, et cetera. But the truth of the matter is, he bursts into the room that she's in, in Rochester, with a company of men. They're all dressed in the same thing, because one of the games at court has been, the king appears in disguise, this happened back in the day of Catherine of Aragon, and he's dressed the same as five or six of his courtiers. And how can you tell which one is the king?

• 35:46Kate Lister?

  It's so embarrassing. Oh no.

• 35:47Speaker 04

  And, you know, obviously, he's, at that early point, he's the best looking, the tallest. So he appears in fifteen forty, dressed up like a jester, effectively, and kind of motley. And grabs hold of her. And everybody else, of course, knows he's the king, and perhaps could have warned her that he might appear, or that he might smell, or that he might be a little portly. And he grabs hold of her and kisses her, and she is just, frankly, and obviously disgusted.

• 36:17Kate Lister?

  Oh no.

• 36:18Speaker 04

  And I think it's that moment, everybody's been pretending all the time, and now someone holds up a mirror and shows him what he really looks and indeed smells like. And that is his complaint. He says, she's fat, smelly, and not a virgin. Like, he's talking about himself.

• 36:35Kate Lister?

  You see, really, he is. When you put it like that, like, she hasn't been informed that she needs to pretend this stuff. Like, it's proper empress new clothes time, isn't it?

• 36:46Speaker 04

  Exactly. She's, the little boy is saying, but he's not wearing any.

• 36:49Kate Lister?

  He's not, and he really smells. So as he's getting older, and he's going through his wives, he can't exercise the way he used to. So his weight is increasing exponentially, as you said, in just five years. He starts to suffer really bad bouts of ill health, like repeatedly taken to his bed for weeks at a time. He's black in the face. He's, like, it's dangerous stuff.

• 37:10Speaker 04

  Yes, it's all these ulcers in his legs, whether it's one ulcer or multiple, we don't really know. In the end, that will be what kills him. It's a pulmonary embolism. It's probably a blood clot from one of these ulcers that is what kills him. And he becomes severely disabled. He puts on a lot of weight and he walks with a stick and then after some time he needs to be put in the equivalent of a wheelchair to be moved around his palaces. He has a kind of device that pulls him up from one floor to the next. I mean, he's really disabled by the end of his life. And actually, there is one other point about his appearance that we should mention that's quite important, which is about his beard. So in his youth, he doesn't have a beard. Amberlyn likes him with a beard, Catherine

• 37:54Speaker 04

  of Aragon doesn't. He has two portraits, painted miniatures in the 1520s. One is clearly for Anne, which is like with the beard, and one without for Catherine. But from 1535, he says that he will be no more shaven. And the significance of this is that beards at this time are considered signs of manhood. So they're linked to the ability to produce semen. So if you want to advertise your virility, you do it with this growth on your face. And so from 1540 onwards, there's amazing piece of research by Will Fisher that says, out of, I think it's like 350 portraits that he's looked

• 38:35Speaker 04

  at in the century after 1540, 320 of them show men with a beard. They only don't have a beard if they're a cleric or they're a youth, because they're such a powerful testament to manliness. There are styles of beard. There's the sugar loaf, or the stiletto, or the hammer beam. There are these extraordinary beards. The last piece of evidence for how important beards are at this time is this. When in the 1530s, Henry's exerting himself as King of Ireland, he orders that in Galway, all men's upper lips should be shaved, because he understood the power of stripping a man of his beard is to emasculate him.

• 39:18Kate Lister?

  Wow.

• 39:19Speaker 04

  So, one of the things we really see, even as he's declining, even as hunting is now, him sitting on a horse and them driving the deer in front of him, even as he's unable to walk, he's sporting this massive beard.

• 39:33Kate Lister?

  God, his beard. Oh, Henry.

• 39:54Kate Lister?

  Hello Betwixters, I am jumping in here because I have some very exciting news. Betwixt the Sheets has set up camp on YouTube. That's right, it took us a while, but we are there now. So if you are the kind of person who likes to see your podcasts as well as hear your podcasts, you can now go and find us right there and the link is in the show notes. And please remember to like and subscribe because the people in charge of them really do like that. Right, let's get on with it.

• 40:36Kate Lister?

  I know that he was, well historians say he's complex, he killed so many people and he just seems to have been utterly, utterly vile in so many ways. But there's always a part of me that feels this pathos for this former warrior king, this champion, this erudite man of learning, this everyone's loved him. And he's kind of just been reduced and reduced, reduced and there he is, he's got his beard and he's clinging on to his beard. And I guess that it sort of makes sense, him getting involved with Catherine Howard because he was so ridiculously excited about his young sexy wife. It's all classic midlife crisis stuff.

• 41:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, he's apparently unable to keep his hands off her. This is what the ambassadors say, he touches her more than he did the others.

• 41:18Kate Lister?

  Oh, nice.

• 41:19Speaker 04

  Oh, really? Because she's maybe 18, maybe 20 and he's 50 odd. So, yes, he's very pleased and of course he thinks that maybe she's going to give him an heir at that point as well. So that's important and he has Edward, but Edward's very young and children die a lot before the age of five or 10 at this point in time. So he needs to make provision for another heir. But, I mean, I think you can certainly extend him some degree of sympathy. He goes through a lot, but I think we're also responsible for how we react to trauma.

• 41:58Kate Lister?

  You guys, there has to be, there has to be a limit. So one of the things that I learnt about Henry recently that I hadn't realised, that kind of again, it gets me, he had to wear glasses later in life, or was it glazers, as they called them, imported from Germany, that obviously nobody saw him doing. As he's becoming sicker and sicker, he spends more and more time to quest in his rooms, reading stuff. He has to wear glasses to read stuff. And it's all this hiding this from the outside world and trying to present himself as, I'm still manly, I'm still, I might be fat, but I'm big, I'm married to this young woman, I'm super virile. But the reality is, there's this man who's in pain and his body's failing and he's wearing glasses and he's trying to grow his beard out to look tough. And it's just, it's a huge contrast.

• 42:41Speaker 04

  There is. I think what we could say is, I mean, he's still spending just as much, or even more, on his clothing in these later years. And he still has his hands on power very firmly. I mean, so even in the last month of his life, when Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, the poet, is accused of treason, Henry VIII takes the questions to be asked of this young man, and he annotates them, he writes all over them. So he's personally involved in all aspects of rule. He's still managing everything. He's still really deeply engaged with theology, for example, like ideas about faith dominate his thinking, some

• 43:26Speaker 04

  of the big questions of his reign. And he actually very cleverly annotates books that are written by his bishops and adds one or two words that completely change the meaning of a sentence, or completely rethink the theology that they've asserted. So he is engaged. Like, I feel like we could possibly focus too much on the exteriority, when there's a lot going on at an interior level. And sure, he shows periods of depression. And, you know, we can't excuse him, his blood thirstiness in his later years. But like, he's not just all decline, is what I'm saying, I suppose.

• 44:03Kate Lister?

  No, no, that's very true. So as a final question then, again, I know it's difficult from this kind of a distance. Do you understand Henry to be someone that's supremely confident? Or somebody that's supremely insecure?

• 44:15Speaker 04

  I think that those two things kind of go hand in hand. I think in his youth, he demonstrates. That extraordinary confidence, that egotism, and his egotism is shown off by him doing a thousand jumps on his horse, or tiring out all those horses, or being particularly wonderful at tennis or jousting or whatever. But that reality does not continue. And so he's trying to grasp onto something that he's losing. And at the same time, he has all these attacks on him, for good reason, for things he's done, like the break with Rome. There's a moment where

• 44:55Speaker 04

  the Pope says it's legal for anyone to invade the country and take his throne. There's a moment when Francis I and Charles V are ganging up to do just that. And Henry builds all these fortresses along the south coast to defend England from invasion. There's a moment in 1545 when a bigger fleet than the Spanish Armada arrives on the south coast, the Battle of the Solent, and tries to attack. That's when the Mary Rose sinks. So Henry is subject to threat, and he begins to see threats amongst those around him. But his response to that is so egocentric. He has treason laws passed that expand the definition of treason. It becomes treasonous to call the king a tyrant, which is about the most tyrannical

• 45:40Speaker 04

  thing you can imagine. And it becomes treasonous to imagine the death of the king in words, to even think it, really. And so he tries to sort of pin down everything around him. He's trying to secure himself, which, to me, speaks of deep insecurity.

• 45:58Kate Lister?

  Oh, Henry. But also, oh, Henry. Susannah, you have been fascinating. You always are. And if people want to know more about you and your work, and frankly, they should, but where can they find you?

• 46:09Speaker 04

  Well, they can, of course, find me on your sister podcast, on Not Just the Tudors.

• 46:13Kate Lister?

  Fabulous.

• 46:14Speaker 04

  And we've got a couple of documentaries also on History Hit. There's one out already called The World Torn Apart, which is about the dissolution of the monasteries. There's lots there about Henry VIII's queens. And we've got some coming up about things like Henry VIII on film, Lady Jane Grey, Catherine Howard, the wife we've been talking about. So everybody should be dwelling on History Hit all the time and obviously subscribed.

• 46:36Kate Lister?

  Thank you so much. You have been fabulous.

• 46:39Speaker 04

  It's been great to talk to you, Kate.

• 46:45Kate Lister?

  Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Susie for joining me. And if you like what you heard, please don't forget to like, review and follow along, whatever it is that you get your podcasts. Coming up, we are back on the hunt for more historical fuckboys. Can Charles II, Raphael or the Emperor Nero outdo Henry VIII, Byron and Caligula? Well, there's only one way to find out. If you'd like us to explore a subject, or maybe you just wanted to say hello, then you can email us at [email protected]. This podcast was edited by Peter Dennis and produced by Sophie G. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again, Betwixt the Sheep, History of Sex, Scandal and Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.