History, hypocrisy and Henry the Eighth.

I’ve been away on holiday with friends (including one of my honourable co-bloggers) for the past week. As well as the usual bouts of walking, drinking and rabidly competitive connect 4, we managed to make time for some middle class, liberal dinner party conversations a la Bremner, Bird and Fortune which are likely to provide a good deal of fodder for this blog in the next couple of weeks.

So rather than fight the urge I am going to jump straight in, with a topic that irritated me so much at the time I was rather reduced to incoherent grunts of rage… and sure as I am that I’m right on this one, that probably isn’t the best way to win an argument. Here is the hopefully more coherent version:

David Starkey is an idiot. He is an idiot because of these (argh, can't believe I am linking to the Mail!) comments, in which he argues that some seething and apparently threatening mass of woolly minded female historians have shifted the emphasis away from poor ickle Henry the Eighth and onto his wives. He is an idiot despite (and in part because of) the fact that this whole diatribe was inarguably made for the sake of some cheap publicity, and may not be truly felt at all. He would like to frame his arguments as ‘pay more attention to Henry’, but in fact, what he really means is ‘pay more attention to me.’

Where I parted company with my dinner companions was over the idea that Starkey, however sensationally expressed, might have some kind of point. Henry, they suggested, has been rather reduced to his relationships with his wives. He should be centre stage since he was the monarch, he was the decision maker and he was the instigator of everything.

Fair enough. Henry is interesting and certainly worth studying in terms of his religious and political significance. What I don’t understand however is why Henry’s worthiness as a topic of historical interest renders his wives obsolete. What’s wrong with a book about the life of Anne Boleyn, or Jane Seymour? Beyond their names and the rather gruesome little rhyme detailing their fates I don’t actually know much about them - and I say this as one who studied the Tudors at both GCSE and A-level. To say that Henry has been reduced to his wives is ridiculous as they remain largely silent victims in the face of Henry’s own larger than life personality and legendary, machismo fuelled drive for a male heir.


The thing is, history is subjective and at least partially driven by those elements of the past that interest us the most. And people are often interested in the human side of things, the relationships and personalities that inform events as much as the events themselves, not to mention the importance of the experiences of people from the past, regardless of their cause and effect. What bothers me about Starkey’s comments is his attempt to establish some kind of historical hierarchy in which women are inevitably reduced to bit parts… if you want to argue that only the powerful and famous are really worth studying then inevitably only a handful of women make the cut. A 'proper' history of Europe, according to Mr Starkey, is one of white males, but who exactly put him in charge of defining such a thing?

The bottom line is that many historians have their own private cause to champion, a particularly neglected or misunderstood corner of the past that they are seeking to bring to greater public attention. Seen in the most charitable light possible Starkey’s obsession with Henry could be seen as a particularly eccentric version of this. But it is categorically not necessary to champion one area of history by degrading and belittling another. And to make it about gender smacks of the large scale disenfranchisement of women’s history. Given that until very recently you could be forgiven for thinking that women only arrived in the world in their current numbers after the advent of the twentieth century arguing that the scales have already swung too far in the opposite direction is frankly ludicrous.

Ironically the government are desperate to get children more interested in history, so much so that there are changes proposed to history GCSEs that would see students considering the making of television documentaries about history as much as history itself. Is David Starkey ready to take up the cause of his oppressed patriarchs against such another shift in focus?

Ummm. No.