By the standards of history, there is probably no single story as engrossing as that of Henry VIII and his six wives. The wives—Katherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves, Katherine Howard, and Katherine Parr—are more than figures from the Tudor court; they have become part of our cultural heritage, inspiring generations of writers, filmmakers, artists, and historians. At the National Portrait Gallery, the exhibition The Six Lives brings these six women together for the first time in a way that honours their legacies while inviting fresh reflection on how we remember them.
For those who love the intrigue and drama associated with the Tudor family, Six Lives is certainly a must-see. This historic portrait is the first exhibition of its type that the gallery has hosted since it opened its newly renovated doors, offering the perfect mix of both old and new.
The core is the juxtaposition of Hans Holbein the Younger’s original Tudor portraits with the modern photography of Hiroshi Sugimoto. Entering into a dialogue between historic and modern art, the present exhibition examines how Henry VIII’s six wives have been portrayed and modified over time, all the way into the present day. As the court artist for Henry VIII, Holbein was a master at rendering precisely what his patrons wanted, yet he managed a superlative sense of personality. He presents the idealised, mythopoeic view of the Tudor royalty. By contrast, Sugimoto’s photography is starkly minimalist, begging the question of how these queens exist within our collective imagination.
Sugimoto works against the very notion of historical truth, as time distorts and reshapes memories. The result is a kind of conversation across the centuries between Holbein’s paintings and Sugimoto’s photography, demonstrating how the way we contemplate these women is as much a product of modern imagination as of Tudor history. Centuries on, each of the six wives has, in turn, been subject to fascination, scrutiny, and myth-making.
Katherine of Aragon, the steadfast first wife, is portrayed here in her traditional role—that of the pious, dignified queen who refused to yield her title even after Henry had cast her aside. She had been a wife, married to Henry for over twenty years, and her picture is irrevocably linked with her reputation for loyalty and religious piety.
Anne Boleyn, however, is the elusive and contentious figure that she has always been: her likeness—sombre-eyed, darkly alluring, faintly smiling—has generated endless conjecture about her character—a martyr to political intrigue or the scheming woman who brought about Katherine of Aragon’s ruination?
The third wife is Jane Seymour, whose image is caught in repose, almost ghostly. She was the mother of Henry’s only male heir, Edward VI, but she died shortly after childbirth, and so her legacy became one of silent domesticity, bound in maternal sacrifice. This image—what happens in Six Lives—really cements that in the popular imagination: she is the ‘perfect’ Tudor wife—deferential, fecund, and tragically brief.
Anne of Cleves is more enigmatic; she is mostly remembered as ‘the ugly wife’, who was supposedly much uglier than Holbein’s portrait of her suggests. Because she is a wife primarily remembered for the unconsummated marriage that was ended in annulment, Anne becomes a political pawn. Yet, the post-divorce life as ‘sister’ of the king and as a financially independent queen problematises that narrative of woman and wife.
Katherine Parr was Henry’s wife, but she survived him and was an important part of both his children’s lives during the Protestant Reformation. Learned and intelligent, she is an author in her own right; the one who guided the future Queen Elizabeth I. While her role as the stabiliser during Henry’s later years has been sensationalised less than those of the other queens, Six Lives brings her to the foreground to remind us that she was much more than the wife who survived.
But then, of course, there is Katherine Howard, the fifth wife—youngest and arguably the most tragic figure in this narrative. Moving through the exhibition, one is struck by the absence of an authenticated portrait of Katherine Howard. Where the other queens leap from the walls in all their colourful glory through the sure strokes of Holbein’s skilled hand, Katherine remains a mystery.
The exhibition contains a small watercolour, whose attribution to her has often been doubted. This one fragile image becomes an icon of Katherine’s historical erasure: she is, in any case, the only one of Henry’s wives for whom no official portrait survives, and the absence of a definitive likeness underlines the tragedy of a short, scandal-filled life.
Of all the wives, Katherine Howard’s story is perhaps most difficult to square because she was only a teenager—probably no older than 18—at the time of her execution on charges of adultery. Her image has been used time and again in popular culture to illustrate the randy, self-obsessed seductress—the young girl who played a dangerous game and lost. But how much of any of this has to do with anything remotely like fact? The truth is we actually know very little about Katherine as a person. The historical records are not all that strong, and what does exist was often written by people with a point to prove. Her whole life was spent amidst the most powerful men who used her as one of their chess pieces in a political game. We will probably never learn what she really thought or what her motives were.
This exhibition challenges us to rethink Katherine’s legacy. Should she simply be reduced to the stereotype of being a light, selfish girl? She was a product of the dangerous play of power within the Tudor court, where the wrong move would bring sure death. And all these years later, historians debate Katherine’s guilt versus her innocence regarding those charges or whether she was a simple girl who was thrown into a web of intrigue she didn’t fully understand. But because we have so little to go on—no letters, no portrait, and no definitive account of her life—Katherine Howard remains, to a large extent, a blank slate onto which history has projected its own assumptions.
This fact is acutely felt in the context of Six Lives. While the other queens leap to life graphically through their portraits, those of Katherine remain ghostly and fail to reach that level. This little watercolour suggests little about her personality, if indeed it is her. She is a queen dominated in life and death by scandal, whose image—both literally and figuratively—has faded into obscurity. It is that, in fact, which makes Katherine Howard’s story so heartbreaking. She was, after all, only a young girl—perhaps naïve, perhaps manipulated—who, before she even had any chance to define herself, was executed.
This usually speaks to the popular imagination concerning Katherine Howard: that seductive, almost fatalistic figure—a woman whose youth and good looks lured her to play with fire. Yet, that glosses over certain subtleties of her position. She most likely had no choice in the matter and was being forced to marry Henry VIII at such a young age, too, which would have been an enormous burden upon her to be queen in such a hazardous and back-stabbing environment of the court. Again, it is unfair for us to go hard on her when we do not even know who she really was.
Six Lives forces us to face these uncomfortable realities. It presents once and for all the incompleteness of biased or flatly incorrect history. While Holbein’s portraits provide insight into the lives of the Tudor queens, they equally present how selective and idealised that record can be. The absence of Katherine Howard in the gallery poignantly reminds us that there are stories unvoiced and faces unseen. And with a deeper understanding—not only of Henry’s wives but also of history itself—as one now knows it moves along and develops over time, taking on shapes birthed from both what is remembered and what is forgotten—that we leave Six Lives.
It could even be said that in the case of Katherine Howard specifically, her erasure from the historical record is just as instructive as any portrait might have been. It speaks to the fragility of memory and how women’s lives—especially those caught in power struggles—are reduced to convenient narratives.
Yet, Six Lives is actually a challenge to us to look beyond the narrative and see these queens not merely as characters but as women—not just with struggles and triumphs but with tragedies.
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