The improprieties of the present British royals are mere peccadilloes compared to the bawdy court of their distant ancestor Henry VIII. (The present queen is the direct descendant of Henry's sister through 14 generations.) The House of Windsor is positively frugal when compared with the extravagances and conspicuous consumption of that Tudor king: his palaces and castles, the opulent interiors, personal adornment and the delicious food. The author describes in detail the magnificence and sheer splendour of the royal palaces, the jewels and jewel-encrusted garments, and to this she devotes more than one-third of the book. Film companies take note.
Henry inherited a fortune estimated in today's money at £375 million, and annual revenues of about £30 million. Even so, he would not make the Fortune 500 or the list of the 100 top Irish companies. He was in real estate, with an inheritance which included 38 houses ranging from palaces to manors and medieval castles, many of which he refurbished and extended several times.
During his life he acquired another 32 residences by fair means and foul, purchase or confiscation, sometimes at the rate of half a dozen in a year.
The King's household, in today's terms a medium-sized enterprise, numbered up to 1,500 people, from lords and earls to scullions and loo cleaners (the quaintly named "gong fermours"). Management was a highly organised bureaucracy, hence the volume of detailed information available to the author. The Lord Great Chamberlain was the MD, in Henry's time a post held mainly by the Earls of Oxford. Beneath him in the hierarchy were layers of line managers, all noblemen. The Chamber which was the King's private quarters had a staff of up to 400, at least half of whom were "gentlemen", who attended to his intimate and personal needs.
Henry travelled widely through- out his kingdom. His annual "progresses" from one residence to the next may have been ostensibly to see his realm and be seen by his subjects, but they were also dictated by the practical need to clean the garderobes when the stink became too much. He was a fastidious man - far from the mythical image of a messy eater who gorged on hunks of meat and tossed bones over the shoulder. Obsessed with cleanliness and hygiene, he had water piped from natural wells into his main London home at Hampton Court. He ordered a communal, 14-seat public lavatory, which flushed into the river, to be built there, and urinals were installed around the palace courtyards "for the convenience of those who might otherwise have used the walls".
Henry VIII had a great fear of plague - the sweating sickness that could kill with devastating speed and may have been typhus - which visited London at intervals. At the first sign of this terrifying disease, he fled to the countryside.
Alison Weir obviously liked Henry, whom she describes as a humanist, with a quick mind, superb organisational skills and a formidable intellect. (Humanism was the new literary and cultural movement of the time, part of the Renaissance, that sought to free the people from the thralldom of the mediaeval church and state.) He was also good-looking, loved music, dancing, women, jousting and hunting of the blood-sports variety. When he died he owned 87 hunting parks and forests.
Henry VIII emerges from this book as an attractive and charismatic man. To his court and his circle of friends and relations he was a charming, generous despot; to his enemies, who, in the often-changing personnel of the court, were also his friends and relations, he was a ruthless confiscator of wealth and, at times, executioner.
Was licentiousness part of the profligacy of Henry VIII's court? There was, according to the author, some sexual dalliance, but while drunkenness was common, "the King would not permit open display of lewd behaviour" and he banished offending women from his household.
There was, of course, a double standard: "while fornication and adultery could never tarnish a man's honour...women were expected to be above reproach"; and graffiti artists who drew huge penises on the palace walls were punished lightly. The king himself was a recidivist adulterer. On the other hand, the two wives whom he executed, Anne Boleyn and Katherine Howard, were convicted of adultery and condemned to death. On the whole, though, he preferred divorce. Unlike the present royals, he was not con cerned with the virginity of prospective wives, only with their subsequent fidelity.
Henry's serial marriages may have given the impression of rampant lechery in the court, but affairs were carried on with discretion. The king fell in love with most of his wives (apart from Anne of Cleves, whose body odour disgusted him). After reading this book, one could almost feel sorry for the man who really only wanted a male heir.
Ethna Viney is an author and critic