These are not the best of times to be a woman, to say nothing of any minority. The rise of bro culture and misogynistic incel culture, which helped propel President Donald J. Trump back into the White House; the demise of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) in government and much of the workplace; and the curtailing of reproductive rights are among the challenges that have led women to consider the backlash to their hard-won gains.
Perhaps that’s why I found the marvelously mocking Broadway musical “Six” so moving. It’s the story of a sextet of queen consorts who for most of their history were famous, even infamous, for their marriages to an orange, scowling, bloated, diseased malignant narcissist — Henry VIII. As “Six” explores with delicious irony, Henry — no Alexander the Great in the leadership department — is today mostly famous for having been married to them.
With a Tony Award-winning score by Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss that ranges from rap to jazz, salsa and Broadway ballads in “Hamilton”-like fashion, and with a color-blind cast as well, “Six” unfolds the tragedies of Henry’s put-upon consorts — pressured to deliver the obsessed-over male heir and spare for the fragile Tudor dynasty by a despot whose genetic abnormalities may have been the root of the frustration in that quest. — as a kind of “queen for a day, leader of the band” competition. It’s a conceit that the musical does not resolve as it moves toward a kind of sisterhood and a reclaiming of the women’s individual destinies.
Each queen gets her turn in the spotlight, backed by the others in the tradition of 1960s girl groups. Catherine of Aragon (1509-33) is up first, as the classic first wife, married to Henry’s older brother, Prince Arthur, who died, and subsequently to Henry for 24 years, the longest of the marriages, turning a blind eye to his many infidelities; nurturing their daughter, later Mary 1; and remaining faithful to the Roman Catholic Church and the warrior temperament of her royal Spanish parents, Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castille.
Her marriage ended with Henry’s grand passion for the bewitching Anne Boleyn (circa 1501 or 07-1536), the sophisticated English-born, French-reared courtier and lady in waiting to Catherine, for whom he famously broke from Rome and instituted the Church of England. Anne went to the scaffold on trumped-up charges of adultery and incest. (It’s impossible to believe that the haughty, witchy Anne would’ve cheated on or conspired against the husband on whose life her existence and position — to say nothing of that of her adored daughter, later Elizabeth I — depended. Nonetheless, she was beheaded to make way for one of her ladies in waiting, the anti-Anne Boleyn, pro-Catherine of Aragon Jane Seymour (circa 1508-37), a woman whose demure nature masked a hidden agenda and steely reserves. Unfortunately, she died giving birth to the longed-for, future Edward VI. That gave way to the search for a Protestant alliance with the German House of Cleves and its hereditary duchess, Anna (1515-57).
As noted in a previous blog post here, she is perhaps the most underestimated of the wives, the so-called sheltered, unattractive one who nevertheless managed to pivot like a World Series-caliber second baseman when Henry decided the Protestant alliance wasn’t necessary. (All these people, with the exception of sixth wife Catherine Parr, were really Catholics in form and ideology.) For going along to get along, unlike her foreign princess counterpart Catherine of Aragon, Anna earned an annulment settlement that included the use of three palaces, plenty of cash, jewelry, clothing and home goods, visitation rights to court and stepdaughters Mary and Elizabeth, with whom she had a mostly affectionate relationship, and a cultured, sporting life of financial independence that few women in her time knew.
Beloved by everyone from the English people to her servants, this Anne outlived all the other wives, Henry and his heir Edward VI and is the only one of the queens to be buried in Westminster Abbey, resting place of many of the English monarchs. As for the resplendently prim portrait by Hans Holbein that led Henry to cry deception and decapitate the instigator of the marriage, master secretary Thomas Cromwell, it hangs in the Musée du Louvre, where it has recently been restored, bringing its reds, blues and golds — and its not-so-naive subject — back to life. (The pic even gets a cheeky “Cabaret”-style song in the show, “Haus of Holbein.”)
Still, Anna remained a bird in a gilded cage. She could never remarry or return to Germany. Henry, who retained a cordial, visiting relationship with her, ultimately pulled the strings of power — a fact underscored in his relationship with Anna’s lady in waiting Katherine Howard (circa 1523-42), the beautiful, sexy, good-hearted trophy fifth wife, who like her Howard cousin Anne Boleyn would also go to the scaffold — in Katherine’s case, for her inability to outrun her youthful romantic indiscretions. Some contemporary historians portray her as a child-woman being groomed by her various suitors. But the teenage Katherine was an aristocrat of age in Tudor England who called the shots until she came up against the one man she could not control.
By the time the obese, aged, bald Henry — whose open leg wound oozed a foul-smelling pus — got around to his last wife, the twice-widowed Catherine Parr (1512-48), he was in need of the caregiving she provided him and his family. But she was also an intellectual and reformer whose radical Protestant views nearly cost her her head. Fortunately, Henry died in 1547 at age 55 but not before wreaking untold damage on the women in his life, to say nothing of the country and his three legitimate children.
This Catherine is cast as the survivor in the “Divorced, Beheaded, Died; Divorced, Beheaded, Survived” rhyme that “Six” has such fun with. But her post-Henry life replicated the fate of the woman who might’ve been her sister-in-law, Jane Seymour. Married to Jane’s bad-boy brother Thomas, who was supposedly the love of her life. Catherine, too, would die in childbirth.
So there is a kind of symmetry in the wives’ stories. Catherine of Aragon and Anna, or Anne, of Cleves — foreign princesses, annulled marriages, death probably from cancer. Anne Boleyn and Katherine Howard, beheaded cousins. Jane Seymour and Catherine Parr, sisters-in-law who died of complications giving birth. It’s as if Henry were playing out the relationships of wives one through three with four, five and six.
There are other redundancies in the ties of six women who were often rivals or didn’t know each other. The second Anne lived in the first Anne’s childhood home, Hever Castle. (Wasn’t it thoughtful of Henry to allow the second Anne to dwell on how lucky she was in the home of the Anne who was not so lucky.) Jane championed Catherine of Aragon’s daughter Mary. Anne of Cleves, Katherine Howard and Catherine Parr all had roles in shaping Elizabeth’s ascension to the impenetrable Gloriana, the Virgin Queen, although Parr loses points for her complicit role in Thomas Seymour’s molestation of Elizabeth. (The abuse of the daughters — all ultimately Henry’s fault — could drive a lifetime of musicals.)
“Six” packs a surprising amount of this into its score, beautifully delivered by a group of singers — and an all-woman band — who bring new meaning to the word “voice.” Nowadays, we hear some grumbling about minorities cast as historically white figures. But what matters in art is the essence of the characters. We need a Catherine of Aragon who does not go gently into that good night, an Anne Boleyn who overplays her hand, a Jane Seymour who’s tougher than she seems, an Anne of Cleves who takes the lessons of the first three wives and runs with them, a Katherine Howard who falls into the beauty trap and a Catherine Parr who survives Henry, even if it’s not for long.
And we get that and more. Art can’t make up for life. It can’t rewrite history — or herstory, as it’s called here. Each of the queens, married to a monster, was tragic in her own way.
But when done right, art offers a kind of poetic justice. And for the 90-minute span of “Six’s” tale of “Divorced, Beheaded, Live,” that is enough.