So I Married An Axe Murderer: Firebrand

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An everyday tale of elite conflict, control, influence and domestic cruelty. Pushing the Henry VIII as tyrant manifest popular theory, Katherine Parr (wife number six) is essentially married to a royal serial killer. Jude Law is unrecognisable as the bloated and decaying monarch, suspicious, paranoid, pained, fearful and susceptible to the whispers of ‘well-meaning’ others in his ear. Worse still, this man loves power, hates women to the point of abusing them, appreciates the skills of a good doctor and swings wildly between self-pitying romantic love and egotistical displays and violence. He has more in common with Stalin…wanting everyone to ‘SHUT UP!’ (Even by violent means of silencing them all).

Sourly, Henry returns from France and a vainglorious war, where he can’t help comparing his losses with his Queen’s literary and faith fame. And just like his leg, it pains him.

Katherine Parr (Alicia Vikander) is an intelligent learned woman who also likes power and believes that she has a manifest destiny to do good…by also whispering in the King’s ear. We encounter her standing infront of her husband’s empty throne — and she looks very tempted to try it out for size. Besties with Ann Askew (Erin Doherty), muddy gentlewoman and passionate preacher in the field, Katherine may be seen as behaving treasonously and very much against the patriarchy — and the ultimate patriarch, her King and husband.

The film does Henry VIII wrong. He was (as history shows) much more nuanced — a man very focused on his legacy, a believer in marriage until it became inconvenient, fastidious, romantic, health focused and deeply religious. What if he really did believe (as his daughter Mary did) that he was put in place by God and responsible for the souls of the nation entrusted to him. What if he really did believe that his wife was a heretic and dangerously close to the ‘Defender of the Faith’? What if he really did believe that he was divinely appointed to judge men’s hearts (in a way that his daughter Elizabeth chose not to). We don’t get much of the man who scribbled pointy hands in the marginalia of books to make a note — here he’s roistering, brutish and self-focused, surrounded by baying and uneasy lying sycophants. Literally trying to shut his wife up — and anyone else who bores or annoys him.

Revengeful he may have been and unpleasant to perform with, but I don’t believe he would have brutalised his pregnant wife in the way shown here, especially given his desire for living sons. Certainly he tyrannized her with power — mounting a ‘legal’ case against her removal on grounds of heresy. Nor was she locked in a martyrs cage — all his queens were confined to gentlewomanly apartments, with ladies to maintain them — and listen to them.

What we don’t get here is Katherine’s remarkable hysterics — her screaming in bed got everyone running throughout the palace and shamed the King into backing down. The shutting her out rings true, the domestic abuse not because they were probably never alone, with servants always loitering at a distance in the background. Angry, bad tempered, rotting and in pain certainly, but I think it would have gone against the King’s own inclinations to be seen as a courtly suitor to hurt his wife in such a fashion. More likely he would have felt it his dynastic right to move onto another wife if there were no children (i.e. sons) or a more entertaining women if he became bored of the company of his current nuptial companion.

He wasn’t above admiring other women at court in the Queen’s presence nor being jealous/spiritually concerned when she published an admired book in her own name. The film captures something of the intellectual sparring between husband and wife as Katherine Parr ‘admires’ a giggling young Howard woman noticed by the King, and turns her into a joke, getting her to sing horribly in public.

Vitally, the movie ignores that Henry VIII was used to being around women, especially strong women — he’d been raised in a household full of them and was at ease with them. Maybe so much so that he felt the need to prove himself as a merry and roistering manly man to his contemporaries. Unlike his brother, he wasn’t sent out to his own household — but kept at home, unexpectedly becoming heir to the throne. Which makes the small weeping boy, who can be seen in a painting of Henry VII, all the more poignant. He really cared for his mother because they’d spent so much time together; equally his grandmother laid all the structure in place for the workings of the Tudor court.

Unlike his wily father, perhaps feeling his usurper status in more ways than one as a second son, Henry VIII was much more influenced by those around him and created appalling factions at court through bustling men like the Howards and Seymours. In an earlier age there would have been yet another throne grabbing civil war — instead everyone competed to get their girls married to the King. We see something of this when the King forces a Seymour brother to dance with his wife at a May Day celebration — the uneasy watching before a pounce, and perhaps a death blow.

Another dramatic license is having all the children about being ‘family’ and uneasy onlookers to their father’s capricious behaviour. Whilst they visited court, all of them had their own households and spent little time together; Katherine Parr was certainly kind and inclusive, but not a nuclear family builder. Nor was she present alone at Henry’s deathbed in a Gothic denouement. Certainly Katherine expected to be Regent — and was shocked when the Seymours pushed her out. At the same time, she was finally married to the man she wanted to be with so perhaps this grievance was blunted.

However, what the movie does well is the clothes — no headbands with see-through gauze here. We get a proper sense of the cap-like construction of the headdress, the use of jewels, furs and finery to denote status. The life lived out in the open with a crowded court — a dog holder lurking on the outskirts desperate for a word with the King or someone who could influence him, the ‘Fool’ who could say and do anything, the well-behaved Queen with her loyal ladies around her, the diversity — even in Tudor Britain. We truly see a merry court, that past-time with good company, as his courtiers urge Henry on to play his greatest-hits musical compositions and cheer him on as he does so. Nonetheless, it’s a place where people rise and fall all the time (in public) depending on the King’s whim — and increasingly, his mood. No-one can afford to be too confident of the King’s favour.

Not addressed here, but creepy to think about, is how Seymour betrays Katherine to keep in with the King (and stay alive). And how this foreshadows how he will betray her again by making predatory moves towards Elizabeth I (who is in their care at the tim, e). Done well is Elizabeth’s desire to emulate Katherine’s learning and erudition, as well as her watchfulness. She’s learning political lessons too, alongside the literary ones.

The factions are captured well — the Seymours chuckling up to their nephew-King (future Edward VI) and sparring against each other — and the pushy Howards with their many beautiful women dangled infront of the King’s wandering gaze. The whispering in corners; Stephen Gardiner’s (Simon Russell Beale) intriguing watchfulness tipping the King into calling the guards and dispatching the axe at just the right moment by just a look — or a word or a shocking paper pushed forward. The Regency Council ruled by a woman! who has to push to keep her Lords attention (and bums on seats).

Notably and uniquely, it takes the faith of our ancestors seriously — what if people really believe, if their lives are bounded, guided and driven by faith? Anne Askew and Henry VIII are prime examples of this — but so too is Katherine Parr. Henry VIII even forces his Queen to pray repentant prayers — in Latin. At the same time, we see the growing popularity of a Bible written in a language people speak every day (and if they could read it, use it to think for themselves and question), where will it end?!!

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Cultures: Arts Reviews and Views by Susan Tailby
Cultures: Arts Reviews and Views by Susan Tailby

Written by Cultures: Arts Reviews and Views by Susan Tailby

By Susan Tailby. Appreciator of arts and culture; things I've seen and enjoyed and you might too! Reviews all my own opinion....Theatre, Movies, Dance & Art!