Until its final act, Karin Ainouz’s Firebrand is a phenomenal and frankly overdue retelling of how the final wife of Henry VIII barely escaped her unwanted marriage with her head intact.
The real and unbelievable saga of Catherine Parr, the last of the English king’s six wives, is woefully untold, and when fictionalized, usually as an afterthought to the dramatic executions of wives two and four (Anne Boleyn and her cousin Katherine Howard, respectively), Parr is usually portrayed as a comely enough but middle-aged matron.
In Firebrand, Parr, who was likely 34 years old on the fateful summer her 55-year-old husband almost murdered her, is finally done justice by the slight yet steely Alicia Vikander. Unlike placid prior tellings that gloss over the sheer horror of Henry in his later years, Vikander’s Catherine Parr isn’t just relegated to serving an ailing, corpulent, and unrecognizably grotesque Jude Law as Henry at his bedside (though we do get to witness Catherine personally putting maggots on his ulcerated leg after Henry demands she treats him personally) — the primary work expected of Catherine, like all of Henry’s wives, is within his bed and under his body, which amounted to nearly 400 pounds at the time of his death.
But for all the flawless casting, costumes uncharacteristically accurate for the Tudor fictional drama, and narrative setup that correctly establishes the stakes of Catherine’s Protestant faith in a court dominated by Catholic dogma, Firebrand fails in its conclusion. Although Law describes the film’s revisionist ending as an attempt to “steal back the narrative” to tell “a story about a great woman,” Firebrand forgets that Catherine’s real-life maneuvering is not just stranger than his fiction, but also a good deal more feminist.
In both real life and the film, it is 1546 when the Catholic Bishop Stephen Gardiner and Lord Chancellor Wriothesley begin putting their plots against Catherine, who would openly discuss new religious trends and debate but whom they correctly suspected of holding deep Protestant convictions in secret. Although Henry had been thrilled by Catherine’s competence as regent when he went to war in France in 1544 and her performance as a stepmother to his three motherless children, Catherine, like the rest of Henry’s later wives, never recorded a pregnancy with the increasingly porcine and obese king, and unlike wives one and four (Catherine of Aragon and Anne of Cleves, respectively, both foreign princesses in their own rights), Catherine had no royal family abroad to save her from the axe if Henry decided to discard her.
The Catholic faction got its chance to move against Catherine when they arrested the Evangelical preacher Anne Askew, primarily due to her advocacy for sola scriptura and the English-language Bible and her denial of transubstantiation. Although Askew implicates members of Catherine’s royal household in her religious activities even after being tortured for days, the Catholic faction used Askew’s execution for heresy as a pretext to turn Henry against Catherine. Henry gave Gardiner his approval to arrest Catherine for heresy, and it is here that the film and the historical record depart.
In the film, a helpless Catherine is arrested, begs for mercy, and when she’s finally back in enough favor to traverse the king’s lodgings unsupervised, an about-face that is unsatisfactorily explained, she kills Henry in cold blood, strangling him to death.
Per the admission of the film’s own director, the real Catherine obviously did not murder her husband. She wasn’t even in the same palace at the time of his death. And while the real story has Catherine execute far less violence, it allows her a good deal more agency.
As best as we know, according to the history documented at the time, after Henry approved Catherine’s arrest, a member of Catherine’s household found the arrest warrant accidentally dropped in a hall and informed the queen immediately. Catherine became understandably apoplectic, after which Henry sent his personal physician, Thomas Wendy, to attend to her. Wendy reportedly warned Catherine that the king was ready to follow through on his arrest warrant, lest she “conform herself unto the king’s mind” and “show her humble submission to him.”
Heeding Wendy’s warning, Catherine promised the king that whatever new religious fads she had discussed with him, she had only done so not out of actual interest in the growing Protestant movement but rather to distract him from his ulcerated leg.
“Since, therefore, that God hath appointed such a natural difference between man and woman, and your Majesty being so excellent in gifts and ornaments of wisdom, and I a silly poor woman, so much inferior in all respects of nature unto you, how then cometh it now to pass that your Majesty, in such diffuse causes of religion, will seem to require my judgment? which when I have uttered and said what I can, yet must I, and will I, refer my judgment in this, and in all other cases, to your Majesty’s wisdom, as my only anchor, supreme head and governor here in earth, next under God, to lean unto,” Catherine reportedly said. Henry, happy with Catherine’s concession that she was simply a loving wife and foolish woman, declared they were “perfect friends” again.
In a final display of his complete descent into absolute tyranny and probable mental illness, Henry intentionally neglected to inform Wriothesely. After the newly reconciled couple walked into a garden for a leisurely stroll the next day, the Lord Chancellor tried to execute the arrest warrant that Henry had personally approved. Henry then lambasted Wriothesely as a “knave” and “beast” and banished him from his sight.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
In a matter of months, Henry would die of some combination of natural causes resulting from his jousting accidents and gluttony, while Catherine would go on to publish the Protestant masterpiece, The Lamentation of a Sinner, a blockbuster conversion narrative that permanently influenced her two Protestant stepchildren and thus the England that would go on to forever leave Catholicism behind. Catherine, who also rapidly married the real love of her life just weeks after Henry’s death, is the first woman in English history to publish under her own name.
While it’s nice to think that at least one of Henry’s wives would have been able to stick it to their abuser in person, the real Catherine Parr exacted a victory far more formidable. In outlasting Henry, she continued to educate two of the next three English monarchs in Protestant theology, and thanks to their reigns, the Church of England remains solidly independent of Rome to this day. Catherine did so with the weapon that Henry loved to deny women, her intelligence, ultimately outwitting Henry as well. That ending may be less cathartic, but it’s a good deal more satisfying, as the truth usually is.