Katharine Parr, The Sixth Wife

by Alison Weir

‘Divorced, beheaded, died//Divorced, beheaded, survived’ is the rhyme by which we remember what Henry VIII, who ruled England from 1509-1547, did to each of his six wives. He was the second ruler in the new Tudor dynasty, after the death of his father, Henry VII. Historian Alison Weir has done the world a huge service by recreating the lives of Henry VIII’s wives by means of a historical novel about each of them, her Six Tudor Queens series.  This is the last in the series, about Katharine Parr, the wife who survived Henry. Like all the books in the series, this is a historical novel that appeals to the historian, a reconstruction of a life rather than a lyrical flight of imagination.