Oh for sure… I mean, even if she hadn’t had several pregnancies, that like…still happens? Our metabolisms slow as we age, so people tend to put on weight later in life. The same thing happened to Henry, too, even before the significant leg injuries; we can tell by the increasing measurements of his armour.
There’s a lot of fatphobic…tones, at the very least, by a lot of historians, if not an outright fatphobic rhetoric/commentary. Starkey’s speech for the five-hundred-year mark of Henry VIII’s included fatphobic remarks about COA (comparing her to Queen Victoria and making snide remarks about her weight as well) that I particularly did not care for.
Tbh, they can all spare me with the ‘he had totally fell out of love/devotion with her’ when they mark it as far earlier than it realistically was. He literally nearly caused an international incident that ambassadors had to smooth over (#Beardgate) in 1520 because she told him to shave. If he was ~repulsed~ by the inevitable weight gain of six previous pregnancies, then how exactly was she pregnant in 1518? Magic?
I think the trouble is the likes of Tudor (and Henry VIII) fanboys like Starkey are unable to contemplate that Harry boy was a prick, so naturally anything and everything was the fault of the women in his life.
Catherine of Aragorn? Too old! Too fat! A nagging shrew! (because she didn’t just roll over when he chased Anne Boleyn). Yes she must have committed perjury because how dare she tell a different story to Henry about whether or not her marriage to his brother had been consummated? Never mind that Henry stacked the deck as hard as he could when trying to have his marriage annulled and was the one pushing to have it done so he could marry his new squeeze – he was telling the truth, she was lying (even the more sympathetic ones take his side over hers on this).
I’m ride or die for Catherine (sorry, Anne Boleyn people) and I think Henry had a wife and partner and co-monarch in her that frankly the fuckboy did not deserve. See how he later behaved when Anne became inconvenient to him.
Dismissing Starkey as a “Henry VIII fanboy” is hardly called for. He’s an established historian that specialized in him in his studies, he certainly admires aspects of Henry VIII; but his work about him is not absent of criticism of him, either. In the same 500-year speech he said Henry was “roasting away in hell”, so he can’t be accused of undue sentimentality towards him.
Whether she lied about the consummation of her first marriage or was telling the truth about its absence also doesn’t have much to do with fatphobia. The issue with the marriage was not that she was ‘too old’ for Henry (it was the smallest age gap of all his romantic relationships); but that she was menopausal and thus too old to have children, and there was no male heir yet. To imply he ‘tired of her because she gained weight’ misrepresents the situation and leaves out several key factors and modernizes 16th century beauty standards, and that was primarily my issue with it. Although, certainly to characterize ‘nagging shrew’ would also be misogynistic and uncalled for.
COA was successful when left as regent. She was a successful queen consort in all except securing an heir. The marriage had also ceased to be as politically advantageous as he had hoped in terms of a foreign alliance. Whether he ‘deserved’ her as a wife is somewhat irrelevant to this discussion, but if the implication is that he didn’t deserve her because he attempted to annul the marriage, I would point out that most kings of the time in similar situations would (and had done, in the past) done the same.
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