Yes, Henry VIII really was that disgusting

On January 24, 1536, the 44-year-old Henry VIII was injured in a jousting accident. His horse fell on top of him, knocking him unconscious for two hours and tearing open an old injury in his leg. He would live for another eleven years, but that time saw the marked decline of the formerly lean and athletic king. By his sixth and final marriage to Catherine Parr in 1543, “burly king Harry” was a changed man. 

His obesity and increasingly sedentary lifestyle led to flare-ups of crippling gout, with one French diplomat tactfully writing that he was “marvellously excessive in eating and drinking”. This in turn worsened the infected ulcers on his leg, which doctors regularly lanced with red-hot pokers to keep them open and oozing foul pus. 

This is the pungent period of life presented in the new historical drama Firebrand, which sets Jude Law’s ailing Henry opposite Alice Vikander’s radiant Catherine. It’s just the latest bout of reputational wrestling that has been going on for some sixty years concerning England’s most notorious king. The 1970s gave us the sober seriousness of BBC Two’s The Six Wives of Henry VIII – but also the romping Carry on Henry (tagline: “a great guy with his chopper”). Yet by the early 2000s, Henry VIII was once again hot property, played as a dashing young bounder by Jonathan Rhys Meyers in The Tudors. Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy (and its BBC adaptations) further complicated the myth: her Henry, played by Damien Lewis in the series, was spiky, mercurial and spiteful – but also soulful, sensitive and insecure, a little boy lost in the voluminous garb of kingship. 

Now, it seems, the fall into disrepute is complete for the man who was, only a century ago, famed for offering the picture of English kingship at the Field of the Cloth of Gold. Firebrand’s Henry is a grasping monster, both literally and metaphorically putrid – a 16th Century “Harvey Weinstein,” as the Telegraph’s reviewer noted. When the film premiered at Cannes, Law made headlines talking about a perfume which he had specially brewed to inspire him in the role, featuring strong notes of “pus, blood, faecal matter and sweat”. Director Karim Aïnouz reportedly spritzed the set between takes, leaving crew members gagging, all to conjure up the grotesque wife-murderer who, Law suggests, courtiers could smell coming from “three rooms away”. 

It’s not the first time that an actor has used stench as an element of getting into character. Shia Labeouf fell out with his Fury cast-mates after deciding not to bathe for four months to transform into a Second World War tank crewman, while Daniel Day-Lewis, apocryphally, refused to wash for the entire shoot of The Crucible so that he could match the supposed hygiene standards of a 17th Century American settler. All of this is done in the name of accuracy, but how true-to-life are these efforts to capture the odours of the past? Would Henry really have reeked?

There’s no doubt that Henry’s many worsening ailments would have made him a particularly strong-smelling man in the final years of his life, but Dr William Tullett, an historian at the University of York who specialises in odours across time, warns that Law “falls into the trap of only engaging the foul and ignoring the fragrant”. There’s a myth that personal hygiene was far down the list of priorities for people in the past, and that we march forward in history towards a cleaner and more pleasant-smelling land. It’s propagated by some of our earliest encounters with history, like the scratch-n-sniff childrens’ books in the Smelly Old History series, one page of which gave readers a facsimile-whiff of Henry’s gangrenous toe.

In fact, Tullett argues, Tudors were very particular about odours, and had plenty of tricks at their disposal for disguising bad ones. Henry had his clothes regularly washed in “rosewater mixed with the spicy scent of cloves and the vanilla-scent of storax” while Thomas Vicary, the leading surgeon in London during Henry’s reign, “recommended a mix of water, vinegar, mint, and cloves for dealing with bad breath”. Sir Thomas Elyot wrote in his 1534 book The Castle of Health of the benefits of frequent bodily cleansing, further advising that you should “wash oftentimes your face and hands with pure vinegar mixed with rosewater”.

Notably absent from these lists is the bath. At a time when many suspected that disease entered the body through opened pores in the skin, bathing was seen as a surefire way to contract anything from the plague to the equally terrifying sweating sickness, the exact nature of which remains a mystery today (though an unknown strain of hantavirus is a probable candidate). The anxiety mainly surrounded public baths, however, where large numbers of people would crowd around and use the same water. Henry had fewer qualms when it came to using the private bathhouse he had constructed at Hampton Court (complete with hot and cold plumbing) and his steam bath at Richmond Palace, though even he avoided a full soak during periods of epidemic.

A regular bath might have been unusual for almost everyone in the Tudor period. But there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that people wanted to smell as good as they were able to – and the reasons for this weren’t purely social. Before the discovery of germs, people commonly subscribed to the miasmatic theory of disease transmission, which held that inhaling unpleasant smells could have serious consequences for a person’s body. Because the very quality of the air that a person breathed was bound up with their health, there was a far closer relationship between perfumery and medicine. 

The infamous plague masks, with their crow-like beaks stuffed with aromatics like dried lavender, camphor, vinegar-soaked sponge and juniper berry, date from the mid-17th Century (three hundred years after the Black Death) but they’re a direct product of this long-enduring way of thinking about disease. A Tudor ancestor of these masks would have been the “sweet bag”, a drawstring purse containing pleasant-smelling herbs that might be tucked in a closet with stored clothing or worn about town. 

Perfumes were one way of minimising scent, but the most important way in which Tudors cleaned themselves was a result of the very different way in which they wore clothes. For Firebrand, Vikander spoke about dressing in “seven, eight layers – it’s a 30 minute preparation in the morning”. As a reigning queen Catherine’s morning dress-routine would have been at the complex end of the spectrum, but even a moderately well-off Tudor would have worn more layers than we do today. 

Tudor undergarments for men typically included tight woollen hose and a linen shirt, covering the whole body. This protected the outer layers of clothing (those which were most visible, and most expensive) from the sweat and oils of the skin. With the exception of prominent figures with access to velvet or silk, the early modern wardrobe would have largely been constituted of clothing made from wool or linen, natural fibres that lasted longer and released odours more easily than today’s synthetic blends. 

Linen undergarments were changed frequently, and as an optional extra a wet linen cloth could have been wiped all over the body. The historian Ruth Goodman wrote about living under this cleanliness regime in her 2015 book How to Be a Tudor, remarking that whatever “slight smell” of bodily odour that may have arisen was “mostly masked by the much stronger smell of woodsmoke”. The opposite case meanwhile, washing the body but never the undergarments, led to a stench that was “impossible to ignore”. 

But what might we have actually smelled if we were at Henry’s deathbed? It was certainly a more maximalist smellscape than most Tudors would have been accustomed to. No doubt it would have been dominated by the rotten scent of pus, mixed with the animal stink of stool examinations and bloodletting. This would have combined, though, with a variety of powerful and pleasant smells designed to overwhelm, or at least counteract, the bad air. These would likely have included rosewater, but also animal extracts like musk, civet and ambergris. 

Ambergris in particular would have been a sign that this was no ordinary patient. The waxy grey substance made in the intestines of sperm whales remains expensive and famous for its earthy smell. The Spanish physician Nicholas Monardes wrote in 1569 that ambergris was worth “two times more than the most fine gold” and it had been used in Europe since the middle ages as a curative for migraines and epilepsy, both of which tormented the king throughout his life. 

This isn’t to suggest that, beyond Henry’s chambers, the prevailing scents of Tudor London were clean linen and rich perfume. After all, this was a city of cramped buildings and open sewers in the streets, thick with livestock, horses and woodsmoke. A quick scrub with a wet linen rag would be as much help as a figleaf in a hurricane. Nonetheless, it’s time to move on from the Monty-Pythonesque image of late Medieval life, with peasants scrabbling between patches of filth on the ground. We might equally ask what Henry and his fellow Tudors might have made of the fertile pong of our sewage-inundated rivers, the acrid air of car exhaust fumes, or any of the other smells that we take for granted in modern life.

At the far end of the Elizabethan period we see Shakespeare’s bumbling knight Falstaff, in the Merry Wives of Windsor, hiding from the man he is trying to cuckold in a laundry-basket rammed with “shirts and smocks, socks, foul stockings, greasy napkins” all of which combined into the “rankest compound of villainous smell that ever offended nostril”. It’s hard not to feel sorry for Vikander and the Firebrand crew, forced to grin and bear the daily olfactory assault – all to ahistorical ends. The Tudors experienced stench in just the same way we do now, and they worked hard to get rid of it. 

Firebrand is in cinemas from Sept 6