David Starkey attacks ‘feminised’ history

Historian David Starkey has launched a thinly veiled attack on female authors such as Lady Antonia Fraser and films like Elizabeth by lambasting the "feminisation" of history in the run-up to his new series about Henry VIII.

He says that the obsession with Henry's wives is "bizarre" and lays the blame for that at the door of writers with an eye on sales, who have tried to tell the monarch's story through his marriages.

Among the guilty parties are Fraser, who wrote the best-selling book The Six Wives of Henry VIII; Alison Weir, author of a book with the same name; and Jessie Childs, who wrote the prize-winning Henry VIII's Last Victim.

Starkey told the Radio Times: "One of the great problems has been that Henry, in a sense, has been absorbed by his wives. Which is bizarre. But it's what you expect from feminised history, the fact that so many of the writers who write about this are women and so much of their audience is a female audience. Unhappy marriages are big box office."

The historian continued his attack by saying that until recently white men were the only important figures in European history. "If you are to do a proper history of Europe before the last five minutes, it is a history of white males because they were the power players, and to pretend anything else is to falsify," he told the Daily Telegraph.

He then appeared to take a dig at the romantic image of Elizabeth I fostered by film-makers: "The way she is presented as some sort of female icon is ludicrous," he said.

But Starkey insisted his comments were not a "value statement". "I'm not joining forces with Fathers for Justice," he added. "It is simply saying that our new world has its own set of prejudices, its set of distinctive lenses, and we need to be aware of them." ·