Coeur Loyal?

Dr David Starkey's new series about Henry VIII looks gloriously as if it is going to be about Henry VIII, rather than about his wives, who have come to be treated as if they were in themselves the point, or even terribly interesting in at least the middle four cases.

This is in the spirit of Diana, of course. And perhaps of Michelle Obama as things unfold. Though not of the WAGs: they really are the point. But in fact, even Henry VIII's first divorce was replete with theological and political issues that are ignored almost completely outside academia, and sometimes inside it.

That Perkin Warbeck first turned up in Ireland is an interesting insight into the importance of Ireland in the history of these islands as a whole, contrary to what is usually asserted or assumed right across any spectrum that you care to name. A whole series on that would be very worthwhile indeed.

And I don't know how this had never occurred to me before, but how closely related was Henry to Catherine of Aragon? His mother, Elizabeth of York, was descended from the Royal Lines of Portugal and Castille. And thus, via the old Moorish Kings of Seville, from Muhammad. Not the tar brush's only touching of the present Royal Family, which, though not descended from Henry VIII, is descended from Elizabeth of York through her daughter Margaret's Scottish marriage. The rest, as they say, is history.

There is more than one series in that, too. The Mooorish lines must have extended all over the courts of Europe. And not only the Moorish lines, of course. As Rabbi Lionel Blue (I once annoyed one of this blog's most partisan and parvenu readers by going to his birthday party instead of watching some interview with Tony Blair) told me a few years ago, the earliest written Spanish is in Hebrew characters.