Did Christina of Denmark REALLY Say "If I Had Two Heads..."?

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Did Christina of Denmark really tell Henry VIII, "If I had two heads, one would be at His Majesty's disposal"?

It's one of the most famous quotations associated with Henry VIII's search for a fourth wife. Christina, the young widowed Duchess of Milan, was considered as a possible bride for the Tudor king in 1538, and the story goes that she responded to Henry's interest with this wonderfully cutting remark.

But did she actually say it?

This question came up in the comments on my recent video about Henry VIII and Anne of Cleves, when someone claimed that the famous quotation first appeared in Martin Hume's 1905 book, The Wives of Henry VIII.

I knew I'd seen it earlier than that, so I went down a historical rabbit hole to see just how far back I could trace it.

In this video, I follow the quotation through nineteenth-century histories to a fascinating seventeenth-century account by German artist and art historian Joachim von Sandrart, who had actually seen Hans Holbein the Younger's famous portrait of Christina in England.

But Sandrart's version isn't quite the quotation we know today.

I also look at the contemporary diplomatic evidence surrounding Henry's proposed marriage to Christina, including what Thomas Wriothesley reported about Christina's attitude towards the match, and a wonderfully dry comment made by Christina's aunt, Mary of Hungary, about Henry VIII's treatment of his wives.

So, did Christina of Denmark really make the famous "two heads" remark? Or are we looking at a story that developed long after the events of 1538?

Join me as I follow the evidence and try to find out.

The National Gallery's current scholarly catalogue likewise describes the two-heads story as apocryphal and identifies Sandrart as the first known source for it.

Sources include: Joachim von Sandrart, Teutsche Academie (1675) Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Henry VIII Calendar of State Papers, Spain Henry William Herbert, Memoirs of Henry VIII of England (1856) The Herald and Genealogist (1863) Martin Hume, The Wives of Henry VIII (1905) Retha M. Warnicke, The Marrying of Anne of Cleves Susan Foister, National Gallery catalogue entry for Holbein's Christina of Denmark

National Gallery: Christina of Denmark, Duchess of Milan