The lives and marriages of Henry VIII and his wives
Recently a historian friend of mine put some data on Facebook about Henry VIII of England and his wives. It showed how old the women were when they married him, how old when they died and how old he was when he married them. It provoked a reaction in me that has happened before with historical data – at the same time thinking “this is really cool” and “but it’s really frustrating because I know I’m not understanding it as much as I could”. This has happened before with data on wealth inequality and definitions of stages in someone’s life.
In all cases, including this one, I visualised the data. This helped me to understand it, and I’m blogging about it in case it helps you understand it too. Also, I’ll describe why I made it the way I did, because visualisations aren’t bias-free objective truths, but instead are curated and therefore also subjective.
The data
The data that inspired this was great for a quick social media post, but not enough to support a visualisation. I got the data for the visualisation from Wikipedia, starting with the page on Henry VIII and his wives. I think that Wikipedia is reliable enough for this kind of subject. Due to limitations of the tool I used (see below), each date needed a full date and not just a year, so when the source gave only a year (such as for Anne Boleyn’s birth) I picked 1st June as a date fairly near the middle of the year.
The visualisation
This is a screen shot of the visualisation
The proper visualisation can’t be hosted directly on my blog due to limitations with WordPress, so you will have to click elsewhere to see it. In the proper one, if you hover over the elements of the timelines you can see the date range and description for each.
Another historian friend of mine also saw the data and was able to interpret it much better than I could. She said: 5/6 of his marriages were just a massive mid-life crisis, and I hope that the diagram makes that clear. He married Catherine of Aragon when he was not quite 18, and separated from her just under 24 years later when he was not quite 42. He’d been married to her for over half of his life to that point. He fitted his remaining 5 marriages into the following 13 years (with some gaps between them).
Henry was Catherine’s second husband – she had previously been married to his older brother Arthur until Arthur’s death. The only other person in the diagram to be married more than once (other than Henry) is his last wife, Catherine Parr. She married two other men before Henry, with both marriages ending in her husband’s death. After Henry’s death she married again, with that marriage ending in her death.
Note that with every visualisation it’s important to consider what has been left out? In this case there’s no mention of children, which in royal families can be very important. There’s also nothing about the religious turmoil of the time, with the power struggles and other large consequences. These are all left out to make it clearer to see what remains.
Why I made it this way
I wanted to show how people’s relationship status changed over time, and also to show several people so you could compare them easily. My original idea was a line graph, with a line per person that had time as the x value and their age as the y value. I would then colour different sections of each line to show how people’s relationship status changed.
This would have been better than the current visualisation at showing people’s age at key events. However, all the lines would have the same slope – everyone would get 1 year older every year they were alive. This means the slope would be meaningless and so be a slightly confusing and irritating detail. I went for horizontal bars instead which, along with vertical bars, is a fairly neutral orientation.
I thought calendar time would be a better choice for the x axis than the person’s age (which would mean all the bars would line up at the left, at age=0). I decided against this because the same period of time (a particular marriage) would involve two people at the same calendar time ranges but different age ranges, so the same marriage would show up in two different positions on the x axis for the two people involved. This didn’t seem right to me, so I went for calendar time as the x axis.
Initially I showed only the marriages, but this meant you couldn’t see when people were born and when they died (unless a marriage was ended by their death). The marriages seemed to be the most important thing, so they got colours but the other things were grey. I also added in periods between marriages (as in Henry, Catherine of Aragon and Catherine Parr) otherwise their timelines didn’t hang together as a whole due to the white space left between marriages.
All Henry’s marriages are shown in shades of blue to show how they’re similar but different things. When a woman is married to Henry this is shown in purple, which is a royal colour, and marriages to other people are in a fairly neutral green.
Technology
The visualisation uses an extension to ChartJS for creating timelines in parallel, called ChartJS Chart Timeline. It was created for an old version of ChartJS, and hasn’t been updated to work with more modern versions. This is often the case with open source projects – someone has a problem, the project is created to solve it, then the solution is generously offered to the world. However, after the excitement of solving the problem passes, they won’t or can’t invest effort in maintaining the code as the world around it changes.
The tooltips (the rectangles that appear when you hover over sections of the timelines) originally displayed dates differently. They used the US MM/DD/YYYY format for dates, and showed hours, minutes and seconds too. Less than a day was a confusing amount of extra detail, and I wanted UK DD/MM/YYYY dates. As this flexibility wasn’t available, I copied the code locally and edited it so that it only did things the way I wanted them.
I looked into several alternatives, from Excel to other Javascript libraries. These were rejected for a variety of reasons, ranging from needing too many workarounds to needing a lot of effort because the building blocks provided were tiny and too general-purpose.
Conclusion
I hope that the visualisation gives you a slightly better understanding of the key dates for Henry VIII and his wives – when they were born, when they died, and when marriages started and ended. Thanks to the two historians mentioned earlier for their inspiration and many other things.