In the 18th century, society beauties would show their displeasure at tiresome men by slowly drawing their fans across the palm of their hand - a gesture that might have come in useful for countless female historians last week at the latest outburst from “the rudest man in Britain”, the gay television historian David Starkey.

History, he proclaimed in the Radio Times, had been “feminised” because “so many of the writers who write about [it] are women and so much of their audience is a female audience”. Even the subject of his latest television series, Henry VIII, had been “absorbed by his wives”, he said, “which is bizarre”.

Sternly butch stuff like the Reformation and the dissolution of the monasteries has, he seems to think, been pushed aside by billowing shirts, brocaded leg-overs and marital problems: “Unhappy marriages are big box office.”

In a fresh provocation he has since claimed that attempts to beef up female historical figures into “power players” tend towards “falsifying facts”: the portrayal of Elizabeth I as “some sort of female icon is ludicrous”. History should, in short, tiptoe out of the boudoir and back onto the battlefield.

Unsurprisingly the response has been acerbic. “It’s hardly news that he’s never batted for the girls’ team,” says Lisa Hilton, author of Athenais: The Real Queen of France, about a mistress of Louis XIV, and Mistress Peachum’s Pleasure, a biography of Lavinia, Duchess of Bolton. Starkey, she says, is simply “gendering what he clearly feels is the vulgarity of popular taste by choosing to dismiss it as female”.

Nor does the assertion that “female” history is little more than backstairs gossip impress Anne Applebaum, the American historian. “There are plenty of men who fill their history books with gossip and plenty of women who don't,” says the author of the monumentally impressive and distinctly ungossipy Gulag, a 720-page account of the Stalinist atrocities.

She adds dryly: “I can’t, alas, tell the difference between male and female historians.”

Amanda Foreman, author of the hugely acclaimed and bestselling Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, is also perplexed by Starkey’s outburst. “How could you write about a world if half the people are missing?” she asks.

“No one is claiming Nelson was a woman in drag or that Clementine Churchill led the discussions between Stalin and Roosevelt at Yalta. I say bring on the women: there is plenty of room for everyone.”

Not only plenty of room for female historical figures, but female consumers, too. Indeed, Starkey would do well to recognise that, according to BML, the market research company, one in three purchasers of history books is female. (Chaps who have everything comprise only one in four “end-users” of such books, but history is right up there with aftershave and socks as the staple stand-by gift for them.)

Kate Williams, the author of Becoming Queen: How a Tragic and Untimely Death Shaped the Reign of Queen Victoria, feels that the growth in what Starkey terms “feminised history” is part of a larger rise “in demand for books investigating our past, much of it fuelled by television”.

She says his attack on female history seems to be implying that “it is time to reform the reader - and teach her to appreciate men”.

But isn’t Starkey even a little bit right? It’s interesting to link these new jibes with earlier ones: his criticism of the BBC’s The Tudors as “gratuitously awful” certainly seemed fair enough. The series, starring a bare-chested Jonathan Rhys Meyers as Henry VIII, forever romping about in four-poster beds astride an endless succession of Tudor totty, in between travelling around in Victorian carriages, struck few of us as the BBC’s finest hour.

It may have been designed for women, although the sheer number of heaving bosoms suggested that it had a male audience in mind, too. Either way, camp didn’t begin to describe it.

Starkey’s case against what the Radio Times unfortunately dubs “the henhouse” isn’t helped, of course, by the fact that he himself has often capitalised on his audience’s thirst for “female” history.

In 2001 he produced his own Channel 4 documentary series, The Six Wives of Henry VIII, and only last month he was waxing lyrical about Henry’s “emotional incontinence”, which he diagnosed after a close examination of the monarch’s handwriting - and attributed to Henry’s upbringing in a household full of women.

His claim that there have been few female figures in European history worthy of serious treatment probably does deserve a closer examination, however. “It is a history of white males because they were the power players,” he said, “and to pretend anything else is to falsify.”

Certainly there’s a type of history writing today which is so guilt-stricken and confused that it can hardly bear to take any notice of dead white men at all. As Tom Holland, the author of Rubicon and Persian Fire, puts it: “There is a desperate desire nowadays to pretend that European history doesn’t chiefly consist of white men doing appalling things to one another, but the evidence is overwhelmingly stacked against it. Who have you got to set in the balance against Julius Caesar or Henry VIII or Napoleon or Hitler - Mary Seacole?”

This much is unarguable. There has been no female Napoleon or Hitler, which some feminists might chalk up as another triumph for the sisterhood. But Starkey’s characteristic preference for the grandstand statement rather than the reasonable observation lets him down again. A proper history of Europe, to him, is a “history of white males”, not largely or principally but tout court. Yet if you tried to understand the history of Europe solely in terms of dead white males, you would miss some pretty important episodes.

Roman history would be incomprehensible without taking account of cunning operators such as Messalina or Agrippina. Indeed, without the latter’s machinations her son Nero would never have become emperor. If Mark Antony hadn’t been so distracted by a certain Cleopatra, sole ruler of Egypt, he might have defeated Augustus at the battle of Actium and things could have turned out very differently.

Then there was Helena, mother of Constantine, under whose powerful influence the emperor decided that the Roman empire should become Christian. Without her, today Rowan Williams would probably be a priest of Mithras.

Following Starkey’s preference for white males, try telling the history of Europe without reference to Boadicea, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Joan of Arc, Catherine de’ Medici, Elizabeth I, Catherine the Great, Victoria. It would be quite impossible. None of these women were mere wives with walk-on parts, soap opera lovers and paramours. They were all “power players” in their own right, as was Anne Boleyn, whose status as something of an intellectual has been established by no less an authority than . . . Starkey.

For let’s not forget that it was Henry VIII’s colourful private life - or “soap opera” as Starkey has described it - that led directly and incontrovertibly to the rift with Rome and from there to the Reformation.

Furthermore, as Holland points out: “There is perhaps a case for saying that women are to blame for history starting up in the first place. According to Herodotus, in the second paragraph of the first work of history ever written, the reason why East and West, Asia and Europe, are doomed to clash for evermore is all down to a Greek princess having had an affair with a Levantine trader.”

For the moment, however, they will just have to rise above it. “The worst thing women historians can do is get hysterical because Dr Starkey has called us stupid,” concludes Hilton.

“I've just written a book about English queens, but this one is beneath my notice.”

Was that the sound of a fan snapping shut?

Henry VIII: Mind of a Tyrant is on Channel 4 tomorrow

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