THE TUDORS: AND THE SHOW GOES ON

 I was finishing Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell trilogy when my Google algorithm brought to my attention that one more film on Henry VIII’s wives was in the works.  If my calculation is correct, it will be the twenty-eighth film centering on the Tudors and by association the Scottish Stuarts.  It is worth mentioning that one of the earliest silent movies (1895) was The Execution of Mary Stuart.  The new Tudor film is a thriller titled Firebrand. It focuses on the survival skills of Catherine Parr, the bluebeard king’s sixth wife and widow.  I keep wondering: Has something new and titillating been uncovered to justify making another film on the Tudors?  As in previous films, famous actors will lend their talents to the central characters: Jude Law will play the aging king and Alicia Vikander his cool young wife.

                                                   Thomas Cromwell painted by Hans Holbein The Younger

According to the film’s synopsis, Catherine’s short and poorly scrutinized life was also the stuff of high drama.  In 1543, when Henry spotted her and pressed her into marriage, she was hardly a spring chicken by the period’s standards.  She was twice-widowed, childless and in love with another man.  Now historians praise her brains, her wits and her savvy to endure her old, obese, cruel and paranoid husband in a time of renewed religious intrigues.   A convinced Protestant reformer, she managed to surreptitiously use her skills to influence her husband in making critical decisions.  She was on a mission to ensure that court intrigues did not stop the religious Reformation.  Along with wife # 1, Catherine of Aragon (three of Henry’s wives were named Catherine), Parr is regarded as Henry’s most politically savvy wife and is a character able to captivate the attention of a 21^st century movie audience.

The Tudor dynasty lasted 118 years from 1485, when Henry VII grabbed the throne, to 1603 when Elizabeth I died.  The dynasty was extraordinary for the period as it was nearly gender-balanced: the two queens, Mary and Elizabeth, ruled a total of 50 years and the three kings 66 years; Henry VIII being the longest reigning male monarch.  The Tudor mania is all about court intrigues, passion, adultery, lust, hedonism, theatrics, scandals, death sentences and gory executions.  Reality and fiction feed into one another.  For me, the Renaissance period in England and Scotland is intoxicating for mixing magnificence and government modernization with wanton bloodshed and deception.  The Tudors left a legacy of poetry, literature, music, beautiful architecture and strong government, contrasting with fickle political alliances, fratricide wars, and cutthroat (literally) political and religious carnage which could engulf and doom anyone.   

During his 37 year-long reign, Henry VIII may have sent to their deaths some 57,000 persons in addition to beheading two of his six wives.  Catholic Mary, Henry’s eldest daughter, was the first woman to rule England in her own right.  She got her moniker Bloody Mary for sending 280 Protestants to the stake to be burnt as heretics.  Fortunately, her reign was short, only five years.  She was outdone by her half-sister Elizabeth who during her 45 year-reign showed little mercy.  Hundreds of people, mostly alleged traitors and Catholic priests, were killed, either burnt or hanged and for good measure, a few of her supposed lovers.  Elizabeth was the daughter of beheaded Anne Boleyn and consequently she had a rather negative view of matrimony: husband dependency, alienation, cheating and death.  She chose not to marry.  The expression “taking no prisoners” could have been coined for Elizabeth.  She beheaded her most famous prisoner the Scottish queen, her cousin Mary Stuart.  In this mania category, the Stuarts are junior members.

The Tudors, and the Stuarts by association, also fared well on television, either with miniseries or documentaries, and with the theaters.  However, it is impossible to record the extensive written material about them.  I wonder how many historical publications, including novels, romances, children’s books, and articles have been published.  I stopped counting entries and references in Wikipedia.  This plethoric material makes history teachers cringe as their students are unable to dissociate the reality from the fiction!

My curiosity for the Tudors is collateral to my interest in the French Renaissance and the reign of Francis I of France who epitomized this period.  He and Henry VIII were obsessed by one another, a mix of brotherhood, rivalry and suspicion.  They met twice, with their first get-together 502 years ago in June 1520 near Calais, France, at the Field of Cloth of Gold.  I could hardly believe my history teacher who affirmed that the 18 days extravaganza cost US$ 19 m (modern equivalent).  The two dashing young men tried to upstage the other.  Francis was 23 and Henry 26.  Twelve thousand participants, including nobles, staff and servants were on hand to enjoy jousts, balls, wrestling matches, and clean the mess!  Two hundred sixteen thousand gallons of wine were glugged down.  This wasteful pageant came to nothing and the following year the two hotheaded leaders were fighting one another.

And Thomas Cromwell in all this?  He had not been invited to the Field of Cloth of Gold and was still out of the picture.  His life as a stateman only started in earnest in 1529.  I first found about him when I read Antonia Fraser’s The Six wives of Henry VIII (1971); I was in Australia and the book was a big hit among my girlfriends.  I had forgotten about him until I came across an article linking Thomas Cromwell to Guillaume de Nogaret[1].  Both were powerful “fixers” for their kings.  Their priorities were to put an end to the privileges of the church establishment in order to strengthen the royal authority and in the process, fill up the empty royal coffers.  Cromwell may have taken a page from the book of advocatus diaboli Guillaume de Nogaret.

Mantel’s trilogy[2] is a work of fiction on the rise and fall of Cromwell.  Very little is known of his personality: days before his beheading in July 1540, his relatives destroyed most of his archives to protect him from further treason and heresy charges.  Mantel puts flesh on Cromwell’s bones; this is a brilliant achievement as the three books run over 2000 pages and are page turner.  Mantel makes Cromwell seem human and somehow conscious of the risks he is taking and of his total dependance to the King’s whims.  Historians are less indulgent than Mantel.  Cromwell is regarded as the cunning, ruthless, manipulative, loyal bagman and “fixer” of an increasingly vindictive Henry VIII, doing his dirty work and getting rich and powerful in the process.  Expediency and bullying were Cromwell’s mantra.

I am no Tudor expert and regrettably I do not have Mantel’s writing talent.  Within these limits, it is hard to imagine Cromwell’s true self if different from that rendered by Mantel.  I nonetheless view Cromwell as a Renaissance man whose low birth put him at a disadvantage in a milieu of entitled lay-abouts.  He was a social climber, happy to belittle and terrorize his enemies and nag his peers while mimicking their lifestyle.  He compensated for his class inferiority by amassing power and wealth.  He was a leader of the English Reformation.  I may jump to an assumption: Cromwell may have been a closet Lutheran wrongly thinking that Reformation would bring the merit-based society he craved for.  His fall from royal grace was quick.   At the end, he got a taste of his own medicine.

I have started a new book: Francis Drake, Elizabeth I: In Search of a Kingdom by Laurence Bergreen.  The show goes on!

 

 

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[1] 1260-1313.  French stateman, councilor and keeper of the Seal of French king Philip IV.  He masterminded the arrest of the French Knights Templar, who were charged with heresy and burned at the stake in 1307.  The king seized their property.

[2] Wolf Hall, Bring up the Bodies and the Mirror and the Light.