Why the Tudors still enrapture Americans
Tiana Lowe
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New York City may never sleep, but its tourist hot spots usually slow down quite a bit in the gloomy, gray depths of January. The crowds at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, its bastion of culture known internally just as “the Met,” usually thin out in midweek mornings, during the post-New Year’s hangover especially, so suffice to say it was astounding to see the penultimate day of a flagship exhibition absolutely packed on a dreary Thursday morning.
Overheard in the final hours of The Tudors: Art and Majesty in Renaissance England were not “King Henry VIII,” or “his daughters, Queen Mary I and Queen Elizabeth I,” or even “the author of Utopia and Catholic martyr Thomas More.” Instead, scurrying hordes, almost all of whom had at least one resident amateur historian, simply referred to “Anne” and “Jane” and “Hans” and “Margaret.”
PRINCE HARRY LET’S DIANA’S KILLER OFF THE HOOK
That the West has been gripped by Tudormania for over a decade now is, at this point, passe to even point out. From the literary success of Hilary Mantel’s anti-Catholic screed, Wolf Hall, to Showtime’s sexy soap opera of the family, catapulting Henry Cavill as Charles Brandon and Natalie Dormer as Anne Boleyn to fame, the Tudors have dominated the cultural milieu on both sides of the pond. But surely a couple of hundred museumgoers trekking to the Upper East Side on a particularly miserable morning aren’t shelling out $30 to the museum to recall Superman’s abs. So what is it about this 500-year-old English family that still captures the descendants of the colonies that fought to war for the right to ignore the crown?
From a meta-perspective, the entire West is indebted to the dynasty, which ruled from 1485 through 1603, by accident of history and biology. Henry VII never intended to become a humanist icon through his rise to kingship, which required a Machiavellian exercise of virtue to win his throne by right of conquest rather than by his blood claim or his marriage to the true heiress, Elizabeth of York. And Henry VIII killed in his attempt to ensure that it was a son, not his history-defying daughter, who would cement the Tudor dynasty’s importance in the modern world. And to the intense dismay of contemporary true believers, Henry VIII only broke from Rome in the pursuit of his own omnipotence, not because of any principled opposition to the Catholic Church. (For those wondering why the current sovereign, Charles III, is styled as the “Defender of the Faith,” read Henry VII’s Defence of the Seven Sacraments, a Catholic diatribe so fierce the pope himself rewarded the English king with the title that he kept, even after renouncing papal authority.)
But better than any founding of proto-feminism by Anne Boleyn and her daughter, the establishment of the Reformation in the English-speaking world, or thoroughly modern transition of power — that we get power by taking it — is the illustration of all of the above.
The Tudor dynasty coincided with the widespread dissemination of the printing press and the apex of the English language, both as its status as a respectable vernacular used as court, as opposed to the previous status granted toward the French language, and its development from Middle English. Furthermore, the artistic Renaissance also finally reached Great Britain, with the Tudors fully utilizing the visual arts for both pleasure and power. But the best way to understand the latter is through the former.
As students of the Reformation know, the great Desiderius Erasmus, whose portrait by Hans Holbein the Younger was featured in the Met exhibition, began a great religious reckoning with his novel translation of the Bible. A stark departure from the Catholic Church’s chosen Latin translation, the Vulgate, Erasmus based his translations on manuscripts far older than Jerome’s basis for the Vulgate. Erasmus’s translation formed the basis of the Tyndale Bible, which in turn, forms the basis of The Great Bible, the first English Bible ever authorized. This Bible, endorsed by Henry VIII, was also featured in the exhibit and, of course, is the predecessor to the King James Bible, which dominates contemporary Christendom.
That religious debates — no longer restricted to the handwritten word, no longer restricted to the walls of monasteries, no longer in an English language remote from ours today — undergirds the entire Tudor era. At least two of Henry’s wives found themselves facing the ax due to ill-advised writings. Although Catherine Parr, a Protestant who became the first woman in the English language to ever publish in her own name, survived Henry’s wrath, a love letter to her extramarital paramour ultimately sent the teenage Kitty Howard to the block.
And even today, a century after the success of woman’s suffrage, half a century after the sexual revolution, sometimes popular opinion get the Tudors, and especially its women, all wrong. Consider that letter Catherine Howard wrote to Thomas Culpeper. Howard, who as a young teenager had been passed around older men frequenting her relatively unsupervised quarters at Lambeth Palace, wrote to whom may have been her first true love, “It makes my heart die to think what fortune I have that I cannot always be in your company.” The Met exhibit provided a visual illustration via Henry’s obtuse armor as to how obese the king, pushing 50, was when he married the girl, who may have been as young as 15.
Surely our ultra-feminist Hollywood would consider the power dynamics of this minor child forced to become this stinking, domestic abuser’s fifth wife! Alas, Showtime’s The Tudors chose to portray Howard exactly as Henry wanted the world to see her: a manipulative whore who played his entire court.
Tudor paintings, however striking, do not tell the whole story, either then or now. Just as the fattening, stinking, and increasingly impotent Henry VIII failed to see that the comely Anne of Cleves indeed matched the charming visage captured by Holbein — sadly absent from the exhibitions in the States — Tudor portraiture, as much propaganda as art, has immortalized figures such as Margaret Beaufort as the pious old woman who ruled the court, rather than allow us to reflect on the 12-year-old victim of marital rape that ultimately produced Henry VII, and thus, the dynasty.
But whatever Hans Holbein then or Hollywood now misses, the merry Met-goers did not.
“There is Catherine, who was actually innocent.”
“There is Elizabeth, who was not actually a virgin.”
“There’s not even a portrait of Elizabeth of York, who actually had the best claim to the throne her husband took.”
The written word, now as then, will continue to unearth whatever our eyes refuse to see.
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