Introduction

Abstract

“You think you know a story, but you only know how it ends. To get to the heart of the story, you have to go back to the beginning.” Thus does a voiceover by Jonathan Rhys Meyers as Henry VIII introduce each of the thirty-eight episodes of Showtime’s The Tudors. His statement is one with which historians can only agree. Regrettably, its apparent promise of concern for historical accuracy is one on which four seasons and thirty-five hours of the hugely popular cable television series largely fail to deliver. More revealing of what is to come is that the first episode starts not in 1509, the real beginning of Henry’s reign, but c. 1518 with the well-staged but fictitious assassination of Henry’s nonexistent uncle, followed in rapid succession by the king being “inconsolable,” angrily calling for war with France, and gleefully having sex with Bessie Blount, all within a few minutes both on-screen and in the storyline. From there the anachronisms, time compression, distortions, and outright inventions multiply, mingling with occasional moments of historicity and culminating with Henry agreeing with Thomas Moreand Thomas Wolsey’s proposal to create something that sounds like the League of Nations.¹