Postmodern and Conservative: The King’s Ministers in The Tudors

Abstract

It is perhaps too much of a truism among historians that popular culture, specifically Hollywood, almost always gets history wrong. Every few years, it seems, another Oscar-chasing film or prestige premium cable drama will claim, as The Tudors did in its opening credits, to tell the “real story,” undergraduate students will entertain some very dubious ideas about subjects near and dear to their history professors’ hearts, and the rot will spread, as illustrated by the belief that HBO’s Game of Thrones is somehow “medieval.”¹ As readers of this volume undoubtedly know, this problem is particularly acute when it comes to Henry VIII and his reign, not the least because as Mark Rankin, Christopher Highley, and John N. King recently have argued, Henry’s image was remarkably unstable in his own lifetime, as polemicists and playwrights sought to manipulate the figure of the king for their own political and aesthetic purposes.² As a result, construction of the myth of Henry VIII had already begun before the real Henry’s death, and in the intervening five centuries that myth has only grown, relentless in its omnivorous hunger for new expressions, emphases, and idioms. Such iterations inevitably present their narrative of Henrician England as the “right” one, hoping the audience will forget that stories are products of their time and tell us more about the moment in which they were produced than the historical figure, period, or process they purport to depict with accuracy.