The King’s In-Laws in The Tudors

Abstract

In On the Family, Leon Battista Alberti identified acquiring awful in-laws as one of the most calamitous things that could happen to a man in search of a wife: “I think that no one is so great a fool that he would not rather remain unmarried than burden himself with terrible relatives.”¹ Henry VIII was unusual in that he had six opportunities to get it right—or wrong—when it came to assessing the tolerability of the in-laws he acquired along with his spouses. Indeed, the monarch was fortunate in the talent and industry he was able to extract from the male relatives of his English brides while those queens were in favor. Unlike the families to which Alberti alluded, the king did not have to suffer horrible relatives for very long because they were discarded as easily as his wives. Ironically, while The Tudors depicts a highly proactive family politics wherein relatives strategically engineer liaisons and marriages to the king, Michael Hirst—executive producer and writer of the series—is just as reactive as the historical Howard, Boleyn, and Seymour men. Whereas they had to react to the vagaries of their king’s lust, Hirst has to respond to the vagaries of actor availability, the tight time constraints of commercial television, the viewing audience’s ability to follow tangled family relationships among people who often shared the same names, and the need to showcase Jonathan Rhys Meyers as Henry VIII along with his complicated marital history.