Beauty is Imperfection

(Originally posted Tuesday, April 22, 2008 )

Showtime’s popular historical series “The Tudors” takes lots of liberties with the actual story of Henry VIII and the Great Matter of his first divorce and schism with the Catholic Church. What are some of the distortions the show has come up with in taking artistic license?

–*Though Henry VIII was a stud in his youth like Jonathan Rhys Meyers, by the time he started courting Anne Boleyn, he was already in his late 30s and likely starting to turn into an ulcerous fat fuck.

–*Henry was a giant husky type rather than a wiry, slithery type. That’s why he remained such a hug-a-bear after he started drawing, quartering and disemboweling everybody he ever loved.

–*Henry’s fetching younger sister was actually named Mary, and rather than marry the aging Portuguese king, she actually married the aging king of France, Louis. And rather than smother him to death with a pillow in their bedchamber, she more than likely fucked him to death.

–*The real Catherine of Aragon was a multi-talented princess of the Renaissance with a great mind who liked to laugh, whereas in the series she is some kind of rosary-saying, Crucifix-clutching Catholic robot whose dialogue seems to be written by machines at IBM.

–*Henry had an illegitimate son by his mistress Bessie Blount named Henry FitzRoy. Since all of Henry’s progeny were bastards at one point or another, FitzRoy could likely have been anointed heir to the throne at a crucial point, but luckily for posterity he dropped dead at age 17 of consumption.

–*Henry’s chancellor, Thomas Cardinal Wolsey, did not commit suicide, which would be a pretty fast-track way to hell for a cleric.

–*He was, however, guilty of simony, nepotism, graft, selling of indulgences, mass groupie fucking, and all the other things that made the Protestant Reformation the best reformation ever!

–*Nobody tried to shoot Anne Boleyn with a matchlock rifle out a window Lee Harvey Oswald-style during her coronation progress. Everybody did mutter under their breath that she was a scrofulous slut-bag, however.

–*Henry VIII did not write “Greensleeves,” whose stylistic inconsistency with the period would make it about as likely that he wrote Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart.”

–*Anne Boleyn didn’t rail on about idolatry–because like every other neurotic superstitious girl she had one of those weird Virgin Mary things that it took even heretics a long time to grow out of.

–*Anne’s brother George is seen in the show to be both a serious womanizer and a homosexual. This is confusing, but so is the history on the matter. It was the 1530s. Maybe you just had to be there.

–*Anne’s father wasn’t likely fomenting a vast court intrigue to gain power. It is more likely he turned his daughters over to the king simply because he was an obsequious douche bag who got some extra scratch out of it. “Here you go, king. I got ’em all warmed up for ye.”

–*What’s correct, however, is that if Catherine of Aragon had been a bit more fuckable, we would all be living in a very different world.