“But when you realise it’s got 16th-century urine in it, it’s fantastic.”Despite some enjoyable rootling around in the palace’s storerooms, we never found the pisspot. “It doesn’t look anything at all,” she said. Traces were, she said, to be found on one of her favourite artefacts – a pisspot excavated in Henry VIII’s privy garden.There is a whole subgenre of racy romantic fiction about Anne Boleyn, the most obsessed-over of Henry’s queens, with such titles as The Kiss of the Concubine and Between Two Kings. The Six Wives of Henry VIII et al are the serious-to-popular history books but there are also avalanches of fictional Tudors, on screen and in novels. (The next most popular period was the 19th century, with two-and-a-half shelves.) The Tudor titles were mostly variations on a very limited set of themes: The Six Wives of Henry VIII Henry VIII: King and Court Elizabeth the Queen The Elizabethans Young Henry: the Rise of Henry VIII Six Wives: the Queens of Henry VIII Elizabeth’s Women.The Tudors, it seems, are everywhere, neatly calibrated to appeal to every register of age, taste and education. In the British history section of my local Waterstones, in a not terribly royalist part of London, I measured four shelves of Tudoralia, covering the period from Henry VII’s snatching of the crown on Bosworth field in 1485 to the death of Elizabeth I in 1603.
![]() ![]() They have also stoked the national appetite for more and more Tudor things. For the purposes of The Tudors, however, she did it naked.)Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, Hilary Mantel’s bestselling, Man Booker prize-winning novels, have been the most potent recent manifestation of Tudormania. (For her, the most characteristic moment was when Catherine Howard tried out the block on which she was to be beheaded – an act that is historically attested. The show was, said Worsley, “risible – but good for business”. (Sony Pictures Television International)Tudormania spawns more Tudormania: so it is with the great houses and palaces that dot the English landscape. Photograph: 2008 CPT Holdings, Inc. The programme is called Henry VIII’s Six Wives, and is not to be confused with the current Channel 5 series, presented by historians Suzannah Lipscomb and Dan Jones, titled Henry VIII and his Six Wives.Jonathan Rhys Meyers as Henry VIII and Natalie Dormer as Anne Boleyn in The Tudors. And so he has commissioned a new blockbuster BBC1 history show from Worsley, to be filmed this month at the National Trust’s Barrington Court, which was also used as a location in Wolf Hall. “Now we are more consciously giving visitors the Tudors. “As a theme it just didn’t work,” she said. Immerse yourself in a living Tudor world … Have a go with a crossbow!” Tracy Borman, the co-chief curator of the Historic Royal Palaces, told me about the time they tried to promote the Georgians at Hampton Court, in 2014, to mark the tercentenary of George I’s accession. “It is 1533,” announced the website, “and you are invited to join the magnificent celebrations for Anne Boleyn’s coronation as Queen of England. The appeal of the Tower of London has become less about its Norman builders than its Tudor victims: visitors can see costumed interpreters in the guise of Anne Boleyn or Lady Jane Grey, and over the bank holiday weekend it hosted the Tudors at the Tower Family Festival. They are like House of Cards, said another. They are like Game of Thrones, said one. They are like the Caesars, or the Kennedys, said another. The Tudors are like the Kardashians, said one. They are Britain’s most lucrative royal export, Worsley told me, after the current incumbents.When speaking to historians, novelists and curators of the period, I found that they would, at some point in the conversation, reach for a pop-cultural analogy. Excel file read onlyWhat is it about the Tudors that has drawn us to them? And what does the way we have refashioned them tell us about the present moment?The execution of Anne Boleyn in Henry VIII and his six Wives. It is, at least in part, an act of creation. Our relationship with our history tells us about ourselves as much as about the past. Cisco wireless lan controller softwareBut they wouldn’t do that with the French Revolution and they probably never will … The lure of the period is something that worked to my advantage. She added, “I didn’t feel I’d had to move my ground with Wolf Hall: the readers came to me. People don’t want to read about revolutionaries, she said, “these sneaky villains with daggers and a guillotine in the middle distance”. A Place of Greater Safety, set during the French Revolution, was published in 1992 – 13 years after she had first sent it to publishers, when, Mantel told me, she “couldn’t even get anyone to read it”. After publishing those two novels, she became a bestselling, double Man Booker winner with stage and screen adaptations to her name the BBC2 drama was the most popular on the channel since modern ratings began 14 years ago.But the subtle, gloriously rich Wolf Hall was not Mantel’s first historical novel. Before Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, Mantel was respected and loved by a modest number of readers. For the Americans, aside from the origin story represented by the founding fathers, perhaps the most often revisited period of domestic history is the civil war – except that, in contrast with the Tudors, it is still live as an issue, providing a lightly encoded way of talking about present anxieties about race. Different periods of history swim into view at different times, bringing parallels and visions of lost glory or past blunders. You get a category of reader that wouldn’t come to your other fiction because they think, ‘I know that story, and I want more of it.’”Every nation has a changing and sometimes fraught relationship with its past. When I was young I adored a book called A Traveller in Time by Alison Uttley, about Catholic recusants under Elizabeth I in rural Derbyshire. We have been raised on the Tudors. The present moment of Tudormania does not come from nowhere: it can exist only because of our sense of familiarity with them. The French have enough national mythology to go around, but it is invested more in ideas and values than with people.For the English, by contrast, nostalgia is both a national disease and a profit-making enterprise, selling everything from Keep Calm and Carry On mugs to Henry VIII outfits for little boys from the Hampton Court shop. They were the first people to have lived in recognisable houses, rather than in the draughty great halls and militaristic castles of their medieval forebears. We slip into their world – or what we imagine to be their world – with ease. Photograph: Dea Picture Library/De Agostini/Getty ImagesThe Tudors are the first people in British history into whose eyes we feel we can gaze. I still associate the Tudors with long galleries lined with linenfold panelling, the scent of National Trust lavender in bowls, and a wandering imagination.The Darnley portrait of Elizabeth I. For me, it was the grand Hardwick Hall, and the half-timbered beauties Ford Green Hall and Little Moreton Hall. Like many other middle-class children, I was taken to see some of the great Tudor houses of England. Some of the inhabitants of these houses had even been women, whose characters were a little more than cyphers (such as the redoubtable matriarch Bess of Hardwick who, with her four husbands, rivalled Henry VIII in marital energy if not murderous tendency).
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