It’s back! Pretty people in long gowns!
And Peter O’Toole as the Pope…I loved that!
I may have missed something…Thomas More is openly defying the King in regards to the annulment, yet the King hasn’t banished him from court?
It wasn’t a bad episode, but I was a bit disappointed in O’Toole. He can’t seem to drop that same affectation he has, with the run-on sentences. I don’t mean to disrespect the man, but the script didn’t give him enough ammo to steal the show as he normally might, and so I thought he should have toned himself much further down.
At the time, the Tudors claim to the throne was tenuous at best. The Tudors basically usurped the title from the Yorks and executed anyone whose bloodline seemed stronger than their own. Henry VII also had a bad habit of getting into wars, which raised taxes among other things, and helped make him a rather unpopular guy.
Some key betrothals between the Tudors and VIPs from neighboring countries, helped calm the political tempest abroad a bit. Henry turned his attentions to domestic matters, with sealing the Tudors claim to the throne one of his bullet point objectives. Had he produced a male heir with Catherine…
It was during his 20+ year stable marriage to Catherine that Henry VIII met and became an honest admirer of Thomas More. More caught the eye of the King, as well as the world, with his writing. He also enjoyed a very successful career in Parliament and was very well regarded among the English people who were eager for a fair, honest politician. (I can relate!) Henry’s respect for him ran so deep that Henry commission him to co-author a book (aimed at their common enemy, Martin Luther). More also led a campaign for Church reform, to clean up the rampant and blatant corruption from clergymen who abused their authority and exploited their flock.
All in all, More was one extraordinary, popular guy. However, it was a symbiotic relationship, to be sure. Henry enjoyed his association with More and More enjoyed many civil appointments in some part due to Henry’s influence well before Henry finally installed him as Chancellor, which was the most important position in England aside from King.
It’s hard for modern day folk to understand how important the role of Chancellor was. Suffice it to say that before Henry VIII passed laws making him Supreme Being over the Pope, the Pope’s authority was immense, perhaps equalling and/or superceding the authority and influence of Kings. Being Chancellor was akin to being a mini-Pope in a nation full of Catholics. So taking on a popular Chancellor might have been foolhardy. And Henry had already alienated his people by divorcing Catherine of Aragon in favor of the unpopular Anne Boelyn. One could argue that the King didn’t banish him because, at the end of the day, he still admired him. And getting rid of him might have proven to be his own undoing.
After all, you can only banish/behead so many people before they start figuring out whose head is causing all the problems.
Seems like Henry stirred up a whole bunch of trouble just because Anne kept her legs crossed.
Oh, I know it’s more than that…he wanted a legitimate male heir, he couldn’t stand to be thwarted, but how would history have been different if he’d stayed with Katherine and tried for a son with her?
He had been married to Catherine for 24 years at the time of the annulment, and she had had six pregnancies. At the time of the annulment, she was 48. So it’s not like they didn’t try for a son, and at her age, her chance to have any more children was, from a biological standpoint, pretty much non-existant.
When she was divorced by Henry, Katherine had had six children, including 2 sons, only one of whom had survived infancy (the Princess Mary, later Queen Mary). She was about 40 years old, so getting to the stage where a male heir was becoming increasingly unlikely.
But the big change is that, of course, Queen Elizabeth I would not have been born, so that some time in the 1550s (depending on what Henry did after Katherine died in 1536) the throne would have passed out of the Tudor line, presumably to Mary, Queen of Scots, through whom James I of England and VI of Scotland inherited the English throne.
Well, she still would have been born. (She was conceived in January 1533, the marriage was annulled in March 1533) She just wouldn’t have been seen as legitimate by anyone.
Right – so she would have become neither a princess nor a queen.
I loved O’Toole! He seemed so supercilious and bitchy, but cool. His blase discussion of Henry’s “Great Matter” was so condescending, as was his flippant suggestion that Anne be murdered (I was put in mind of “Will no one one rid me of this meddlesome whore?”) I wonder why she was not offed, now. It seems like it would have solved a lot of problems.
I am kind of confused… O’Toole is supposed to be Paul III, but wasn’t Clement VII pope through 1534? Henry and Anne were married in 1533. It’s a bit confusing. Also, the timeline in this show is really condensed… didn’t the whole Anne affair, from beginning to end, last about 13 years? Yet no one has aged. The whole thing is really even more extraordinary when one considers that it was dragged out over a decade. Yet he tired of her in only 2 years of marriage. I’m interested in seeing how they play out his disillusionment and eventual hatred of her after all these years of obsessive love. It’s a topic I’ve always found fascinating.
Do you think Anne will die this season? If so, will there be a S3? There’s plenty of fodder for future seasons, but they seem to be focused on Anne, so I wonder if the show will go on without her.
Really, I can’t believe the crap that Henry got away with. We’re scandalized by Eliot Spitzer…
From what I understand, the show is not particularly historically accurate. In addition to getting chronologies confused, they also got rid of one of Henry’s sisters, invented a bunch of people, and so on.
The season will, indeed, end with Anne’s beheading. It’s already been filmed.
The series’ future is undecided. The producers hope that Jonathyn Rhys-Meyer will get into character and get ugly if it does.
You’re very convincing, and make some really good points. I’d like to rescind my criticism of O’Toole in this case. I really do like him and his body of work overall. (Weird as it must sound, my favorite role of his ever was in King Ralph!)
We don’t know that. He’d already recognized and titled his bastard son as a sort of back-up plan. Unfortunately the boy died when he was 17 or so.
The dark ages were a crappy time to be alive, that’s for sure. Disease running rampant, corrupt church, unscrupulous kings…
That would be really cool, to watch as handsome Harry gets fat and gouty. Will JRM get into a fat suit or pig out ala Jared Leto? I think all of Henry’s marriages would be interesting to see on the show-- they could milk this for at least 3 or 4 more seasons, though it would be interesting to see how people react to an increasinly obese, unbalanced and sickly king tear his way through 4 more wives.
Liberal, glad I could make you reconsider O’Toole’s performance. He actually gave me a chill, he was so exquisitely pompous and droll. Just picture him saying all that in Italian.
They were. This series takes place in the Rennaisance, though. 
I’ve always thought Henry was mostly obsessed and in love with the idea of Anne giving him the heir he desperately needed. As soon as that failed all he could see was her failure.
The series looks interesting, but I haven’t had a chance to watch it. And I’m not sure I want to. I get kind of obsessed myself about historical shows and some kinds of accuracy. Don’t want to be yelling at the screen. I know some of the rest of you are like that, too. Is it okay to watch?
No. It will drive you crazy.
If you watch it for the art direction (very nice) or as historical soft-core porn, you may well enjoy yourself, though.
Oh. Given the infant mortality rate and diseases running amouck (including TB, “sweating sickness”, and the good King’s leg sores), and people being burned alive in oil, I assumed we were in the dark ages.
It’s definitely not the Dark Ages – those were many centuries earlier – but there had been little advance in medicine or in preventing child mortality, even if there had been significant cultural advances.
Well, I think my grandmother had an aunt who died of TB, and she has a leg ulcer, but she didn’t live in the dark ages, either.
Just some notes on terminology that might help. Nowadays, people don’t tend to use the term Dark Ages much anymore. Instead, that time period is generally called the “Early Middle Ages”, and generally, people date it from around 500-1000. Then, come the “High Middle Ages”, from 1000-1300, followed by the “Late Middle Ages”, 1300-1500. Overlapping that, you get the time period generally called the “Rennaisance”, from around 1300-1600.
At the same time that Henry was getting his marriage annulled, the Spanish were settling Central and South America, and had just taken over the Inca empire, and the French were starting to think about colonizing Canada. In Italy, Titian was painting his masterpieces and Michelangelo was just about to start on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.