Without Feathers | Blog | 11.08.04: Always With the Hats: A Review of “Henry VIII”

History, history! We fools, what do we know or care.
William Carlos Williams

Always With the Hats: A Review of Henry VIII

11.08.04

Now why does the BBC think they have to keep remaking every decent miniseries in their archives? The Six Wives of Henry VIII was the final word when it came to the life of Henry VIII and his ladies; no Tudor-based movie, series, or play since then has topped that achievement.

Tudor buff that I am, I felt obliged to watch this—besides, it had a great cast. (Charles Dance? Emilia Fox? David Suchet? Helena Bonham Carter as Anne Boleyn? Be still, my heart!) I wasn’t expecting total historical accuracy; if I wanted that, I would have just popped in one of my Six Wives DVDs and watched that instead. What I was expecting was a decent re-telling of the tale of Henry and his wives. Sure, let them tweak a few things here and there, and maybe the costumes wouldn’t be quite accurate, but that’s okay. I’m as much a fan of historical fiction as the next fellow.

That was what I expected. What I got was a mangled mess that affronted both my historical and entertainment sensibilities. Leaving aside the historical inaccuracies for a moment, let’s just focus on the story and how it was told — badly. The story starts out with Henry as a boy at his father’s deathbed, being told that the most important thing is to have a son. Then bam!—fifteen years go by. Here we have Henry and Katherine of Aragon all sad because they don’t have a son—poor Katherine, we really feel for her—wait, now here’s Anne, out of nowhere, and the king’s suddenly in love with her! And she’s not the ambitious seductress we know and love, she’s a moral woman who just wants to be left alone to marry Lord Percy!

Smilies have no place in a literate review, but it has to be said: o_0

There’s a long, drawn-out, very improbable wooing (would Anne really have talked to the King of England like that, before she even knew him?), and then suddenly Henry’s getting divorced and Katherine’s on the way out. I know they had to condense the story of Henry and Anne to fit it into an hour and a half, but geez does it dash by. There’s a completely stupid scene where Katherine snarks bitterly at Anne (looks like the director changed his mind and switched her character from sympathetic wife to frigid bitch), and then Katherine’s gone—no mention of where she goes, or how she ends up. Anne’s reign snaps by quickly; one minute she’s giving birth to Elizabeth, the next minute Henry’s making eyes at Jane Seymour and Anne’s up on the block. Barely a mention of the huge step Henry was taking in executing his own wife, a woman he had crowned as queen.

And that’s just the inaccuracies in the fantasy world of the story. This is not the real story, folks—far from it. It really pisses me off that film- and miniseries-makers feel the need to twist the real history around, as if it’s not already filled with sex, violence, and intrigue. The real, unadorned events of Henry VIII’s life had enough scandal to satisfy even the most hard-to-please modern viewer; if you don’t believe me, go rent the original Six Wives miniseries and check it out. It’s what would be considered “too talky” today, but it gives you an insight into the characters and their motivations, and it’s all accurate, based on real historical fact, even down to the detailed sets and costumes and the way the people look. (Seriously, every person in that miniseries looks just like the historical person they’re portraying; it’s downright eerie, that.)

But I’m not here to review the better miniseries; I’m here to rant about the worse one. From the costumes to the script, everything was horribly, horribly inaccurate. For instance, the hats. This is becoming my main gripe with modern Tudor films—they never get the hats right. The film Elizabeth had the same problem; all the women ran around with their hair loose and flowing, as though they were maidens from three centuries earlier. Same with this movie. Katherine of Aragon, who made a point of adopting the (pretty damn unflattering) gable hood of English fashion, is depicted wearing a simple veil, of the sort that was not even in fashion back then, anywhere in the world. And Anne—the lady who brought the fashionable French hood to the English court—wears little crowns and puffs of white veils, when she’s not wearing nothing at all. Begging the director’s pardon, but ladies of that time and place almost always wore some sort of hat.

The events are inaccurate, as well. Here’s just a partial list of the true historical events that were mangled beyond recognition:

Anne was nowhere near as chaste and lovelorn as she’s shown in this series; she was a clever manipulator who kept hold of the King’s favor with flirtation and probably a good deal of foreplay, but who held out longer than his other mistresses so that he’d keep chasing her. She did give in eventually, before they were married—one of the reasons he was so anxious to finalize his divorce from Katherine was because Anne was pregnant, and he was confident she carried a son. (She didn’t—that was Elizabeth.)
Was Henry’s accent really that Cockney? We have no way of knowing for sure what English sounded like back then, but if you’re going to have Anne’s accent conform to standard British “upper-class,” then Henry’s should be just as plummy, if not more. He was a highly educated king who spoke several languages, not a stable-boy. I think they let the actor retain his natural accent to make the king seem more boorish compaired to his wives and courtiers, but hey, Keith Michell managed to seem quite the pig while still maintaining standard BBC pronunciation.
That confrontation between Katherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn never happened. Katherine was regal to the bone, and a practical Tudor wife besides; she always chose to turn a blind eye to her husband’s mistresses and indiscretions. She put up with bastard children and long-term affairs, and initially she had no reason to believe that the affair with Anne would be any different. She would never have stooped so low as to personally berate Anne for her behavior, especially not in front of the entire court! An encounter like that would most certainly have been widely recorded for posterity, and there is no such mention of it anywhere.
The film seemed to miss—or, at the very least, gloss over with criminal triviality—the amazing political ramifications of Henry’s actions. The man had torn the country apart with his divorce—nay, he had torn apart Europe. Katherine of Aragon was part of the ancient royal line that governed all of Europe; that was why it was so important for the Tudors to marry her in the first place. Her nephew was Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, a major political and military force in the Renaissance world. Pissing Katherine off meant pissing him off; by divorcing her, Henry risked being invaded by an army of Katherine’s offended relatives. Not to mention civil war—the English people loved Katherine dearly, and saw Anne as a usurping whore. Then, when his divorce wouldn’t go through, Henry took the unprecedented step of breaking with Rome and declaring himself head of his own church. MAJOR CHUTZPAH. Sure, some other countries were already slipping towards Protestantism—but declaring yourself both sovereign and head of the church? That was going a bit far. The whole power balance of Europe shifted, and Henry sent England’s future in an entirely new direction by doing this.
Cardinal Wolsey was arrested, but he never made it to prison. He managed to escape the nasty death of a traitor by growing ill on the way to the Tower and dying of natural causes. His wealth and palaces were taken over by Henry and Anne.
In the series, Anne is shown in childbed, having just given birth; the child, she says, has been named Elizabeth, after the king’s mother. Elizabeth was indeed named after Henry’s mother, but not until a few days after her birth. Everyone had been so sure of a boy that girl’s names had not been considered, and Henry decided to punish his stubborn daughter Mary by giving the new child the same name, thus replacing her in name as well as rank and favour. Only at the very last moment, when the child was being christened, did Henry change his mind and have her named Elizabeth instead. It’s a minor nitpick, but since they bothered to include the scene at all, they should have gotten it right.
Henry didn’t meet Jane Seymour when she was binding his wounds after a fall from a horse. Like Anne, Jane caught the king’s eye while she was a lady-in-waiting to the queen—in an ironic twist of fate, she was in the household of Anne, who had risen to the throne in the very same way.
Anne didn’t see Elizabeth right before she was executed. At that point, Elizabeth may have been out of royal favour, but she was still of royal blood, and Henry wouldn’t have wanted her to be tainted by any more connection to her mother. In fact, Elizabeth probably didn’t see her mother again after Anne entered the Tower. Sad, but life sucked for kids whose mothers were condemned as traitors, however falsely.
Anne Boleyn’s execution was not public, in the sense that it was not open to commoners. There were nobles present, and she did make a speech (infinitely more dignified and poignant than the speech in the series). Also, she was not executed while kneeling upright—she put her head on the block, like all other victims of beheading.

The only bright spot was Helena Bonham Carter’s performance as Anne; her looks fit the part, and her acting skills are incomparable. Her depiction couldn’t compare with Dorothy Tutin’s, though, and the stuff she was given to work with was really pathetic. What a waste of an excellent actress.

In conclusion, avoid this series like the sweating sickness and stick with the good ol’ version instead. Trust me, the real story trumps the fiction any day.