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I bought the Tudors Season Three this evening. It's amazing to me that, as a history nerd, that I am willing to overlook historical inaccuracy when the writers use actual quotes from historical documents in the show's dialogue on occasion. I never forgive historical inaccuracy except for the Tudors and Sophia Coppola's Marie Antoinette (which a delightful bonbon of prettiness). Oh, pretty actors, prettier costumes, and amazing music. Le sigh.
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It's like eating ice cream. I know it's bad for me and I do not care. :)
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Still, JRM looking as young as he does is just... odd. Especially since Catherine Howard is going to have affairs because he's supposed to be old, fat and smelly.
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There's a new book coming out on Anne
By JANET MASLIN
THE LADY IN THE TOWER
The Fall of Anne Boleyn
By Alison Weir
Illustrated. 434 pages. Ballantine Books. $28.
With “The Lady in the Tower,” Alison Weir inserts herself into the scrum of historians eager to interpret Anne Boleyn’s story. Ms. Weir is no stranger to this crowded realm. She has already written “The Six Wives of Henry VIII” (Anne was the second); “Henry VIII: The King and His Court” (Anne played an active role in court intrigue); “Children of Henry VIII” (Anne bore him one, a daughter); and “The Life of Elizabeth I” (that daughter grew up to be Elizabeth I, a k a the Virgin Queen). She has also written numerous additional works about British royalty.
So why another? Because this time Ms. Weir sets out to study one four-month period at particularly close range and to search for the truth by examining primary sources. The narrow range of “The Lady in the Tower” extends from the death of Anne’s predecessor, Katherine of Aragon, in January of 1536 to Anne’s beheading in May of that year. Ms. Weir takes an investigative approach to the forces that toppled Anne from favor and led to her trial and execution.
To Ms. Weir’s credit she is well equipped to parse the evidence, ferret out the misconceptions and arrive at sturdy hypotheses about what actually befell Anne. Her command of minutiae is impressive, as is her enthusiasm for even the most minor aspects of Anne’s frequently distorted story. To Ms. Weir’s disadvantage, this subject has been so frequently dramatized that her sometimes-inconclusive scholarship can seem ponderous and dry.
“The Lady in the Tower” glaringly omits any mention of Hilary Mantel’s “Wolf Hall,” this year’s Man Booker Prize-winning novel, which so ingeniously focuses on the machinations that made Thomas Cromwell the primary architect of Anne Boleyn’s destruction. Yet Ms. Mantel provides such a delectably arch portrait of Anne, and stints so deliberately on the clear historical details, that these two books serve as useful companion pieces. “Wolf Hall” is the more impenetrable. It is also the livelier by far.
“The Lady in the Tower” takes its title from one of the many, many pieces of evidence that Ms. Weir holds up for scrutiny. It comes from a letter of typically shady provenance, since much of the detail surrounding Anne’s undoing surfaced long after she had been undone. The letter is addressed “To the King from the Lady in the Tower,” and it first surfaced in 1649. Some have claimed it was copied by Cromwell from an original letter written by Anne on May 6, 1536, while she was imprisoned in the Tower of London. Historians have long debated the letter’s authenticity, and they have had ample reason to do so. Ms. Weir works hard to analyze not only the historians’ positions but also the essence of the letter itself.
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Some of this book’s investigatory sojourns are far more palatable than others. The details surrounding the executions of Anne and her supposed lovers and co-conspirators are at least as ghastly as they are fascinating. What made beheading the most merciful form of execution? What made a sword a better implement for this than an axe? Why was an executioner summoned before the trial was even over? Did the sword have a groove to accommodate rivulets of blood? How long could Anne’s eyes and lips have kept moving after her head and body parted ways, and for how many seconds might she have suffered pain? It takes a hard-core monarchy enthusiast to appreciate Ms. Weir’s indefatigable pursuit of such information.
On the other hand, the legal arguments that arose from Katherine of Aragon’s death are well worth examining: Henry of course fought to annul his marriage to Katherine in order to marry Anne, forcing a break with the papacy and thus changing Britain’s religious history forever. He was not free to have his marriage to Anne annulled until after Katherine died, for fear of reigniting questions about the second marriage’s legitimacy. And Anne could not have been tried for adultery, as she was, if her marriage to Henry had not remained intact until that point. Ms. Weir does an extremely patient job of sorting out the implications of some of history’s most famous marital problems, and of trying to fathom Henry’s state of mind throughout.
For all of its intimate involvement in Anne’s plight, “The Lady in the Tower” is most worthwhile for its larger overview. It winds up weighing Anne’s influence on the life of her daughter. (Among its unusual illustrations is a picture of the ring Elizabeth wore until her death, decorated with a hidden likeness of her mother.) It describes the way interpretations of Anne’s story have changed over the centuries. It points out that the present-day prevailing attitude (that Anne was “the prime cause and mover of the Reformation”) could be a sweeping overstatement.
Most important, it does not hedge its bets about Anne’s relative innocence and culpability, nor does it foster any illusions about the romanticizing of her story. What if Anne had outsmarted her enemies and survived into old age? “It is virtually certain,” Ms. Weir concludes, “that, dying in her bed, she would not have enjoyed the charismatic, romantic posthumous reputation that is hers today.” And a vast cadre of British court historians would have had to find something else to do.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/17/books/17book.html?hpw
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It is funny how when something else about the piece gets a grip on ya, you can overlook so many odd things.