Welcome to TudorsOnFilm, an interactive website for The Tudors on Film and Televison (from McFarland Books 2012), co-authored by Sue Parrill and William B. Robison, with information about and links to other projects by the authors. Pre-order information below!

THE BOOK

The Tudors on Film and Television is both a comprehensive filmography and a historical analysis of Tudor films that provides basic information about production, participants, plot, and provenance for every item included, as well as assessing the aesthetic qualities, historicity, cultural significance, and potential usefulness in the classroom of each. The authors have attempted to list and discuss, to the extent information is available, all films—fiction or non-fiction—which treat the Tudor monarchs and their times. Read more . . . 

THE WEBSITE

This website will allow the authors to supplement the material in this book with information about hitherto undiscovered films made through the end of 2011, additional details that may come to light about the films included here, the recovery of films currently believed no longer extant, and new online entries about films made in and after 2012. We also welcome discussion, so please join us. Read more . . . 

PUBLICATION DATE

McFarland has set a publication date of December 31, 2012. Ergo . . .

CHRISTMAS AND . . . 

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus, and he is just waiting for your letter asking for a copy of The Tudors on Film and Television. Oh, and it would make a great gift for all of the Tudor-lovers on your Christmas list. And all of the people who should be Tudor-lovers. In other words, everybody. Also an excellent choice for Hannukah, Kwanzaa, anniversaires, birthdays, graduations, and other gift-giving occasions. And if you are really feeling generous or just need more than one present for the same person, don't forget the other fine books featured on the About Sue Parrill page and the About Bill Robison page. You can even hire Bill Robison to present an illustrated lecture about the history of Christmas or a whole selection of other delightful historical topics listed on the Fabulous Lectures page.

PRE-ORDER IT HERE!

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Sun in Splendour by Chris Collingwood. (P)

Although history has closely identified the house of YORK with the white rose emblem, the favorite personal badge of EDWARD IV was the Sun in Splendor or the bright golden sunburst.

The badge apparently derived from a meteorological phenomenon that appeared in the sky to Edward, then earl of March, before the Battle of MORTIMER’S CROSS in February 1461. On the morning of the battle, which was fought only a month after the death of his father, Richard PLANTAGENET, duke of York, Edward saw three suns shining “in the firmament . . . full clear” (Ross, p. 53). Taking this sight to be an omen of victory, Edward went on to win the first battle fought under his leadership. Edward’s sunburst badge was soon closely associated with the king and his family. It appeared frequently on buildings constructed or refurbished by Edward, such as St. George’s Chapel at Windsor and Tewkesbury Abbey near the site of the 1471 Yorkist victory at the Battle of TEWKESBURY. The emblem also found its way into manuscripts written under Yorkist auspices and onto tapestries or apparel created for the Yorkist COURT.

The streaming sunburst badge also played an important role in the Battle of BARNET in April 1471. As the positions of the two struggling armies shifted on the fog-shrouded field, the men of John de VERE, earl of Oxford, one of the Lancastrian commanders, came up unexpectedly behind some of their own men as they tried to reengage after driving part of the Yorkist army from the fight. Because they were wearing Oxford’s badge of a star with streams, they were mistaken in the mist for Yorkist troops wearing the well-known sunburst badge, the sun with streams, of Edward IV. When Lancastrian ARCHERS opened fire on them, Oxford’s surprised and confused men thought themselves betrayed and fled the field crying “treason!” The incident severely demoralized the Lancastrian line, which soon after broke, allowing Edward’s men to surge forward, killing the fleeing Richard NEVILLE, earl of Warwick, and winning the battle.

Further Reading: Ross, Charles, The Wars of the Roses (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1987).

As the highest court of the realm, and the national forum for discussion of important public issues, Parliament became during the WARS OF THE ROSES the instrument whereby major political changes were legitimized and new royal regimes recognized.

Fifteenth-century Parliaments consisted of an upper chamber (the Lords) and a lower chamber (the Commons). The membership of the Lords included both laymen—titled nobles summoned by individual writ (see PEERAGE)— and churchmen—twenty-one bishops and some abbots of large monasteries. The Commons, whose membership by 1485 totaled 296, included two knights from each shire and burgesses who represented LONDON and other incorporated towns. The shire representatives— by law county landholders who were knights or who possessed sufficient land to support a knight’s estate—were elected by male residents of the county who held lands worth at least forty shillings per year. Voting for burgesses was more idiosyncratic, the electorate being defined by a town’s charter, which, in some cases, restricted voting to a small group (see TOWNS ANDTHEWARS OFTHE ROSES).

Fifteenth-century Parliaments were royal instruments of government, summoned and dismissed by the king. The speaker of the Commons, the officer who directed debate and managed business, was almost always a royal councilor and was paid by the Crown after 1461. During the Wars of the Roses, royal governments used their control to ensure that Parliaments confirmed royal titles, such as occurred in 1461 to legitimize the house of YORK, in 1483 to approve RICHARD III’s usurpation (see USURPATION OF 1483), and in 1485 to confirm the right of the house of TUDOR. Victorious regimes also used Parliament to pass bills of ATTAINDER against defeated opponents and to reverse attainders previously passed against supporters. Thus, although the Lancastrians attainted leading Yorkists at the COVENTRY PARLIAMENT in 1459, the first Parliament of EDWARD IV in 1461 reversed many of these attainders and passed new bills against prominent Lancastrians. With each change of political fortune came a new series of attainders and reversals.

To obtain a cooperative Parliament, royal administrations often manipulated borough (i.e., town) elections. Because borough seats comprised almost two-thirds of the Commons, and because town electorates were often small and easily influenced, kings could readily secure the election of royal servants and household officials, even though by law burgesses were to be citizens of the town they represented. For example, in 1478, Edward IV obtained a Parliament that was willing to condemn his brother, George PLANTAGENET, duke of Clarence. Besides some loss of independence, the Wars of the Roses also caused the Commons to lose some legislative initiative. Prior to the 1450s, most bills were initiated by petitions from the Commons, whose main functions were the granting of taxation and the consideration of petitions. Civil war Parliaments saw more bills drafted by the king and his COUNCIL, more attention to royal interests, and greater royal management of business. In general, the wars led to an increase of royal control over Parliament.

Further Reading: Butt, Ronald, A History of Parliament: The Middle Ages (London: Constable, 1989).

Marriage of Henry V and Catherine of Valois

If The Wars of the Roses were fought by the men, it was the women who eventually sorted out the mess. By the late 1400s the royal family tree had become a crazy spider’s web of possible claimants to the throne, and it took female instinct to tease out the relevant strands from the tangle. The emotions of mothers and wives were to weave new patterns — and eventually they produced a most unlikely solution.

Owain ap Maredudd ap Tydwr was a silver-tongued Welsh gentleman who caught the eye of Henry V’s widow, Catherine of France. He was a servant in her household in the 1420S — probably Clerk of her Wardrobe — and being Welsh, he had no surname. The ‘ap’ in his name meant ‘son of’, so he was Owen, son of Meredith, son of Theodore.

But once he had captured the heart of the widowed Queen, Owen had needed a surname. According to later gossip, Catherine would spy on her energetic Welsh wardrobe clerk as he bathed naked in the Thames, and she decided she liked what she saw.

The court was outraged. An official inquiry was held. But Catherine stuck by her Owen and in 1432 their marriage was officially recognised. ‘Theodore’ became ‘Tudor’, and Owen went through life defiantly proud of the leap in fortune that he owed to love. Thirty years later, in 1461, cornered by his enemies after the Battle of Mortimer’s Cross, he would go to the block with insouciance. ’That head shall lie on the stock,’ he said jauntily, ‘that was wont to lie on Queen Catherine’s lap.’

From the outset, the Tudors confronted the world with attitude. Catherine and Owen had two sons, Edmund and Jasper, who were widely viewed as cuckoos in the royal nest. But the dowager Queen resolutely brought up her Welsh boys with her first-born royal son Henry VI, nine or ten years their senior, and the young King became fond of his boisterous half-brothers. In 1452 he raised them both to the peerage, giving Edmund the earldom of Richmond and making Jasper Earl of Pembroke. The two young Tudors were given precedence over all the earls in England, and Henry, who had produced no children, was rumoured to be considering making Edmund his heir. The new Earl of Richmond was granted a version of the royal arms to wear on his shield.

The Tudors rose still higher in the world a few years later, when Edmund married the twelve-year-old Lady Margaret Beaufort, who had her own claim to the throne. The great-granddaughter of John of Gaunt, she proved to be one of the most remarkable women of her time. Bright-eyed and birdlike, to judge from the portraits still to be seen in the several educational establishments she endowed, she was a woman of learning. She translated into English part of The Imitation of Christ, the early-fifteenth-century manual of contemplations in which the German monk Thomas of Kempen (Thomas a Kempis) taught how serenity comes through the judicious acceptance of life’s problems. ’Trouble often compels a man to search his own heart: it reminds him he is an exile here, and he can put his trust in nothing in this world.’

Diminutive in stature, Lady Margaret was nonetheless strong in both mind and body. She was married, pregnant and widowed before the age of thirteen, when Edmund died of plague. In the care of his brother Jasper, Margaret gave birth to Edmund’s son, Henry, in Jasper’s castle at Pembroke in the bleak and windswept south-west corner of Wales. But some complication of the birth, probably to do with her youth or small frame, meant that she had no more children. For the rest of her life she devoted her energies to her son —‘my only worldly joy’, as she lovingly described him — although circumstances kept them apart.

The young man’s links to the succession through his mother — and less directly through his grandmother, the French queen Catherine — made England a dangerous place for Henry Tudor. He spent most of his upbringing in exile, much of it in the company of his uncle Jasper. At the age of four he was separated from his mother, and he scarcely saw her for twenty years.

But Lady Margaret never abandoned the cause. She would later plot a marriage for her son that would make his claim to the throne unassailable, and she had already arranged a marriage for herself that would turn out to be the Tudor trump card. In 1472 she married Thomas, Lord Stanley, a landowner with large estates in Cheshire, Lancashire and other parts of the north-west. The Stanleys were a wily family whose local empire-building typified the rivalries that made up the disorderly jostlings of these years. Allied to Lady Margaret, the Stanleys would prove crucial partners as her son Henry Tudor jostled for the largest prize of all.

KING HENRY VI

Henry VI was the youngest ever king of England, succeeding his warrior father Henry V at the age of just nine months. When the little boy attended his first opening of Parliament, aged only three, it was hardly surprising that he ‘shrieked and cried and sprang’, as one report described.

The problem was that in the course of his fifty troubled years, this king never really grew up. Henry VI went from first to second childhood, according to one modern historian, ‘without the usual interval’.

This is unfair. Henry was a kindly and pious man who financed the building of two gems of English architecture — the soaring Perpendicular chapel of Eton College across the Thames from Windsor, and the chapel of King’s College, Cambridge. He also ran a court of some magnificence, to which his naivety brought a charming touch. The ‘Royal Book’ of court etiquette describes Henry and his French wife Margaret of Anjou waking up early one New Year’s morning to receive their presents — then staying in bed to enjoy them.

But Henry showed a disastrous lack of interest in the kingly pursuits of chivalry and war. Faced with the need to command the English army in Normandy at the age of eighteen, three years after he had taken over personal control of government from his father’s old councillors, his response was to send a cousin in his place. Henry felt he had quite enough to do supervising the foundation of Eton College. It was not surprising he developed a reputation for nambypambiness. Riding one day through the Cripplegate in London’s city walls, he was shocked to see a decaying section of a human body impaled on a stake above the archway — and was horrified when informed it was the severed quarter of a man who had been ‘false to the King’s majesty’. ‘Take it away!’ he cried. ‘I will not have any Christian man so cruelly handled for my sake!’

Unfortunately for Henry, respect for human rights simply did not feature in the job description of a medieval king. Toughness was required. In the absence of a police force or army, a ruler depended on his network of nobles to ensure law and order, and if people lost confidence in the power of the Crown, it was to their local lord that they looked. They wore their lord’s livery and badge — and it was these rival badges that would later give the conflicts of this period its famous name.

A memorable scene in Shakespeare’s play Henry VI, Part 1 depicts the nobility of England in a garden selecting roses, red or white, to signify their loyalty to the House of York or the House of Lancaster. It did not happen — Shakespeare invented the episode. ’The Wars of the Roses’, the romantic title we use today for the succession of battles and dynastic changes that took place in England between 1453 and 1487, was also a later invention, coined by the nineteenth-century romantic novelist Sir Walter Scott. The Yorkists may have sported a rose on occasion, but there is no evidence that the Lancastrians ever did — at the Battle of Barnet in 1471, they started fighting each other because they did not recognise their own liveries. To judge from the profusion of badges and banners that were actually borne into battle during these years, men were fighting the wars of the swans, dogs, boars, bears, lions, stars, suns and daisies.

The struggle for power, money and land, however, certainly revolved around York and Lancaster, the two rival houses that developed from the numerous descendants of King Edward III. The Lancastrians traced their loyalties back to John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, while the Yorkists rallied round the descendants of Gaunt’s younger brother Edmund, Duke of York. Shakespeare dated the trouble from the moment that Gaunt’s son Henry Bolingbroke deposed his cousin Richard II. But York and Lancaster would have stuck together under a firm and decisive king — and if Henry V had lived longer he would certainly have passed on a stronger throne. Even the bumbling Henry VI might have avoided trouble if, after years of diminishing mental competence, he had not finally gone mad.

According to one account, in August 1453 the King had ‘a sudden fright’ that sent him into a sort of coma, a sad echo of his grandfather, Charles VI — the French king who had howled like a wolf and imagined he was made of glass. After sixteen months Henry staged a recovery, but his breakdown had been the trigger for civil disorder, and in the confused sequence of intrigue and conflict that followed he was a helpless cipher. In February 1461 he was reported to have spent the second Battle of St Albans laughing and singing manically to himself, with no apparent awareness of the mayhem in full swing around him. It was hardly a surprise when, later that year, he was deposed, to be replaced by the handsome, strapping young Yorkist candidate, Edward IV.

In this change of regime the key figure was the mightiest of England’s over-mighty subjects — Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, who fought under the badge of the Bear and Ragged Staff. With no claim to the throne, but controlling vast estates with the ability to raise armies, the earl has gone down in history as ’Warwick the Kingmaker’. ‘They have two rulers,’ remarked a French observer of the English in these years, ’Warwick, and another whose name I have forgotten.’

When Warwick and Edward IV fell out in the late 1460s, the Kingmaker turned against his protege, chasing him from the country. To replace him, Warwick brought back the deposed Henry VI who had spent the last six years in the Tower: the restored monarch was paraded around London in the spring of 1471. But the confused and shambling king had to be shepherded down Cheapside, his feet tied on to his horse. Never much of a parade-ground figure, he now made a sorry sight, dressed in a decidedly old and drab blue velvet gown that could not fail to prompt scorn —‘as though he had no more to change with’. This moth-eaten display, reported the chronicler John Warkworth, was ‘more like a play than a showing of a prince to win men’s hearts’.

It was the Kingmaker’s last throw — and a losing one. Warwick was unable to beat off the challenge of Edward IV, now returned, who soon defeated and killed the earl in battle, regaining the crown for himself.

As for poor Henry, his fate was sealed. Two weeks later he was found dead in the Tower, and history has pointed the finger at his second-time supplanter, Edward. Henry probably was murdered — but there is a sad plausibility to the official explanation that the twice-reigning King, who inherited two kingdoms and lost them both, passed away out of ‘pure displeasure and melancholy’.