The Tudors Season 2, Episode 6, The Definition of Love, dives deeper into the disintegration of Henry VIII’s marriage to Anne Boleyn and the moral decay of his court. Haunted by Sir Thomas More’s death, Henry turns cold and unstable, while Anne grows desperate, paranoid, and politically isolated. But how much of this episode reflects real Tudor history? From George Boleyn’s character assassination and Cromwell’s propaganda campaign to Henry’s hypocrisy and Anne’s growing despair, this episode mixes powerful drama with serious departures from fact. Let’s unravel what The Tudors gets right, and what it wildly invents.

Inside This Post:

• The False Portrayal of George Boleyn
• Cromwell’s Propaganda and the Printing Press
• Minor Historical Truths the Episode Gets Right
• Charles Brandon’s Affair Makes No Sense
• Anne Boleyn’s Dogs

Episode 6: The Definition of Love

Haunted by the aftermath of Sir Thomas More’s execution, Henry VIII’s relationship with Anne deteriorates. She becomes desperate to provide him with an heir, while developing an increasing paranoia about her impending downfall, and pushes Henry to arrange a French betrothal for their daughter, only to learn King Francis does not consider her legitimate. Her brother, George Boleyn, marries Lady Jane, while Thomas Cromwell begins his investigation into Church abuses.  

The False Portrayal of George Boleyn

Let’s start off this episode with the character assassination of George Boleyn. Off and on, we’ve seen him be stupid, foolish, reckless, a court jester, and a ladies’ man (remember the naked twins last season?), but this season is when he takes a turn for the worst. First, we saw him watch a man boiled in oil without blinking an eyelash and now he’s a rapist.

But let’s break this down in order of alterations to his character.

First, this George is an idiot who asks the most obvious questions to feed the audience information. In history, he was known for being a “man of great wit,” which for the time meant intelligent. Many of his contemporaries regarded him as just as smart as his sister, and just as proud/arrogant, although none of this became a reason for others to hate him. Chapuys, the Spanish Ambassador, was looking for mud to sling at the Boleyn family, but had nothing to say about George, which means even if he strutted about like a peacock, he didn’t draw attention to himself.

Next, the fabrication of his homosexual relationship with Mark Smeaton. Historian Retha Warnicke initially suggested this, claiming the men accused of being Anne’s lovers were picked because of their ambiguous sexuality, but other historians criticized her lack of evidence to support this. Historian Alison Weir used the same arguments to support it, and also insinuated George was a rapist, because of a poem written from the point of view of George Boleyn by George Cavendish:

I forced widows, maidens I did deflower.
All was one to me, I spared none at all,
My appetite was all women to devour
My study was both day and hour.

But the poem suggests that George’s attentions went to women, to excess; that he was a philanderer, a seducer, and a “rapist.” The writer of The Tudors, Michael Hirst, ran with this supposition, and thus we wind up with the unpleasant scene between George and Jane. But if George had been an infamous rapist, brothers, fathers, and uncles would have complained and pressed charges against him at court, for which there is no sign nor record. Chapuys never used it to illustrate the debauchery of the Boleyns, nor hinted at sodomy.

I really hate turning historical figures into rapists without evidence, because they have no way to defend themselves and it changes how modern audiences view them in a historical context. This repeats the theme Hirst has going that these people deserve what is coming to them, and I don’t like that, because it removes some of the blame from Henry, where it belongs. George deserves to die because he raped his wife. Anne deserves to die because she plotted Catherine of Aragon’s death. And so on.

It is lazy writing, because instead of taking screen time away from some of the dumber and irrelevant plot lines (Thomas Wyatt and his girlfriend, or the Pope’s scenes) and building up a more believable negative relationship between George and Jane, raping her establishes all the audience needs to know. It’s the abuse of a female character, and character assassination of her husband, all in one go, which is repugnant. It is doubly sick, given that he has established George as bisexual/gay, so it falls into the “evil bisexual villain” trope.

As a minor point, George’s marriage to Jane Parker happened in 1524, ten years before the other events of this episode. There’s no sign their marriage was unhappy, even though it produced no children. The need to make George rape Jane is an attempt on-screen to “understand” why Jane would accuse her husband of incest with the queen. The problem is, Jane never said such a thing; those rumors came from the other ladies-in-waiting.

Last, the painting Jane sees in George’s rooms is the Abduction of Ganymede, by an Italian painter in 1700. It depicts a Greek mythology tale of Zeus kidnapping a Trojan prince and transforming him into his lover; so it’s symbolic of George’s homosexual inclinations and a delightful piece of foreshadowing, even if it won’t be painted for 150+ years.

Cromwell’s Propaganda and the Printing Press

Cromwell and Henry solicit a series of performances, and plays to change public opinion about the Catholic Church. I go into this practice (propaganda through art) in-depth in my essay on the topic here, but I will just briefly say this was common in the time. Plays could be easily understood by even the uneducated public and shape their views in the direction the king desired them to go in, making them a useful and relatively inexpensive way to solidify a belief system.

One abuse of the church Cromwell mentions is the now-infamous “Holy Blood of Hailes,” a relic that claimed to be a portion of the Blood of Christ, but whose blood was “refreshed” with a duck’s blood weekly. In an interesting historical twist, it wasn’t Cromwell who looked into this, but Anne Boleyn who objected to it on a visit to Winchcombe Abbey, a few miles away. She heard about the relic and sent some of her chaplains to enquire into its “abominable abuse” of the public.

We also see the darker side of Cromwell in this episode, since he invites the public to spy and tattle on anyone whom they believe has violated the King’s laws. He winds up a little depressed at the hundreds of reports that land on his desk, from mere “slips of the tongue” from eighty-year-old priests to more malicious attacks of character. He also shows George a “brand new invention” that will “change the world” … the printing press! This is a delightful scene and nod to history, even though it comes 35 years too late, since printing presses were in wide use by 1500 and had already produced twenty million volumes. The reason Martin Luther’s Reformation took off was the instant access to the printing press, which made it easy for his supporters to publish and spread his tracts throughout Germany.

Minor Historical Truths the Episode Gets Right

This episode includes a lot of little historical accuracies as they happened, mostly, including the disastrous visit from the French ambassador in which he snubs Anne, the vicious rumors that circulate about court about Anne being a six-fingered witch who has many “witches marks” (moles) on her person, Henry shouting at Anne to ignore his affairs like “your better has done before you,” and Anne’s unhinged public behavior, in which she becomes hysterical/resentful of her husband claiming to intend to introduce her to someone, and being “distracted by a pretty lady” instead.

Charles Brandon’s Affair Makes No Sense

I don’t know why the show has Brandon cheat on his wife with a random French woman, since … it has nothing to do with anything, is not explicit (therefore it doesn’t fill the “nudity and sex quota” per episode) and is probably inaccurate.

Anne Boleyn’s Dogs

The episode ends with Henry blaming Anne for wanting Thomas More’s death, which we aren’t sure about since we saw no scenes in which that happened. This implies Henry is scapegoating her and avoiding his own responsibility. It makes me feel sorry for her, particularly when we see her worried face as she walks her dog in the palace gardens after receiving a vicious look from her husband. Anne had two dogs, a lapdog named Purkoy (a Spaniel) and a hunting greyhound named Urian.