The Tudors Season 1, Episode 4 takes major creative liberties with real historical events, blending truth with soap-opera fantasy. From Margaret Tudor’s fictional murder of a Portuguese king to the slander of Queen Marguerite of Navarre, this episode strays far from the historical record. In this fact check, we separate fact from fiction, covering the actual stories of Anne Boleyn, Thomas Tallis, Henry VIII’s jousting accident, and Martin Luther’s fiery insults. If you’re a Tudor history lover or a fan of the series, this thorough analysis will give you the truth behind the drama.

Inside This Post:

• Who really was Marguerite of Navarre?
• Did Margaret Tudor marry and murder a king?
• What Martin Luther really said about Henry VIII
• Was Anne Boleyn titled “Lady Anne” this early?
• The truth about Thomas Tallis’ life and timeline
• Did Henry actually get struck in the face?
• Minor inaccuracies you might have missed

Episode 4: His Majesty, the King

Henry VIII dispatches his sister, Margaret Tudor, to marry the decrepit King of Portugal. After enduring a public wedding and bedding, she smothers him to death in his sleep so that she can return home with Charles Brandon, with whom she had a one-night stand. Henry pursues Anne Boleyn, who sends back his gifts and retreats to her family home of Hever. After Henry almost dies in a ditch accident, he foreswears to Cardinal Wolsey that he must have an heir to avoid undermining all his father fought to build in the Tudor dynasty.

Don’t Mess with Marguerite: France’s Queen of Reform and Reason

Let’s get my chief complaint out of the way first. I hate that Michael Hurst, writer for The Tudors, took the great philosopher-humanist, patron of the arts, and writer Queen Marguerite of Navarre and turned her into a slut who has a one-night stand with Henry on a diplomatic visit. This woman deserves better than such slander.

Marguerite and her brother, King Francis, made the French court the most desirable, cultural, intellectual, and artistic one in Europe. Leonardo da Vinci spent his last few years there and died while living in her household. It’s at her court where Anne Boleyn learned about reform and intellectualism. Marguerite patronized humanists and reformers and held radical religious views. She became the most influential woman in France during her lifetime. The Venetian ambassador even praised her for her masterful use of diplomacy. After Emperor Charles took her brother prisoner, Marguerite got his freedom. She rode horseback through wintry woods, twelve hours a day for many days, to meet a safe-conduct deadline, while writing diplomatic letters at night. She patron’d the arts and protected many artists and writers. Marguerite mediated between Roman Catholics and Protestants, including John Calvin, and dissuaded her brother from intolerance toward Reformists until her death.

In 1531, she wrote a controversial work, The Mirror of the Sinful Soul, for which she was condemned as a heretic by the Sorbonne theologians. It is an outpouring of self-accusation and self-abasement. The author presents herself as a wretched sinner who has so violated and betrayed her relationship with God she is unworthy of his grace. She explores each of her sins in a biblical context, becoming the prodigal child who deserted her loving father, the mother of the dead infant who went to Solomon for judgment, the sister of Moses who challenged his authority, and the adulterous wife of the prophet Hosea. Each short story displays sin and a return to grace. It is a personal account of her search for God through the lens of being sinful, fallen, and desiring grace.

Theologians took issue with the poem’s suggestion that the soul, once united with God through love, transcends the need for virtues and is freed from moral obligations. The idea challenged the Church’s authority and its teachings on salvation and moral conduct. It suggests that a soul truly united with God is incapable of sin (in alignment with the “Free Spirit” theology of the day), which means the individual has no need of the Church to mediate between itself and God.

Does this sound like someone who would hop into bed with a married king in a foreign country? No. In fact, Dutch humanist Erasmus praised her for her prudence, chastity, moderation, piety, and strength of soul.

The Murder That Never Happened: Margaret Tudor’s Fictional Crime

As with many other casting choices, Gabrielle Anwar looks nothing like the real Mary Tudor. She has an “iPhone face,” although when the series premiered, I called it a “spray tan look.” She’s so orange that with her highlighted blonde hair, it’s hard to take her seriously. The real Mary was the prettiest woman at court, and only 18 when she married for the first time (the actress is in her 30s).

Brandon has also had a glam-up, and is far from the bearded, portly but handsome man depicted many times in paintings from the period. (Brandon was 31 when he married Mary.)

As mentioned in the last episode, the series has combined Henry’s sisters into one person, Margaret, but given her Mary Tudor’s life. Kinda. In history, she married the King of France, not Portugal, and Brandon did not take her there. On the show, she dismisses her ladies from the cabin halfway through the voyage to have hot sex with Brandon in high heels. Obviously, this would not have happened. Her ladies never left her side, and if they had left her alone with a man, her reputation would have been ruined. Kings prized virtue in their wives, and Mary knew this.

Besides, Mary/Margaret faced rough seas the entire trip and arrived in France/Portugal enormously seasick. So there’s that. 😛

There’s zero evidence to suggest she slept with Brandon before the two of them were married; not only would she have been raised with moral objections to it, and taught from a young age that chastity is a virtue, she would have been aware of how it could damage her reputation and shame her family’s good name. Virgins were expected to bleed their first time, and much ado was made about that as evidence of their purity.

The series has her married and publicly bedded (as in, they draw the bed curtains and the court stands around and listens while they consummate the marriage). This was something that happened sometimes during the Middle Ages, but rarely in the 1500s or among royalty. There’s no evidence that the real Princess Mary was subjected to such a humiliation. (This scene gives me so much ick.)

Margaret/Mary did not murder her husband by smothering him in bed! They were married for eighty-two days, at the end of which his gout killed him. He received the final sacraments hours before his death.

A Royal Rant and a Reformer’s Roast: Luther vs. Henry

In response to Henry’s tract defending the seven sacraments, the Pope names him “Defender of the Faith.” But Martin Luther also responds, and states that Henry is “raving like a strumpet in a tantrum.”

Some background on this matter: Henry’s tract made its way to Germany, where it was translated into the native language so people could read Henry’s arguments alongside Luther’s. It became a bestseller, even in Germany, which threatened Luther’s Reformation. So, Luther responded with an attack called Against Henry, King of the English.

First, Luther mocks the Catholic Church for needing a defender, especially someone as unqualified as Henry Tudor! Since Henry had no theological training, Luther argues that Erasmus or someone else wrote his arguments for him. He said Henry had never read his own work. Henry continued to correspond with him for quite some time, but he handed most of the arguments over to Sir Thomas More. Some scholars also think More is the actual author behind Henry’s work, given that it reflects so many of the themes in Utopia and his other works.  

It was a common practice among theologians of the time to trade in insults. Henry called Martin Luther “poisonous rubbish.”

Luther likened Henry to a strumpet; the full text reads “[Henry] does not come forth to battle with a royal mind, or with any drop of royal blood, but with a slavish and impudent and strumpet-like insolence and silliness, proving nothing by argument but only by cursing. […] He would deserve some consideration if he had erred like a man. But when knowingly and designedly this damnable and offensive worm forges lies against the Majesty of my King in Heaven, it is right for me, on behalf of my King, to spatter his Anglican royal highness with his own mud and filth and cast down and trample under foot the crown that blasphemes Christ.”

It’s ironic that Henry would go from being Defender of the Faith to an infamous heretic in only a few years!

Mistress Boleyn or Lady Anne? Titles, Gifts, and Royal Resistance

The show has Anne sending Henry back his gift of jewelry and refusing to accept it, before traveling to her home in the countryside, Hever. In reality, Anne refused his gifts, but not to entrap him. There’s no evidence she set out to seduce the king or hold his interest; it is likely she wanted nothing to do with him, as she was in love with Henry Percy and prevented from marrying him by Cardinal Wolsey, acting on the king’s behalf.

The series refers to her as Lady Anne a good deal, although she did not bear the title until her father became Lord Rochford in a later episode. Others would have called her Mistress Boleyn before that.

Tallis, Truth, and Tokenism: A Composer Rewritten

Let’s talk about Thomas Tallis, one of the great English composers. In the series, he comes to court in the 1520s, rejects women, falls in love with Sir William Compton, and conducts a discreet homosexual affair.

None of that is true, of course, and he was made gay just to fill a quota.

Homosexuality, or “sodomy,” was considered a serious moral crime and punishable by mutilation or death. In fact, Henry VIII enacted the death penalty for sodomy with the Buggery Act 1533. (The act outlawed any sexual activity not related to procreation, by taking canon law and making it a civil law. Thomas Cromwell pushed it through, to test in removing church power in favor of English common law. A convicted sodomite sacrificed their land and property to the crown, rather than to their next of kin, and they could be executed.)

We don’t know much about the real Thomas Tallias. It’s possible he sang as a boy in the Chapel Royal, but there are few facts about his childhood or even when he was born. There’s no record of his career before 1531. He moved around a lot and lived in an Augustinian monastery in Essex until 1940. Tallis did not join the Chapel Royal until 1543 and did not marry until 1552. He served Queen Mary I and died as a member of Elizabeth I’s household in 1585.

Heads Will Hurt: Henry’s Real-Life Near-Death Experience

The series has Henry VIII struck in the face by a lance, held by Anthony Knivert. In history, Knivert did not exist. He’s loosely based on Thomas Knyvett, a friend of Henry who died in 1512 in a warship that went down in flames after engaging in a conflict with the French, and on Anthony Knyvett, a Lieutenant of the Tower of London. (He turned traitor by joining a rebellion against Mary I and was executed in 1554.)

But the incident is true. Henry failed to put down his helmet visor, and Charles Brandon struck him on the brow with his lance. The lance shattered upon impact, sending splinters into Henry’s headpiece. It dazed him.

Some historians claim that these and other head injuries during his many years of jousting led to his later personality changes. Young Henry was an amiable man, short-tempered but good-natured, a far cry from the tyrant who later put his wives, friends, counselors, and chancellors to death!

Henry in the series knights Knivert and his friend, William Compton on the same day. In history, Compton received a knighthood not for “carrying a tree” but for his service at the Battle of the Spurs, a battle in France. Henry rewarded him for mustering 578 soldiers from his manors, almost as many as all the other members of the Privy Chamber raised in total.

Quick Cuts: Small Slips & Random Errors

• Since Mr. Pace never went to prison, he could not go insane in the Tower of London.
• Thomas Boleyn informs his brother-in-law, Norfolk, that Cardinal Wolsey has “appointed himself the Bishop of Rochester.” This is false. Henry VIII appointed him as such, with the consent of the Pope.
• Thomas Wyatt was never engaged to Anne Boleyn.

Curious what personality types feature in The Tudors? Check out my analysis here!

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About the Author: Charity Bishop writes historical fiction, historical fantasy, and suspense novels that explores the darkness in human hearts, and the light that refuses to be extinguished. Discover her books.