The Tudors Season 2, Episode 1 launches viewers back into the high drama of Henry VIII’s court, where fact and fiction collide. This episode fact check explores the real history behind Henry’s demand to be recognized as Supreme Head of the Church of England, the rise of Thomas Cranmer, Anne Boleyn’s contested reputation, Catherine of Aragon’s clever political maneuvers, and the shocking poisoning attempt on Bishop John Fisher. While Showtime’s The Tudors takes plenty of dramatic liberties (making Anne appear deceitful, vilifying the Boleyn family, and even reshaping Thomas More’s role in brutal executions), the truth of Tudor history is even more interesting.

Inside This Post:

• The Cardinals vs. the King
• Cranmer’s Courtly Connections
• Anne Boleyn: Purity or Propaganda?
• Three in a Marriage
• Catherine’s Political Strategy
• Henry’s Temper and Tactics
• The Pope’s Portrayal
• The Fisher Poisoning Plot
• Other Historical Inaccuracies

Episode 1: Everything is Beautiful

Henry VIII rips apart his nation in pursuit of his annulment by demanding his cardinals support him and separate from Rome. He makes a young cleric named Cranmer his personal confessor. Anne Boleyn gives him grief for allowing Catherine of Aragon to stay at court, so after some political maneuvering, he leaves court without his wife and promises Anne that Catherine will not be there upon their return.

The Cardinals vs. the King

The episode opens with Henry accusing his cardinals of supporting the Pope and demanding they accept him as the Supreme Head of the Church in England.

This is true. Cromwell saw that the only way to end Papal authority in England (and to end Catherine of Aragon’s success at blocking the annulment) would be to sever the Church from Rome. She refused to acknowledge the English court and demanded to be heard in Rome. Cromwell orchestrated an attack on the clergy by using an ancient law (from 1353) that targeted individuals in a political maneuver against an entire group in 1530. It claimed the clergy was “obeying a foreign power” over the king, a treasonable offense, and forced them to pay a fine of a hundred thousand pounds for a royal pardon and to recognize his authority. This statute outlawed any loyalty to a person or to a court operating outside of England and made it a crime to appeal to a foreign power.

In 1531, Henry demanded the clergy acknowledge him as the Supreme Head of the Church of England. They resisted, but later agreed after adding the clause “as far as the law of Christ allows.” As seen in the show, this was a way to appease him without giving him what he wanted, since they still clarified that religious doctrine overrode any of his demands. He and Cromwell applied greater pressure on them, leading to an eventual submission in 1532, at which point, a distraught Sir Thomas More resigned as Lord Chancellor.

Cranmer’s Courtly Connections

This episode introduces Thomas Cranmer, an “obscure cleric” thrust into the role of the king’s personal chaplain. They take a rag to riches approach by insinuating he’s a nobody whose Reformist ideals drew him to the attention of Cromwell, who introduces him to the king and paves the way for him.

This isn’t how it happened. Cranmer knew many important people at court from their shared associations at Cambridge. He had received a Doctorate of Divinity in 1526 and became a Cambridge don. Cardinal Wolsey consulted him as a “university expert” in the Great Matter, which brought him into the king’s social circle.

Anne Boleyn: Purity or Propaganda?

The poet Thomas Wyatt has flashbacks about his sexual affair with Anne Boleyn. There’s no historical evidence Anne ever had a sexual affair with him, and to depict her as a liar does her a disservice. It makes no sense within the historical narrative and only serves to generate the idea that Anne deserves her fate, because she manipulated and lied to Henry VIII. (A misogynistic perspective.) It vilifies her because she has people ousted from court who know the truth and tries to divide them from Henry’s favor (Brandon, as we see in the next episode).

The appeal of Anne Boleyn was that she was untouched and pure; that Henry would be “the first” to ever have her. Unlike many of her contemporaries, she was unmarried and had become no one’s mistress. Anne strung him along by refusing him sex altogether at first, and then promising it to him on condition that any of their children would be legitimate. The idea of possessing her appealed to him so greatly, it kept him besotted with her for seven years, as he endlessly waited to bed her. The real Anne knew the value of her virginity and wielded it to her advantage.

Anne would be stupid to mislead him, knowing anyone who knew the truth (servants, Wyatt or his friends) could discredit her with severe consequences for herself and her family. In season one, Anne tells her brother to stop showing people with drawings that show her sigil’s bird tearing apart a pomegranate, because “this is not a joke… it’s dangerous.” The writing is inconsistent; Anne knows the high stakes involved, but gambles with her life and reputation by insisting to the king that she is a virgin when she’s not.

Thomas Wyatt wrote poetry about Anne, but historians agree he had an unrequited love for Anne, who was already involved with Henry.

Three in a Marriage

In one scene, Anne notices a servant carrying shirts into the king’s chamber and demands to know where they came from; he says they are from the king. She confronts him about allowing his wife to continue the wifely noble duty of making his shirts for him, and they quarrel about it, culminating in her telling him, “You can’t have three people in a marriage!”

As silly as this scene may be, it actually happened. Catherine made her husband’s shirts and continued to, even after he pushed her away. She had a distinct way of hemming them with black thread in the Spanish fashion, which made them noticeable. Anne found out he continued to allow it, and fought with him about it, leading to his refusing his wife this task. But since Anne did not like to sew, she hired a seamstress to make his shirts for him rather than do it herself.

Catherine’s Political Strategy

I like that when Henry confronts Catherine about it, she smirks at him because it’s such a stupid thing to be mad about. You can tell she thinks he’s a child in a tantrum, as usual. She asks after his health and mentions she heard he was suffering from “a touch of gout.” The skinny JRRM’s Henry rolls his eyes at this; but in reality, it’s true the historical Henry, with his ballooning waistline and health problems related to his impending diabetes, suffered from gout, even as early as the 1930s.

Catherine asks if she can visit their daughter, and Henry snaps at her, saying she can visit their daughter and stay there. Catherine answers that nothing and no one will ever draw her from the king’s side.

This tense exchange makes for good television, but the actual story is sneakier. Catherine asked to visit her ailing daughter and received permission for a visit, but she was smart enough to realize if she left, Henry might bar her from returning to court. She remained at court, not to give away her political advantage as a tactical move. This is but one example of how she intelligently kept the upper hand and stalled his annulment by anticipating his moves and blocking them.

Henry’s Temper and Tactics

After Catherine is banished from court, one of her servants approaches the king to bid him farewell on her behalf. Henry loses it and beats the man to a pulp, while screaming that he never wants to hear from his wife again. This unhinged behavior isn’t how the real Henry handled things. He was a tyrant, but rarely got his hands dirty. To lose his cool and attack someone in public would demean his royal reputation.

Henry used subtler emotionally vindictive tactics in punishing people by taking away what mattered to them (their favorite ladies-in-waiting, by giving them false hope, manipulating situations so they thought they would receive a pardon and didn’t, by almost allowing them to be arrested and swooping in to save them, etc.).

This scene, I guess, is to show how unhinged, dangerous, and abusive Henry can be, and how Anne realizes what a serious mess she has gotten herself into, since she’s visibly terrified but conceals it behind a weak smile and a gentle reassure that everything is beautiful.

The Pope’s Portrayal

Peter O’Toole arrives to play the droll Pope Paul III, and he has this funny line: “Clement was a terrible procrastinator. Although it was very wrong of some people to dig up his dead body and stab it in the street, I can well understand their sentiment—he was never popular.”

It never happened, so I’m not sure why the writer threw it in there.

But here are some similar historical incidents:

• Boniface VIII’s corpse was stripped of its papal vestments, dragged naked through the streets, trampled, and pierced with spears (985).
• Pope Formosus was buried, then dug up and put on trial, found guilty, stripped of his vestments, and chucked into the Tiber (897).

The Pope mentions there’s a letter from Henry asking for an annulment, and another from his wife demanding the Pope excommunicate her husband. Catherine never asked for this, and indeed, feared that the king would be damned for creating the Church of England. She felt intense grief that her refusal to submit to his authority meant England itself fell from Catholicism and the people were therefore damned. She wondered on her deathbed if she would be held responsible for this great “sin.”

The Fisher Poisoning Plot

This series really vilifies the Boleyn family. It makes her father out to be a sociopath who shows no remorse for the actions that lead to people’s horrific deaths (whether that’s a servant he has paid to keep silent or his own children), her brother to be an abusive rapist, and Anne to be a liar.

The latest “crime” of theirs involves her father bribing Bishop Fisher’s cook to poison him, as Fisher is the main vocal opponent of both the king’s divorce and his establishment of the Church of England. The cook does so, and poisons the soup, which kills four men at dinner. Fisher had only one sip, but languished in his bed. Thomas More is in the room, and later has an upset discussion with Henry in which he insists Henry must treat this matter harshly, to “set a precedent.”

As a result, Henry orders the cook to be boiled alive. Visibly distressed by the man’s suffering, Cromwell leaves the room—but the ice-cold Thomas and George Boleyn continue to watch as the flesh melts off the poor man’s bones.

There are several things that need to be said about this.

Fisher was indeed poisoned, but the cook (Richard Roose) poisoned his porridge, not his soup; and two people died, rather than four of his friends. (A member of Fisher’s household, and a beggar woman to whom was given a charitable breakfast.) Seventeen others were violently ill. Fisher avoided being poisoned because he had fasted that day. (This was not an isolated incident, either; a cannon blasted through the roof of his house, harming no one but doing serious damage to the roof. After these two attempts on his life, Fisher left London before the end of the sitting parliament, to the King’s advantage when it sided with him.)

Roose claimed a stranger gave him the powder, lied to him and said it was a laxative, and had told him it would incapacitate his fellow servants for a few hours. He said he had meant it as a joke and never intended to kill anyone. But on-screen, he is covering up for Boleyn and implies to Cromwell that his family has been threatened if he exposes the source of the murderer. He was tortured on the rack, rather than simply questioned, but offered no information about who provided him with the white powder.

Contrary to only three people watching his execution, the real Roose was boiled alive in public at Smithfield, and it took two hours for him to die.

The series makes Sir Thomas More responsible for the inhumane method of the cook’s death, because he pushes Henry to come up with “severe” consequences for this action. This seems like a deliberate choice to vilify More and make his execution seem like “just rewards” for his inhumane behavior, despite calling himself a humanist. (First, watching a man be burned alive, and now inspiring the king to boil a man alive.)

Henry was terrified of being poisoned, and addressed the House of Lords on the matter of the attempted murder of Bishop Fisher, who then retroactively made murder by poison a treasonous offense and mandated that the method of execution would be by boiling alive. They hoped that such an inhumane punishment would deter anyone else who got similar ideas. Ambassador Chapuys, who wrote about the incident, suspected Henry over-reacted to Roose’s crime to distract attention from his and the Boleyn’s bad relationship with Fisher, out of fear that the public would assume one or both of them were behind it. Chapuys suspected Thomas Boleyn, as revenge against Fisher for so wholeheartedly taking up Catherine of Aragon’s cause (but he hated the Boleyns, so he’s a biased observer).

I feel like this series is trying to make everyone who winds up executed “earn” their execution by being a horrible person. It’s hard to work up much sympathy for George Boleyn after this, and his father, who has a compassion level of minus zero. In my mind, this does a disservice to these often innocent individuals who were victimized by a powerful tyrant. None of them “deserved” their fate.  

Other Historical Inaccuracies:

• The Spanish ambassador, Chapuys, colludes with a hooded assassin to kill Anne Boleyn. This is fictional.
• Norfolk has vanished without explanation, along with Henry’s friend Kivet.
• Anne rides astride, which she would not have done in preference to a sidesaddle (she does this in other episodes as well). Riding astride was immodest for women.

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.