The Tudors Season 3 Episode 1 dramatizes one of the most turbulent years of Henry VIII’s reign, depicting his 1536 marriage to Jane Seymour, the growing unrest that would lead to the Pilgrimage of Grace, and the political maneuvering of Thomas Cromwell. While the series captures the emotional tension of Henry’s court, the episode also contains several notable historical inaccuracies, including altered timelines of the Lincolnshire Rebellion, fictionalized characters such as Lady Ursula Missledon, exaggerated portrayals of court figures, and dramatized interactions involving Princess Mary and Sir Francis Bryan. Examining these differences between television narrative and documented history reveals how The Tudors blends fact with dramatic storytelling to heighten emotional stakes while reshaping key Tudor-era events.

In This Post:

• Virginal Queens Versus Whore Queens
• Was Jane Seymour Really This Sweet?
• Who Was Lady Ursula Misseldon?
• Sir Francis Byron & Intimidating Princess Mary
• The Disillusionment of the Monasteries
• The Lincolnshire Rebellion
• Minor Inaccuracies

Season 3, Episode 1: Civil Unrest

1536. Henry marries Jane Seymour and plans her coronation, while forcing his daughter, Princess Mary, through indirect threats, to renounce the Catholic Church and claim her mother’s marriage was invalid. Thomas Cromwell struggles to remain in control as the north of England erupts into rebellion with the Pilgrimage of Grace.

Virginal Queens Versus Whore Queens

I’ve noticed something interesting / curious about The Tudors, which is that none of the “virtuous” wives have any on-screen sex/nude scenes (Catherine of Aragon, Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves, and Catherine Parr). I’m not sure if this was a subconscious decision by the writer, Michael Hurst, or an intentional one… but all the smut in their seasons go to the king’s mistresses, or random women bedding Charles Brandon or Thomas Boleyn. In the “promiscuous wives” seasons, Anne Boleyn and Katherine Howard strip down a lot, with Katherine Howard having a huge amount of sexually suggestive scenes. This seems to play into the trope of them being “whores” because that’s what the king called them, and it’s disrespectful to them as historical figures. The representations here are stereotypical, as I’ve talked about with Anne Boleyn. We’ll discuss the show’s depiction of Katherine Howard as a sexpot later.

Was Jane Seymour Really This Sweet?

The show takes the middle ground with Jane Seymour, making her sweet but a little pushy in ensuring the king’s happiness. She marries him and is all aflutter about the generous gifts he gives her, but he ominously states that he looks forward to her gift, which will be a son. The show also underscores her Catholicism, and has a nice scene where she receives a cross that belonged to Catherine of Aragon, whom she respected.

Historical perspectives on Jane differ depending on whether the person studying her is pro-Anne or not; those who favor Anne Boleyn dislike Jane because she married Henry VIII eleven days after Anne got the chop. (It is not like she had a choice.) But they all agree that Henry made much ado about loving Jane the best, probably because she was submissive to him in a way her predecessors were not. Catherine had no reason to submit to Henry as an equal—she was a Princess of Spain and a diplomatic force to be reckoned with, who grew up opening the Spanish Parliament. Anne didn’t defer to Henry because she was a fiery personality who got used to telling him no, and couldn’t stop the execution ball from rolling once she didn’t deliver a son. But Jane did three things Henry liked: she gave him no trouble, she kept her mouth shut, and she birthed a son.

Like in the show, she pushed for him to reunite with his daughters and to reinstate them at court, and she became friends with Princess Mary, who welcomed her as a warm and caring “mother figure” after spending seven years in emotional distress, as she saw her parents’ marriage deteriorate into a vicious annulment, the complete overhaul of Catholicism, and by her being claimed a bastard.

Henry wanted nothing to do with Anne Boleyn’s daughter and had declared her illegitimate, so Queen Jane paid for new clothes for her out of her own purse. (One minor inaccuracy is when asked to pay for new clothes, Henry VIII says, “She isn’t even my daughter; she’s the bastard of the traitor Henry Norris.” He never said this or denied that she was his child. It would have been obvious since Elizabeth inherited his red-orange hair and her mother’s dark eyes and slender features.)

There are a few minor inaccuracies around Jane in this episode, though;

• Henry dismisses all the attendants on their wedding night and says they need not watch the consummation this time; this was a tradition but only included placing the young married couple into the same bed, then everyone would leave the room. They were rarely witnessed having sex.  
• She appoints Thomas Boleyn’s wife, Jane (Lady Rochford), as her “principal lady-in-waiting,” though that position went to Lady Rochford’s sister.
• Jane meets Chapuys, the Spanish ambassador, for the “first time” when she had been a lady-in-waiting to Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn, and knew him. They have an awkward conversation in which Chapuys urges her to support the Lady Mary, and says Jane might take pleasure in her “even over your own children by the king” that is just… weird. Chapuys was a diplomat, and would have known not to say anything that was socially precarious.
• Henry gives Jane a Cocker Spaniel in the show, but there’s no record of him giving her such a gift in real life. (He gave lapdogs to Katherine Howard.)
• When Jane tries to encourage Henry to reunite with his daughters, he icily tells her to stop interfering and to remember the fate of queens who meddled in his affairs; this happened, but regarding her appeal for mercy for the Pilgrimage of Grace, rather than asking about his daughters or encouraging him to bring them to court.
• He acts sulky with her, and when she asks why, he says he’s disappointed that she is not with child yet; there’s no record of him behaving this way in public.

Who Was Lady Ursula Missledon?

Lady Ursula is a made-up character; so she never became the king’s mistress, nor was mistress to Sir Francis Bryan. Henry also had no mistresses during his year and a half long marriage to Jane Seymour, in keeping with his tendency only to take mistresses when his wives were “with child” and sexually unavailable.

Sir Francis Byron & Intimidating Princess Mary

The series introduces Sir Francis Byron this season as a rake and a scoundrel, but doesn’t tell us much about him. He was Anne Boleyn’s cousin and a notorious philanderer. He had also been at court since 1513 and was a close favorite of the king, present at the Field of the Cloth of Gold and other events. He served Cardinal Wolsey, entered negotiations with Charles V, and had a reputation for being a candid speaker and having a bold personality. He became a member of the Privy council when Anne became queen, but worked with Cromwell to bring her down.

His big scene in this episode is going to visit Princess Mary and telling her she needs to renounce Rome and admit she is illegitimate, or her father may retaliate against her. He says, “I’m afraid Cromwell cannot guarantee your safety if you do not sign it,” and adds, “You are an unfilial daughter. If you were mine, I would smash your head against the wall until it’s as soft as a boiled apple.”

Mary was told this, but not by Sir Francis Byron. Mary underwent extreme pressure and threats of treason to force her to sign the Act of Supremacy, but it’s doubtful that even if she continued to refuse, her father would have executed her, an act that would have entailed severe political backlash. She does eventually sign the Act of Supremacy when Chapuys tells her to do so, by insisting she can claim she was coerced and be pardoned by the Pope. (This was a common practice at the time; if you were not called to martyrdom, you could confess or renounce your faith under duress and receive absolution.) Mary did not read it before signing it, so she could honestly claim later that she had no awareness of the document’s contents. (In real life, Mary received a sharp letter from her father “through” Cromwell, then had members of her household arrested and interrogated.)

The Disillusionment of the Monasteries

The series doesn’t really touch in-depth on why these actions happened, it just uses a few relics and references last season to priests / monks being corrupt and amoral as justification for Cromwell shutting them all down… but in reality, the decision to close Catholic abbeys was more monetary than religious-motivated. Cromwell was no idiot; he knew the largest landowner in England aside from the King was the Catholic Church, which owned about a third of the countryside. The abbeys received taxes and revenues from their tenants.

As soon as Henry renounced Catholicism and was excommunicated, leading them to establish a new Church of England, Cromwell saw they could replenish the treasury, which had been depleted by Henry’s lavish lifestyle and wars in France, by seizing all the religious houses. He started out with the smaller ones and graduated to larger ones with parliamentary permission, gaining momentum and putting over a million pounds of revenue into the royal treasury.

The church was the heart of every parish and a tremendous influence on people’s lives; they saw this seizure as disruptive and as threatening to everything they held dear. Most of them were devout Catholics and resented being unable to worship in the manner to which they were accustomed. There was little resistance in the South of England, but the further north one went, the more deeply entrenched the Catholicism. Cromwell’s men not only took land and private houses connected to cathedrals, but seized jewels, expensive cloth, and gold and silver plates, some of which had been donated in memory of lost loved ones (causing offense).

The Lincolnshire Rebellion

In October 1536, a rebel army of 30,000 people resisted and marched to York to demand these abuses cease and the monasteries be reopened. It gained popularity with the common people, who were starving because of a poor grain harvest in the preceding year and who could not look to the church for help. Many poor people depended on the monasteries for food and shelter.

In the show, people complain of all their feast days being gone, which was a legitimate complaint; the Church mandated these days off for the common folk, which gave them down time and an escape from the extremely hard work required of them most of the time. It was one of Cromwell’s least-popular mandates.

The show combines two active rebellions into one by establishing Robert Aske as an early instigator, when in reality, he only led a second rebellion. The first uprising was the Lincolnshire Rebellion, which led to the Pilgrimage of Grace a few months later. Robert Aske was recruited along the way after being surrounded by rebels.

Cromwell hears of the inciting incident, in which two of his men were attacked in Lincolnshire and one was beaten to death; this is like the historical event, where a man was pulled from his bed and dragged out into the street.

Minor Inaccuracies:

• Max von Sydow plays Cardinal Otto Waldburg; at the time of the show, Max was 80; the real cardinal was barely out of p[uberty. They presumably are using him as a stand-in for last season’s Pope, Peter O’Toole.
• Henry is blaming Cromwell for the Pilgrimage of Grace, to foreshadow his eventual downfall and execution (“I will destroy them all if they do not submit, and then I will destroy you!”); but at this point in their relationship, Henry still favored him and called him “my most faithful servant.”
• Henry VIII exaggerates his childhood fears over the Cornish Rebellion, and says the enemy was at their gates; in reality, thousands of men deserted the rebel army within sight of London, and the king met them with 25,000 men.

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

This article is part of my Historical Accuracy in Historical TV Shows & Movies series, where I break down the real history behind popular historical dramas.

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.