Did The Tudors Season 4 Episode 1 portray Henry VIII and Catherine Howard accurately? While the series leans heavily into drama and scandal, the real Tudor court was far more complex (and many times, far less sensationalized) than what appears on screen.

In This Post:

• What Did Henry VIII Really Look Like in 1540?
• Summer 1540
• Was Catherine Howard Really Immature and Improper in Public?
• Who Was Catherine Howard? Her Real Life, Family, and Upbringing
• Who Was Joan Bulmer? The Real People Behind The Tudors Character
• Did Catherine Howard and Mary Tudor Hate Each Other in Real Life?
• When Did Thomas Culpeper Meet Catherine Howard in Real Life?
• Why Was Lord Dacre Executed?
• Did Henry VIII Have a Brain Injury?
• Did Edward Seymour Encourage His Wife’s Affairs?
• Who Was Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey? Real History vs The Tudors
• Was Thomas Culpeper Really a Rapist? The Historical Evidence
• Minor Inaccuracies

Episode 1: Moment of Nostalgia

What Did Henry VIII Really Look Like in 1540?

Let’s get the most basic, obvious inaccuracy out of the way first; by 1540, Henry VIII looked like this famous portrait. Jonathan Rhys Meyers has put on a gruff voice, a weary expression, and limps around a bit, but he is still “hot” by comparison to the almost-300 pound forty-nine-year-old monarch, who married a seventeen-year-old Catherine Howard. Far from being strapping, the king was obese and had jowls. He also stank from the rotting ulcer in his leg. But his personality is on point.

Summer 1540

It’s true that a historical drought hit England in 1540, and it was hot. I feel for the dudes in Henry’s Council Chamber, who are decked out in fur coats in the dead of summer. My friends, there is a time to show off your wealth and a time to go without.

Was Catherine Howard Really Immature and Improper in Public?

An ongoing theme this season is Catherine Howard is immature; she has no proper manners, is caught playing in mud puddles in her underclothes, performs dirty puppet shows for the king, and throws little hissy fits around Princess Mary (who at 24 looks and acts like a mature woman). Then she has an affair behind the king’s back. The point is to show her as an oversexed, ignorant fool living her best life until her head is hacked from her neck by an intolerant king. But she had it coming, am I right?

Actually, Catherine Howard would not have been this insipid. She served in Anne of Cleves’s household, where there were no complaints about her behavior. Her step-grandmother ensured she had the proper manners and etiquette to succeed, and taught her how to dance. She knew everyone at court, and people spoke well of her. There are no references to her being inappropriate in public, only ones that said she was sweet, compliant, and kind. Nobody knows what she was like in the king’s bedroom, but The Tudors makes her a sexpot. (I think I mentioned earlier in this series that it goes full-bore nude and sex scenes with the “slutty” wives, but has none for the rest of them.)

Overall, this season is hard for me to talk about because I think the actress is phenomenal in the part. She really makes me care about Catherine and invest in her on an emotional level, despite half of her scenes being sex and/or nude scenes. And it just feels like too much.

The real Catherine would not have been a giggling, insipid mess in public. And I doubt she was dumb enough to have a sexual affair, but we’ll talk about that when we get to those scenes.

Who Was Catherine Howard? Her Real Life, Family, and Upbringing

Who was Catherine Howard? A daughter of Edmund Howard, the third son of Thomas Howard, the 2^nd Duke of Norfolk (b: 1443, d: 1524), first cousin of Anne Boleyn, and second cousin of Jane Seymour. She came from an enormous family (eleven children) and as the “least” son, Edmund had no money to provide for them with and begged off his rich relatives, when he was not spending what he had on gambling or in paying his way out of debtor’s prison. He died in 1539, at which point she went to live with her step-grandmother, the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk.

The Duchess of Norfolk had a lot of wards and poor relations she provided for, and Catherine grew up surrounded by friends but with little supervision, since the Duchess preferred to be at Court. (Unlike the last season implied, Catherine did not come from a brothel, and the Duchess was not a madam.) There, she was sexually abused and preyed upon by two men, Henry Mannox and Francis Dereham, at twelve-to-fourteen years old.

Catherine had no religious or political agenda as queen, unlike her predecessors, but her inability to get pregnant suggests either she tried not to (“I know how to mettle with a man…”), was infertile, or Henry was no longer capable of siring children. The latter seems likely, since his unmanaged diabetes could have made him infertile.  

Who Was Joan Bulmer? The Real People Behind The Tudors Character

The character of Joan is a blend of three different people from Catherine Howard’s early life: Joan Bulmer, who wanted to serve Catherine at court to get away from her unhappy marriage, her friend Katherine Tilney, and Alice Wilkes, a former servant of the Dowager Duchess. All three women knew about Catherine’s past life, particularly Tilney, since she was present one evening and witnessed Catherine and Dereham being “intimate.”

The way Joan hops into bed with Catherine and touches her hints there may have been some same-sex experimenting going on when they were younger, which again, we have no evidence for and it’s doubtful.

Did Catherine Howard and Mary Tudor Hate Each Other in Real Life?

Yes. Considering her father’s new wife was seven years younger than her, Mary had good reason to look down on her. She was the daughter of a queen, and Catherine Howard was a “nobody” from the lower aristocracy. She came from the Howard-Boleyn family, which Mary resented because of Ane. And Catherine was favored, showered with gifts, and preferred by the king, when Mary had been fighting all her life for a modicum of approval and compassion from her father.

When Did Thomas Culpeper Meet Catherine Howard in Real Life?

Thomas Culpeper is sent to deliver presents to Catherine on the king’s behalf, and shows his predatory nature early. He takes a fancy to her and plans to seduce her after she charms him.

Actually, Culpeper and Catherine courted when she served in Anne of Cleves’s household. Some sources say she considered marrying him, but broke it off when the king started lavishing her with attention; another says Culpeper wanted to bed her, and she refused. But she broke down in tears over it. A former romantic attachment makes sense in a historical context. That he loved her and intended to marry her, only to have her snatched away by the king, is tragic, but something that happened to several of Henry’s wives (Anne wanted to marry Henry Percy; Catherine wanted Culpeper; Catherine Parr hoped to marry Thomas Seymour).

Why Was Lord Dacre Executed?

A minor plot involves an English nobleman charged with murder. Henry, rather callously, says he will be dragged through the streets to Tyburn and hung for all to see as a “common criminal.” Another character says that the judges wept when they read his sentence because he was so young.

Who was this youth?

Lord Dacre’s name was Thomas Fiennes, and he inherited the title at nineteen (1533). He was a well-known noble at court who attended the trial of Anne Boleyn and those involved in the Pilgrimage of Grace. He also went to Prince Edward’s baptism, carried a canopy at Jane Seymour’s funeral, and greeted Anne of Cleves.

In April 1540, Dacre and six other men went poaching on a neighbor’s land, were discovered by the man’s servants, and defended themselves. After the servant died from his injuries, Dacre pled guilty, hoping the king would lessen his sentence, but he had him hanged rather than executed with an axe (a sign of disfavor since only lowborn people were hanged).

Why did Henry come down so hard on him? To show everyone that no one was above the law, and even high-ranking lords could be executed.

Did Henry VIII Have a Brain Injury?

Dacre’s harsh sentence is also a sign of Henry’s increasing mental illness. By this time, he had become paranoid and cruel. Some think it the result of a head injury he received when he fell from his horse in a joust (1536); he was unconscious for hours, which could have caused him brain damage. Given that Henry was an agreeable, compassionate king in his younger years, and became a bloodthirsty tyrant by the end of his life, it is entirely possible damage to his frontal lobe altered his personality and that his condition worsened over the last ten years of his life.  

Henry had “mean moments” when young, but they increasingly escalated after the accident, as he became almost impossibly callous about executing people he had grown up with, considered his friends, and married. All of his erratic, unstable, and unpredictable behavior, from how he treated Catherine of Aragon to the executions of Sir Thomas More and Sir Thomas Cromwell, to believing Anne Boleyn committed adultery, and terrorizing of his last few wives, happened after his coma.

As much as I hate the bastard, it’s entirely possible his brain injury made him a sociopath, and he cannot be completely held responsible for his actions by mental insanity. And if that’s true, it makes the fate of everyone he put to death even more tragic. England’s nobility and its Catholic populace would have been better off had he died in that joust.

Did Edward Seymour Encourage His Wife’s Affairs?

One subplot this season involves all of Anne Stanhope-Seymour’s sexual partners outside of her marriage, including her husband encouraging her to bed Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey. This never happened. And her marriage with Edward must not have been as tepid as depicted here, because they had ten children together.

Who Was Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey? Real History vs The Tudors

Howard / Surrey is portrayed gruffly and callously with occasional forays into his poetry, but he is considered one of the founders of English Renaissance poetry. He grew up at Windsor Castle with Henry Fitzroy, the king’s illegitimate son, and his sister married Fitzroy before his death. Surrey was a known troublemaker, jailed multiple times for breaking windows, punching people in the face, and getting into drunken brawls. For a short time, his cousin Anne Boleyn tried to convince Henry to marry off his daughter Mary to Surrey, hoping to neutralize her claims to the throne.

Here, Howard calls Catherine his niece, but she was actually his cousin. He is also middle-aged, whereas the real one was in his twenties, with slender, long features rather than a “round Irish face.”

Rather than being a newcomer to Court, he had been there for many years; he took part in the trial of Anne Boleyn and helped suppress the Pilgrimage of Grace.

Was Thomas Culpeper Really a Rapist? The Historical Evidence

The series sensationalizes a claim that Thomas Culpeper was brought up on charges of rape and murder and pardoned by the king. The source for these allegations came from a letter ten years after the fact, and there is no evidence to support them in the court’s legal documents.

Slandering someone after they are dead, once you know (or think you do) their crimes, is a fairly common practice, so this is one of those “… I doubt it, but there is a slim chance it is true” incidents. Michael Hirst made it true for the series, which makes Culpeper into a creep who is already talking about the queen’s breasts at dinner with his friends and how “wanton” she is for smiling at him.

Minor Inaccuracies

• Mention is made of Thomas Boleyn having recently died, and the only people who attended his funeral were the ghosts of his children. Actually, he died in March 1539, over 13 months earlier.
• Brandon is separated from his wife in the series, which never happened in real life.
• Catherine Howard meets a teenage Princess Elizabeth, who was only six years old.
• Henry VIII mentions the death of the French dauphin (prince) as if it had just happened, but the boy had been dead for four years.
• Henry condemns Viscount Lisle to death for treason, but actually held him in the Tower for several years. As soon as he heard of his intended release, the poor man died of a heart attack.
• The French ambassador suggests a marriage between Mary Tudor and the Duke of Orleans, but the latter was already married.

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.