I should preface this post by saying that I am not a professional historian. I am an amateur history buff, however, mostly interested in early English history from the Norman Conquest through the Elizabethan era. Right now, I’m also dabbling in American history, specifically the Revolutionary War and its aftermath. I am happy to learn about this history through a variety of medium: mostly books and movies. They can be fiction or nonfiction but they must tell a good story. I think we do a real disservice to historical times by trying to summarize them in textbooks. When I watched the John Adams series with my parents, my mother commented that if she had learned about history in this way, through telling it as a good story, she probably would have found it much more interesting than all the name and date memorizing to which she was subjected. And, at least two of my dissertation study participants who were history teachers complained that the history standards tend to be fact-based and thus seem to sap all the energy and excitement out of what should be very good stories.

As part of my fascination with English history, I’ve been watching the Showtime series, The Tudors. I’ve written about it before on my personal blog, labeling it as a guilty pleasure that plays a bit fast and loose with the historical record. The show’s producers do not deny this and, in fact, encourage viewers to identify those inaccuracies and post them to a wiki. The wiki also has a page devoted to Tudor historians and their impressions of the show, most of which are very bad. They call it entertaining fluff, spiced up with lots of sex, and a dumbed down version of history specifically designed to appeal to ignorant Americans. I would agree with the first two (lots and lots of sex, folks, so be warned) but I’m not sure I agree with the last one.

The series does take liberties–Henry, played by the very attractive Jonathan Rys Meyers–never seems to age even though he would have been close to 50 when he married Katherine Howard. In addition, they made the choice not to have Henry get fat, which he certainly did, weighing possibly 300 pounds. Characters are combined together or even made up. There are anachronisms in terms of language and costumes and the sex is mostly gratuitous but this is television after all. However, for a professional historian, I’m sure it’s problematic.

But the essential facts are there: Henry married six wives in his quest for an heir. He had no qualms about ridding himself of advisers like Cardinal Wolsey, Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell when their views differed from him or he otherwise perceived that they had failed him. He reigned over the English Reformation and began the Church of England. The series spends some time on the development of the Six Articles, which, as Cromwell points out, affirm Catholic ideas such as transubstantiation. Henry brutally put down the uprisings in the North related to his dissolution of the monasteries, something which is also covered in the series. I don’t see any dumbing down there.

Which gets back to my original point…the series tells the very intriguing and exciting story of the reign of Henry VIII. It is interesting enough that it may appeal to people who have otherwise found history to be a dry recitation of facts. And that may lead them to doing some of their own investigating. Luckily, the web is filled with great resources which I’ll share in another post. Does historical accuracy matter so much? After all, in may cases, historians themselves do not agree on the facts as they are relying on sources that may themselves be suspect depending on the point of view and political agenda of the writer. Here’s where good research skills become essential along with the lesson that we cannot always believe everything we hear, see or read.