They weren’t England’s most successful dynasty. That distinction belongs to the Plantagenets, some 300 years of brilliant, beautiful, bloody backstabbers who would’ve eaten the characters on “Game of Thrones” and “House of the Dragon” alive.
But in many ways the Tudors are as fresh and modern as the Windsors in everything from Lucy Worsley’s “Secrets of the Six Wives” docudrama series to Broadway’s “Six” to Starz’s “Becoming Elizabeth.” And that, as a fabulous, beautifully sited new exhibit at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan demonstrates, has as much to do with their ability to market themselves as it does with the history of their dynastic ambitions and complicated relationships.
That the Tudors had to brand themselves was as much a necessity as a proclivity. Founder Henry VII — whose self-satisfied portrait is one of many you’ll encounter in “The Tudors: Art and Majesty in Renaissance England,” at The Met through Jan. 8 — was descended from Owen Tudor, whose claim to dynastic fame was that he married Catherine of Valois, widow of one of England’s greatest monarchs, the warrior Henry V. But Henry VII raised the dynastic stakes by marrying Elizabeth of York, daughter of Edward IV, whose two brothers — Edward V and Richard, Duke of York — were presumably murdered by their usurping uncle, Richard III.
Richard’s death in the Battle of Bosworth Field — which marked the end of the War of the Roses and the extended Plantagenet dynasty — and the union of Henry and Elizabeth heralded the Renaissance and a renaissance in England. Certainly, the couple must’ve thought so as they named their first born Arthur after the mythical king of Camelot and married him off to the accomplished Catherine of Aragon, daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spanish unification and Christopher Columbus fame.
Yet as every student of history and soap opera knows, Arthur died and Catherine wound up remarried to his kid brother, who would become Henry VIII. The narcissistic Henry’s obsession with securing the Tudor line with a male heir — there hadn’t been a queen regnant since Empress Matilda some 400 years earlier — would lead him to break with the Roman Catholic Church, divorce Catherine, mother of his daughter Mary'; and marry Anne Boleyn, mother of his daughter Elizabeth. It wasn’t till Henry beheaded Anne on trumped-up charges of adultery and treason and secured wife No. 3, Jane Seymour, that he arrived at the longed-for son, Edward.
But Jane’s death due to complications from childbirth, would leave Henry to replay the “divorced, beheaded, died” cycle with wives four through six — Anne of Cleves, Catherine Howard and Catherine Parr. (While Parr survived Henry, her subsequent marriage to Jane Seymour’s brother Thomas led to her death in childbirth. So the “divorced, beheaded, died” symmetry in a way held.)
As did irony: While the boy Edward succeeded his father as Edward VI, he died at 15, reigning for only six short years. It would be Mary and Elizabeth — the daughters Henry had used and abused as their mothers waxed and waned in his affections — who would provide a more lasting legacy, Elizabeth in particular would preside over an age of exploration, artistic flowering and military ascendance that would take its name from her.
LIke her father and her sister before her, Elizabeth cemented her power and authority in her appearance, the progresses to her various estates, her gardens but especially in what was written about her and how she was portrayed. The Tudors were fortunate to live in the age of the relatively new printing press. But that was a double-edged sword for monarchs and authors. Slander could cost you your right hand.
Micromanaging their images and exploits and above all dynastic solidarity on paper, the Tudors also curated these on canvas, employing some of the finest painters of the day, including Hans Holbein. The exhibit’s many portraits illustrate particularly the cult of Elizabeth as Gloriana — with her pale skin, dark eyes, russet tresses and symbolic gowns and jewels. In the so-called “Sieve Portrait” by Quentin Metsys the Younger (1583, oil on canvas), Elizabeth holds a sieve, symbol of virginity. (According to legend, the Roman vestal virgin Tuccia, accused of impurity, plunged a sieve into the Tiber River and carried the water back to her temple without spilling a drop.) The painting suggests that Elizabeth’s integrity, her wholeness, was that airtight.
Being a professional virgin — as well as an actual one, as far as history can deduce — suited Elizabeth politically. Her enemies never knew whom she might ally herself with, while her people knew she was married to them. Modern psychologists, however, might wonder if this didn’t also suit her personally. She was, after all, the daughter of a man who had brought down her mother and stepmothers; the stepchild of a man who had molested her; and the sister-in-law of a man, Philip II of Spain, who had married her sister only to try to secure England as part of the Spanish Empire. Even the great love of Elizabeth’s romantic life — Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester — was something of an opportunist.
The one thing we know for certain is that being a professional virgin proved to be the perfect marriage of a talent and a temperament. As the Scottish diplomat James Melville shrewdly observed to her in a letter: “You think if you were married, you would be but queen of England, and now you are king and queen both. I know your spirit. You cannot suffer a commander.”
But that didn’t mean she didn’t like to dally with men who might try to tame that unconquerable spirit — including the charming Francis, the Duke of Alençon, her last real suitor, for whom she wrote the poignant poem “On Monsieur’s Departure.” The so-called “Rainbow Portrait” by Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger (circa 1602, oil on canvas) gives us Gloriana at the apotheosis of her glory — ageless in a low-cut, highly embellished gown, whose eye and ear designs speak of a omniscient woman and her deadly spy network, part Venus, part Virgin Mary, alluring and yet forever at a remove.
Yet for all that attention to what we would call branding and leaning in, Elizabeth’s brand of leaning in, her professional virginity, actually ended the dynasty the Tudors had labored so brutally to construct. Elizabeth would be succeeded by her godson, James VI of Scotland (James I in England), who ushered in the Stuart dynasty. He was, of course, the son of her cousin and rival, Mary, Queen of Scots, a woman who, unlike Elizabeth, preferred her heart to her head and so lost both. (Still, a child is no guarantee of a legacy. Queen Anne, the last of the Stuart sovereigns, was pregnant 17 times. None of her five children survived her.)
In our own time, when workers and women are but two groups who are disenchanted with their place in the world, “The Tudors” offers us a portrait of a woman devoted to duty — devoted to the job, to country — who nonetheless ultimately remained true to herself.