The Tudors: Is it Really Good to Be the King?

The Tudors, a ten part series starting on Showtime, is covering familiar ground. The story of "the King's Great Matter" has been told on film, television, and the stage for decades. Past examples include A Man for All Seasons,Anne

of the Thousand Days, and the Anne Boleyn episode of The Six Wives of Henry VIII.

One of the things that make The Tudors different from all of its predecessors is the scope it is apparently trying to achieve. The Tudors is trying to depict the very origins of the process that caused King Henry, once so devoted to Catholicism that he was named "Defender of the Faith" by the Pope, to destroy the primacy of the Roman Catholic Church in England and assure that country would be a Protestant one, albeit after centuries of religious strife.

We meet Henry VIII, played by a slender, vibrant John Rhys Meyers, in 1520. He is in his mid twenties, a great athlete, a mighty wencher, eager to make a name for himself as a power in European affairs. He is aided by two of his closest advisers, Cardinal Wosley, played by Sam Neill, and Thomas Moore, played by Jeremy Northam. We'll doubtlessly see a lot more of those two esteemed gentlemen, a worldly cleric and a religious layman, later.

In any event, policy and Henry's desire have placed England in an alliance called the Holy League, which was formed to oppose French ambitions in Italy. The assassination of Henry's ambassador at the court of the Duke of Urbino would seem to be the pretext for war. But Wosley, who secretly favors the French for his own reasons, proceeds to manipulate events so that a peace summit, known as the Meeting of the Cloth of Gold, will result instead of yet another English invasion of France.

In the meantime, Henry's Queen, Catherine of Aragon, the aunt of the Holy Roman Emperor, is getting a little old and frumpy. Worse, only a daughter, the Princess Mary, has survived from her loins. Recent English history, which featured a bloody, thirty year conflict for the English throne known as the Wars of the Roses, dictate that the King have a male heir.