Anne Boleyn

I'm hanging out with Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn, and the English court. It's the year 1536 as I write this, and Anne Boleyn's lovely head is about to be separated from her body. Her crime? Being unable to produce a male heir to assuage Henry's panic that England would be left in the care of a woman should he die. 

Henry as a young man

Catherine of Aragon

Yes. It turns out that Netflix has added "The Tudors" season 2, to its instant view, and I'm now on hour nine of my 10-hour marathon of viewing. 

 Jane Seymour

My love is away for a few days, attending a reunion. My parents, who are visiting, have gone to Montreal for the weekend. I love Montreal, but I have bad memories of the place and do not want to return. And it's been raining steadily now for 36 hours. I'm still intending to go for a long walk; I have grocery shopping to do; I want to read Admission by Jean Hanff Korelitz, the latest novel that I'm enjoying; but once I found "The Tudors," I knew what would comprise my weekend. 

Why? You might ask. When I was a child, I learned to read at an early age, and sometime around kindergarten or so, I learned the story of Henry VIII and his six wives. I also learned about Henry's greatest progeny: Elizabeth I, the queen with the heart of a woman but the stomach of a king, the woman who defeated the Spanish Armada (with a little help from the storms), and who refused to marry because she did not want to be subject to any man. 

Elizabeth, when she was about 13 years old. 

It would be fair to say that I was obsessed with the Tudor family. Not only could I name each and every wife and what became of them, I could also tell you the names of their children, how two of them were related (Boleyn and Henry's fifth wife, Katherine Howard, both of whom were beheaded), and Elizabeth's life story. I hated Bloody Mary, Elizabeth's half-sister, thought Jane Seymour, the woman who replaced Anne Boleyn as Henry's wife was a simpering idiot who having done her duty to provide Henry with a son, promptly died. I had always thought Catherine of Aragon an unreasonable woman, who, if she had just agreed to a divorce would not have caused the split with Rome. 

Katherine Howard

 It's funny now. I see all of this in a whole new light. Catherine of Aragon was courageous, and paid a stiff penalty for defying Henry: sent into exile, she was not allowed to see her daughter ever again--even when she was on her deathbed--and Henry's bad treatment of Mary may have led to her ruthlessness on the throne. She was called Bloody Mary for the number of people she executed, but statistics show that she was far less murderous than she's been made out to be. In reality, she was a sad, broken woman when she ascended the throne, and she only lived but a few years. 

Catherine Parr

And Henry's son? Weak from birth, he died at 17 without an heir, thus clearing the way for first Mary, and the Elizabeth to become queens. 

Again. Why am I telling you this? 

I just noticed this is Lady Jane Grey, who reigned for a few days in a disastrous attempt to claim the English throne. She, too, was beheaded. 

Because I have this picture in my mind. I'm living in a house, the location of which I can't remember because we moved so many damn times, but I'm lying on my stomach with a sketchbook. With me is a friend who shares my fascination with the Tudors. I have no idea what her name was, but I remember what we did for pleasure. We would lie on our stomachs in front of large sketch pads and we would draw, over and over again, our designs for Tudor dresses. 

I can't draw stick figures, but I would laboriously and lovingly craft each dress. They were kind of fun. I would draw the shoulders of the dress, cinch in the waist, and then draw a large triangle. Then, I would design the neck of the gown--sometimes a squared-off neck, sometimes a v-neck, and, if I was feeling risque, I'd add cleavage. The dresses always featured a long chain belt, and at the end of the belt was a ball of some kind, often made of gold or some precious metal. Huge puffy sleeves. Head pieces that changed depending on whether I was attempting to draw Anne's or Katherine's. 

(It's funny. I'm such a geek. I just went looking for a portait of Jane Seymour on Google, and someone had put Catherine Parr's portrait there instead. Idiots. Can't you distinguish Catherine Parr (#6) from Jane (#3)?

Anyway. This post is purely for me. I've included some portraits, lifted from the net, of the cast of characters. By the way, the Showtime series is damn good, and if I thought it would be of any interest, I'd write about how I see the courtiers at Henry's court acting straight out of Castiglione's Il Cortigiano with a little of Machiavelli's The Prince thrown in. This stuff is way cool to me. 

Okay. So back to the last hour and a half of the Season 2. Even though I know exactly what is going to happen, I can't take my eyes off the screen. 

And the funny thing was, I had planned to write this serious post about torture, and truth, and power, and gender, and manipulation. And instead, I got all geeked out thinking about being that little girl again, who didn't quite understand what the power struggle was all about, but who was fascinated anyway.

I'm actually thinking of going to the bookstore and buying one of those "Tudor coloring books." Coloring in costumes seems like a fun project on a rainy day with no one around to play with.