‘A Great National Heritage’: The Early Twentieth-Century Tudor Church Music Revival

This chapter examines the revival of interest in early English choral music that took place in the first quarter of the twentieth century. It pays particular attention to the religious agendas driving this revival, and to the role of the Tudor Church Music edition, published in the 1920s by Oxford University Press, in promoting this music as a ‘national heritage’ of which all Englishmen could be proud.

Tudorism in English Music, 1837–1953

Between the early nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, a cultivated relationship with the music of a favoured period in the distant national past was a pervasive aspect of high, and sometimes lower, musical culture in England. This chapter first sketches a general picture of that relationship before presenting some particular case studies. It addresses the following questions: to what extent does Tudorism in music refer to the revival of music itself, to what extent to its stylistic emulation in nineteenth- and twentieth-century English compositions? Was it a matter of appealing to the Tudors to set a political agenda for music? Tudorism in English music was many things but also one very definite thing — a conscious modelling of style or atmosphere in musical composition on that of a perceived golden age of national culture. It was in some respects part of the early music movement that Harry Haskell identified as beginning in 1829 with Mendelssohn's revival of J. S. Bach's St Matthew Passion, yet not the same thing insofar as that movement was about reviving discarded old music and Tudorism was about creating new music in an earlier image.

The Tudors Viewed by French Romantic Artists

This chapter singles out two features of the cult of British historical themes in French Romantic painting, and focuses on the most prominent of the artists who cultivated such scenes involving Tudors and Stuarts: Paul Delaroche. It argues that the pronounced nineteenth-century French interest in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English history was a form of displacement, so that Delaroche's painting of the execution of Lady Jane Grey (1834), for example, opened up for the French viewer a space in which to negotiate memories of the Terror within the relative comfort of a more distant and foreign historical moment.

Slashing History: The Tudors

This chapter examines the television series The Tudors (2007–2010). It argues that whilst it pays much lip-service to the Tudor dynasty as a real, historical entity, it is very unconcerned with the actuality; indeed, it strives to take the well-known iconography and to reject it. The series demonstrates to a great degree Tudorism, the fetishisation and commodification of a set of cultural norms, tropes, and ideas. The Tudors is Tudorist because it deals directly with the ways in which historical cliché — particularly surrounding Henry VIII — works in the popular imagination. The chapter considers The Tudors from a variety of perspectives to analyze what the show demonstrates about contemporary engagement with the Tudor period, about the evolution of costume drama more generally, and the ways in which popular cultural history might be engaged with, disrupted, and used by viewers and audiences.

‘A Great Guy with His Chopper’?: The Sex Life of Henry VIII on Screen and in the Flesh

This chapter analyzes how the cinema and television have rendered Henry VIII. It considers films such as The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933) and Anne of the Thousand Days (1969), and television shows such as The Six Wives of Henry VIII and The Tudors. It suggests that Henry has generally been the protagonist in the dramas in which he has appeared, and it has been his experiences and his emotional journey, that are spectators' principal concern.

Architecture: The Tudoresque Diaspora

This chapter focuses on the use of Tudoresque architecture overseas, where it began as an expression of Britishness, but since then has come to have other connotations along the way. It describes examples from 1920s America which show that Tudoresque architecture can flourish without the support of a British expatriate community; and Tudoresque buildings at Shimla in the northwest Himalayas, India, which from 1864 became a seasonal capital that served as the seat of government from March to November. Tudoresque architecture has become emblematic of Britishness and can be found around the world wherever quality is valued. It is also found in a less explicitly ‘Tudor’ mode, where the black-and-white colouring of the style is used for the sake of its connection with earlier, more colonial buildings that have come to be seen as smart and authoritative, but where specific evocation of Britishness does not seem to be the point.

The Pleasures of Tudor Horror: Popular Histories, Modernity and Sensationalism in the Long Nineteenth Century

This chapter discusses Tudorism in popular historical culture during the nineteenth century. First, it briefly delineates the apparent streamlining of the Tudor era into a broadly Whig and liberal-radical culture of progress and improvement and the confident interpretation of history. It then focuses on the evolution of popular Tudorism with its emphasis upon, and uses of, horror and its relations to modernity and urbanisation: what Dickens described as the ‘attraction of repulsion’ in horror. It traces developments in representations, meanings, and uses of Tudor horror, mainly by concentrating on the Tower of London, which during the nineteenth century evolved into an embodiment of the history of England, and the site of continuous debate and contest over access to, and ownership of, the Tudors.

Revisiting the Olden Time: Popular Tudorism in the Time of Victoria

This chapter revisits, in light of subsequent scholarship, some arguments about popular Victorian appropriations of Tudor history that were made by the author about a decade ago. It investigates the nineteenth-century cult of the ‘Olden Time’, which sought in English history a basis not only to sanction but to criticise the social and political arrangements of the present day, in order to provide a more genuinely national and socially inclusive basis for collective identity. To do this, it reached back in time to recapture and reintegrate stories about portions of the nation omitted or elided by the Whig interpretation, retaining Whiggism's progressive, forward motion but braiding in previously excluded strands.

The Tudors: Famous for Five Centuries*

This chapter addresses the question of why the Tudors have been famous for five hundred years. One reason is the availability of actual representations of them through art, which allows people to see what every one of them looked like, or at least what they wanted us to think they looked like. Another is their extraordinary life story. The Tudors are almost the perfect soap — a drama powered by the mechanics and dramas of family relationships.

Myth and Memory in Representations of Henry VIII, 1509–2009

This chapter explores a portrait of King Henry VIII that has played a key role in sustaining and inflecting received notions of the Tudor age in the post-Tudor period. It argues that almost without exception the Tudorist visual representations of King Henry VIII from the mid-sixteenth to the twenty-first century derive their communicative force from, and were indeed only made possible because of, the existence of an extraordinarily compelling and efficacious point of origin. The portrait of Henry VIII that set this cascade of information, ideas, and associations about the king in motion was the full-length portrait from the Whitehall Mural, painted by Hans Holbein the Younger (1497–1543) in 1537.