The Tudors Stink

Where did they do their dry cleaning?

Yesterday, killing time in England before heading to Israel, I caught the old Richard Burton film Anne of a Thousand Days, the Anne Boelyn story.

Personally, I thought that Showtime did a better job with The Tudors, but both suffer from severe historical issues.

What struck me in both films was how incredibly well dressed, groomed and manicured everyone in the film is – particularly in the court of Henry VIII.  Everything is so spotlessly clean.

It turns out that our obsession with cleanliness is a very 20th Century thing- in fact late 20th Century.

Ironically, The Economist is running a story this week called The Joy of Dirt, and it turns out that for most of European history, bathing was a rarely experienced event, if ever.  As for clean clothing – forget it.

Europeans around the time of Henry VIII believed that water was a carrier of diseases like The Plague and the best way to avoid them was to avoid water. Furthermore they believed that plunging yourself into hot water only served to open your pores and let the disease in. As a result, they rarely, if ever, bathed.

Elizabeth I, Henry’s daughter and heir to the throne took only one bath a month. James I, her son, never bathed, and only washed his fingers.  Most europeans caked on powders and oils to cover the smells where they could, rarely removing them. Wigs were in fashion because people rarely if ever washed their hair.

Charming.

And this was the royalty.  Most commoners never bathed in a lifetime.

Henry IV, King of France was ‘famously filthy, stinking of sweat, stables, feet and garlic”.

To add to this, let’s remember that public sewage systems were pretty much unknown, and the streets were already choked with horse manure.  When one came into the palace or someone’s home, they didn’t take off their boots – that wasn’t Japan.

So watching an ‘historical drama’ like The Tudors or Anne of a Thousand Days one can only laugh at the beautiful furnishings, rugs, clothing, furs, bedclothes or lack thereof. One must imagine that hopping into bed with the King (or Queen) was probably something most of us would today say ‘are you kidding me’?

If we’re indeed on the path to becoming a visual culture; if future generations are going to learn about the past mostly through movies, TV and video as opposed to reading, then perhaps we have a responsibility to try and inject a bit more historical accuracy into the films.  This, after all, is how most people are going to both remember and envision Henry VIII.

Instead of Jonathan Rhees Myers, let’s show him for the fat, stinking slob that he was.  Having done that, you can then really appreciate what ‘the power of the King’ meant, as he continues to bed everyone from here to Timbuktu.