Connections/The Tudors

My name is Peter Antony, and I work in the editorial department at the Metropolitan Museum. My topic today is the Tudors.

From a very early age, I became keenly interested in British monarchs.

These characters in my mind are larger than life, who

made all sorts of political and religious changes that we're still living with the ramifications of.

But that's not it entirely, it's often as simple as these people's personalities.

It's risky to judge a medieval or early Renaissance family by modern psychotherapeutic standards, but they seem to me to have been extremely dysfunctional.

Henry VIII clearly had issues. Six wives I think by any standard is excessive, and you know, to go out of your way to kill two of them is a bit much. And you can

see the effects of how he lived, he appears to be obese, exhausted, irritated and maybe a little gouty. And

we get the sense of the physical presence of Henry by looking at his field armor. Some of these objects are

at least comparatively speaking, modest, but the stories behind them add tremendous value. Henry's son

Edward VI, was crowned as a boy and died as a boy, a very poignant story.

Mary I, Bloody Mary, her mother set aside her princess title, she was called a bastard by her own father, and she came to the throne and she—it was pay back time. She wanted revenge. It's that kind of color that continues to draw me to the period.

Philip II of Spain was her husband, but not a very affectionate one. And of course it's this figure who sent the Spanish Armada against England so calamitously. He went on to propose to Mary's sister

Elizabeth I. Elizabeth did decline that marriage proposal as she declined all of the great many marriage proposals that were offered to her over decades of her reign.

Historians really do differ on whether Elizabeth's purported virginity was a fact, or whether it was a posture she assumed. You know, people differ. Robert Devereux was

her last great favorite, featured all the time in films and television and popular novels. We don't know whether their relationship was physical. But Elizabeth executed him, he was part of a rebellion, he was implicated in a rebellion, and she had him executed. And it isn't

always clear to me, as I think about these figures, the degree to which there was affection between and among them, but you know I'm not really feeling the love. What I do see is that they were all deeply preoccupied with dynastic concerns. You know, depending on how you came down in religious and nationalistic terms, that was where you sided. Tremendous drama. Of all of the figures

This fellow was some sort of figure in the court Henry VIII. He's wearing the livery of the court and he's looking out of this picture in a way that helps me to imagine what he would have beheld. The extraordinary spectacle, perhaps the marital intrigues, the crushing, calamitous political failures that resulted in people being executed.

The pageantry, you know, the music of the period,

the dance. It's the age of Shakespeare and Holbein was brought from Germany

to paint portraits. The period's fascinating to me not only because of the political and religious tumult, and these characters are fascinating to me

not only because of the drama of their personal lives, the period's also interesting because it was a period during which culture

flourished.