The cry goes out across the land. It whistles across the heather and rumbles through the tenements: “Who will rid us of these troublesome Tudors?”
I mean, really. As a nation, have we not already lavished as much attention as can reasonably be lavished on Henry VIII and his unfortunate wives? And his malignant children? And the nasty Thomas Cromwell? And the whole tottering, castellated, half-timbered pile that is the story of the benighted Tudors? Poor old Hilary Mantel is probably in hiding in heaven lest her agent phones her and demands a further sequel to Wolf Hall. Yet still they bring us more.
Six Lives at the National Portrait Gallery isn’t merely another exhibition devoted to Henry’s desperate housewives. It is also the epicentre of a fresh outbreak of Tudor fever. Six the musical is back with its sixth or seventh (I forget) metropolitan season “remixing 500 years of historical heartbreak into an 80-minute celebration of 21st-century girl power”. The NPG, trashy edition of Tit-Bits that it has become, is promising us a themed Tudor evening in which DJ Timberlina will introduce a sing-a-long of Six as well as songs by Beyoncé and Ariana Grande. While the artist Robin-Lee Hall will oversee “a mass-participation drawing event” devoted to the costumes of the Tudor queens. The heart gulps, sinks and dies.
The difficulty with all this getting down with the kids is not just that it involves so much fancy dress. I have no problem with turning up at the NPG in my Anne Boleyn outfit and singing Beyoncé classics with DJ Timberlina. The life of the art critic takes many turns. The issue here is the absence in this glut of reheated Tudors of any genuine investigation or depth or serious cultural probing — when there should be so much.
Somewhere along the line the civilisation-crushing, art-destroying sins of the Tudors have mutated into a silly soap opera: War and Peace has turned into Carry on Henry. The opening sight of Six Lives at the NPG is a set of waxwork models of Henry’s queens photographed by Hiroshi Sugimoto at Madame Tussauds. Six glass-eyed approximations are setting the agenda.
But the real problem here is not the transformation of the Tudors into popular waxworks. The real problem is the space that transformation has allowed for their redemption. By turning the story of the Tudors into Six the musical we make light of their sins, giggle in collusion and forgive them. When they should never be forgiven.
In the days when Tate Britain was an institution with scholarly ambitions it mounted a show about art in Britain before the Tudors called Image and Idol. It was a heartbreaking event. I particularly remember a tiny wooden head of Christ arranged in a frame with a portion of his leg. These small bits, found walled up in a church in Gloucestershire, were the only fragments of a Romanesque Crucifixion to survive the Reformation. Once, they would have been ubiquitous. For a thousand years Britain was a Catholic nation, filled with Catholic churches, packed with Catholic art. By the time the Tudors and the Cromwells completed their iconoclasm, the tiny head and pathetic leg were all that was left.
There is no measure that adequately conveys the seriousness of this destruction: half of a nation’s cultural history redacted on a royal whim. The monster who started the process probably believed he was the priest-king foretold in the Bible by Zechariah 6:13: “He will be clothed with majesty and will sit and rule on his throne. And he will be a priest on his throne.” When it comes to unleashing lunatics, there is no mind-altering substance as powerful as the Bible.
To be fair, the NPG has a decent go at separating out the six wives whom the monstrous Henry beheaded or abandoned or traduced on his insane prophetic journey. The trouble is that only half of them — the ones Holbein painted — can be identified securely. The stiff art of the Tudors makes its sitters interchangeable. Anne Boleyn remains a famous name with a faceless face. Catherine Howard is a waxwork lacking a likeness.
Henry, of course, has no such identity issues. The incomparable Holbein invented a superb image for him that has played an incalculable role in laundering the reputation of the royal monster. There’s a good version in the show, borrowed from the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, with Henry in his classic pose: extra-wide shoulders, cocked codpiece, legs planted. Compare that with the timid ugliness of the pre-Holbeinian Henry in the early portrait of him from the NPG’s own collection and you see immediately how transformative art can be.
Yet, instead of removing a destructive royal lunatic, the British nation chose to remove the only king in its history who fully and actively understood the power of art and supported it on an international level. I’m thinking, of course, of Charles I, who brought Rubens to England; who unleashed Van Dyck on the English portrait tradition; who collected the best Titians and Mantegnas in Europe; who collected Britain’s first Rembrandt; who gave us the first native artist of genius, William Dobson, and made him his court painter at a time when the English civil war needed desperately to be memorialised in art.
Charles I’s crime was loving art immoderately. Henry VIII’s crime was destroying half of his nation’s cultural past — a thousand years of national achievement — on a deluded biblical dream.
We beheaded the wrong king.
Six Lives: The Stories of Henry VIII’s Queens is at the National Portrait Gallery, London WC2, to Sep 8
