And So It Ends...

The last episode of the Tudors ends with Henry's approaching death and his view of himself as
king.  He stands before Holbein's great portrait in the chapel and sees his life flash before him.  His death is not seen, but foretold by his dream of a pale horse with death as a rider coming for him.  For those of you not familiar with the symbolism death rides a pale horse when he rides with the four horsemen of the apocalypse.  The pale horse is just yet another of Hirst's beautiful use of imagery and symbolism in this epic series.  He used it before when Anne Boleyn was executed.  There was a flash of swans and feathers as she died.  Swans are said to burst into song before dying, thus the term "Swan Song" to describe the end of something.  Crows or ravens also flew from the top of the tower after she died.  Crows are said to carry the souls of the dead to the other side.  Hirst is truly an amazing writer and director.

The other fabulous thing about tonight's episode were the visits Henry received from three of his four dead wives.  Katherine of Aragon came first.  She chided him for being cruel to their daughter Mary and for not allowing her to marry and become a mother.  She also told him that she was his true wife in the eyes of God when she was alive and still was.  Needless to say, he was not happy about this, but I liked that she got that barb in one final time.

Anne Boleyn came next.  She appeared to him in the night as he was preparing for sleep.  He appears to be preparing some sort of tincture no doubt for his health, but one must wonder if he thinks he is losing his mind.  He asks her why she has come and she says to see her daughter.  She tells Henry she is so proud of her, how clever she is, how strong, how beautiful.  She asks Henry if he is proud and he admits that yes, indeed he is but that he cannot always love her because she reminds him too much of Anne and what she did to him.  Anne is shocked and replies that she did nothing to him, that she was innocent and the accusations against her were false.  Then she looks at him and says "I thought you knew."  It is not clear if he knew or not, but he does now.  She also tells him that poor Catherine Howard lies in the ground next to her and that what happened to her was not her fault either.  Anne looks at Henry almost with pity, but she still has that amazing strength that will not allow her to give in to the emotion.  He turns and speaks her name and asks her not to go, but she is gone.  He had not spoken her name in years.  He is left to live with the fact that he killed an innocent woman, a woman he dearly loved, and that he never got the chance to apologize, which he does not deserve.  Let him die with the guilt.

Jane Seymour is the last to appear and she tells him that all of his coddling of Edward has killed him.  He will die young and he never lived much of a life shut away from the world.  Henry is devastated by the news and turns away from his most beloved wife.  He then orders his council to bury him next to her.  Guess he really didn't have any choice since he either divorced or executed all of his other wives that were no longer alive and he knew his current wife would outlive him.

Hirst also did an amazing job of directing the cast.  Princess Mary stands strong with her hands clasped as her mother always did.  She has that backbone of steel they both inherited from Isabella of Castile.  Elisabeth though is truly amazing.  She has her mother's dignity and that way of thrusting her chin forward and holding her head high when she hears news that is not to her liking that Natalie Dormer as Anne perfected.  The gestures of these two actresses are so similar that they really appear to be mother and daughter.  A truly amazing series has come to an end.  It goes out while a pale horse approaches from behind.

The Tudors Season 4 Episode 4

And so it begins...the downfall of yet another of Henry's queens.  Last night Katherine Howard was forced to hire Francis Derham as her personal secretary and gentleman usher.  I say forced because he blackmailed her into it by threatening to reveal his carnal knowledge of her.  Poor man, he doesn't realize that this will lead him to the block.  One does not simply waltz into Henry's court and say "Dude, I slept with your wife way back when."  Derham really is an idiot or a rash drunken fool because he brags about his exploits openly to the rest of Katherine's household, going so far as to say to her other gentlemen ushers that he "has had the queen by the cunt!"  What an idiot.  All those around him are begging him to keep quiet, they like their cush jobs, but he won't.  What an idiot.

Prince Edward became very ill in this episode and Henry rushed to his bedside only moments after finding out that he would not be meeting the King of Scots, his nephew James, who he keeps referring to as his cousin.  He manages to ride from the north of England to Windsor in one day on horseback and sleeps at his son's bedside.  The next morning when the prince wakes from his feverish sleep and plays with his father's hair to awaken him we see for a second, maybe two, Henry as a worried and relieved father.  He looks just like any other man who loves his child and is greatly relieved that they are returned to health.  Then the king comes out in him again and he calls for a celebratory mass for his son to be said in the chapel royal.  Rhys Myers does a wonderful job displaying these little flashes of humanity in his otherwise monstrous character.  We see them at other times when he looks at Elisabeth and pauses, in his mind seeing Anne Boleyn.  We saw it when he comforted Anne after her fist miscarriage, and for a brief moment when he gladly welcomed Anne of Cleves to his court for New Years.

At the end of the episode a letter is dropped on Henry's chair by an unknown person.  This is the letter that will lead to Queen Katherine's downfall.  Poor Katherine, young, foolish, graceless girl.  She will meet a bad end for her foolishness.  I was speaking to a friend this morning about the difference in Katherine Howard's arrest and Anne Boleyn's.  Henry had Anne arrested and taken to the tower immediately because she had a powerful faction at court, and she was very intelligent and I think he knew that if he did not remove her from his sphere completely she would plot a way out of her fate.  With Katherine, he has her placed under house arrest.  She had not enough friends or supporters at court to cause him any trouble, she was only a silly girl.  He knows Norfolk will not dare cross him twice, so he worries not.  Katherine is nothing to anyone except Culpepper, she never was.  Henry is the only man who ever loved her, and even he looked down on her.  Everyone else in her life abandoned her, tolerated her, or used her to their own ends.  It is sad to see that Katherine is learning some grace here, at the end of her life and reign.   She had the good sense to remove her ladies a few times from Derham's undesirable company.  She behaved in a queenly manner in church and on progress.  Too little, too late.  Henry has already realised that she does not possess the dignity of her predecessors.  She bores him outside of the bedroom and is unable to bare children, a huge mistake in his eyes.

There are two more things I want to talk about in this episode.  The first is the disconnectedness of the arguing between Katherine and Culpepper.  Why is she angry with him?  Why did she react so strongly when he touched her and asked her to rid herself of Derham?  I didn't get it, it was like in season 2 when Anne suddenly turned on Henry Norris.  It took me a while to get that too, it just seemed out of place where it was, with not enough leading up to it.

The other thing I wanted to talk about is Charles Brandon and his growing regret for his past actions.  At the beginning of the season he was waxing nostalgic for Thomas Boleyn, his old enemy.  I think he enjoyed the sparring and genuinely missed him and his argumentative ways.  Now he is seeing Lord Darcy's ghost.  Lord Darcy who he was forced to turn on during the Pilgrimage of Grace.  The court has stopped at Pontefract castle, Darcy's former home, during their progress and Brandon is now seeing, and talking to ghosts.  I think he is a kind man forced into being a monster and it is catching up with him.  His wife no longer loves him, he has killed and betrayed many and he realizes his soul needs saving.  It might be too late...

The Tudors, Season 4, Episode 2

I just watched the newest episode of "The Tudors" and I think this season is going a little bit out of the range of reality.  Culpepper sleeping with Jane Rochford?  Looks like Henry is going to sleep with Anne of Cleves next week?  As far I as I know, and I know a lot none of that ever happened.  Yeah, it makes it interesting, but it was interesting to begin with, these little plot twists are mmm...not needed.  Notice Henry's pause and funny look when Katherine says "I'm the most happy" in a sentence, that was Anne Boleyn's motto.  Sort of like his pause last week when watching his daughter Elisabeth.  My beautiful and most dignified Anne is not leaving his mind that easily.

I am also at the moment reading a most wonderful book, "Threads" by Nell Gavin.  It is the story of the reincarnation of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn and it is truly an amazing book.  Nell's whole explanation of reincarnation is thought provoking and the character of Anne is quite unique.  Though I think this take on Anne is more girl than woman, I'm not disappointed.  The story is wonderful and I can hardly stand to put the book down.  Any fan of a different type of story should read this book, it's a page turner and you will not be disappointed.  Buy this book off my link on one of the posts below, it makes me money!

"The Most Happy" and the most Betrayed

What can I say, how do I even begin to discuss this tragic and doomed marriage?  Nothing I can write, nothing I can say can even begin to convey how I feel about this woman, and her relationship to her husband and what I can only call his savage destruction of their marriage and of her.  I think Natalie Dormer brought Anne's pain to life in a way that no words ever could.  Maybe, after having felt that blinding pain of love gone terribly wrong I know that there is nothing to explain the raw cold of it.  The sense of living in a state of alternate reality, the disbelief, it's horrifying in it's magnitude.  So, today, while I'm thinking about what to say, I'll leave you with another video, if I can't get the whole video to display just click on the video and you'll be taken to YouTube.