Weather in Tudor times has also previously been misrepresented. In another scholarly breakthrough, the pair were shown as sleeping together post-divorce, presumably after Anne had received guidance on hygiene and grooming. It is now beyond dispute, for example, that Anne Boleyn won the royal heart by giving him a blow job during the Anglo-French festivities of the Field of the Cloth of Gold and that Anne of Cleves's main sexual drawback was not that she looked like a "Flanders mare", or possibly a girl-next-door soul singer enduring a career slump, but that she was very smelly. Given that Starkey fronted Channel 4's The Six Wives of Henry VIII, Starkey will have been particularly piqued that a drama he slated as "soap" offered insights into the dynamics of the king's relationships that made his own efforts look stuffy and old hat. As The Tudors has revealed, young aristocratic women at Henry's court were well-versed in other erotic options, and not afraid (see Anne Boleyn below) of initiating them on a first date.
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Historians of sex must now be scrambling to rewrite their accounts too, as only prostitutes, plus the odd debauched Roman orgy-goer, are conventionally seen as engaging in anything other than the missionary position before 1960. The era's hairstyles lent men the look of boyband members (until they turned 30, when obligatory beards made them more like country or easy-listening artistes), while in all but clothes women resembled characters in Gossip Girl or Desperate Housewives.
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Courtiers' skin was flawlessly smooth, teeth met Hollywood standards of whiteness and evenness. Our sense of how people looked in the 16th century will have to be radically revised as a result of the series' research.
Similarly, Catherine of Aragon was not Spanish judging by her tourist-style efforts to speak the language, slyly posing the question: if she was an impostor, was the whole business of seeking a papal annulment and turning England Protestant unnecessary? Appearance The future monarchs Edward and Elizabeth also had, it seems, faint but discernible Irish accents, calling into doubt both their parentage and the legitimacy of the Tudor dynasty. Instead, Jonathan Rhys Meyers's definitive performance shows he had an oddly jerky vocal style, like a Rada-trained robot or Basil Brush channelling Laurence Olivier. Nor did he speak in the fruity roar actors such as Charles Laughton and Keith Michell have duped us into imagining. The king also still looked 30 when in his 50s. Paintings depicting him in this way presumably used bulk as a propaganda symbol of greatness. But as the Henry VIII saga reaches its final episode tomorrow night, fusty dons such as Starkey should be running scared – because the drama has exploded one historical bombshell after another, and has taught us that almost everything we thought we knew about Henry VIII was wrong.
"Shame on the BBC!" yelled David Starkey when The Tudors began, outraged by what he saw as systematic inaccuracy.