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I’ve been sick for about a week now, so while I was stuck in bed, I rewatched the rest of The Tudors, the first fifteen episodes of which I had already rewatched in order to compare them to Wolf Hall. I originally, and at first skeptically, watched the series in 2012; I had been expecting a televised romance novel with some 16th-century names sprinkled on top, but the series turned out to be a surprisingly substantive piece of pop history. And it held up very well after a dozen years. Some of the minor characters who pop up actually meant a bit more to me after reading Wolf Hall and watching A Man for All Seasons: Gregory Cromwell, Thomas Wriothesley, and Richard Rich, to name a few. But of course, as with most works that cover the full reign of Henry VIII, or at least his reign from the arrival of Anne Boleyn to Henry’s death, the focus is not on these sorts of dudes; the organizing principle is Henry’s relationship with his six queens. Not only do they make for a natural set of chapters, but they’re all quite different, giving us six distinct stories rather than the same story six times. After plowing through five different renditions of the Anne Boleyn episode, or portions thereof, it was great to finally press onward and revisit the Catherine Howard arc, which was my favorite in 2012 and remained so this time around. I’d forgotten her reply when asked whether she wanted a confessor sent to her cell before her execution, and, oh, my heart.
I’d actually forgotten a lot of things. Entire season-long story arcs had disappeared from my memory: Francis Bryan’s pursuit of Reginald Pole, for instance, or the rise and fall of the Earl of Surrey. I also hadn’t remembered what a prominent role the king’s grotesque leg wound, which persisted without healing for eleven years (!) and often incapacitated him for several days at a time, played in the series. But the biggest difference in what I got from my two viewings of the show was that, in 2012, I compared the Henry VIII of The Tudors to “a Renaissance Stalin”. In 2024, a rather different comparison sprang to mind. The main thing that made me think of Stalin was Henry’s repeated purges of his advisors, but this time around, watching the fall of Wolsey, then More, then Cromwell, I was more immediately reminded of the secretary of state brought on as “truly great”, “forceful and clear-eyed” and dismissed shortly thereafter as “dumb as a rock”; of the attorney general brought on as “truly great”, “a world-class legal mind” and dismissed shortly thereafter as “not mentally qualified”; of another attorney general brought on as “a terrific person, a brilliant man” and dismissed shortly thereafter as “weak, slow-moving, lethargic, gutless, and lazy”; of a defense secretary brought on as “a brilliant, wonderful man” and dismissed shortly thereafter as “the world’s most overrated general”, etc., etc. In 2012, the cult of personality around Henry VIII called to my mind that around Stalin (perhaps indirectly, via Napoleon the pig). In 2024, listening to the blandishments incessantly heaped upon Henry in every episode (“I pray, and beseech you all to pray, for the life of the king, my sovereign lord and yours, who is one of the best princes on the face of the earth,” says someone whom that king is at that moment having executed) instead called to mind that weird cabinet meeting in 2017 in which each official in turn was called upon to pay tribute to their dread lord. Attorney general: “It’s an honor to be able to serve you.” Chief of staff: “We thank you for the opportunity and the blessing you’ve given us to serve your agenda.” Treasury secretary: “It’s been a great honor traveling with you around the country for the past year, and an even greater honor to be serving you.” And when I saw that Henry’s motives were purely transactional—e.g., he wanted to break from the Vatican not for theological reasons but in order to get out of his first marriage—and that he was thus steered by groups of ambitious ideologues who used him as a vehicle to turn their agendas into state policy… that didn’t evoke any parallels to Stalin that I’m aware of, but it should sound very familiar to anyone familiar with present-day American politics.
Of course, not everything about Henry VIII’s depiction in The Tudors reminded me of the three-time Republican nominee for president. For instance, unlike his real-life counterpart and his modern analogue, the Henry in the TV show is not morbidly obese. And while we do see this Henry having sex with various mistresses while his wife is pregnant, and he does implicitly coerce women into sex through the power of his office, we don’t see him overpower and sexually assault anyone. So in this respect, the current frontrunner in the 2024 election is more like the bloated rapist in The Other Boleyn Girl than like the version of Henry in The Tudors.
E. B. White, 1970
This was my favorite book when I lived in Delaware. I checked it out of the library multiple times. But I hadn’t actually read it since leaving Delaware at age six, in 1980, and I had no memory of what it was about. So when I found a copy in a Little Free Library box, I decided to snag it, and read it over the course of many evenings while waiting for my pot of water to come to a boil so I could cook that night’s pasta. I imagined that it would tell the tale of a boy who discovers some swans at his family’s woodland retreat, watches a few phases of their life cycle, and comes away from the experience with a deeper appreciation of nature. It turns out to be the story of a swan who makes a lot of money playing the trumpet at a Philadelphia nightclub.
You may wonder how a swan goes about getting a job. That would require that the swan find some way to communicate with people. And so it does: the swan goes to a school and learns the alphabet, after which it can effortlessly conduct conversations with people because this is a world in which wild animals already know the English language and merely need some assistance conveying their anglophone thoughts to members of other species. It also turns out that wild animals are familiar with the names of cities, the sartorial habits of hippies, and the tipping conventions of fancy hotels, but are unfamiliar with mayonnaise.
I don’t think my five- and six-year-old self had any sense that this book was meant to be funny or whimsical. I had little sense of how the world worked and probably took the book at face value—not that I thought it was non-fiction, but at that point I was just uncritically absorbing whatever I read. So, since I didn’t really comprehend what the author was doing, how did I decide that this book was my favorite and not some other? Probably the same way I decided which girls in my class I would have a crush on around that age. Completely arbitrarily.
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