Oddball Special Interests #1: Part One
When I was a child I really thought that the Tudor rose was going to have a more central role in my life because I was bang into the Tudor rose. One teacher we had used to get us to draw them, often without warning. We were like tiny soldiers in a constant state of alertness for the command. Everyone wanted to be able to draw the Tudor rose the fastest, or the neatest, or with the good red pencil, the one with the rich dark pigment that produced opacity from the first line without having to go over it. The children in that classroom could have drawn one blindfolded, even with the waxy pale red pencils (the rubbish ones). I wonder if English schoolchildren still regard the Tudor rose as a mixture of party trick and serious business, or still assume that as adults, maybe in a job interview or at a wedding, someone will bark at them “Stop what you’re doing, it’s Tudor rose time”. Probably not. Now I think about it, while I remember the other kids diligently sketching out their roses, I don’t really have any proof that any of them were quite so taken with this little emblem as I was.
The Tudors, then as now, are one of my oddball special interests (distinct but connected to my oddball special interest in the Wars of the Roses), and I was sorry when I left primary school and we stopped learning about them. The general assumption seemed to be that we had the basics down with the six wives, the dissolution of the monasteries, the sickly boy king, sketchy portraits of Bloody Mary and the Virgin Queen, and of course the rose, and didn’t really need to know anything else. Instead we were encouraged to think about Britain between the Wars, briefly the French Revolution and the Bay of Pigs. I was reminded not that long ago that 9/11 is taught now as a historical event, and that I do not care for.
I am not a very good historian. I take things too personally, and I take violently against some individuals and violently for others. I like issuing mini lectures to listeners on various points on the interest-and-tolerance spectrum about the building of the Pantheon. I dismiss entire periods and even civilisations that I don’t find interesting. Vikings? Stuarts? Hanoverians? No. Keep them. Queen Victoria? Get rid of her. Julius Caesar? What did you say about the great man, you come here and you say that to my face. Pals who are good historians are very strict with me on this point, and insist correctly that no serious historian is doing anything worthwhile unless they work in a mixture of disciplines, with a strong focus on social history. They also, again quite correctly, say that Julius Caesar by any standards was a monster. There’s nothing I can do about it though – I am not a serious historian. I am a clown historian, and I am a stan, and I want to talk at length about Henry VIII and the surprisingly weak Tudor claim to the English throne.
Since I don’t want to hear even one word about what we can learn from gravestone epigraphy in Lyon, a good compromise for me would probably be to watch and read lots of historical fiction but I once said to someone as a joke that I think historical fiction is cheating, and then I said it again, still as a joke, and now I’ve said it so many times that I sort of believe it. I also don’t want to wonder what can be put down to creative license and what I can file away as part of the information infrastructure; I suppose what I’d like most is to have been a historian in the eighteenth century. Having said that, I’ve been consuming all kinds of Tudor Content in order to prepare myself for the festive season, so in Part Two I will be talking a little bit about that. It’s Tudor rose time, baby!