The origins of a British obsession

  England has long adopted the version of events informed by the Victorians' biases and neuroses. But what is behind the flood of 21st-century retellings, including the new TV series The Mirror and the Light? [...]
  It all started in 2001, with Philippa Gregory. “There's definitely a wave of interest in the Tudors now and I was part of generating that wave,” she says, before rowing back a little: “I was an early surfer.” The Other Boleyn Girl was the start of 15 novels in Gregory's Plantagenet and Tudor series, a stunning, incredibly racy narrative of the Boleyn who preceded Anne in Henry's affections – her sister, Mary.
  The story came about by chance: “I wanted to work on women pirates in the 1400s, so I was in the library looking up Tudor shipping and I came upon a ship called Mary Boleyn,” says Gregory. She scoured the work of historians, but could only patchwork together Mary's life through footnotes and margins. The resulting book (which became a film in 2008) was enough to spark a cultural fascination with the Tudors. But it was part of a bigger plan, Gregory says: “One of the things I brought to it, which I thought was quite fresh, was trying to look at the wives as agents of their own lives. I was at university in the 80s and that was a time when women's studies was being taught and feminism was creeping into an academic consciousness. [...]
  Every time we accept a version of the Tudors as handed down by the Victorians – or later, by the 1950s and 1960s – we accept the stories that they wanted to tell themselves about authority, society, leadership, politics [...] The most obvious misrepresentation is of Henry himself. “I think it's really chilling that he's taught, still, in primary schools as a jolly king,” says Gregory. “He is a serial killer, he is an abuser of his wives, he is a tyrant. I regard him with other tyrants: Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin.”