It is 1531 and you are a yeoman of modest means, grateful for the panem et circenses of Henry VIII’s reign. It’s a day out at the jousting! That horse is wearing a blue dress, and this knight is rather handy with his lance. Generalised Anxiety Disorder has not been invented yet and, well, you don’t own a TV so why not be entertained by men in tights and horses in armour on a Sunday afternoon in the grounds of Hampton Court Palace? Do not be alarmed by the Boeing 787 that flies overhead.
I do wonder why Thomas Wolsey decided to build Hampton Court under the flight path for Heathrow Airport. Because, 512 years later, the sound of the Airbuses still drowns out the Tudor-ese at the joust re-enactment. I spot the Etihad logo soaring past, which somewhat detracts from the Shakespearean romance of it all. The cumulative effect teases some questions: what would it be like if we gave Anne of Cleves an iPad? And would Thomas Cranmer have enjoyed Mario Kart?
No one else appears troubled by the temporal incongruity. This is the family day out to end all family days out – so it seems. Bloodthirsty children run at each other with plastic swords, mums stand around and look bored, and dads pretend to find the juvenalia of knights and maces and halberds beneath them. It isn’t, of course. The show is about to start and “We Will Rock You” (written: 1977) plays half-heartedly from the PA system (invented: 1993). A handsome Friesian horse flounces in. “No vaping or smoking allowed in the jousting arena,” some health and safety bore announces. And then, we’re off.
Horses possess no natural serenity; inner peace is not an equine state. Their grip on sanity is tenuous and they spook easily. What you are looking at when you look at a horse is not so much a noble, martial creature as much as a giant bag of nerves with bricks for feet. You might be tempted to ask whether jousting is a good fit for an animal of this countenance: what with all the charging, whacking, crashing, lancing, smashing and bashing. It’s a good question. But they are also fast, biddable and athletic – and this is a matter-over-mind kind of sport. Which is to say, for the most part, it works.
The small white cob from the blue team stares down the vertiginous bay from the red (at about three hands higher than his adversary, my money is on him). One does worry – given the proximity of the audience – that he might just plough straight through the ropes and into a picnic. I am not sure what the Ye Olde is for “move!”, but it might be worth learning. There are scabbards and fake squires, a tilt, a herald, flags, factions, chanfron, an enthusiastic crowd and an entire library of hastiludinous (look it up) props. The hobbyists are satisfied. The picnics and, crucially, the children remain untrampled.
This is the Department for Tudor Agitprop in total overdrive. “Accidentally in Love” – a song written for Shrek 2 (2004) – plays while two men in armour mock-wrestle one another, WWE-style (founded: 1953). Someone in a Renaissance beret and a tunic plays air guitar on a shovel, totally unmoored from any set date in time. The horses are pristine – vain, perhaps. And not only are women permitted to ride cross-saddle, but they also “win” the tournament. We can’t know for sure what good old, licentious Henry would make of suffrage, and far less of second-wave feminism, but go on, take a guess.
No, no, no – family-day-out jollities be damned. When we think of the court of the Tudors, we must think regicide, revenge, idolatry, excommunication, flying arrows and nasty ways to die. There are monasteries to be raided, Catholics to be ignored, women to be beheaded. There is a Holy Roman emperor to befriend and betray, and a hesitant invasion of France to be getting on with. This is not the time for garage rock and the Lionnesses, or history by HR.
I wander through the palace, which is rather nice, and find some great equivocation: “The Tudors changed England. The actions of Henry VIII and his dynasty had long-lasting consequences… good and bad.” That’s all cleared up, then. Elsewhere, I find some banalities courtesy of Christopher Columbus scribbled on the wall (“the further one travels, the more one learns”).
Well, I’ve learned that this exhibition has been sponsored by an indemnity scheme from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport – thanks to a neat little department logo stuck to the wall. You might have an easier time explaining the Boeing 787 to a Tudor husbandman than the existence of DCMS.
England’s self-mythology would be nothing without Tudors – the second-largest occupants of the national psyche, after the events of the Second World War. Every country has its version. Irish children are forced to look at the Great Famine top-down, bottom-up, sideways, backwards, inside out and from the fourth dimension. In the US they have the foundation story, crossing the Delaware, declarations of independence and that shot, heard all around the world, as they say. Italy has Garibaldi. France, the Bastille. But for the English, it is the Tudors.
We have, in part, Hans Holbein, Thomas More and Shakespeare to thank for that. The latter wrote the sycophantic Henry VIII and Richard III. Holbein immortalised that same Henry on the canvas. And then along came Hilary Mantel to bring Thomas Cromwell to life on the page, selling five million copies and picking up two Booker Prizes in the process.
And what, exactly, is the appeal? The drama? The permissive court morality? The aesthetics? Plenty will make the case that we are attracted to the people in the same way we are attracted to the Kardashians, with all the internecine squabbling and beheading, the campy celebrity and venal jockeying. Yes, sure – maybe? But it is more serious than sex lives and pageantry. To get the obvious out of the way, England’s Tudor-philia is about the inflection point of history. Without the Reformation, the national story is very different. Back to those “long-lasting”, “good and bad” consequences again! It is no problem that the children must learn of them, once a term, every year, from birth to GCSE.
I am wandering back through the central court and look up. There are busts of Roman emperors impressed on the walls – Galba, Tiberius, Hadrian, the gang is all here. Wolsey put them there to flash his connection with Renaissance Italy (wouldn’t you?), but for a loftier reason too. How better to create the psychological association – or the mythical resonances – between Albion and Imperial Rome? Authority as derived from history is quite literally the oldest trick in the book. Henry and Trajan, united in all-out power, and all that.
Even the jousting itself – I rooted for team blue in vain – was a medieval throwback for the Tudors at the time. It is not just me in a confused timeline: mead and airplanes, vaping and lances. The Tudors were at it too: smashing into each other for sport, taking good care of their horses, fans of garage rock and creative interpretations of history, terribly good at looking back, but not so good at understanding why.
[Further reading: Aunt Sally, Oxfordshire’s secret addiction]
Content from our partners
Related
This article appears in the 22 Jul 2026 issue of the New Statesman, The Take Over
Join the debate
Subscribe here to commentAs the son of Irish immigrants growing up in Luton in the 1960s/70s I attended Catholic state schools. History was a sensitive subject when it came to the Tudors. At church we were told of the 40 English martyrs of England and Wales. Then we were informed that Prince Charles as he then was could not marry a Catholic. We also watched with interest the goings on in the six counties of Ulster. For some of us it made for a sense of separation but for most we just went on with life. It made me get the best education I could out of the British state. Now at 69 years old I still have a very critical view of Good Queen Bess but I definitely feel very sorry for Prince Charles.