Historical novels have tried to capture something of her life and surviving portraits allow us direct access to her legendary golden beauty, although aesthetic ideals change across the centuries. Elizabeth of York, wife of Henry VII, seems to elude serious treatment. With the publication of Thomas Penn’s 2011 award winning “The Winter King” the unfashionable Henry VII has finally been allowed to step into the spotlight. Lady Jane Grey’s nine-day-rule has attracted a degree of Victorian romanticism and recently, Katherine and Mary Grey, the short-lived Queen’s sisters have come in for more attention. The reputations of their cousins have been fairly inconsistent, too.
Perhaps their lives do not combine those requisite elements of romance and scandal perhaps their suffering makes for uncomfortable reading. In spite of a rash of recent Marian rewritings, with authors navigating through her standing as the bloody scourge of mid-century Protestant martyrs, she and her sickly brother still fail to compete. The thwarted passions of their lives eclipse the shorter reigns and less popular policies of unluckier siblings Mary I and Edward VI.
Without doubt, Henry VIII, his wives and daughter Elizabeth top the polls. In TV series, films and novels, there are Tudors and then, there are Tudors. Some Tudors are more popular than others.
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