What Got You Interested in the Tudors?

[dies out]

It was a couple of things that got me interested in the Tudors.

I first read "The Prince and the Pauper" when I was a kid, then someone introduced me to the story of Mary I. I was hooked. It was like reading a fairy tale where everything goes wrong for the heroine in the end. The daughter of the wicked and abusive stepmother triuimphs? These things just aren't supposed to happen to people like Mary I!

But that lead to  studying Alison Weir and Antoina Fraser's two books on the wives of Henry VIII, the BBC series with Keith Mitchell, and pretty soon I was studying the whole dynasty and history of 16th century England.


THen, a couple of years back, my uncle, my father's brother, began researching my father's family background and he claims * that we were descendents of Magdalen, Viscountess Montaque, a leading Catholic recusant who was a maid of honor at the court of Mary I, but later had a  close friendship with Queen Elizabeth. I even wrote a stage play on their relationship, though I used my imagination to fill in the blanks for a lot of it.
(* Though someone else told me once that Magdalen's line dies out in the 19th century, and my Uncle has been wrong about the family history before, so I take it at face value! )  

My mom gave me The Sixth Wife by Jean Plaidy when I was around 12 years old. And ever since then I've been interested in the era.

For me it's hard to pinpoint an exact time when I started being interested in royalty. It's like the interest has always been there somehow. I remember reading the children's book "Good Queen Bess" in about 5th grade. I remember being intrigued when it mentioned Henry VIII and his wives because they were such a footnote. "Henry would go on to marry three more times, but would have no more children". As I kid I was like "But I want to know more!". I think I read Weir's The Six Wives of Henry VIII for the first time in 6th or 7th grade. After that when I would go to the library I'd start getting books about various royals. Biographies about Princess Diana were a big favorite early on (this was before she died) and one day I came across "Anastasia's Album" and thought it sounded intriguing. I had no idea that Russia had ever had royalty! In 6th grade we had to do a report on someone's life for reading class and I chose Anastasia. No one had any idea who I was talking about! And would you believe I had completely forgotten about that report until I started replying to this topic? I became a huge QE2 fan and started reading about her life, staying away from the tabloid stuff as best I could. In 12th grade we had to choose from a list of topics to do our big oral reports on for English class and I chose the Hanovers because they were the only royals. I learned all sorts of things about them that I never knew (not that I'd spent that much time on them before) and had a lot of fun giving my report. A lot of people in my class told me how much they really enjoyed it. Eventually, I discovered this site and have learned so much over the past year or so.

What started your interest in and love of Tudor history, and how old were you? When I was 10 years old, I read a book called, "Doomed Queen Anne", but Carolyn Meyer, and although it is an adolescent level book, it was extrememly accurate in its chronicling of the life of Anne Boleyn. That is what started it all for me.  I am only 16 years old now, but have read everything I can get my hands on about the Tudors. 

I was reading at 9 years old some old magazines about Princess Diana's wedding that my mother had saved since 1981 ( it was the mid '90s). I was reading about past royal marriages in one article, and it said there was a king named Henry VIII that had six wives. I found it unbelievable that any body could have had six wives. So I went to the library and found a book about Elizabeth I, because I knew she was his daughter. It was an adult level book, but it was mostly pictures. I started reading everything I could get my hands about Elizabeth I, and so Tudor history was the first history I got into, and my love of other royalty followed.

Red Rose, you are welcome here and very welcome to start new threads.
You can blame Jean Plaidy for starting my interest in the Tudors when I was about 9 years old or so.
I am more interested in the later Plantagenets in particular King Richard III and I also like early Scottish history (there is a fantastic serial on in the UK at the mo.....The History of Scotland. Lucky for me that Himself has his evening bath when it is on so I can sit and relish it with a G and T, uninterrupted)

It was simple for me. I was 8 or 9 years old, watching television way past my bedtime (my mother must have been distracted by something, perhaps my younger brother and sister were acting up). Suddenly this visually stunning program came on - a handsome bearded man, in a plumed hat and a velvet cloak, riding up to a shy young maiden in a modest gown. I was riveted, transfixed. Even more so when the next scene was of yet another woman, kneeling before some kind of wooden block, and then a sword came down over her head. At this point my mother entered the room and pronounced those dreaded words: "It's time for bed." But I was so emotionally carried away by the scenes I had just witnessed that I actually managed to convince her to let me stay up to watch the rest of the program, and, for that matter, during successive weeks, the rest of the entire series.

That program was, as I discovered much later watching the series on video, the episode "Jane Seymour" in the 1970s BBC series The Six Wives of Henry VIII. It's still unsurpassed as the best series about Henry VIII ever made, in terms of historical accuracy, acting, casting, screenplay, costumes, etc.

Seeing the Six Wives of Henry VII on PBS during the 80s. I had read books before that of medieval nature but the Six Wives is what started the big Tudor craze for me.

In 2003 I watched the series with Ray Winstone as Henry VIII. Then I read Antonia Fraser's Six Wives.  It started from there and then just grown.

Believe it or not my interest in the Tudors was aroused watching  the Errol Flynn pirate movie The Sea Hawk on TV when I was 13. That queen challenging the Spaniards simply fascinated me so much that I got hooked forever.

Great topic!  Good to see new postings here!

In 1972, when I was 11, I watched "The Six Wives of Henry VIII".  That very summer, we went to England to visit family.  We went to Windsor Castle and Westminster Abbey, where I bought those small, beautiful, well illustrated books (Pitkin Pictorial Guides and Souvenir Books) on Henry VIII and His Six Wives and Elizabeth I and memorized them straight away.  By sheer luck, when we went to Hampton Court, the costumes from the BBC TV series were on display!! 

The next year I read Jan Westcott's "The Tower and The Dream", the story of Bess Hardwick, and "The White Rose", the story of Elizabeth Woodville.  I was completely infected for life by this point!

My intrests in the Tudors  was started by the movie "Elizabeth", i started to read and just got fascinated by Elizabeth I, her father and his six wives.

Mine was started by reading Shakespeare's history plays and then researching the background behind them.

When I was growing up in the 1960's I found a book on my Mom's bookshelf called "The Young Elizabeth" and reading it got me curious about the Tudors which started it all.

Holly

in english class i had a nice teacher who taught us english through stories. and one of the stories she told us was the story of the wars of the roses. and what stuck with me was the story of a beautiful princess who married her servant and their grandchild became king. it was a sort of a backwards cinderella story.

i still have this desire to know more about the very early tudors - owen, edmund, catherine of valois, jasper... and henry 7th, as the odd guy out who became king (a very successful one, if you ask me), is still my favorite.