The Return of the Tudors

By Kevin D. Williamson

Wednesday, October 07, 2026

 

The famous Hans Holbein portrait of King Henry VIII holding a turkey drumstick is so universally known and instantaneously comprehended that you see it humorously referenced everywhere from State Farm commercials to heavy metal videos—so famous that you would almost think that it exists, which it doesn’t. In reality, there is no such poultry-wielding image of Henry VIII in Holbein’s work (the much-married king holds a pair of gloves in the most widely known portrait) or in any other contemporary depiction. Henry VIII with a drumstick is a shared false memory, an example of the “Mandela Effect” that probably dates to no earlier than the 1930s.

 

Our image of Henry VIII is, in fact, all wrong: He was an active and athletic man, intellectually and religiously serious, though he did grow obese and gout-ridden in the last decade of his life after a jousting injury forced him into physical inactivity, with the king’s considerable energy then redirected to debilitating luxury and vice, including the consumption of many gallons of wine weekly and about 10 pints of ale a day. (Henry is estimated to have spent the equivalent of nearly $1 million a month on booze in current U.S. dollars.) But tubby Henry with the drumstick is so indelibly stamped into our minds that Damien Lewis seems to look entirely wrong playing him in Wolf Hall.

 

We ought to give Henry VIII some thought: He was the prototype of the modern tyrant, and his brand of politics is still very much with us even if it often is practiced by men who are less serious, less cultivated, and less able. One need not look too far to see the works of his epigones on the Washington scene.

 

Henry VIII was a nationalist in that he chafed at England’s being made to answer, to the degree it was obliged to do so, to the original European union—the elite, transnational, Continental bureaucracy known as the Catholic Church, which insisted that England was not entirely without any limit to its discretion in the matter of its own government. The notion that there is a law above national law, that this law is universal (which is what “catholic” means), and that kings and nations must be bound by it remains a matter of controversy in our time.

 

But Henry’s nationalism—the story will continue to be familiar—was subsidiary to his personalism. Yes, Henry did his own royal business a century before Louis XIV of France supposedly informed his parliament that “l’état, c’est moi,” but he was fluent both in the French language and in French political theory—that he was not a French-style absolutist was more a matter of state capacity and English realpolitik than of ideology: That the Tudors were not the Bourbons or the Trastámaras had relatively little to do with any cherished notion of English liberty—or any real capacity to distinguish between English liberty and Henrician liberty—but because English facts and English history made it difficult for an English monarch to rule like a French king or Castilian queen.  

 

But Henry’s protean nationalism meant the same thing as the ersatz nationalism of today’s nat-pop right in the United States—for the executive, I get to do what I want, and for his apologists, We get paid. The former is, of course, utterly dependent upon the latter, even though it always seems to be the other way ’round. It was nationalism in the service of absolutism and absolutism in the service, much of the time, of mammon.

 

Henry’s court was practically an Olympus compared to Donald Trump’s circle of imbeciles and moral midgets—imagine a Cabinet with the modern answers to Thomas Cromwell, Cardinal Wolsey, Thomas Howard, Thomas Cranmer, etc., and a presidential circle with Hans Holbein instead of Rob Schneider and Thomas Tallis standing in for Lee Greenwood—but the Tudor entourage had its Steve Witkoffs and Jared Kushners, too, a pillaging aristocracy all too happy to profit from policy, using the seizure of church property and church funds to enrich itself. Then as now, the common people in whose interest the autocrat alleged to act were dispossessed and expropriated in their turn, suffering economically (and morally) for the ambition of the executive and the avarice of his sycophants.

 

Donald Trump is a religion-exploiting heretic whose most unshakeable base of support is among evangelical Christians, the heirs to the proto-Puritans who supported Henry VIII and, at times, manipulated him. The very people who should most oppose Trump’s setting up what amounts to a Church of Trump in the United States harken back in all too obvious ways to the Christian reformers who cheered as the English king set up a Church of England, which was, in practical reality, a Church of Henry.

 

Christians cheering for idolatry. Farmers and manufacturers cheering for the gutting of their markets. Supposed Taftians cheering for illegal imperial wars in Venezuela and Iran. Self-proclaimed patriots cheering for a man whose enemies are all Americans and whose friends are all in Moscow, Pyongyang, and Beijing. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

 

Donald Trump as Henry VIII—“a blot of grease and blood on the pages of [our] history,” in the words of Charles Dickens?

 

There’s more to it than the fat jokes.