Mock Tudor

I didn't see the first series of The Tudors. I assumed that it would be populist tat. But my brother told me that, although it had its moments (which it certainly has), it was really quite good. And it is. I'm hooked, despite the totally non-period, thrown-together ecclesiastical costumes, and the deeply dodgy liturgical Latin.

Last night, though, Mrs Cranmer was given a 1980s radical feminist "whatever happened to Vatican II?" sort of rant against the Catholic Church. (A Pope who understood it properly, that's what.) However, in the same scene, Thomas Cromwell gloated over his abolition of numerous holidays properly so called, because they were "bad for the economy", i.e., for his own gentry-cum-mercantile class, then emerging in the shape of ghastly social climbers unburdened by any social conscience. People like the Boleyns. And people like the Cromwells. Whatever happened to the Cromwells? Had they any subsequent history?

Subsistence farmers and their labourers managed to survive throughout the thousand years before the Reformation with numerous annual examples of what Chesterton called "that trinity of eating, drinking and praying that to moderns appears irreverent" unused as the modern mind is to "the holy day which is really a holiday". We need them back, even if we could not, alas, stretch to quite so many of them. And away with the pointless celebration, so full of the spirit of both Cromwells, of the mere fact that the banks are on holiday.