Last October, Richard Fitch, the Tudor cook at Hampton Court Palace, London, tweeted his method of making the best cockentryce possible. What’s a cockentryce, I hear you ask? It’s the centrepiece of a Tudor feast and made from half a suckling pig and half a capon (a castrated cockerel) sewn together, posed like a mythical beast and spit roasted.
It’s only natural for a Tudor destination such as Hampton Court Palace to experiment with such ancient delights, but recently a host of more unusual places have been reinterpreting the Tudors. Perhaps the most bizarre example came from a commission by Royal Museums Greenwich (RMG).
Artist Mat Collishaw was asked to respond to the Armada Portrait of Queen Elizabeth I and the result – The Mask of Youth (showing until 3 February) – is an animatronic portrait of the Queen making subtle facial expressions. 
“Brexit has put British sovereignty back on the menu,” says Collishaw. “It seemed pertinent to take her up as subject matter. She had to be careful about what she said, how she appeared and how she worked with her courtiers.”
Votes for women

It’s certainly pertinent to consider how women are perceived in public, a topic that has been debated as part of the #MeToo movement. And the year of Vote 100 has just ended. We Are Bess is a new exhibition at Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire that looks at modern women’s lives in relation to those of Elizabeth Talbot (aka Bess), countess of Shrewsbury, who resided at the hall and was a reputedly bossy woman.

The exhibition, curated by the historian and broadcaster Suzannah Lipscomb, draws ties between the lives of women in Tudor and modern times.
 
“We wanted to right a wrong reputation on a shrewd intelligent woman of her time,” says Lipscomb. “There are two other themes though – whether women are believed when they speak and the parallels of their experiences over time.”

Akhela Ahmed, an equalities campaigner who is pictured in the Hardwick Hall show, says: “To get your voice heard as a woman cuts across all races and ethnicities. It’s a struggle Bess was facing 500 years ago and one that women still face. Bess shows we can overcome that through sheer determination.”

So the Tudors are a vehicle to interrogate age-old misogyny? Not so, says David Starkey, the historian and broadcaster who has curated a gallery of Tudor portraiture at Hever Castle in Kent. The works are hung in the way they would have been in Tudor times, with the portraits in a storytelling sequence, lit by candlelight (or rather state-of-the-art spotlights), with curtains bordering them and lined in each family’s colours.
“Women could exercise power and hold property providing they weren’t married,” Starkey says of the 16th century. “Marriage undid them because their property went to the husband.” Anne Boleyn, second wife of Henry VIII, was particularly wise.
 
“A man was servant in love, lord in marriage – Anne exercised this vigorously,” says Starkey.
 
The power that Anne, as a woman, could wield certainly delayed Henry VIII’s and her marriage, but so did the split with Rome in order to divorce his first wife. Starkey says: “The break with Rome is astonishingly like Brexit. It’s a dispute over jurisdiction.”

Valuable insights

It is clear that many a chord is being struck ethically and politically with so many readdressings of our Tudor ancestors, but if #MeToo and Brexit are sleep-inducing to you, take a leaf out of the National Trust’s Little Moreton Hall in Cheshire. In 2017, it held an exhibition on sleep in Tudor times, which was researched by Sasha Handley, a senior lecturer in early modern history at Manchester University.
The Tudors used soporific herbs, such as camomile and lavender, and burned candles to ward off evil spirits. The show included a Tudor soundscape by the electronic musician Scanner. But the cock on the tryce (icing on the cake) was Handley’s thesis of the Tudors having two sleeps each night. Given our oft sleep-deprived society, this is valuable information.
Handley, Starkey and Lipscomb demonstrate that it’s the new research into the Tudors that’s spawned the revelations on how similar lives were then and now.