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Returning: The Tudors

Season Four of The Tudors, the last in the series, begins on ABC2 next month.

Season Four of The Tudors with Jonathan Rhys Meyers, the last in the series, begins on ABC2 next month.

Season Four focuses on Henry’s ill-fated marriage to Katherine Howard and his final marriage to Katherine Parr.

Whitehall Palace, London, 1540. Thirty years into the reign of King Henry VIII (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) and it’s been a long, hot summer. London is experiencing intense heat and there has been no rain for two months. But while his subjects wilt, the King’s vigour remains undiminished.

Henry has just married the beautiful Katherine Howard (Tamzin Merchant), his fifth Queen, who is a mere seventeen years old. She’s different from earlier wives in more ways than age: far from being nobility, she was ‘discovered’ by some of the King’s friends in a boarding house for wayward young ladies. Joan Bulmer (Catherine Steadman), the new Queen’s best friend from her youth is hired as a lady-in-waiting. Aside from their friendship she knows too much scandalous detail about Katherine’s sexual past to be outside the Court.

The Queen’s ‘low’ background, combined with her youth and beauty, arouses a lusty familiarity in certain members of Henry’s Court. Most notably Thomas Culpepper (Torrance Coombs), the King’s handsome and ambitious new groom, who makes no secret of his desire for the new Queen during an extended hunting trip. Culpepper unleashes his sexual frustrations by raping an unfortunate local peasant woman and then murdering her aggrieved husband. When the local Sheriff confronts Henry with these charges the King sides with his young courtier; protection he may come to regret.

9:30pm Monday, 13 February on ABC2.

4 Responses

  1. Finally! I was thinking about getting it by other means as I had appreciated how they were running the series before with no gaps in between series but then they sadly stopped at the end of series 3.

  2. For some reason I thought they showed the entire series in one go, glad you told me about this last season because I wasn’t keeping an eye out for it.

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