Starting near the end of the story: the quick and alarming fall of Katherine Howard

I'm jumping into the blog with the incident that is Henry at his worst: the fall of Katherine (sometimes spelled Catherine) Howard, his fifth and youngest wife. No fictional representation of Thomas Cromwell comments on the affair; Cromwell had lost the king's esteem, and his own head over Henry's discontent with his fourth wife, Anne of Cleves.  

Katherine's  looks like a simple story by Tudor standards since it doesn't  involve religious or political upheaval,  just the  family-advancement scheming that is de rigeur for any Tudor tale.   A king,  elderly by the standards of the time,  is smitten with a cute and, unbeknownst to him, sexually experienced teenager who likes boys.  He marries her. She giggles at his witticisms and tells him she much prefers him to those callow boys.  She is not telling the truth.  After a while her infatuation with a good looking courtier, which is mutual, overrides any sense of self preservation on the part of the two young folk. They begin a full-on affair. The king finds out and all is erstwhile sweet nothings about how she was his rose without a thorn are worth...nothing. Off with their heads! But...even the simplest Tudor tale has multiple interpretations!

Most Katherine Howard narratives take as a given that the infatuated Henry was much past his sexual prime when he became infatuated with Katherine.  He had become quite obese, with no Lipitor and no Viagra to mitigate the effects. In addition, a wound in his calf refused to heal, had to be constantly drained, and was decidedly not fragrant. Without getting overly medical since I have no qualifications, a non healing wound could be symptomatic of Type 2 diabetes or other conditions which cause poor circulation, and is consistent with the idea that Henry was not quite the sexy beast of earlier days. The Tudors does include scenes with the dressing and  of Henry's wound, but it is shown as being more acutely painful during drainage than disabling until well into their short marriage.

This line of thinking is not exactly adopted by Showtime's lavish but not so accurate four season series The Tudors.  Henry is played by Jonathan Rhys Meyers, who, like virtually all of the actors in The Tudors is insanely good looking.  His strength in playing Henry is the reptillian thousand yard stare that he adopts when it's time to do something ruthless.  A problem with the casting, makeup and wardrobe decisions around Mr. Rhys Meyers is that as the narrative years pass, Showtime's Henry gets  little to no older and  hearvier looking (it looks as though the wardrobe department  put a little padding around his waist that would represent an athletic type overdoing the beer and wings for a couple of months, no more.)  Rhys Meyers' Henry looks about thirty, not the ill preserved fifty or so  that he was during Katherine Howard's time. Also, the moderately explicit representations of their sex life give the impression that Henry was still on his game if not at the very peak.

So, if Henry, by virtue of casting and fanciful writing,  is a generally vigorous and not bad looking husband, how does The Tudors explain that anyone, even someone as foolish and pleasure loving as Katherine undoubtedly was, might decide to take a lover when she knows full well that Henry has already executed her cousin Ann Boleyn on charges of adultery that were almost certainly not even true? The Tudors tells (by showing) that courtier Thomas Culpepper 1) is obsessed with seducing Katherine and 2) is conveniently already the lover of Lady Rocheford, her chief lady in waiting and a principal actor in Ann Boleyn's downfall.  Rocheford is so enamored of Culpepper (or so kinky, or so crazy) that she volunteers to engineer a liaison between him and the queen, who is easily manipulated.