The New Murrey and Blue blog

Three series of this Canale Plus production, showing a charismatic Louis XIV (George Blagden) decreeing a new palace outside Paris, have now been shown in the UK and it seems that a fourth will not now be made. It has much in common with “The Tudors ” in that it has been enjoyable from a dramatic perspective, broadcast after the watershed, allowing for many scenes of “horizontal jogging” and there has been some adjustment to the historical record. Whilst “The Tudors” conflated Henry VIII’s sisters Margaret and Mary, marrying her to the King of Portugal and not those of Scotland and France, among other crimes against history, “Versailles” has just gone further.

Perhaps the producers have been reading the research of Kathryn Warner and Ian Mortimer but the Man in the Iron Mask, who was almost certainly a valet named Eustache Dauger, is the King’s father and predecessor by the same forename, Louis XIII, about forty years after his witnessed death. They have also shuffled historic events such that Louis XIV’s niece marries Carlos II, Spain’s last Habsburg King, in 1679 AFTER Louis’ first wife Maria Theresa died in 1683 – indeed Cardinals refer to her death in discussing Carlos’ marriage plans, however they made better work of “l’affaire des poisons”, culminating in the burning of “la Voisin” at the end of series two (1680). Blagden appears to have a similar build to Meyers, although the latter was surely too thin to portray Henry VIII, as he moves the court to a new location southwest of Paris.

Interestingly, the BBC followed the first two series with a five-minute “Inside Versailles” slot with Kate Williams and other historians.