Those of you who read the TLS with any regularity may have noticed a piece a couple of weeks ago by Professor Clifford Davies in which he asserts, with the satisfied solemnity of a cherry-bomb-hurler, that both historians and the hoi-poloi have been wrong for centuries, that there isn’t any such thing as the Tudors and there never was. In his commentary, “A Rose by Another Name,” Professor Davies maintains that nobody at the time – including the monarchs in question – thought of themselves as “Tudors,” or as living in the “Tudor era.”

I can hear your rumbles of confusion already! What about those historians, you’re asking? What about all the poets and playwrights and novelists and movie producers and TV researchers? What, indeed, about Open Letters’ monthly “A Year with the Tudors”? Has all of that been one protracted mistake, stalking some fraudulent ideological boojum? Can the magisterial pouting of Jonathan Rhys-Meyers (from Showtime’s apparently calamitously named “The Tudors”) have been in vain?

Let’s all stay calm and listen to what Professor Davies has to say, shall we? Perhaps he and I might yet find a way to live with each other.

Item: Davies says that when young Henry Tudor took the crown from Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485, he “did so as the ‘Lancastrian’ claimant, tracing his descent, through his mother, from John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster (by way of his third wife), after the end of the main Lancastrian line with the deaths in 1471 of Henry VI and his son Edward, Prince of Wales.”

Well, yes and no. True, Henry made much of his Lancastrian claim to the throne, but he knew better than anybody how shaky that claim was. Yes, once John of Gaunt was able to marry his mistress Katherine Swynford, an act was passed legitimizing the children they’d already had (who’d been born bastards), but that same act explicitly barred their descendants from the succession. In offering to marry Elizabeth of York (Edward IV’s daughter), Henry was offering a union between York and Lancaster, knowing how fragile the texture of peace was after 150 years of internecine strife. It’s hard not to conclude that this union was to take the form of a new ruling house, neither York nor Lancaster. Hard, but Davies manages it.

Item: “Henry,” Davies writes, “did not use his patronymic.”

True enough, if you’re only thinking of London. In the north and west country, he used it quite a bit, and of course he used nothing else in Wales, his homeland. He imported the Welsh red dragon and other Welsh symbolism to his official heraldry, and these things became very visible decorative motifs throughout his reign. Davies says this is inconclusive, since such things were “Welsh” but not specifically “Tudor,” but for Heaven’s sake, what can this mean? Does Davies know of some other Welsh family wearing diadems and issuing edicts in 1490s England?

Item: Referring to the scandalous marriage of Queen Catherine to her steward Owen Tudor, Davies somewhat grudgingly writes, “To their credit, the ‘Tudor’ monarchs seem to have made no attempt to censor the account of their origins.”

The young people today refer to those as ’scare quotes’ – they’re meant to deny (or at least sneer at) the validity of whatever words they contain. The acid test I’ve developed for scare quotes is very simple: remove them, then see what happens to the thrust of the sentence. If, as in this case, nothing happens, then you have caught the author trying to eat his cake and have it too. If the Tudors were actually all just Lancastrians, then this is not an “account of their origins,” since those origins go back to poor old John of Gaunt. And if this is an account of their origins, then they – something – must have originated thereby. Owen Tudor’s seizing of (among other things, the randy dog) the main chance speaks volumes about his intent to create something of his own, something new.

Item: When Professor Davies begins sifting through the evidence, his account takes on its best, most engagingly donnish brio: “If one searches accounts of 1485, of 1509, of the succession crisis of 1553 (the attempt to make Lady Jane Grey Queen), of the accessions of Mary and Elizabeth, even of accounts of Elizabeth’s death in 1603 – occasions on which any historian today could hardly but allude to ‘Tudor’ – the word and concept is conspicuously absent.”

“The only conclusion,” he concludes, “must be that the word was not in common use.”

This is fascinating stuff, and we must give credit for some points well-raised. The caution here comes from the conflation of “common use” with “common knowledge” (that allusion to “any historian today” is something to fear). History must of necessity give names to periods and movements that they might not have thought for themselves while they were unfolding. That doesn’t make those names wrong, even factually. Other than the man himself, no Roman in the first century b.c. thought of himself as living in the age of Julius Caesar. No citizen of the Byzantine Empire ever thought of himself as anything other than a Roman. Millions died of the Black Death without calling it that. Millions more were caught up in the Industrial Revolution without knowing the name it would later be called. The present uses these names because they accurately describe the finished reality of the past, not because those are the names the past itself used. Slapping ‘Lancastrian’ or even ‘psuedo-Lancastrian’ onto the brief line of rulers who sprang from Bosworth Field wouldn’t be accurate, despite how worked up Professor Davies gets on the point.

Item: And he does get worked up! He scolds: “Indeed, historians of the period seem incapable of mentioning kingship, monarchical government, or state without adding the epithet “Tudor” in a sort of reflex action; as if there was necessarily something both special and uniform about the period, ignoring the very different policies, attitudes, and approaches of the monarchs concerned.”

But, as I hope I’ve shown in the last seven months, those monarchs weren’t all that different, despite their very different actions. They had the same drive, the same fierce temper, the same enormous intellectual abilities, and something of the same charisma. Richard III had some of these qualities but by no means all; James I had none, alas. That bespeaks a discreet subset, whether Professor Davies likes it or not.

And he doesn’t like it, not one bit. He ends his jeremiad with a line that deserves to be quoted and discussed everywhere: “We must learn to do without the Tudors.”

Of course this will never be, as Professor Quixote seems to know perfectly well himself. Hundreds of years of usage makes a term impossibly entrenched – you could write a hundred such learned pieces as this one, and it wouldn’t change the central fact: the Tudors aren’t going anywhere.

Nor, in my humble dissent from Professor Davies, should they.