Lock up your daughters: Henry VIII is back in town and causing trouble. England’s most famousking returns to our screens this week in the second series of The Tudors, a lavish production that has provoked controversy for putting history to the sword almost as often as its characters shed their clothes for sex. Characters are invented and omitted, time-lines compressed and fashions trashed to put more cleavage on display. Even a subtle reference to Diana, Princess of Wales, is slipped in, though she lived a mere 500 years later.

Naturally, The Tudors was a ratings hit with its first series last year, averaging 3.2m viewers on BBC2, despite purists lambasting it as “tosh” for its inaccuracies and anachronisms. What was that central-heating radiator doing in a scene from the 16th century?

Fans will be delighted to learn that the second series continues in the same racy vein, though some may be disappointed that this time it’s not quite such a bonkfest: brooding is more the mode.

In the episode to be broadcast this Friday, Henry, increasingly besotted with Anne Boleyn, tries to engineer his divorce from Catherine of Aragon. The matter is referred to Rome, where Peter O’Toole plays Pope Paul III with marvel-lous aplomb. “Do sit down,” he invites one of his cardinals. “My feet are killing me.”

As they discuss Henry’s dilemma over Boleyn and the implications for papal authority, the Pope muses: “Why doesn’t someone just get rid of her?” This is Henry VIII meets The Sopranos.

O’Toole carries it off superbly, and there’s only one tiny snag with this finely staged scenario: it’s the wrong pope. The pontiff who really refused the divorce and excommunicated Henry was Pope Clement VII. By the time Pope Paul III took over, Henry had already snuggled up to Anne.

Do such historical manglings matter? Should this sort of mock-Tudor TV be bulldozed in favour of traditional academic rigour? Michael Hirst, the show’s creator, makes no bones about it: he wants to have his chicken legs and toss them over his shoulder at the same time. He admits he was “commissioned to write an entertainment, a soap opera, and not history”, yet in doing so he freely plunders the lives of historic figures.

Opinions among serious historians are strikingly divided over this approach. Some are horrified; others say bring it on – the Thomas More, the merrier, they reckon.

Among those defending the bastion of fact is the historian Alison Weir, author of Henry VIII: King and Court, The Lady Elizabeth and numerous other works. “My feeling is that historical dramas are really badly done these days,” she says. “Both people who know about history and those who don’t are being sold short because of the inaccuracies.

“In some cases it is sloppiness and in others it is deliberate. The shows may get the ratings and the makers think they are a success. But the ratings don’t tell you what people think: most are horrified.”

Weir, who gives regular talks on history, has found her audiences so annoyed by the liberties taken by film and televi-sion that she has written new chapters to two of her books on the portrayal of historical figures in modern culture.

What galls her and many others is that real history is shot through with plentiful drama without the need for fictional additions. “History is incredible. Look at Henry VIII: here’s a king who married six times, with two wives executed. You can’t get much more farfetched than that,” she says.

“Lady Jane Grey [great-granddaughter of Henry VII] was a 16-year-old girl who was beheaded. She was queen for nine days. Why do we have to have representations that so distort history?”

Catherine of Aragon, for example, is perpetually presented in dramas as a dark, Spanish beauty; in reality she had golden hair. Even when the historian David Starkey presented his admired documentary series on Henry’s wives, he couldn’t stop producers making Catherine dark-haired.

Poor old Henry also gets a rough time at the hands of dramatists, Weir says. While he was a Renaissance prince who took advantage of the opportunities open to him, he was not simply the lecherous glutton of many portrayals. In many ways, according to Weir, he was prudish and discreet about his private life.

“We know of two examples of people making a dirty joke to the king, and in one case he lost his temper and in the other he blushed,” Weir says. “He wouldn’t have that kind of lewd talk at his court. He wanted to promote himself as a virtuous prince.”

Weir blames the actor Charles Laughton for our stereo-typical image of Henry. Laughton played the king in the 1933 film The Private Life of Henry VIII and homed in on him as a dangerous woman-iser. The image has stuck.

Others blame Hans Holbein, the painter who immortalised Henry in 1537 as a bearded, barrel-chested, middle-aged porker bedecked in royal finery. That image endures because Holbein was such a fine artist, says Brett Dolman, curator (collections) of the Historic Royal Palaces, but also because Henry had not previously had a top-flight portrait artist. Though there are paintings of him as a young man, none has had the impact of the Holbein.

“The portrait is successful because it’s a very good work of art and you somehow seem to think you know Henry by looking at it,” Dolman says.

“I’m not at all sure that’s fair, and if it is fair, it’s only late Henry that it speaks to. It doesn’t speak to the optimistic, confident, ambitious young man who comes to the throne aged 17.”

For that reason, Dolman regards the Tudors TV series as doing Henry a service. In the series the king is played by Jonathan Rhys Meyers, a lithe, dark-haired 31-year-old. Critics have complained he doesn’t look anything like Henry.

Dolman takes a different view. “It’s a wonderful thing they’ve done. It’s the first time anyone has been brave enough to do a Henry VIII programme that hasn’t started with the Holbein image,” he says.

“Opening [his life] up to give you this sexy, more visceral insight into the young Henry and Tudor court life is a really good thing. He was young and handsome and athletic. The only thing Jonathan Rhys Meyers lacks is his height. Henry was about 6ft 2in.”

Dolman does deplore the historical inaccuracies – the melding of Henry’s two sisters into one character, for example – but he accepts that The Tudors and its ilk have a role in attracting people to history.

“It takes more liberties than an academic book, but I think with a purpose. It has decided it is an emotional history of the Tudors, and that’s interesting, a way of opening out the Tudor world to us today.”

If it encourages people to pursue deeper study or brings more visitors to monuments such as Hampton Court – where special exhibitions next year will celebrate the 500th anniversary of Henry’s accession – all well and good. And the king might also approve, Dolman says.

“Personally, I think Henry would be quite pleased about this, looking down from wherever he is. Or looking up. I think he’s been quite fed up to be remembered as this late, postHolbein Henry. The series feels modern – and in its time, life at Henry’s court would have felt modern too.”

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