[2] Five Tudor Portraits owes its origin to a conversation with Sir Edward Elgar, who suggested that Vaughan Williams set Elinor Rumming; Skelton's metre, he said, was often pure jazz.
Vaughan Williams selected and began to set texts from Philip Henderson's edition of Skelton's poems for six portraits, eventually rejecting one, Margery Wentworth.
[7] Many members of the audience were rather disconcerted by the earthy humour of some of the Portraits,[8] one in particular, the Countess of Albemarle, walking out of the hall in the middle of the performance with the loud comment, "Disgusting!".
[9] The work was widely praised by critics,[8] H. C. Colles writing that "Everyone concerned had caught the spirit of the thing", while Edwin Evans noted the audience were unusually "relieved of concert-room inhibitions".
[11] The five movements are: Though Vaughan Williams described the work as a "choral suite", it shows more sign of symphonic argument than that phrase implies, leading the composer and critic Wilfrid Mellers to call it "a cross between a symphony and an English oratorio, albeit one of a pronounced secular character.
[17] The third movement, Epitaph on John Jayberd of Diss, is a splenetic scherzo celebrating in a mixture of Latin and English the death of a disreputable cleric, a historical character from Skelton's hometown who died in 1506 and whom he clearly did not miss.
Jazzy and marked by virtuosic use of cross-rhythms, it is divided into three sections, the first pentatonic, the second in E flat major, and the last a fugato passage combining the previous two themes.
Vaughan Williams sanctioned a degree of flexibility, the following instruments being dispensable at need: flute 2, oboe 2, double bassoon, French horns 3 and 4, tuba, percussion 2.
[8] It is true that there have been some dissenting voices: John Caldwell, in 1999, found that "the impression of a fading period-piece is hard to resist",[25] and after the first London performance Constant Lambert wrote, "Vaughan Williams' temperament seems to me too elegiac, nostalgic, and individual to interpret the extrovert bawdy directness of that admirable poet Skelton".
[28] Similarly, James Day, in his 1961 study of Vaughan Williams' music, wrote that "The whole suite is aflame with passion and feeling...This is a portrait gallery as vital and as colourful as Miss Power's Medieval People; here are gargoyles carved out with glee and impatience rather than carefully worked miniatures (except of course for 'Jane')".