Tudor England: A History

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Memento: The reliquary known as the ‘tablet de Bourbon’, made by one of the great Parisian goldsmiths and acquired as part of a ransom during the Hundred Years War. Worn by Mary I in the portrait by Hans Eworth. People/Social The giving and consumption of food underlines an important political point about Tudor England: namely, that the most important relationships were always understood as having a personal element. William Cecil, Lord Burghley, advising his son Robert on the rules of political life, told him how to maintain a friendship with anyone eminent: ‘Compliment him often with many, yet small, gifts, and of little charge. And if thou hast cause to bestow any great gratuity, let it be something which may be daily in sight.’ [26] The Lisle family in Calais maintained their links with Henry VIII by sending everything from boar’s head to sturgeon, as well as the quails that Jane Seymour craved while pregnant. [27] Their envoy in London could begin a letter by announcing that ‘I presented the King with the cherries in my lady’s name, which he was very glad of, and thanks you and her both for them.’ [28] The Lisles adopted a particularly familiar tone in their exchanges to underline the point that they really were family: Arthur, Lord Lisle, was Elizabeth of York’s illegitimate brother. Thomas Cromwell’s accounts record the rewards dispensed to those who brought gifts such as arti­chokes, quinces and porpoise; and Robert Dudley responded to tributes, including a brace of puffins from the earl of Derby. [29] The rarity of certain foodstuffs, or the fact that – like cherries – they were only briefly in season, heightened the value of the gift. Water and Beer When Henry VII landed in a secluded bay in a far corner of Wales, it seemed inconceivable that this outsider could ever be king of England. Yet he and his descendants became some of England’s most unforgettable rulers, and gave their name to an age. The story of the Tudor monarchs is as astounding as it was unexpected, but it was not the only one unfolding between 1485 and 1603. Wooding’s book covers all the juicy drama of the Tudor nobility, but she argues there’s only so much you can learn about the period by following the ups and downs at court. To get a real sense of what life was like, you have to get out in the streets and in the fields. She opens her book with a chapter about the almost mystical connection Tudor people felt to the land that they inhabited.

Yeah, there’s not quite so much drama in Henry VII, [who] does well. And in fact, that figure at the end of Richard III, you know, Henry of Richmond appearing, he’s a curiously unsatisfactory character. BOGAEV: It’s all fascinating stuff and you’d think that Henry’s—his tortured theology and these towering contradictions would be perfect fodder for Shakespeare. But his play doesn’t deal in any of that. I mean, he makes Henry VIII out to be a kind of a young, innocent, duped by evil Catholic Wolsey. WITMORE: We can’t seem to get enough of the Tudor dynasty in all of its soap opera twists. But to really know the Tudors, you have to look past the famous names and racy plot lines twist. BOGAEV: Great. And we’re going to get into some of the details that you give that are fascinating about the people at the bottom all throughout Tudor society. But as you say, this was such a complicated period and England was so politically unstable. You had, Scotland was hostile territory, and Ireland a big political problem, and Wales, the separate country, and the Cornish spoke another language. Why was Tudor England, as you put it, so preoccupied with its own historical past?

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There are good grammar schools, many of which were founded in the late medieval period, and a great many more are founded in the 16th century. They do say that the proportion of grammar schools per head of population is not equaled again until, I think, the 19th century. I think he is a lot more intelligent than people often make out. I think he was genuinely fascinated by theological debate. Remember, he has, in 1521, written a work against Luther. Although, we’re fairly sure he had some help with it, I think it’s also clear that he did genuinely have input into that work. Yeah, he’s interested in scholarship.

Impressive and authoritative, combining narrative panache with rigorous new research to give us a new perspective on one of the most controversial and critical English dynasties. It is the reassessment we needed. . . . A treasure trove, exploring Tudor history from every angle.”—Joanne Paul, author of The House of DudleyThese counter-examples are not just distracting “whataboutism”. Wooding argues that our modern sense of “good” and “bad” monarchs is a lazy shorthand for the complex ways in which beliefs changed across 118 years of Tudor rule. It is easy for us to see the people of the past as helpless subjects to a procession of heroes or villains at the very top. What really made the difference for poor Perotine though, along with so many others, were the vicissitudes of public opinion across a Renaissance that was “raw, sharp-edged, invigorating and disputed”. BOGAEV: Well, bringing this up some more to modern times, I’m, I’m thinking the Tudors had just been getting so much pop culture airtime lately. You have Hilary Mantel’s novels and the spinoffs on TV, and then on stage, and The Tudors on Showtime. So why do you think there’s this particular interest in the period right now? Christopher Dyer, A Country Merchant 1495–1520: Trading and farming at the end of the middle ages (Oxford, 2012), 27. From the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited. I’m Michael Whitmore, the Folger director. Lucy Wooding teaches history at Oxford University and is the author of a biography of Henry VIII. BOGAEV: Right. You say that 95% of the people lived in villages. But then you had London, this amazingly mutating city. It just had tremendous turnover and it depended on immigrants, you write, to keep the city alive. That they needed, I think you said, 4,000 new arrivals each year to sustain population with so many people dying of, what? Plague and overcrowding and poor sanitation?

These are the difficult-to-articulate disputes that baffled me as a bright-eyed undergraduate. While a lesser work would lose its way in a forest of difficult and often contradictory scholarship, Wooding is refreshingly clear and balanced. Tudor England is so well-cited that it’s easy to recommend to someone trying to get up to speed with current historical debates, but it’s also far from dry – liberally scattered with grisly tales and memorable digressions into everything from gardening to the theatres. WOODING: Yes. I think, actually, the arguments that people have in this period, or the debates that they have about the role of women, are fascinating, and really confound a lot of the assumptions that… I mean, we just assume that early modern society is a patriarchal society, and that women were going to have the rough end of every deal. But the more you probe the way people are thinking and writing about gender and the relations between the sexes, the more you realize that there’s a huge diversity of views. There are people who, you know, will quite emphatically stand up for the education of women, and sometimes the sort of moral superiority of women. Then, if you can imagine Henry VIII succeeding him, he’s 17 years old. He’s tall, he’s handsome, he’s full of life. He wants to separate himself from his very overprotective and sort of careful, father. He wants a court which is perhaps a little bit more ostentatiously magnificent. He takes part in a lot of jousting, which was actually a bit irresponsible of him, because kings were not really supposed to risk their lives in this way. But he didn’t care, he was going to do it anyway.Now that we are questioning whether in fact there was that much Protestant commitment when she comes to the throne in 1553, we can look at her in a slightly different light and think, “Ah, okay. Well…” I mean, she herself always said that she was ruling over a largely Catholic population with a small vocal minority of Protestant troublemakers. Our learned guide on this journey is Lucy Wooding. Wooding is Langford fellow and Tutor in History at Lincoln College, Oxford. She is an expert on Reformation England, its politics, religion and culture and the author of a study of King Henry VIII. The story of the Tudor monarchs is as astounding as it was unexpected, but it was not the only one unfolding between 1485 and 1603. In cities, towns, and villages, families and communities lived their lives through times of great upheaval. In Tudor England: A History, Lucy Wooding lets their voices speak, exploring not just how monarchs ruled but also how men and women thought, wrote, lived, and died. WOODING: Yes. I don’t know whether the inequalities were quite as glaring as they are now in the modern world.