Tudor England: A History

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This bleeds into a revisionist account of Henry VIII that portrays our most notorious monarch not as a sex-crazed monster but as an “oddly bookish king”, who gathered the finest legal and theological minds of his age to try and resolve his “Great Matter”, the divorce of Catherine of Aragon (no less sharp but determined to remain married), in the pursuit of a male heir. It is the dust raised by these tome-flippers that irritates religious orthodoxies, leading in significant part to the Reformation (or indeed reformations – Wooding stresses that it was Henry VIII’s son, Foxe’s “godly imp” Edward VI, whose tenure saw the first Book of Common Prayer, the everyday impact of reform with a meaningfully Protestant character, and a great explosion of anti-papal rhetoric). 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? I am of course fully aware that this was a period of bitter religious and political division- which indeed representations were often designed to temper, if not deny. But short of a full political narrative (as well as my subject) I didn?t see how these could be related and I took them as given and well known. It was really only maybe from the 1970s onwards that the historical pendulum swung the other way and people started to appreciate the richness and diversity of late medieval religious culture. You know, we began to look at the amount of money that people invested in building and rebuilding their parish churches. We began to look at the extraordinarily rich literary culture of the 15th century, much of which was emphatically in favor of traditional religion.

WOODING: No, I think the whole six wives thing has given people the wrong idea. I mean, if you compare him with his European counterparts, he’s really quite restrained. But we do tend to talk about the Tudors as though it’s all about this one dysfunctional royal family, and that it’s five people and their closest adherents. You know, we are looking at a country where there are thousands and thousands of people who just don’t figure in a lot of the kind of popular culture that revolves around the Tudors. BOGAEV: Well, Henry VIII of course had plenty of drama, and he is such a towering figure in popular culture even now. What’s most misunderstood or misrepresented about him? You write, he wasn’t a libidinous predator.It’s interesting that, you know, with Anne Boleyn, he’s already had an affair with her sister. So yeah, no surprises there. So, I don’t think seeing him as some kind of sexual predator is really at all appropriate.

BOGAEV: Yeah. It sounds as if it was a time of great income disparity, you know, prosperity as well as widespread poverty, or fear of poverty. It sounds very familiar actually, and I know you caution often against making great parallels between modern times and Tudor times. But between immigration and plague and political instability and income inequality, it’s hard not to.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. My attention has just been drawn to Lucy Wooding's wonderfully engaged, thoughtful and most generous review of my Selling the Tudor Monarchy. I am most grateful for her succinct summation of some of the most important arguments and lucid presentation of what I was trying to do. I accept the criticisms which are helpful and well worth further reflection. Only on two points would I comment:

There can never be a definitive history of Tudor England. The debates about religion, government and society still rage unabated as they have done for much of the past 500 years. I suppose, ignoring for a moment the Horrible Histories nature of the period, this is why the reigns of the Tudor monarchs continue to have such a hold over our imagination in a way that the Plantagenets and Stuarts do not. 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.They felt that their riches, their land holdings were a blessing, and therefore, they very often—I mean obviously not universally, there were greedy people in the 16th century too—but very often they felt that their land came with an obligation to the people who farmed it, to the people who lived on or around their holdings. Tudor charity and Tudor philanthropy are quite an inspiring subject. Fresh water was not widely available, particularly in an urban setting, and the Tudors consumed enormous quantities of beer. Manual workers, sailors and soldiers were assumed to need 4 quarts (over 4 litres) of beer for their daily allowance. [30] There was little concern over alcohol consump­tion, although Thomas Elyot did observe the longevity of the Cornish, who drank mostly water, and commented that men and women brought up on milk and butter were a lot healthier than those who drank ale and wine. [31] Pregnant women necessarily drank a fair amount of alcohol, which may have contributed to late miscarriages; but they were advised to avoid strong drink. [32] Ale, beer and cider, like milk, were mostly produced at home, or close to home. [33] Wine was believed to have health-giving properties, and Elyot recalled the opinion of Plato that it ‘norysheth and comforteth, as well all the body, as the spirites of man’. He thought that God ‘dyd ordeyne it for mankynde, as a remedy agaynstd the incommodi­ties of aege, that thereby they shulde seme to retourne unto youth and forgette hevynes’, but advised that ‘yonge men shoulde drynke lyttell wyne, for it shall make them prone to fury, and to lecherye’. [34] Fasting In London, however, this was not quite the case. 1558, the year we analyse in this episode, was one of tension and surprise. Mary’s death in November was not anticipated. When it came it brought attention, scrutiny and power to Elizabeth. As Wooding explains, people had been watching the young princess carefully for a long time. Now, it seemed, she would be forced to show herself. 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 Now that we look more at the underbelly of society. Now that we look at what it’s like to live through these upheavals, we are more alive to the reluctance, I think, that many people felt about this new, quite contentious way of looking at religion. And a religion which did require a level of literacy and which deplored the kind of material sensory culture of pre-reformation religion, which, I think, made it hard to understand and assimilate for a lot of society. Now, we are looking at it from that perspective. We realize that the advance of Protestantism was a lot slower and more halting, and more reluctant than we ever thought.

WOODING: No, although girls in the village would also have the… well, they would get a basic education probably within the home. And, there were, kind of, much more unassuming schools where, you know, sometimes girls might be educated.But you’ve got to remember that for the first sort of 20 years of his reign, he is very popular and very successful, I think, in the eyes of his subjects, and does a pretty good job of creating an image of the Renaissance prince who is godly, who is artistic, musical, who is good at the arts of war. He rises to playing that role and does so to good effect, I think. Our memory of Bloody Mary’s reign, and her unfortunate sobriquet, are still heavily informed by the horrifying tales recorded by Foxe. In Lucy Wooding’s radical new history, she argues that singling out her tenure as uniquely bloody is a deliberate decision made by subsequent writers – a way of telling the story that ignores, for instance, those murdered by Protestant mobs under Edward VI when he dissolved the chantries, and the 700 Yorkshire people with Catholic loyalties who were executed during the period of martial law that Elizabeth I imposed in the wake of the 1569 Rising of the North. William Harrison, The Description of England, ed. G. Edelen (Washington, DC, and London, 1994), 216. 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. I mean, if you look at late 16 th-century culture more generally and the way that women are depicted in ballads, as well as in plays, as well as in poetry, you don’t really get the overriding impression that women were quiescent, submissive, and silent. Far from it.