The Tudors Read online

  Also by G. J. Meyer

  A World Undone: The Story of the Great War, 1914–1918

  For Rosie

  Contents

  Map

  Family Tree

  A Tudor Timeline

  Introduction

  Prologue: August 22, 1485

  The Battle of Bosworth: An exile returns.

  PART ONE

  An Excess of Good Fortune: 1485–1532

  1: The Luck of Henry Tudor

  The king who had (almost) everything.

  Background: The Origin of the Tudors

  2: The King’s Great Matter

  His pursuit of an annulment—and of Anne Boleyn.

  Background: The Spanish Connection

  3: Frustration and Embarrassment

  Queen Catherine resists, and finds support.

  Background: England Then

  4: Radical Departures

  Moving the line between church and state.

  Background: The Old Church

  5: Another Way Devised

  A policy of winning by intimidation—and terror.

  Background: The Royal Horn of Plenty

  6: A Revolution in the Making

  Henry raises the stakes.

  Background: Windows of Opportunity

  7: A Thunderbolt Falls

  The royal ultimatum.

  Background: Parliament

  8: Submission

  The archbishop of Canterbury surrenders.

  Background: Other Reformations

  9: Consummation

  The king beds, then weds, Anne Boleyn.

  PART TWO

  Monster: 1533–1547

  10: First Blood

  The destruction of the Nun of Kent.

  Background: The Tower

  11: Supremacy

  Parliament acknowledges the king’s new powers.

  Background: Monks, Nuns, and Friars

  12: “We Will All Die”

  Destruction of the Charterhouse monks, and of John Fisher.

  Background: Best Sellers

  13: “Preserve My Friends from Such Favors”

  Trial and execution of Thomas More; the monastic visits.

  Background: Popes

  14: All but Godlike

  Anne Boleyn is replaced; the smaller monasteries destroyed.

  Background: They Were What They Ate

  15: Rebellion and Betrayal

  Explosion: the Pilgrimage of Grace; King Henry gets his son.

  Background: The Sport of Kings

  16: The Last of Henry

  Three more wives, money trouble, a final torrent of killings.

  PART THREE

  A King Too Soon and a Queen Too Late: 1547–1558

  17: A New Beginning

  Evangelicals triumph; Edward Seymour assumes command.

  Background: Instruments of Power

  18: England’s Second Reformation

  Henry VIII’s church dismantled; the fall of Seymour.

  Background: Calvin

  19: A Revolution and a Coup

  The rise of John Dudley, the death of Edward VI, the brief reign of Jane Grey.

  Background: The Making of Mary

  20: Another New Beginning

  Mary I and the restoration of the old religion.

  Background: Schooling and the Schools

  21: And Another Early End

  Dreams turn to dust.

  PART FOUR

  Survivor: 1558–1603

  22: Yet Another New Beginning

  The return to Protestantism.

  Background: The Council of Trent

  23: The Succession, Again

  Robert Dudley and the hope for an heir.

  Background: The Fall and Rise of English Theater

  24: A Torrent of Miseries

  Religion, the succession, and Mary, Queen of Scots.

  Background: The Turks

  25: Actions, Reactions, Provocations

  Trouble in France, trouble with Spain; rebellion in the Netherlands.

  Background: Torture

  26: A Horrific Tangle—And War at Last

  Years of meddling produce war in the Netherlands.

  Background: The Punishment of the Innocent

  27: The Last Favorite

  The Rise of Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex.

  Background: Winning Big

  28: A Seat at the Table

  The rivalry of Essex and Robert Cecil.

  Background: A Diamond of England

  29: The Last Act

  The fall of Essex; the dismal final decade of the Tudor Age.

  An Epilogue in Two Parts

  Sources and Notes

  A Tudor Timeline

  1457 January 28 Henry Tudor is born to Lady Margaret Beaufort, thirteen-year-old widow of Edmund Tudor, Earl of Richmond

  1485 August 22 Tudor is crowned Henry VII of England after defeating Richard III in the Battle of Bosworth Field

  December 15 Catherine of Aragon is born in Spain

  1486 January 18 Marriage of Henry VII to Elizabeth of York

  September 19 Birth of Arthur, Prince of Wales

  1491 June 28 Birth of future King Henry VIII

  1494 September 12 Birth of future King Francis I of France

  1495 April 27 Birth of Suleiman I, Sultan of the Ottoman Empire

  1500 February 24 Birth of Charles of Hapsburg, future Emperor Charles V

  1501 November 14 Catherine of Aragon is married to Arthur, Prince of Wales

  1502 April 2 Death of Arthur, Prince of Wales

  1503 February 11 Death of Elizabeth of York, Henry VIII’s mother

  1509 April 22 Death of Henry VII

  June 11 Henry VIII is married to Catherine of Aragon

  1513 June 30 Henry crosses the Channel to take command of the campaign against France

  September 9 Scots army is destroyed by the Earl of Surrey’s English force at the Battle of Flodden

  1515 December 24 Thomas Wolsey becomes chancellor of England

  1516 February 18 Future Queen Mary I is born to Catherine of Aragon

  1519 June 15 Birth of Henry VIII’s illegitimate son Henry Fitzroy

  1527 May 21 Birth of Philip of Hapsburg, future King of Spain and husband of Mary I

  1529 September 22 Thomas Wolsey is stripped of chancellorship, replaced by Thomas More

  1532 March 30 Thomas Cranmer is consecrated as archbishop of Canterbury

  May 16 More is allowed to resign after the submission of the clergy

  1533 January 25 Henry VIII is quietly married to Anne Boleyn

  April 13 Anne is proclaimed queen

  May 28 Cranmer’s court declares Henry’s marriage to Anne to be valid

  June 8 Parliament extinguishes papal authority in England

  September 7 Birth of future Queen Elizabeth I

  1534 April 20 Execution of Elizabeth Barton, “Nun of Kent”

  April Thomas Cromwell is confirmed as Henry VIII’s principal secretary

  November The Act of Supremacy establishes Henry VIII as head of the church in England

  1535 June 22 Execution of John Fisher

  July 6 Execution of Thomas More

  1536 January 7 Death of Catherine of Aragon

  March Dissolution of monasteries begins

  May 19 Execution of Anne Boleyn

  May 30 Marriage of Henry VIII to Jane Seymour

  July 1 Mary and Elizabeth are declared illegitimate

  July Ten Articles assert reformist religious doctrines

  July 22 Death of Henry VIII’s illegitimate son Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Richmond

  October 8 Start of Pilgrimage of Grace in Yorkshire

  1537 October 12 Birth of future King Edward VI

  October 24 Death of Jane Seymour
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  1539 June Act of Six Articles returns the church to a more conservative position

  1540 January 6 Henry VIII is married to Anne of Cleves

  1540 July 9 Cleves marriage is dissolved

  July 28 Henry VIII is married to Catherine Howard; Thomas Cromwell is executed the same day

  1541 May 27 Execution of Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury

  1542 February 13 Execution of Catherine Howard

  December 8 Birth of Mary Stuart, future Queen of Scots

  December 13 Death of James V of Scotland

  1543 July 12 Marriage of Henry VIII to Catherine Parr

  1544 July 14 Henry crosses the Channel to make war on France

  1547 January 28 Death of Henry VIII

  February 20 Coronation of Edward VI

  March 31 Death of Francis I of France

  September 10 At the Battle of Pinkie English forces commanded by Edward Seymour, new lord protector and Duke of Somerset, defeat the Scots

  1549 July 8 Start of Kett’s Rebellion in Norfolk

  September 5 Execution of Thomas Seymour

  1551 October 11 Arrest of Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset; John Dudley, new lord president of Edward VI’s council, is elevated to Duke of Northumberland

  1552 January 22 Execution of Somerset

  1553 May 21 Marriage of Lady Jane Grey to Guildford Dudley

  July 6 Death of Edward VI

  July 10 Jane Grey is proclaimed queen

  August 3 Mary I enters London in triumph two weeks after being proclaimed queen

  August 21 Execution of John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland

  October 30 Coronation of Mary I

  1554 February 12 Execution of Jane Grey and Guildford Dudley

  April 11 Execution of Sir Thomas Wyatt

  May 19 Release of Elizabeth after two months of confinement in the Tower

  July 25 Marriage of Mary I to Philip II of Spain

  1555 October 16 Execution of Nicholas Ridley and Hugh Latimer

  November 12 Death of Stephen Gardiner, chancellor

  1556 March 21 Execution of Thomas Cranmer; Reginald Pole becomes archbishop of Canterbury

  1558 January 5 Fall of Calais to France

  April 24 Marriage of Mary Queen of Scots to future Francis II of France

  November 17 Deaths of Mary I and Reginald Pole; appointment of William Cecil as Queen Elizabeth’s secretary of state

  1559 January 15 Coronation of Elizabeth I

  May 8 Elizabeth signs Act of Uniformity

  September 18 Mary Queen of Scots becomes Queen of France with accession of Francis II

  1560 December 5 Death of Francis II

  1561 August 19 Arrival of Mary Queen of Scots in Scotland

  1564 September 29 Robert Dudley is created Earl of Leicester

  1565 July 29 Mary Queen of Scots weds Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley

  1566 June 19 Birth of future James VI of Scotland and James I of England

  1567 February 10 Murder of Darnley

  May 15 Mary Queen of Scots is married to James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell

  July 24 With Mary a prisoner, her son is proclaimed King James VI

  1571 February 25 William Cecil is raised to nobility as Baron Burghley

  1572 June 2 Execution of Thomas Howard, fourth Duke of Norfolk

  August 24 Start of St. Bartholomew’s Massacre in Paris

  1584 June 9 Death of Francis, Duke of Alençon

  July 10 Assassination of William of Orange

  1585 August 20 With Treaty of Nonsuch, England commits to sending troops to the Netherlands

  1586 January 15 Earl of Leicester takes the oath as governor-general of the Netherlands

  1587 February 8 Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots

  1588 July 27 Spanish Armada arrives off Calais

  September 4 Death of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester

  1593 February 25 Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, becomes a member of the Privy Council

  1596 July 5 Robert Cecil is appointed secretary of state

  1598 August 4 Death of William Cecil, Lord Burghley

  September 13 Death of Philip II

  1599 April 14 Earl of Essex arrives in Ireland as lord lieutenant

  1600 June 5 Arrest of Essex

  1601 February 25 Execution of Essex

  1603 March 24 Death of Elizabeth I

  Introduction

  The Tudors ruled England for only three generations, an almost pathetically brief span of time in comparison with other dynasties before and since. During the 118 years of Tudor rule, England was a less weighty factor in European politics than it had been earlier, and nothing like the world power it would later become. Of the five Tudors who occupied the throne—three kings, followed by the first two women ever to be queens of England by right of inheritance rather than marriage—one was an epically tragic figure in the fullest Aristotelian sense, two reigned only briefly and came to miserable ends, and the last and longest-lived devoted her life and her reign and the resources of her kingdom to no loftier objective than her own survival. Theirs was, by most measures, a melancholy story. It is impossible not to suspect that even the founder of the dynasty, the only Tudor whose reign was both long and mostly peaceful and did not divide the people of England against themselves (all of which helps to explain why he is forgotten today), would have been appalled to see where his descendants took his kingdom and how their story ended.

  And yet, more than four centuries after the Tudors became extinct, one of them is the most famous king and another the most famous queen in the history not only of England but of Europe and probably the world. They have become not merely famous but posthumous stars in the twenty-first-century firmament of celebrity: on the big and little screens and in popular fiction their names have become synonymous with greatness, with glory. This is not the fate one might have expected for a pair whose characters were dominated by cold and ruthless egotism, whose careers were studded with acts of atrocious cruelty and false dealing, and who were never more than stonily indifferent to the well-being of the people they ruled. It takes some explaining.

  At least as remarkable as the endlessly growing celebrity of the Tudors is the extent to which, after so many centuries, they remain controversial among scholars. Here, too, the reasons are many and complex. They begin with the fact that the dynasty’s pivotal figure, Henry VIII, really did change history to an extent rivaled by few other monarchs, and that appraisals of his reign were long entangled in questions of religious belief. It matters also that both Henry and his daughter Elizabeth were not just rulers but consummate performers, masters of political propaganda and political theater. They created, and spent their lives hiding inside, fictional versions of themselves that never bore more than a severely limited relation to reality but were nevertheless successfully imprinted on the collective imagination of their own time. These invented personas have endured into the modern world not only because of their inherent appeal—it is hard to resist the image of bluff King Hal, of Gloriana the Virgin Queen—but even more because of their political usefulness across the generations.

  Henry, in the process of forcing upon England a revolution-from-above that few of its people welcomed, created a new elite that his radical redistribution of the national wealth made so rich and powerful so quickly that within a few generations it would prove capable of overthrowing the Crown itself. No longer needing or willing to tolerate a monarchy as overbearing as the Tudors had been at their zenith, that new elite nevertheless continued to need the idea of the Tudors, of the wonders of the Tudor revolution, in order to justify its own privileged position. It needed to make the mass of English men and women see the Tudor century as the supreme forward leap in England’s history, a sweeping away of the dark legacy of the Middle Ages. (This whole “Whig” view of history requires a smug certainty that the medieval world was a cesspit of superstition and repression.) It demanded agreement that the Tudors had put England on the high road to greatness, and that to say
otherwise was to be not only extravagantly foolish or dishonest but actually unfit for participation in public life. Centuries of relentless indoctrination and denial ensued, with the result that England turned into a rather curious phenomenon: a great nation actively contemptuous of much of its own history. One still sees the evidence almost whenever British television attempts to deal with pre-Tudor and Tudor history.

  It was not until the second half of the twentieth century, really, that historians of some eminence in England and the United States began, often slowly and grudgingly, to acknowledge that the established view of the Tudor era was essentially mythological and could never be reconciled with a dispassionate examination of the facts. Not until even more recently was the old propaganda pretty much abandoned as indefensible. Tudor history remains controversial because, quite extraordinarily for a subject now half a millennium old, its meaning is still being settled. The truth is still being cleared of centuries of systematic denial.

  With the academy still bringing sixteenth-century England into focus, we should not be surprised that much of the reading public and virtually the entire entertainment industry remain in the thrall of Tudors who never existed. Whether this will ever change—whether the cartoon versions of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I that now shine in the celebrity heavens alongside James Dean and the Incredible Hulk will ever give way to something with a better connection to reality—is anybody’s guess. Perhaps such a change is no longer possible. It is certainly not going to happen as a consequence of this book. I do entertain the more modest hope, however, that a single volume aimed at introducing the entire dynasty to a general readership might prove useful in two ways: by helping to show that the true story of the Tudors is much richer and more fascinating than the fantasy version, and by showing also that the whole story is vastly greater than the sum of its parts. That it contains depths and dimensions that cannot be brought to light by focusing exclusively on Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, or any other single member of the family. That if it is as deeply tragic as I believe it to be—as I hope I have shown it to be—the extent of the tragedy can become clear only when the five reigns are joined together in a narrative arc that begins with Henry VII building a great legacy out of almost nothing, moves on to his son’s extravagant abuse of a magnificent inheritance, and follows the son’s three children as, one after another and in their joltingly different ways, they attempt to cope with what their father had wrought. If a writer should have an excuse for adding to the endless stream of Tudor literature, I therefore offer these: that not enough has been done to deal with the Tudor dynasty as a continuum, a unity, and that popular perceptions of the family have fallen so far behind scholarly understanding that it is necessary to try, at least, to narrow the gap.