The Tudors

6 Key excerpts on "The Tudors"

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  eBook - ePub

  The Kings and Queens of Britain

  • Cath Senker(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Arcturus

    (Publisher)

  The Tudors 1485–1603

  T he ferocious rivalry of the Houses of York and Lancaster was over, to be replaced by a new civil conflict over religion. Like a butterfly effect, the desire of Henry VIII for a divorce prompted far-reaching changes: the English Reformation and decades of struggle between Catholics and Protestants. The religious wrangling did not prevent economic development though. An era of European exploration began in Tudor times, bringing riches from trade and exploitation, and new ideas; the monarchy benefited greatly from this period of prosperity. The Tudors did not rule alone – they had to recognize the importance of Parliament in running the country and relied on talented public servants. Yet the most dynamic king and queen, Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, had a substantial personal impact on politics, economics and society.

  TUDOR MONARCHS

  Henry VII (1485–1509) Henry VIII (1509–47) Edward VI (1547–53) Mary I (1553–58) Elizabeth I (1558–1603)

  HENRY VII (1485–1509)

  Henry VII ended the War of the Roses, marrying Elizabeth of York to unite the houses of Lancaster and York and founding the Tudor dynasty. To stamp his authority on the land after three decades of civil war, he ruled harshly. Was his assertion of royal authority necessary to stabilize the country or did his tyrannical tendencies have a destabilizing effect? Historians today give a mixed verdict on the success of Henry’s rule.

  Securing stability

  Henry’s throne certainly remained insecure, and there were several Yorkist plots against him. One pretender was Perkin Warbeck. The son of a boatman from Tournai, Belgium, Warbeck was persuaded in 1491 to pretend that he was Richard, Duke of York (the younger of the princes in the Tower), who had somehow escaped from the Tower of London. By 1493, the king had uncovered the plot and brought treason trials against Warbeck’s associates. When Warbeck landed with a force of 300 men in Kent in 1495, he and his followers were captured. The Englishmen among them were hanged for treason, while the pretender himself was eventually executed in 1499. Henry’s message to his enemies was clear.

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  eBook - ePub

  The Kings & Queens of Britain

  • Cath Senker(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Arcturus

    (Publisher)

  The Tudors 1485–1603

  The ferocious rivalry of the Houses of York and Lancaster was over, to be replaced by a new civil conflict over religion. Like a butterfly effect, the desire of Henry VIII for a divorce prompted far reaching changes: the English Reformation and decades of struggle between Catholics and Protestants. The religious wrangling did not prevent economic development though. An era of European exploration began in Tudor times, bringing riches from trade and exploitation, and new ideas; the monarchy benefited greatly from this period of prosperity. The Tudors did not rule alone – they had to recognize the importance of Parliament in running the country and relied on talented public servants. Yet the most dynamic king and queen, Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, had a substantial personal impact on politics, economics and society.

  HENRY VII

  (1485–1509)

  Henry VII ended the War of the Roses, marrying Elizabeth of York to unite the houses of Lancaster and York and founding the Tudor dynasty. To stamp his authority on the land after three decades of civil war, he ruled harshly. Was his assertion of royal authority necessary to stabilize the country or did his tyrannical tendencies have a destabilizing effect? Historians today give a mixed verdict on the success of Henry’s rule.

  A contemporary portrait of Henry VII.

  SECURING STABILITY

  Henry’s throne certainly remained insecure, and there were several Yorkist plots against him. One pretender was Perkin Warbeck. The son of a boatman from Tournai, Belgium, Warbeck was persuaded in 1491 to pretend that he was Richard, Duke of York (the younger of the princes in the Tower), who had somehow escaped from the Tower of London. By 1493, the king had uncovered the plot and brought treason trials against Warbeck’s associates. When Warbeck landed with a force of 300 men in Kent in 1495, he and his followers were captured. The Englishmen among them were hanged for treason, while the pretender himself was eventually executed in 1499. Henry’s message to his enemies was clear.

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  The Kings and Queens of England

  • W M Ormrod, The British Library(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • The History Press

    (Publisher)

  - 6 -

  The House of Tudor 1485-1603

  Richard Rex

  T he argument that The Tudors brought peace, stability and prosperity to England after a century of infighting and disorder is a myth very largely of their own making: Henry VII, Henry VIII and Elizabeth I were all expert in the arts of what today is called propaganda, and much of the popular modern image of those rulers still derives from the messages they chose to impart to their subjects. To an extent, The Tudors were simply the beneficiaries of an economic and cultural dispensation that gave England new wealth, new ideas, and a new sense of its own identity during the sixteenth century. On the other hand, the greatest of The Tudors, Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, clearly helped to shape the government, religion and culture of their realm in a forceful, dynamic and expansive manner that demonstrated not only the long stretch of the arm of State but the real and considerable impact of personal monarchy. Most remarkably – and something often taken too much for granted today – the Tudor dynasty was the first successfully to establish both the principle and the practice of female monarchy: and if the experiment manifestly failed in the case of Jane Grey, and was at best of arguable success in the case of Mary I, it was spectacularly vindicated by the exceptionally durable and stable reign of Elizabeth I. Without the right of female succession, the Tudor dynasty would have failed in 1553, and might have gone down in history more in terms of the Lancastrian regime which, to a degree, it had earlier claimed to reinstate. The triumph of pragmatism represented in the failure of the male succession and the acceptance of regnant queens in itself articulated something of the new political culture that The Tudors had embraced and imposed upon the kingdom of England.

  HENRY VII (1485-1509)

  Henry VII was born at some distance from the English throne. His mother, Margaret Beaufort, was the great-granddaughter of John of Gaunt by his mistress, Katherine Swynford, and it was from her that Henry derived the dregs of Plantagenet blood that were his claim to the succession in 1485. His father, Edmund Tudor, was connected less directly but more respectably with royalty. He was the son of a Welsh gentleman, Owen Tudor, a minor officeholder in the Lancastrian court who won the hand in marriage of none other than Catherine of Valois, the young widow of Henry V. Henry VII made more of this connection than he did of his dubious descent from John of Gaunt: Henry V was still a charismatic enough figure to be worth invoking, even if only as a relative by marriage. The irony is that, were it not for the French Salic Law (which, though not recognized by the English, forbade female succession), Henry VII had a better claim to the French crown than to the English.

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  A Companion to Tudor Britain

  • Robert Tittler, Norman L. Jones, Robert Tittler, Norman L. Jones(Authors)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  According to Elton, England before the 1530s was medieval. By the end of the decade, the revolution was deeply embedded, and by 1550 England had assumed a modern identity. 1 Challenges to Elton’s vision have played down the impact of administrative changes in the 1530s. Many of the specific elements supporting the idea of a revolution in government have been modified or discarded. The state as a positive force in people’s lives is much debated. As we examine the period, it will not be necessary to delve too deeply into this longstanding historiographical clash, but the discussion may serve as a guide in our attempt to discover a vision of the rise of the Tudor state which is sat-isfying to the historical imagination of contemporary scholars and students alike. Our story begins with the ascent to the English throne of Henry VIII who on 22 April 1509, not yet eighteen years old, succeeded his father. By 1520 Henry had reached his twenty-ninth year, had married, fathered a legitimate daughter and an illegitimate son, fought a war, and had governed his realm for more than a decade. That year is a good time from which to take our first look at Henry’s kingdom, free from the distractions caused by the Wars of the Roses on one side and the Refor-mation yet to come on the other. English government could still be described as medieval, but this is not to say primitive. Patronage, good lordship and pageantry tied together noble households and the king, a great landowner in his own right. Patronage, especially, acted as a binding force between king and nobility. Both parties preferred the carrot to the stick. Real power came from combining territorial influ-ence with offices held from the crown. Peasants for their part were expected to obey the law as well as their lords who owned the land they worked. In addition, the church exercised a powerful author-ity over individuals. Alongside aristocratic power stood the secular authority of the church and its princes.

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  The History of Britain and Ireland

  Prehistory to Today

  • Kenneth L. Campbell(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  6 Religion, Warfare, and Dynastic PoliticsThe Tudors and the Stewarts in the Sixteenth Century

  Religion and Politics in the Sixteenth Century: The English Reformation

  The Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century affected every region in the British Isles; it just did not affect England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales in the same way. In Ireland, for instance, the English-controlled area of the Pale—which, in 1500, constituted a fairly small area along the eastern coast extending inland from Dublin to the earldom of Kildare—at first acquiesced in the religious changes introduced by Henry VIII (r. 1509–47). Nevertheless, Catholicism remained the dominant faith in those parts of the island not controlled by the English. In Scotland, the northeast became more associated with an Episcopalian church (based on the Protestant Church of England), while the lowlands adopted a different form of church governance called Presbyterianism. The Welsh were more accommodating to the English Reformation, but only because they regarded Protestantism as having roots in Welsh or Celtic Christianity predating even the arrival of the Christian faith in England. In England, Henry VIII and his state apparatus helmed by Thomas Cromwell compelled the people to accept a dizzying array of changes that resulted more in mystification than clarification on matters of faith.

  Henry’s father, Henry VII (r. 1485–1509), had to overcome a number of challenges in order for his son to inherit the kind of authority that would allow him to make the sweeping religious changes that removed England from the Roman Church and the authority of the papacy. First, he backdated the beginning of his reign to August 21, 1485, the day before the Battle of Bosworth Field, to emphasize the legitimacy of his claim to the throne. He did not want rivals thinking a military victory against him could undo this. This act also had the effect of making traitors of those who fought against him, allowing him to levy fines for doing so. Second, in order to facilitate an end to the dynastic quarrel between the Yorkists and Lancastrians, he married Elizabeth of York, the daughter of Edward IV. Here again, Henry wanted to make it clear that Elizabeth did not convey legitimacy upon his rule, which she could not have done anyway. If Elizabeth had a legitimate claim to the Crown, it was hers alone. Fortunately, for Henry, the children of the marriage made that a moot point and conveyed upon them a legitimacy Henry himself, one might argue, lacked. Second, Henry had to walk a fine line between curbing the power of the nobility and eliciting their support, without which he could not have ruled at all. Henry needed their backing, because even after 1485 he continued to face challenges from pretenders to the throne such as Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck, two impostors who attracted significant support by claiming to be the Earl of Warwick and the son of Edward IV, respectively. Henry waited until 1504 to ask Parliament to outlaw private armies, which it did in the Statute of Liveries; even this merely gave Henry the opportunity to be selective in his enforcement of the prohibition. Third, Henry devised various ways to raise revenue for the royal coffers, some of them highly unpopular and of dubious morality, if not legality. He made particular use of fines, starting with the ones he levied against those who had fought against him at Bosworth Field because they were retroactively guilty of treason. The passage of so-called “acts of resumption” by Parliament allowed him to reclaim lands alienated from the Crown during the Wars of the Roses.

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  The History of Britain

  From neolithic times to the present day

  • Richard Dargie(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Arcturus

    (Publisher)

  Early Modern Britain

  Three Renaissance Kings

  1485–1547 On both sides of the border, Tudor and Stewart kings sought to meet the ideal of the Renaissance prince who governed firmly but wisely and encouraged the arts and sciences to flourish.

  Henry VII (r. 1485–1509)

  Henry Tudor inherited a kingdom exhausted by three decades of dynastic feuding. The royal treasury was empty and frequent changes of monarch had debased the office of kingship. Despite his marriage to Elizabeth of York in 1486, Henry’s claim to the throne was weak. He was soon challenged by the pretender Lambert Simnel, backed by 8,000 Irish and Continental mercenaries under the command of the Yorkist Earl of Lincoln. Henry’s narrow victory at the Battle of Stoke in 1487, in which many of his aristocratic enemies conveniently fell, ended the Wars of the Roses.

  Strong Government

  Henry’s first task was to put the royal finances on a sound footing. He took a personal interest in the work of his financial officers and by the end of his reign, annual Crown revenues had almost tripled to over £140,000. To secure the peace on which English prosperity depended, Henry’s daughters were married into the Scottish and French royal houses. Good relations with France were payback for their help in sponsoring his invasion in 1485, but also ensured that Paris would be less likely to support future Yorkist plots.

  Star Chamber

  Henry was determined to cut the English nobility down to size. Only the most loyal families were allowed to keep their regional fiefdoms. Justices of the Peace, unpaid magistrates drawn from the lesser gentry, increasingly upheld the king’s laws in the shires. Eager to ally themselves with the Crown, these ‘new men’ were a dependable and relatively inexpensive counterweight to the great magnates. Laws against maintaining large households of liveried men reined back the private armies of the greater lords. Henry also used the court of Star Chamber to speed up cases that were becalmed in local courts, where prominent men could exert undue influence upon magistrates and witnesses. Meeting in secret, the Privy Councillors who sat as judges of the Star Chamber read cases presented as written testimony without recourse to witnesses or juries. There was no appeal against their decisions, even for the most noble of defendants.

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