by G. J. Meyer
Meanwhile the Tudors—not all the Tudors, but Henry VIII and Elizabeth—were not receding into the background as historical personages usually do. Instead they were showing themselves to be the two most durably vivid figures in the whole long saga of English royalty. Henry struck deep roots in the world’s imagination as something more than, or at least other than, human, a kind of sacred monster: as pitiless as a viper, a killer not only of enemies but of the utterly innocent as well as of his own best servants and even his wives, but at the same time the magnificently manly centerpiece of Holbein’s larger-than-life portraits. Though there was no way to deny his awfulness, throughout the English-speaking (and Protestant) world it remained impossible to condemn him outright; to do so would be to bring into question the English Reformation and—what continued to matter most—the legitimacy of the people who now owned and governed the empire. No matter that three-plus centuries of Plantagenet rule had produced any number of stronger, braver, better kings. Henry had proclaimed himself greater than any of them, bought agreement where he could and coerced it when he had to, and resorted to murder if all else failed. What with one thing and another, the story he told about himself stuck. Every king before him was a pale and shadowy figure by comparison, and no later king ever rivaled his fame. The nature of that fame was deeply ambiguous, however, which is perhaps one reason why it continues to fascinate. Henry remained both sacred (to his beneficiaries certainly, and to all who regarded the Reformation as God’s own work) and a monster. He has held the world’s interest in part because of the question of how such a gifted and fortunate man could have committed such crimes. And because of the related, troubling question of how it is possible for such a thoroughly vicious character to be so … attractive.
With Elizabeth things are both simpler and more complicated. She is more understandable in ordinary human terms than her father, but at the same time her personality is no less opaque; it is often impossible to be confident that we know what she wanted, what she felt, or what (if anything) she intended in making (or refusing to make) particular decisions. Her image has been much more fluid over the centuries than her father’s, and it is undergoing a profound change even now, more than four centuries after her death. Her reputation certainly got off to a fast start: upon becoming queen, she was exalted as the restorer and protector of true religion, and she was still a fairly young woman when the anniversary of her accession was made an official public holiday. But she disappointed and even alienated many of her most ardent early supporters (the proto-Puritans, for example), and the whole last third of her reign was a time of deepening general misery. By the end of her life most of her subjects were pleased to have seen the last of her, and to have what they regarded as the natural order restored in the person of a male monarch. But the Stuarts in their turn proved a disappointment too—a disappointment above all to the landowning gentry, whose agents in the House of Commons were unwilling to tolerate Henrician assertions of unlimited royal power. Praising Elizabeth, depicting her reign as England’s golden age, became an effective if oblique way of cutting the Stuarts down to size. Her first biographer, William Camden, laid down the tracks along which Elizabethan historiography would run almost up to our own time. In volumes published first in Latin and then in English between 1615 and 1629, he depicted Elizabeth’s reign as a half century of peace, prosperity, and true religion harmoniously achieved. It mattered little that the picture he painted could have been scarcely recognizable to anyone alive in England from 1559 to 1603. The figure of Elizabeth became sacred in its way, too, and thanks to the disregarding of certain inconvenient facts it was never nearly as dark as her father’s. She became part saint and part goddess, the highest expression of what England was coming to see as its own quasi-sacred place in the world.
The pedestal on which she had been placed was given a vigorous shake in the nineteenth century by historical writers as esteemed (in their own time) as Macaulay and Froude, and by the better historian John Lingard, but it was too firmly planted to topple. To the contrary, these early challenges were followed by decades in which the study of Elizabethan England was dominated by scholars whose belief in the queen’s greatness and the glory of her reign was little more qualified than Camden’s had been three centuries before. Possibly in unconscious reaction to a decline in England’s global stature, A. F. Pollard, A. L. Rowse, John Neale, and Conyers Read together erected a fortress of hagiography so formidable that for a time it must have seemed that there could never be anything more to say. Gloriana was not only greater than ever but evidently more secure in her greatness.
There is always something more to say when the subject is history, however; time passes and perspectives change. The chief vulnerability of the Pollard-Rowse-Neale-Conyers consensus was its close connection to the old Whig school of history, according to which everything that had happened was to be celebrated because all of it was part of the (divinely ordained?) process by which England had ascended inexorably to greatness. Membership in this school required believing that the English were fortunate—and had also always been grateful, most of them—to be rid of everything the Tudors had cast aside. Such a subjective judgment was by definition unprovable at best, and the work of a new generation of scholars has rendered it untenable. The cooling of ancient religious passions—the evolution of Britain into an essentially secular, post-Christian culture—has made a dispassionate examination of the past possible at last. The result has been—still is—a literally radical revaluation of Elizabeth, her reign, her times, and their meaning. One could cite many examples, but for present purposes one will stand in for all: Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars. This single book, since its first edition was published by Yale University Press in 1992, has made it impossible to responsibly assert that at the time of Henry VIII’s revolution the English church was a decadent, moribund, obsolete, or obsolescent institution that had lost its central place in the everyday lives of the English people.
Elizabeth—and with her the whole Tudor story—looks very different today than she did half a century ago. She appears likely to change at least as much again when another twenty or fifty years have passed. The process is still at full flood. Whether or when it will end, whether and to what extent the popular image of the Tudors will be reshaped by all the fresh scholarship, we can only wait to see.
It is somehow impossible to resist ending on an admittedly minor note, by making a final visit to the amazing Dudleys.
Edmund Dudley had risen high in the reign of Henry VII only to be destroyed. His son John had risen even higher in the reign of Edward VI only to be destroyed also. One of John’s sons was married to a queen of England (even if she was queen for only nine days), another had come close to marrying a much longer-lasting queen, but in the end it had all come to nothing. When we left them, the Dudleys appeared to have become extinct. The last of the line, Ambrose Dudley, Earl of Warwick, had a long marriage but no children. His brother Robert, Earl of Leicester—Elizabeth’s beloved Rob—had died in 1588 and had been preceded to the grave by his little son Lord Denbigh, the only child of his late marriage to Lettice Knollys Devereux. (A very Dudleyesque footnote: Leicester had hoped to marry Denbigh to Arabella Stuart, a descendant of Henry VIII’s sister Margaret. If James VI and I had died without children, Arabella Stuart would have had a strong claim to the English throne and the Dudleys might have had a third chance to become kings through marriage.)
But in fact the story was not over. In 1574, five years before the birth of Denbigh, Leicester had had a son with Lady Douglas Sheffield, a daughter of the queen’s admiral Lord Howard of Effingham and therefore a royal cousin through the Boleyn connection. Lady Sheffield would later claim that she and Leicester had been married, but he would always deny this and she could produce no documentary evidence. (Possibly there had been a sham ceremony as part of an elaborate seduction scheme.) Leicester did, however, recognize the boy, whose name was Robert, as “my base son,” enrolling him at Oxford as filius comiti
or earl’s son and providing for him in his will.
By the time of Elizabeth’s death, this new Robert Dudley was in his late twenties and, having married very young, was the father of a family that would soon grow to include six daughters. He was a true Dudley—tall and handsome, skilled not only in handling horses and dogs and the sports of the aristocracy but at mathematics as well—who at age seventeen had been temporarily exiled from court for kissing the maid of honor who later became his wife. Shortly after Elizabeth died, taking her jealous resentment of any wives and offspring of the Earl of Leicester with her, Dudley asked the Court of the Star Chamber to affirm that his parents had in fact been married and that he was, therefore, rightful heir to the earldoms of Warwick and Leicester. Whatever the merits of his case (they have been in dispute ever since), a finding in Dudley’s favor would have given rise to horrendous complications having to do with property already distributed to other heirs. (Among those other heirs were the Sidney family—Sir Philip Sidney, that most perfect of Elizabethan soldier-poet-courtiers, had a Dudley as his mother.) The court never ruled on Dudley’s legitimacy or lack thereof, instead taking an easy way out by dismissing his suit on technical grounds, locking up the evidence, and forbidding him to pursue the matter further.
Dudley then requested and received King James’s permission to go traveling. He departed for the continent, secretly taking with him his beautiful young cousin Elizabeth Southwell, who went disguised as a boy. In short order the pair reported from Lyon, France, that they had converted to Catholicism and married. It was one of the great scandals of the age.
Dudley and his bride proceeded to Florence, where he entered the service of the Medici grand dukes. His career there was long and distinguished: he became a respected authority on all things maritime—sailing to the New World, designing and building ships and harbors, writing books on navigation—while also developing a “curative powder” of some kind and receiving a patent for a silk-weaving machine. He and Elizabeth had half a dozen sons, a fresh crop of Dudleys but now named Carlo, Fernando, Cosmo, and the like. At that point we lose track of them. If there are still Dudleys in Italy today, it is easy to believe that they must be dashing figures, and having fabulous adventures.
Sources and Notes
Nothing could be easier, in connection with the Tudors, than the assembly of an impressively weighty bibliography. The available literature, even the fairly recent literature, is so vast as to bring the concept of infinity to mind. And few exercises could be of less real value to the general reader for whom this book is intended. What may have some value—at least in a book that is an attempt at synthesis, without any claim to plowing new ground in original source materials—is an indication of which works the author has found to be particularly useful.
As to source notes, to the extent that the facts of the Tudor story are knowable (many are not, and after more than four centuries it is unlikely that they ever will be) they have by now been sifted and settled by something like fifteen generations of scholars and writers. Many of the facts, often the most significant or just plain interesting, recur so frequently in the literature of the Tudor era that to give sources for them would (while requiring dozens of pages) be no less pointless than a comprehensive bibliography. The author of the current work has elected, therefore, to provide sources in particular cases only: for quotations that do not appear to have become widely familiar as a result of frequent previous use, and—what seems especially necessary—for those facts and opinions that are most likely to challenge the reader’s preconceptions because they are most at variance with popular views of the Tudors. The resulting source notes appear below, along with citations of those books to which the author feels particularly indebted. Both things are arranged under headings corresponding to the four parts of this book.
In assembling and verifying the facts out of which his narrative has been constructed—dates and biographical details, for example—the author has relied heavily on one of the world’s most awesomely comprehensive and authoritative resources: the sixty-volume 2004 edition of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (DNB in the notes below). Use has also been made of The
Encyclopaedia Britannica, and for the same reasons. Readers seeking to confirm statements of fact for which sources have not been provided, or to pursue additional information, are encouraged to begin by consulting those two works.
The Subject Overall
Studies dealing in depth with the reigns of all five Tudor monarchs have always been rare, at least in comparison to biographies of individual figures, and some of those that were once well known are now discredited and largely forgotten. Examples are the works of Macaulay and Froude, who survive as masters of style and of storytelling, but not of scholarship. An exception is the relevant part (volumes 4, 5, and 6) of John Lingard’s History of England (New York: Publication Society of America, 1912). Though inevitably superseded in many details since it first appeared early in the nineteenth century, this remarkable work (pioneering in its use and sophisticated evaluation of original source material) remains a fruitful and broadly reliable guide to sixteenth-century England, rich both in facts and insights. Lingard is obscure today mainly because he has always been obscure. He was too far ahead of his time, replacing fable with fact more than a century before England was ready for so much objectivity.
Noteworthy among much more recent treatments of the whole dynasty are works by G. R. Elton, especially England Under the Tudors (Methuen, 1955) and The Tudor Constitution (Cambridge University Press, 1960); John Guy’s Tudor England (Oxford, 1988); and Penry Williams’s The Tudor Regime (Oxford, 1979). These are scholarly achievements of a very high order and immensely useful, though not well suited—or indeed intended—for a general audience.
PART ONE
An Excess of Good Fortune
In tracing the careers of the first two Tudor kings, the author has taken as his guide two biographies generally still regarded as the best on their subjects: S. B. Chrimes, Henry VII (University of California Press, 1972), and J. J. Scarisbrick, Henry VIII (University of California Press, 1968). G. W. Bernard’s The King’s Reformation: Henry VIII and the Remaking of the English Church (Yale University Press, 2005) provides a massive and magisterial overview of the first of the Tudor reformations.
Other notably good sources of the information and ideas presented in this section (and in several cases later parts of the book as well) include:
Duffy, Eamon. The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400–1580, 2nd ed. Yale University Press, 2005.
Fraser, Antonia. The Wives of Henry VIII. Vintage, 1994.
Griffiths, R. A., and R. S. Thomas. The Making of the Tudor Dynasty. Alan Sutton, 1985.
Loades, David, ed. Chronicles of the Tudor Kings. Bramley, 1996.
________. Henry VIII: Church, Court and Conflict. National Archives, 2007.
Mackie, J. D. The Earlier Tudors, 1485–1558. Oxford, 1952.
Marius, Richard. Thomas More. Vintage, 1985.
Mattingly, Garret. Catherine of Aragon. Little, Brown, 1941.
Smith, Lacey Baldwin. Henry VIII: The Mask of Power. Houghton Mifflin, 1972.
Starkey, David. Six Wives: The Queens of Henry VIII. HarperCollins, 2003.
Williams, Neville. Henry VII. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1973.
Notes for Part One
But because we have no eyewitness accounts …: Good if conventional introductions to the Battle of Bosworth appear in Griffiths and Thomas, Tudor Dynasty, and Michael Bennett, The Battle of Bosworth (Sutton, 2000).
The detailed descriptions in countless books … : The conventional understanding of Bosworth is seriously and responsibly challenged by Michael K. Jones in Bosworth 1485: Psychology of a Battle (Tempus, 2002).
On top of all his other blessings…: As Lawrence Stone observes in The Causes of the English Revolution, 1529–1642 (Harper & Row, 1972), p. 88, the concept of the divine right of kings figured importantly in the thinking of radical
(anti-Roman) religious reformers from William Tyndale onward. Henry VIII’s exposure to and embrace of such thinking, and Anne Boleyn’s role, is shown in Fraser, Wives, p. 145, among other sources.
When the seemingly endless demands for new taxes …: Popular resistance to the tax levies of the mid-1520s, and the shift of blame to Wolsey, is in Carolly Erickson’s Great Harry (Simon & Schuster, 1980), p. 173.
One of the mentors of Henry’s youth John Fisher’s upholding of Henry’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon is in Fraser, Wives, p. 139.
Henry, clutching at straws, suggested The question of how Leviticus should have been translated is an insuperable one for anyone lacking knowledge of Hebrew. Bernard, King’s Reformation, p. 17, and others take the position that Henry’s interpretation lacks merit. By contrast, Richard Rex in The Tudors (Tempus, 2002), p. 56, is more supportive.
About this, too, he was proved wrong Bernard, King’s Reformation, p. 18.
“No one would ever have taken her …” : This quote, and the one on the following page about Henry being “struck by the dart of love,” appear in the DNB entry for Anne Boleyn.
In one of the many letters he sent her … : DNB entry for Anne Boleyn.
It is entirely possible … : Bernard, King’s Reformation, p. 7, provides reasons why Henry might have chosen to defer consummation of his relationship with Anne.
“I close my eyes before such horror” … : Scarisbrick Henry VIII, p. 216.
No easy solutions were open… : The extent to which Clement VII had freedom of action in dealing with Henry’s annulment suit is one of the unresolved and probably unresolvable questions of Tudor history. The ambiguities and contradictions of the pope’s situation are explained in ibid., p. 197.
