Birth of nation: what we see (and miss) in Tudor history
We British are obsessed with the Tudors, but do we see reflections of ourselves or just a soap opera posing as costume drama?
In today’s Sunday Times Culture, there was an interesting examination by Josh Glancy of the current, enduring fascination that the viewing and reading public has for Tudor history. The usual suspects were there, from the book which launched the craze, Philippa Gregory’s The Other Boleyn Girl (2001) through C.J. Samson and the appalling Michael Hirst-helmed television atrocity The Tudors to Dame Hilary Mantel’s admittedly magnificent trilogy depicting the rise and fall of Thomas Cromwell.
Glancy is a sharp and engaging writer, and he picked up some obvious reasons for our fascination: the character and charisma of Elizabeth I, the eternal appeal of Shakespeare’s plays, the monstrous king-of-all-villains Henry VIII. He drew attention to the parallels with our own times. The break with Rome is often invoked as a 16th century Brexit, the fear of Catholic plots and the ‘othering’ of Englishmen and women who followed the Roman church finds its echo in today’s identity politics, and our modern bureaucratic state was, he claims, birthed by Cromwell (I dispute this in part).
Is this really why we cannot get enough content of codpieces and court intrigue? Do we watch Wolf Hall or Six the Musical and nod sagely to ourselves, recognising our antecedents and the germ of today’s society and politics? Or do we just like lusty, bawdy, human drama, Henry VIII eating vast banquets between wives and his daughter Elizabeth retreating from reality behind white lead face-paint and a ginger wig?
Historians will tell you that not all is at it seems. Henry VIII actually didn’t believe in divorce: most of his marriages were annulled. Katharine of Aragon was declared an inadmissable spouse because of her previous marriage to Henry’s brother Arthur, Prince of Wales; Anne Boleyn was found guilty of treason and incest (admittedly on trumped-up charges); Anne of Cleves was cast aside because the union was never consummated; and Katherine Howard was (like Boleyn) condemned for treason and adultery. In fact the king was never anything even approaching a Protestant. He was in most matters a loyal Catholic, but he was perfectly content to cast off papal authority for the sake of securing a legitimate heir or achieving a longed-for sexual conquest, depending on what you choose to believe.
The stars of Tudor history are Henry and Elizabeth, unquestionably. There is also a strong supporting cast in Cromwell, Thomas Wolsey, Thomas Cranmer, William Cecil and Francis Drake. But, like all history, it is more complicated than that.
Jane Grey, for example, the Nine Days’ Queen who is such an easy tragic heroine, was not an especially interesting teenager, save that she was very bright and formidably learned. She preferred her books to the traditional aristocratic pastimes like hunting, and complained to one visiting scholar that she found her life “hell” (is there a teenager who doesn’t?). Her micro-reign as pseudo-queen was an exercise in manipulation, principally by her father-in-law, the Duke of Northumberland, and she was pushed forward as queen by Protestant nobles who feared that the Reformation would be lost if Mary Tudor, Henry’s eldest child, succeeded.
But Jane’s position as even a putative queen was interesting. It was not simply the result of a religious power struggle at court. Since the 1530s, and the annulment of Henry’s marriage to Katharine of Aragon, Parliament had been involved in the succession of the crown to a degree which would have been unthinkable just half a century before. The Succession to the Crown Act 1533 had declared Mary illegitimate and therefore no longer an heir, and instead the infant Elizabeth was recognised as the next in line to the throne. (It did not last long. The Succession to the Crown: Marriage Act 1536 delegitimised Elizabeth and left Henry without an heir until the birth of his son Edward the following year.)
The Succession to the Crown Act 1543, passed once Edward VI was on the throne, restored both Mary and Elizabeth to the line of succession. But the 1536 had authorised the king to dispose of the crown by letters patent or by will. So the situation which prevailed under Edward VI was that the king could nominate his successor, but, importantly, that was a right bestowed on him by statute.
Edward exercised this right in 1553. He had developed a fever and cough at the beginning of the year, and his condition did not sustainably improve. He was coughing up sometimes black or green phlegm and sometimes blood-tainted matter, and his legs became so swollen he could not even sit up but had to lie flat. He was otherwise growing thin and wasted, and his appointment with his maker was evidently close. Accordingly he drew up a document he called “my devise for the Succession”, which excluded his half-sisters Mary and Elizabeth and instead settled the crown on Lady Jane Grey, his impeccably Protestant cousin, who, conveniently enough, then married Lord Guildford Dudley, the younger son of the Duke of Northumberland. The duke was Edward’s effective regent, controlling the privy council and directing the state bureaucracy.
Jane’s accession was, therefore, something approaching not a constitutional monarchy, but a parliamentary one. Her claim to the throne may have come from the hand of the ailing Edward, but his right to make her eligible, and the reason he might hope that it would be respected, derived from the passage of legislation in 1543. It was a far cry from the claims which Charles I would assert a century later, and it quietly but with determination challenged the foundation of kingship on which much of Europe still relied. It was, in fact, a major land-grab by the legislature, and one which went almost unrecognised at the time.
The Dudley queenship did not last. When Jane was proclaimed queen in London, there was unrest and dissent, and Mary, who had shrewdly retreated to Norfolk, sent a message to the privy council asserting her own right to the throne. Northumberland collected a small band of soldiers and headed for East Anglia, but his fellow councillors realised that they had gravely misjudged the situation, and proclaimed Mary as the rightful queen.
Queen Mary is my cause célèbre. Her five-year reign was the subject of my (cough unfinished) doctoral thesis, and I champion her whenever I can. I would have walked out of Elizabeth (1998) because of Kathy Burke’s dreadful portrayal of her had I not been in my own living room, and a surprising number of my university essays ended up being about why she was actually a skilful and wise queen who would have transformed England for the better if only she had lived beyond her early 40s. If only, if only… it is the catchphrase of any Marian historian.
She was, after all, England’s first queen. Jane can be discarded, and my splendidly waspish history master told us that he would beat any boy who said “What about Matilda?” She assembled a strong privy council: Stephen Gardiner, bishop of Winchester, was a hardened veteran who acted as a very able chancellor in the first years; the Marquess of Winchester was a brilliant lord high treasurer who began the consolidation of England’s finances which allowed much of Elizabeth’s Gloriana years; and Sir William Petre continued as secretary of state as ably as he had served under the previous arrangements.
Mary made the idea of a female monarch possible by her example. Although there were noises off—John Knox published his infamous First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women in 1558, aimed at Mary but coming into circulation, awkwardly, just as Elizabeth succeeded—there was no serious challenge to Mary’s right to the throne on grounds of her gender. Even her marriage to Philip of Spain, which unsettled some who feared foreign domination, was accepted and hedged about with enough conditions to make Parliament happy.
(In fact the match, though childless, could have been significant for England: it was the couple’s intention to divide their possessions between children, and one heir would have inherited England and the Low Countries, an impressive and powerful compact unit which would have had considerable sway in the later 16th century.)
These are some of the critical points of Tudor history which the popular imagination misses. They are not glamorous—my life as an academic and then a parliamentary official was never likely to attract much stardust—but they are building blocks in the modern unitary state of the United Kingdom. They paved the way for much of what we have become, a constitutional monarchy governed by the Crown-in-Parliament, some of whose greatest days have been under women: Elizabeth I, Victoria and the current Queen.
One last thought. Our fascination with the 16th century seems not to have extended to music. England produced two of its very greatest composers in that era, William Byrd and Thomas Tallis, and of course the instantly recognisable Greensleeves is popularly attributed to Henry VIII himself. Spem in alium, Tallis’s magnificent 40-part motet, was composed around 1570 and is one of the greatest works of English music, an astonishingly rich and complex piece of polyphony drawn from the liturgy of the Sarum rite. I doubt whether most people would even come up with Byrd or Tallis if quizzed on British composers. It would be Elgar, Händel, Purcell, Vaughan Williams, Britten, perhaps Holst. We are truly keeping a bushel over our light.
The Tudors made England in their own image, and that image is still with us today. We claim to “rule the waves” and the post-Brexit ‘global Britain’ dream of a fierce, buccaneering trading nation is founded on Drake and Raleigh, the defeat of the Armada and the winking piracy of the Spanish main. Our established church is still a messy patchwork of compromises which began in the 16th century. Our queen is “Defender of the Faith” thanks to a grant by Pope Leo X in 1521. Our great aristocratic landlords accumulated their possessions after the dissolution of England’s monasteries, one of the biggest transfers of land ownership in our history. And for our entertainment, we look, as Josh Glancy argues today, to the larger-than-life characters of the house of Tudor. They may have reigned for only 118 years, but they left their mark upon us.