The Tudors (93 page)

She was allowing her world
…: The number of Privy Council members is in Haigh,
Elizabeth I
, p. 107.

It was long customary to interpret
…: Loades,
Elizabeth I
, p. 274.

He had already been talking recklessly
…: Lingard,
History of England
, pp. 6:597 and 600, and
DNB
entry on Robert Devereux, second Earl of Essex.

Elizabeth showed a marked aversion
…:
DNB
entry for Robert Devereux.

This has often been represented
Lingard,
History of England
, p. 6:629, suggests that the queen’s “victory” lay in the fact that the royal prerogative on monopolies had not been positively surrendered.

Revenues from the land sales totaled
…: Smith,
Elizabeth Tudor
, p. 203.

In 1601 and 1602 he became the leading
…: Hibbert,
Virgin Queen
, p. 244; Elton,
England Under
, p. 411; and Guy,
Tudor England
, p. 396.

The Greatest Monarchs
Who Never Lived

O
ne of the many fascinating things about the Tudors is the way they have managed to remain
so
fascinating for so many of us more than four centuries after the last of them departed this world.

There are many reasons for this, starting with the fact that the second Tudor monarch, King Henry VIII, truly
is
a historical figure of the highest importance. He changed the political and economic life of his kingdom—along with, of course, the religion of its people—in ways so radical that the effects are still being felt today.

Next perhaps comes the fact that Henry’s daughters, Mary I and Elizabeth I, were the first women ever to become queens of England by right of birth rather than marriage. They went on to defy the expectations of what was in every sense a man’s world by holding on to power for half a century between them.

Then there’s the theatrical flair that Henry and Elizabeth displayed throughout their reigns—the talent they shared for constructing public images of themselves that were much more impressive than who they actually were, and projecting those images across England and beyond, keeping their real selves concealed behind them.

Last but by no means least, what has been rightly called the Tudor “age of plunder” created a whole new elite in England. This elite owed its wealth and power to the revolution-from-above that Henry VIII put in motion, and relentlessly celebrated that revolution to justify their own lavishly privileged position in a country where most people long remained virtually destitute. This impulse to glorify the Tudor past in order to legitimate an inglorious present distorted the writing of English history for centuries. It explains why the 118 years of Tudor rule have so often been depicted as
the
golden age of English history, the period when England ceased to be a semi-backward island on the fringe of Europe and set forth on the high road to global greatness.

It was in fact golden for only a microscopically tiny part of the population, and it would be difficult today to find a reputable historian prepared to say otherwise. As old religious passions cooled, scholars came to acknowledge that the world the Tudors destroyed was far from entirely bad, and that what they put in its place was far from entirely splendid. The acknowledgement came gradually, however, and was sometimes fiercely resisted, so that Tudor history remained a battleground of conflicting perceptions well into the second half of the twentieth century. This is more than a little remarkable, considering that the people being fought over—the Tudor rulers, the people they used, and the people they destroyed—lived nearly half a millennium ago. It is uncommon for historical figures to remain so widely and hotly debated so long after their death.

As often happens, the scholarly world’s new and more nuanced understanding of the Tudors has thus far had almost no impact on how they are depicted in popular culture—in popular entertainment especially. Hollywood continues to believe in, or at least to offer the public, a Henry VIII and Elizabeth I who never were. Popular understanding of the Tudors, therefore, remains shrouded in old and increasingly musty myths. Some of these myths are important because they falsify our understanding not only of the past but of the world we live in today. Others are little more than silly.

Perhaps it doesn’t much matter, for example, that Henry VIII is widely and wrongly believed to have been a kind of Bluebeard, an insatiable devourer of wives and mistresses. We probably don’t become a great deal wiser when we begin to see the truth: that Henry was a bit of a prude where sex was concerned, that he is known with certainty to have fathered only one illegitimate child (making him a model of chastity compared with other kings of his time), that Anne Boleyn contributed to her own destruction by joking about his poor performance in bed, and that he may have proved incapable of consummating more than half of his famous six marriages.

Nor is it cosmically important, possibly, that Anne Boleyn was innocent of the adulteries for which she was beheaded—never mind of incest with her own brother. Or that Elizabeth, toward the end of her reign, was not the Gloriana of legend but a haggard, evil-tempered and pathetic crone, easy prey for any young courtier willing to praise her nonexistent beauty and profess undying love.

Other Tudor myths, however, are misleading in more serious ways. A few examples:

The idea that the Tudor era, the sixteenth century, was the zenith of Merry Old England—that home of a uniquely free, prosperous, and happy people
.

In fact, what most of the people of England got from the Tudors was disruption, oppression, loss, and pain. At the end of Henry VIII’s reign, homelessness and unemployment had reached such proportions that the government, fearful and contemptuous of the growing hordes of the displaced and penniless, prescribed branding and lifelong enslavement as the penalties for vagrancy. The last two decades of Elizabeth’s rule were marked by uninterrupted (and costly and sterile) warfare, extensive unemployment, raging inflation, food riots, and spreading lawlessness. In the 1590s, a century after the first Tudor captured the throne, England’s standard of living was lower than it had been 250 years before.

That Henry VIII, in severing England’s connection to Rome, brought religious liberation to his people
.

Some liberation! In fact, the pre-Reformation church in England had for the most part taken little interest in the pursuit and punishment of “heretics.” Henry, by contrast, forbade his subjects to believe what they and their ancestors had believed for a thousand years, prescribed the death penalty for anyone who would not embrace what he himself happened to believe at any given time, and killed a number of the best people of his time (not to mention two of his wives and several of the men who had served him most brilliantly). Elizabeth, when her turn came, persecuted Catholic and evangelical Protestants alike, creating a state-run church that few other than the queen herself found altogether congenial.

That the Tudors, however deplorably harsh their methods, raised England to heights of glory never previously achieved and laid the foundations of its great empire
.

Henry VIII inherited from his father, the first Tudor monarch, the fattest royal treasury ever seen in England up to that time. He quickly squandered all of it by pursuing his fantasies of military glory in France (taking care never to be in combat himself) and starting to accumulate what would eventually be a collection of fifty palaces and royal residences. He then made himself vastly richer than his father had ever been by confiscating the property of the church, only to mismanage his colossal new fortune so irresponsibly that, by the end of his reign, the government was deeply in debt and the reigns of all three of his children would be chronically hobbled by a shortage of funds. Elizabeth too, despite serious financial difficulties, spent heavily on avoidable foreign wars, leaving the Crown so weakened that, less than fifty years after her death, the new class of landed gentry created by the Tudor revolution would not only overthrow and execute King Charles I but abolish the monarchy.

Internationally, too, the Tudor record is worse than merely unimpressive. England at the end of the sixteenth century mattered less on the European mainland than it had long before the Tudors took the throne. The Tudor dynasty had limited itself to a policy of piracy and pillage, while Spain and Portugal were building global empires.

For a tiny number of extremely lucky or crafty families, of course, the Tudor era could scarcely have been more fruitful. These were the families that gathered up into their own hands, thanks either to royal favor or skillful speculation in real estate, the immense wealth that Henry VIII was so recklessly throwing away. Two centuries of privilege would transform them into the genteel teasipping characters who populate the novels of Jane Austen—and still own vast expanses of countryside in an overcrowded England today.

But for most people—for almost all of the ordinary people—it was a different, much darker story. It was to tell both sides that
The Tudors: The Complete Story of England’s Most Notorious Dynasty
was written.

1. Perhaps the most fundamental question to be asked about any ruling dynasty is whether it was good for the people it ruled—whether, in this case, the Tudor era contributed to the well-being of England and its people as a whole. Would you have liked to live in the England depicted in this book?

2. Does the Henry VIII depicted by the author differ significantly from the preconceptions you brought to the reading of this book? How?

3. Do you think Catherine of Aragon was justified in refusing to agree to the annulment of her marriage so that Henry could marry Anne Boleyn?

4. Henry VIII has often been portrayed, even by writers who deplore some of his methods, as England’s religious liberator who freed the kingdom and its people from the oppressive dictates of a tyrannical papacy. Is such a view justified by the facts? What is G. J. Meyer’s view, and does he defend it adequately?

5. Philip II of Spain, husband of Queen Mary I and later the man who sent the Armada to attack England in Elizabeth’s reign, has commonly been depicted as one of the great archenemies of the Tudor story, determined to destroy Elizabeth and her regime at all costs. Is this a valid and sufficient view of the man? Why or why not?

6. Mary I, the first woman ever to rule England in her own right—does she, among all the Tudors, deserve to have “Bloody” as part of her nickname?

7. Which actor would you choose to play Henry VIII in a movie? Who do you think would be a good choice to play Anne Boleyn?

8. How true is it that Henry VIII
needed
a legitimate son to inherit his throne? Did Henry himself actually regard this as imperative? What was there to fear if Henry died without a male heir—and did Henry fear it?

9. The Tudor era, from the time of Henry VIII’s break with Rome, brought enormous change to England, including a massive redistribution of wealth. Who were the beneficiaries of this change—the big winners? What was the secret to being included in this group?