Tudor England: A History

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Felicity Heal, ‘Food gifts, the household and the politics of exchange in early modern England’, P&P 199 (2008), 41–70. Peter Clark, The English Alehouse (London, 1983); Martha Carlin, ‘“What say you to a piece of beef and mustard”: The evolution of public dining in medieval and Tudor London’, HLQ 71 (2008), 199–217. They felt that their riches, their land holdings were a blessing, and therefore, they very often—I mean obviously not universally, there were greedy people in the 16th century too—but very often they felt that their land came with an obligation to the people who farmed it, to the people who lived on or around their holdings. Tudor charity and Tudor philanthropy are quite an inspiring subject. So, you know, you could be the son of a… I mean, like Shakespeare, you could be the son of a glover or you know, somebody else in trade. And you could still get an extraordinary education.

I mean, if you look at late 16 th-century culture more generally and the way that women are depicted in ballads, as well as in plays, as well as in poetry, you don’t really get the overriding impression that women were quiescent, submissive, and silent. Far from it. So, the understanding that the fertility of the landscape is a blessing from God, I think this helps imbue the landscape with a lot of religious meaning. BOGAEV: Right. You say that 95% of the people lived in villages. But then you had London, this amazingly mutating city. It just had tremendous turnover and it depended on immigrants, you write, to keep the city alive. That they needed, I think you said, 4,000 new arrivals each year to sustain population with so many people dying of, what? Plague and overcrowding and poor sanitation? This ‘dialogue’ was growing rapidly in scope and intensity during this period. Sharpe notes the proliferation of images, particularly during Elizabeth’s reign, partly encouraged by technological advances in printing or portraiture, partly a response to a growing market economy. He argues for the emergence of a Tudor ‘public sphere’, suggesting that a unique concern with art, spectacle and display gave the early modern era a concern with ‘the theatricalization of regality’ which would be lost after 1688, and not resurface until the Victorian age. Yet this was not a ‘public sphere’ formed in opposition to the state; rather it was an outgrowth from the state. Opposition to a monarch was more likely to appropriate official imagery than destroy or repudiate it. Critics of Henry VIII could take his self-presentation as the Old Testament King David and instead of David’s piety, regality and musicianship read instead a message about his sins, especially his adultery, and the disaster which followed from it. For Sharpe, it was the Henrician Reformation that gave birth to the ‘public sphere’ in England, and in his view ‘we can be in no doubt that Henry VIII and his successors discerned a public sphere which was far removed from the passive subjects discussed by Habermas’. Not so much print and coffee-houses here, as a hugely important oral culture, public debate and participation alongside an emerging ‘consumer culture’. Now that we look more at the underbelly of society. Now that we look at what it’s like to live through these upheavals, we are more alive to the reluctance, I think, that many people felt about this new, quite contentious way of looking at religion. And a religion which did require a level of literacy and which deplored the kind of material sensory culture of pre-reformation religion, which, I think, made it hard to understand and assimilate for a lot of society. Now, we are looking at it from that perspective. We realize that the advance of Protestantism was a lot slower and more halting, and more reluctant than we ever thought.

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So, yeah, there is a sort of concerted attempt by some of the upper echelons of society to deride Henry VII’s achievements. To deplore his reign and, you know, his style of kingship, which is deeply unfair. These counter-examples are not just distracting “whataboutism”. Wooding argues that our modern sense of “good” and “bad” monarchs is a lazy shorthand for the complex ways in which beliefs changed across 118 years of Tudor rule. It is easy for us to see the people of the past as helpless subjects to a procession of heroes or villains at the very top. What really made the difference for poor Perotine though, along with so many others, were the vicissitudes of public opinion across a Renaissance that was “raw, sharp-edged, invigorating and disputed”. BOGAEV: Hmm. Well, is this why you think, Henry VII didn’t get his own Shakespeare play? I mean, he does appear just at the end of Richard III as Richard’s successor after the Battle of Bosworth Field. But that’s it. Shakespeare didn’t take him on.

Our memory of Bloody Mary’s reign, and her unfortunate sobriquet, are still heavily informed by the horrifying tales recorded by Foxe. In Lucy Wooding’s radical new history, she argues that singling out her tenure as uniquely bloody is a deliberate decision made by subsequent writers – a way of telling the story that ignores, for instance, those murdered by Protestant mobs under Edward VI when he dissolved the chantries, and the 700 Yorkshire people with Catholic loyalties who were executed during the period of martial law that Elizabeth I imposed in the wake of the 1569 Rising of the North. But we do tend to talk about the Tudors as though it’s all about this one dysfunctional royal family, and that it’s five people and their closest adherents. You know, we are looking at a country where there are thousands and thousands of people who just don’t figure in a lot of the kind of popular culture that revolves around the Tudors.WOODING: Yeah, in a way. I think that… I mean, one of the problems with Henry VII was that he was very efficient, and he was very efficient at extracting the money that was their due from the more elite members of society.