Tudor England: A History

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These are the difficult-to-articulate disputes that baffled me as a bright-eyed undergraduate. While a lesser work would lose its way in a forest of difficult and often contradictory scholarship, Wooding is refreshingly clear and balanced. Tudor England is so well-cited that it’s easy to recommend to someone trying to get up to speed with current historical debates, but it’s also far from dry – liberally scattered with grisly tales and memorable digressions into everything from gardening to the theatres. BOGAEV: Yeah. It sounds as if it was a time of great income disparity, you know, prosperity as well as widespread poverty, or fear of poverty. It sounds very familiar actually, and I know you caution often against making great parallels between modern times and Tudor times. But between immigration and plague and political instability and income inequality, it’s hard not to. WOODING: Yes. I think, actually, the arguments that people have in this period, or the debates that they have about the role of women, are fascinating, and really confound a lot of the assumptions that… I mean, we just assume that early modern society is a patriarchal society, and that women were going to have the rough end of every deal. But the more you probe the way people are thinking and writing about gender and the relations between the sexes, the more you realize that there’s a huge diversity of views. There are people who, you know, will quite emphatically stand up for the education of women, and sometimes the sort of moral superiority of women. 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.

BOGAEV: Well, in terms of our royals, at least we’ve arrived at the Early Reformation. And this is where we get into another of what you describe as the “great myths of the Tudor period”: that it’s all about the Reformation, not, as you put it, the richness of religious life at this time. Tell us what we’re getting wrong in focusing so much on the Reformation. Come to that, there’s a great deal of debate within Catholicism as well as to, you know, where the sort of center of gravity of Catholic belief and worship should be. BARBARA BOGAEV: Well, the first and maybe overarching point that you make in your book is that Tudor England, as most of us think of it from depictions in popular culture, is a myth and a huge distortion. So if you had to choose one thing, what do we get most wrong? 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’. 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.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. WOODING: Well, that’s a fascinating question. I think the scholarship that surrounds that play suggests that they were prepared to take her great speech as tongue-in-cheek. I think they thought that Shakespeare was having some fun with this whole debate about the role of women and whether a wife should be submissive or not. WITMORE: We can’t seem to get enough of the Tudor dynasty in all of its soap opera twists. But to really know the Tudors, you have to look past the famous names and racy plot lines twist. At the heart of this book are some important convictions about historical method. The first long chapter of this volume is a very interesting and thought-provoking discussion of the author’s methodology, which in Sharpe’s view, is too often neglected or avoided by most early modern historians. His approach is grounded on an awareness of the ‘readers’ turn’, invoking Terry Eagleton, insisting that it is how these images were read that gives them meaning. ‘The turn from authors to readers in critical studies has been central to my approach’, he states firmly, and he is highly critical of historians who, ‘anxious about the risk of anachronism’, have shied away from examining representations, images, appearances, and chose to concentrate instead on ‘what they regard as substantial and real’. He therefore rejects the ‘traditional historical distinction between events and representations’. He also presents a lively manifesto for the importance of studying material culture and bridging the gaps between history, literary criticism, art history and other pertinent disciplines. This is a vivid and provocative chapter, which embraces sources as various as the Bayeux Tapestry and Victoria’s Highland Journals. Mary’s reign was eventful, but it also turned out to be short. In 1558, aged just forty-two, she died. This event moved the English nation into a new and uncertain era. Mary’s successor was her younger half-sister Elizabeth. The daughter of Anne Boleyn, there was a great deal of uncertainty about the direction the new queen would take England in. Just one thing was plain. By 1558 the young Elizabeth was known to be clever and single-minded. These were qualities that, over the course of her long reign, would turn out to be crucial.

It’s been a good long time since a book season featured a whopping-big general-purpose history of the Tudor era. The last was probably G. J. Meyer’s The Tudors, and Lucy Wooding’s new book, Tudor England, new from Yale University Press, is twice as long, seeks to tell the story of England from 1485 to 1603, and brandishes its modernity on its calling card. “In the last fifty years or so, we have seen significant advances in historical writing,” Wooding writes. “Anthropology, sociology and the history of race have provided important fresh perspectives. Women’s history, gender history and ‘history from below’ have transformed our view of society, popular culture and the political process, while the study of mentalites has added a kind of ‘history from within’.” BOGAEV: So, that’s why the education was focused so much on classic Greek and Roman history and writings. I guess the question is, what kind of Tudor adult did all of this classical education yield, besides William Shakespeare?Our learned guide on this journey is Lucy Wooding. Wooding is Langford fellow and Tutor in History at Lincoln College, Oxford. She is an expert on Reformation England, its politics, religion and culture and the author of a study of King Henry VIII. BOGAEV: Well, we’ve barely scratched the surface, but how could we? It’s been so interesting. Thank you so much for talking today. Andrew Borde, Hereafter foloweth a compendyous regyment or a dyetary of helthe (1542), STC 3378.5, Sig. Ciiiv. 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. Sharpe argues that early modern historians need to wake up to a body of evidence which has been neglected for far too long. The many different ways in which monarchs were represented - by themselves, their courtiers, their subjects and their critics - have something of vital importance to tell us about the exercise of power in the 16th century. ‘The business of government was the act of securing compliance’, and by studying representations of authority we can see how this was attempted, mediated, received and implemented. He sees this as ‘negotiation rather than autocratic enactment’, and suggests that the 16th century saw a wide range of responses to the ‘uncertainty in early modern England about whether government was an act of faith or statecraft’. This was not a matter of the simple imposition of authority, or a straightforward attempt to manipulate popular opinion. Representations of the monarch were crafted by an array of different individuals at all levels of society, and the same image could be communicated and understood in many different ways. Portraits might flatter both the subject and the patron; royal progresses could have several scripts; portraying a monarch as an Old Testament character was open to pious or prophane readings.