Tudor England: A History

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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. BOGAEV: This education that they were getting, it wasn’t just for elites, right? It sounds as if it was learned or absorbed or felt on every level of Tudor society. BOGAEV: Well, this brings us to the nobility and to kings and queens, and you have a lot to say about all five of them in this period. But maybe we could do a little bit of a romp through royalty, because your book is so compelling in its myth busting. WOODING: Yes. I don’t know whether the inequalities were quite as glaring as they are now in the modern world.

The story of the Tudor monarchs is as astounding as it was unexpected, but it was not the only one unfolding between 1485 and 1603. In cities, towns, and villages, families and communities lived their lives through times of great upheaval. In Tudor England: A History, Lucy Wooding lets their voices speak, exploring not just how monarchs ruled but also how men and women thought, wrote, lived, and died. It’s interesting that, you know, with Anne Boleyn, he’s already had an affair with her sister. So yeah, no surprises there. So, I don’t think seeing him as some kind of sexual predator is really at all appropriate. WOODING: I’m not entirely sure. That’s a very good question, and I ask myself that question quite often. I mean, obviously I think this period is utterly fascinating. But you know, this is what I do for a living, so I would say that.

Transcript

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. Obviously for the elites—who are tutored at home and who then might go to Oxford or Cambridge University, or, indeed, who very often traveled Europe and went to universities abroad—for them, there is an education of quite extraordinary range, which is why Elizabeth I is supposed to have spoken about seven languages. It’s really not uncommon for people at the very highest levels of society to be extraordinarily gifted in terms of language and literature. 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”. But what did this mean for the ordinary people of England? What was their experience of life like as the monarchs came and went? Wooding explains that many parishes life went on, with continuous readjustments, in a relatively uninterrupted manner. 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.

WOODING: Because this is the era of Renaissance and because everyone in Europe is preoccupied with the past—with the classical past and with the biblical past. in the 16th century, their idea of progress is not forward looking like ours might be today. I mean, nowadays, you know, we look forward to—I don’t know—colonizing Mars or finding a cure for cancer.

Thirsk, Food in Early Modern England, 13; Thomas Elyot, The Castell of Helth (1539), STC 7643, fos. 33v–34r. BOGAEV: We were just talking about Jane Anger on this show, and that’s who I’m thinking of as you speak. There is this phenomenon that he marries the women he knows. You know, he marries his former sister-in-law. He marries, most unusually, a succession of women from the court. Well, you know, that’s not really how an early modern monarch is supposed to behave. You’re supposed to make a grand, dynastic match with foreign royalty. The one occasion that he does that, with Anne of Cleves, is a disaster. No, I think he is quite cautious when it comes to his private life.

But you’ve got to remember that for the first sort of 20 years of his reign, he is very popular and very successful, I think, in the eyes of his subjects, and does a pretty good job of creating an image of the Renaissance prince who is godly, who is artistic, musical, who is good at the arts of war. He rises to playing that role and does so to good effect, I think. It was really only maybe from the 1970s onwards that the historical pendulum swung the other way and people started to appreciate the richness and diversity of late medieval religious culture. You know, we began to look at the amount of money that people invested in building and rebuilding their parish churches. We began to look at the extraordinarily rich literary culture of the 15th century, much of which was emphatically in favor of traditional religion. For a woman who had real kind of imagination and determination—it’s not easy to get an education. It’s not easy to express yourself through writing—and yet people did. And the few voices that we hear—I mean, they may be just a few voices, but they’re really quite powerful and eloquent voices. I mean, I’ve always argued that Henry needs to be set in the context of his own time, rather than evaluated according to later categories of what we think Protestant and Catholic might mean. Because in the 1530s and 1540s, everything is still in flux. There is no single Protestant identity. At the start of this period before the Reformation, you also have a way of looking at the world which sees sacrality. Which sees, you know, spiritual meaning and indeed spiritual power invested in material things.I think the thing that we get wrong is that we forget that this was a huge and complicated society, and we just focus on the people at the top. I think that’s a missed opportunity, quite a lot of the time. BOGAEV: One major point that you make that has so much resonance with Shakespeare is, you say you can’t understand Tudor England without knowing about the land and the woods and the towns and the cities. That the landscape around Tudor men and women was full of meaning. What did Tudors believe about the landscape of their country that makes it so ripe with significance? So, his primary motivation is to fix his marital problems. He does need to get rid of Catherine because it becomes clear to him that their marriage is just not blessed by God, so he must have done something wrong. He is, I think, genuinely in love with Anne Boleyn. Who is, of course, a very fascinating creature herself, and is also a highly intellectual, highly educated, and very pious individual who’s interested in some of the same, humanist ideas about religion.