Tudor England: A History

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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. WOODING: No, although girls in the village would also have the… well, they would get a basic education probably within the home. And, there were, kind of, much more unassuming schools where, you know, sometimes girls might be educated.

There is some mild revisionism. Henry VII is rescued from later Tudor propaganda and shown to be a half decent king. Mary I's reputation as the sadistic burner of Protestants is put into the context by the more than double the number killed under Elizabeth after the failed Northern uprising (although of course it is the burnings that did for Mary's reputation, not simply the number). This bleeds into a revisionist account of Henry VIII that portrays our most notorious monarch not as a sex-crazed monster but as an “oddly bookish king”, who gathered the finest legal and theological minds of his age to try and resolve his “Great Matter”, the divorce of Catherine of Aragon (no less sharp but determined to remain married), in the pursuit of a male heir. It is the dust raised by these tome-flippers that irritates religious orthodoxies, leading in significant part to the Reformation (or indeed reformations – Wooding stresses that it was Henry VIII’s son, Foxe’s “godly imp” Edward VI, whose tenure saw the first Book of Common Prayer, the everyday impact of reform with a meaningfully Protestant character, and a great explosion of anti-papal rhetoric). My attention has just been drawn to Lucy Wooding's wonderfully engaged, thoughtful and most generous review of my Selling the Tudor Monarchy. I am most grateful for her succinct summation of some of the most important arguments and lucid presentation of what I was trying to do. I accept the criticisms which are helpful and well worth further reflection. Only on two points would I comment: 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. BOGAEV: Well, bringing this up some more to modern times, I’m, I’m thinking the Tudors had just been getting so much pop culture airtime lately. You have Hilary Mantel’s novels and the spinoffs on TV, and then on stage, and The Tudors on Showtime. So why do you think there’s this particular interest in the period right now?BOGAEV: It’s all fascinating stuff and you’d think that Henry’s—his tortured theology and these towering contradictions would be perfect fodder for Shakespeare. But his play doesn’t deal in any of that. I mean, he makes Henry VIII out to be a kind of a young, innocent, duped by evil Catholic Wolsey. WOODING: Yes, but Shakespeare’s got to be careful because Elizabeth is, you know, still a very powerful memory. And Protestantism is still a bit precarious. And, also, we are not entirely sure, are we, where Shakespeare’s own religious loyalties lay? So, if you are going to talk about the religious politics of the 1530s and 1540s, it’s getting a little bit close to home and you might well find yourself in trouble. So yeah, you could see why you need to sort of steer carefully around Henry VIII as a subject. I think that this is also an age of such sort of vivid imaginative communication. It’s such a great age of literature, that so much of that still shapes our imagination today. And that has a kind of universal appeal still. I mean, you know, Shakespeare’s never really lost his ability to inspire. 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.

Richard Gardiner, Profitable Instructions for the Manuring, Sowing and Planting of Kitchen Gardens, STC 11570.5 (1599), Sig. D2v. WITMORE: Lucy Wooding is a Langford fellow and tutor in history at Lincoln College, Oxford University. Her book, Tudor England: A History is out now from Yale University Press. LUCY WOODING: It’s great that people are fascinated by the Tudors. It’s lovely that there are all these films and novels and so on. And, you know, anything that promotes enthusiasm for history, I’m totally behind. Print has always been associated with the arrival of Protestantism, but actually for the first 50 or more years of the printing press in England, it was churning out great medieval religious classics. So, we began to think again. Lucy Wooding’s Tudor England: A History is a beautifully written account of the society, culture, and beliefs of the Tudor period. Along the way, she punctures many of the stubborn myths that clinging to the period and its headlining figures. The Times of London called it, “A classic in the making.”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? 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. I mean, she keeps a vernacular New Testament in her chamber for people, for her friends to read. She understands that excitement at the encounter with scripture. But that doesn’t make you a Protestant. Not overnight, anyway.

WOODING: I think it created the most extraordinary sort of mindset, and one that’s not just limited to, you know, the occasional genius playwright. 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. In this episode Dr Lucy Wooding tells us more about these two fascinating characters. Mary and Elizabeth were the first women to rule England in their own right. United in complicated ways by their blood, it turned out that there would be an even greater division when it came to their faith. 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: 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. WOODING: Well, because Britain became a Protestant country, because Protestantism became a big part of its identity, we assumed for many years that when Protestantism first arrived in England in the 1520s, that it was enthusiastically welcomed, endorsed by in a great sways of society. We used to think that by 1547, England was already fairly Protestant. 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.

BOGAEV: We were just talking about Jane Anger on this show, and that’s who I’m thinking of as you speak. 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.WOODING: It’s been a very, sort of, powerful part of the stories that the English—later the British—like to tell about their own history. That Protestantism wasn’t, until very recently, understood in British culture to be a superior form of Christianity. And anti-Catholic prejudice has survived into the 21st century. It still, you know, affects the role of the Monarch today. I think the assumption always was that the pre-Reformation Church must have been a disaster, because Protestantism must have naturally been the reaction against that. So, you know, for generations we took the view that the late medieval church was unpopular and oppressive and that it alienated its congregations by worshiping only in Latin. This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the associate producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. Ben Lauer is the web producer, with help from Leonor Fernandez. We had technical help from Tiffany Cassidy at Oxford, and Voice Trax West in Studio City, California. Final mixing services provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc. 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. Now that was partly because we were looking at history from the top down, much more. So we were looking at the work of, you know, churchmen and scholars. We were viewing it from an elite perspective. Also, assuming that when governments pass legislation declaring the country now to be Protestant, that everything fell into place accordingly.