Telegraph e-paper

Good Tudor, Bad Tudor? Too easy

Instead of chopping the period into reigns, this superb history charts the tides of popular opinion

By Daniel BROOKS

TUDOR ENGLAND: A HISTORY by Lucy Wooding

480pp, Yale, T £25 (0844 871 1514), RRP £30



The most disturbing executions recorded in John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs are those of Perotine Massey, her sister Guillemine, and their mother Katharine in July of 1556, all charged with heresy for their failure to attend church. On the pyre, Perotine gave birth to a baby boy. He was rescued momentarily from the flames, only to be thrust back in “under circumstances of aggravated cruelty” by a zealous bailiff. Six years later the new Queen, Elizabeth I, was petitioned by Perotine’s brother, and the responsible authorities were punished.

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.

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”.

Wooding reveals how everyday lives were actually impacted by royal decisions, and vice versa. While there’s undoubtedly a certain amount of gall in giving a book a title as broad as Tudor England: A History, she soon convinces you that it would be a disservice to address anything less ambitious.

And it is incredibly ambitious, bearing detailed witness to a society being “ineluctably and painfully pulled apart by the intensity of diverging rules on doctrine”. In dizzying succession we learn about the legacy of Henry VII, rescued as a “Solomon of England” by Francis Bacon in 1622 but, in the meantime,

transformed in the public eye into an avaricious tyrant to bolster his son’s relative credibility.

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 antipapal rhetoric).

Each chapter offers an important nuance to a more commonly known tale, backed up by a laudably diverse cast of sources. It makes for generous, heroic history – populist rather than popular – that will shake up long-held views while also serving as a grand introduction to a period that “celebrated the ebb and flow of argument, and found virtue in a variety of viewpoints”.

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.

Against all this we see Elizabeth I transform into Gloriana, a figure “assiduously crafted” to suggest an illusory continuity – adopting the motto semper eadem (“always the same”) – that would overshadow real anxieties about succession, disputes with Europe, and England’s colonial ambitions. Wooding demonstrates the fruit of this with an extract from Thomas Dekker, whose (whimsically named, to the modern ear) “Wonderfull Yeare” addresses the last Tudor monarch’s death, and an accession interrupted by bubonic plague ravaging London: “To report of her death (like a thunder-clap) was able to kill thousands.”

In a world marred by rupture, conflict and argument, Dekker offers an image that may clearly be embellishment, but nonetheless resonates today: one of a people who “never sawe the face of any Prince but her selfe, never understoode what that strange outlandish word Change signified”.

It was writers like Foxe who later singled out Mary I’s tenure as uniquely bloody

Books

en-gb

2022-10-01T07:00:00.0000000Z

2022-10-01T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://dailytelegraph.pressreader.com/article/281814287746272

Daily Telegraph