Dan Snow's History Hit - Death, Desire, Power & Scandal: The House of Dudley

Episode Date: May 3, 2022

The Dudleys were the most brilliant, bold and manipulative of power-hungry Tudor families. Every Tudor monarch made their name either with a Dudley at their side - or by crushing one beneath their feet. With three generations of felled family members, what was it that caused the Dudleys to keep rising so high and falling so low?In this edition of Not Just the Tudors, Professor Suzannah Lipscomb talks to Dr. Joanne Paul, author of The House of Dudley: A New History of Tudor England, the story of a noble house competing in the murderous game of musical chairs around the English throne. If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.

Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. This is an episode of Not Just the Tudors with Professor Susanna Lipscomb for you to get into. Enjoy. There were many great families in Tudor England, but among them, none except perhaps the Howards rivaled the Dudleys for their dramatic seesawing between high favour and low disgrace. Every Tudor monarch made their name with a Dudley by their side, or by crushing one beneath their feet, says today's guest. Think of Edmund Dudley, who enriched Henry VII and was executed by Henry VIII. John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, who helped Edward VI rule,

put Lady Jane Grey on the throne and died a traitor's death under Mary, and Robert Dudley, Elizabeth I's amie amoureuse, and that's before we've got to the women. Yet their crucial family role in the Tudor story has never been told before. But today's guest has done just that in her new book, The House of Dudley, A New History of Tudor England. She is Dr. Joanne Paul, who is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of Sussex, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a BBC New Generation Thinker. She's also appeared on Not Just the Tudors Before in an episode called Bloody Massacres and the Puritan Poet.

Dr. Paul has published books on Thomas More and Council and Command in early modern England, but The House of Dudley is her first book for a general audience, and it's a corker. Well, first of all, I want to congratulate you on this book because it is a real triumph. I think it is really beautifully and evocatively written. You have produced a really gripping narrative history book, and you are talking about a family who are so important to the Tudors. Strangely, no one has done this before, this biography of the family.

And it is such an interesting way of kind of telling a shadow history of the Tudors. And as I say, in gripping prose. So congratulations. And thank you for coming to join us on Not Just the Tudors to talk about it. Oh, thank you. Thank you so much. It's really, really nice to hear that. That was sort of what I was going for. So I feel validated. That's fantastic. Yeah, there has, of course, been some writing on the Dudley family before, but usually individual members of it. And what I was trying to capture was a sense of the family as a family, almost the culture of the family. I'm glad that that worked. culture of the family. I'm glad that that worked. You say that ambition was in the Dudley blood, and the word ambition can feel dirty. Did you feel like you were writing about unlikable people?

At times. I was trying to make sure what I wasn't doing was writing a defense of the Dudley family. It's interesting writing a book like this. You'll probably relate. There are moments when you fall in love with the figures you're writing about, and then moments when they really revolt you, and you kind of can't believe you're spending this much time with them. So I was trying to find a balanced way through. But certainly there were moments of them being unlikable, but rarely in the political sense. I understood why they felt so driven to rise higher, to try to get more. And what I realized when I was reflecting on all the readings that I'd done and on the story as a whole was it really came from a place of fear and paranoia. There's this sense where they were trying to rise higher in order to overcome something and to avoid a situation where they were sidelined or forgotten or worse. Now,

of course, that didn't work for them. But I never felt that this ambition was out of a sense of greed, for instance. There were members of the family who certainly took themselves very seriously, of greed, for instance. There were members of the family who certainly took themselves very seriously, but I think often it was a survival instinct almost. Well, let's try and talk a little bit about some of the key people without trying to cover your entire book in the podcast. I suppose we ought to begin, as you do, with Edmund Dudley. He is a man who produced coin for the first Tudor king. So let's talk about what sort of man he was and what his methods for enriching Henry VII were. I think Edmund is a really interesting character, and I think he would have been very unlikable.

He's the eldest son of a younger son of a baron. So that sort of upper middle in terms of Tudor society had connections to the court, but wasn't in it and had trained as a lawyer. He had a reputation for knowing certain niche parts of the law, particularly to do with the king's prerogative, which wouldn't have necessarily done anything for him. We wouldn't have necessarily heard of him, except that Henry

VII at that exact moment in time needed someone who really, really knew those laws and could push them to the furthest extent. So that's what Edmund does. He's brought to the king's attention, he first becomes Speaker of the House of Commons, and then very quickly becomes a minister for Henry VII, and essentially becomes tasked with filling the coffers. And so we have a copy of his account book, which he begins in 1504, where he collects these obligations, these monies from people, often where they've promised essentially that they'll behave or that they'll do something and then he finds a way or those working under him find a way to show that they didn't do that thing or they misbehaved or what have you and therefore they owe the crown money and he accumulates vast sums for Henry VII

and all of it is in line with the law and I think this is the interesting thing about Edmund. I think he's the sort of person who took the law and the king's will and what was right very seriously. What was right, not morally, I should say, but in terms of what's legally right. And we see this when people are describing interactions with him, that as soon as they question his position or his knowledge of the king's will or the execution of the king's will, he gets very defensive very, very quickly. And so I think you might describe him in today's terms as a sort of a stickler or maybe an A-type personality that the rules are the rules, this is what the king has said, this is what the law allows, that's the way it is. And so I think he pursues that very diligently for the king but does allows, that's the way it is. And so I think he pursues that very

diligently for the king, but does not make friends along the way. He appears uninterested in forging alliances. And he clearly had misgivings, or at least he was willing to state he had had misgivings at a later stage, maybe to try and save his neck, because he produces this petition from the tower in the reign of Henry VIII that suggests that some of the things he had done had weighed on his conscience. It's so fascinating. He's arrested as soon as Henry VIII comes to the throne, literally as the announcement is going out, you know, the king is dead, God save the king. He's arrested and taken to the tower. And there he has this either breakdown or transformation, but there's a sense of him having to account for what he had done when he had been collecting money for the king. And some of this is precipitated from the fact that Henry VII had

a very similar, almost redemptive moment at the end of his life, where he tried to make amends. And we have Dudley's letters to people who are writing to him saying, you know, you took 20 pounds off me, I want my 20 pounds back. And he says, by all rights, you should have that 20 pounds. I'm not in a position to grant that to you right now, but it's true. Really, you should have that money back. And he essentially blames the king for everything. He does seem aware that what he did wasn't morally right and that he might suffer for that. I don't know if he thinks it will save his neck. Oh, I think he's probably more concerned in those moments with his soul, but he's also very concerned with his neck because he does try to escape from the tower. So there's this real sense of deep, deep

fear in him. Given that he had made quite so much money for Henry VII and then been so important in that king's success, why does Henry VII's son, Henry VIII, when he becomes king, act so quickly to arrest this man? I don't think it's anything particularly to do, Henry VIII, when he becomes king, act so quickly to arrest this man? I don't think it's anything particularly to do with Henry VIII himself. I think it's a lot to do with the people around him. After Henry VII dies, they keep his death secret for several days. And I say they, it's largely Reginald Fox, who is orchestrating all of this. Because they're in the king's chamber, his corpse is there, they're bringing people in, they're smiling, going and grabbing their allies, bringing him into the room, and then letting them know that, oh, look, it's the king's corpse.

And one of their top priorities in terms of that transition is getting rid of Edmund Dudley and Richard Epson, who is one of the people that Dudley works with and under in a sense. So he's unpopular with these folks who are controlling things. He's also deeply unpopular in London. The London Chronicle is full of people who really, really hate him. And fair enough. He was working with very shady people. He was extracting money from them. He's also unpopular around the realm in general.

And in particular, when Henry VIII goes on his progress, the story usually told is he gets out to the West and is handed petitions or told that his popularity rests on him getting rid of Edmund Dudley. Because Edmund Dudley's in the Tower for more than a year. So he sends word back while he's on progress to have Edmund Dudley executed. So it really all comes down to popularity, that Henry VIII wants to be a very different king than his father. He wants all of the things about that previous reign to be forgotten, and that requires a sacrifice of Edmund Dudley. Now, Edmund's son was John Dudley, who would go on to be close to the king who had ordered the death of his father, which is interesting in itself. How did John Dudley rise in Henry VIII's service? So John is very young when his father is executed and his guardianship is given to a family called the Guilfords. They have a few court appointments. They are known to Henry VIII and his family,

and they're generally very well liked. We have that beautiful Holbein picture of Henry Guilford, of course. Yeah, exactly. We do. And we also have a lot of records about Mother Guilford, who is the step-grandmother of the Guildfords, who's very dear to Mary Tudor, especially when she goes into France. And he's raised in their home and essentially his guardian takes over his education, makes sure that he has all the connections that he needs to begin to rise in the court once again. The other key thing is that John's mother, Edmund's widow, marries the illegitimate uncle of Henry VIII, Arthur Plantagenet. It's not very clear how this marriage comes about. It's fairly soon after Edmund is executed, but it's very advantageous

for her, certainly, but also for John, and that may have been why she chose to do this. And so those two connections really propel John back up. And the fact that he was so young. We think of the Tudors as very merciless, but there was an understanding that he was an innocent in all of this and could prove useful to the crown as well. What do you make of John Dudley's temperament and character, especially, I suppose, during the reign of Henry VIII? In this period where he is growing and rising in status and position, what do you make of him? It's hard to get a really clear grasp on that always,

to get a sense of people's personalities in the past. But he was obviously very well liked. He made friends. One of his earliest friends, of course, is Edward Seymour. He was quite useful on the battlefield. He's knighted on the battlefield of France by Charles Brandon. They have a long friendship as well, right up until Brandon's death. He was chivalrous. He was involved in court performance, He was chivalrous. He was involved in court performance, jousts. So you get this sense of a sort of laddish kind of guy, very amiable, probably a sense of ambition, but who didn't have a sense of ambition in the Tudor court. And he just sort of gets on. It's amazing in this time when we think about the 1530s, the 1540s, of course, people are losing heads all

over the place. And the Dudleys just have this sort of steady course. They're really brought into favour by Anne Boleyn, by Thomas Cromwell, survived both of their falls, very close to the Seymours, so do very well with Jane Seymour, do very well under Anne of Cleves as well. John and his wife Jane both have positions under Anne of Cleves. The Howards are a long-standing enemy of the Dudleys, so that's a difficult few years, but of course it doesn't last very long under Catherine Howard. And then Jane Dudley and Catherine Parr are very close friends. And so the Dudleys just continue to steadily rise without too much scandal or controversy. And Jane Dudley, of course, was Jane Guilford.

He'd obviously been likable enough. Yes. He'd been able to marry the daughter of the people who had been his wards. And I think there's such a contrast between that sense of him being clearly amiable, clearly someone people took to, which is quite a hard thing to trace through historical records. And then what goes on to happen? You know, he clearly is successful on the battlefield. If we fast forward to the middle of Edward VI's reign, when he has risen in position, he's already, well, vicar now, then Earl of Warwick,

in position. He's already, well, vicar now, then Earl of Warwick. And he demonstrates his success on the battlefield again in defeating the rebels in Norfolk in 1549. But he then goes on to preside over their massacre, executing at least 300 rebels in a fortnight in August 1549. And that sort of deed, you know, isn't something that's done by that likeable person. Yeah, we have a speech that's recorded to have been by him. I mean, you never know what people actually said. But he apparently gives this speech where he says that they're not human, the rebels, that it's fine to massacre them, because they're nothing more than animals, essentially, I'm paraphrasing. So there's a couple of different things we could do to try to reconcile this. One is that he might have a strain of that sense of sort of righteousness

from his father. Some things are very clear cut, and that this is the king's will, and you execute that. There's a bit of a pun in there. And that's just the end of it. They're the rebels to the king. They are just animals. It could have something to do with his military reputation. Anyone with a very strong military reputation will have the ability to dehumanize people. And certainly by then he had been involved in a number of campaigns. So there might be something there as well. But yeah, he at various times is not a pleasant fellow. And I think that's where Jane comes into this as well, his wife Jane, that I think she is incredibly skilled at making connections at court. And I think part of his popularity is her. That's interesting. I mean,

one thing I noted is that if we're telling the story of a family, we inevitably end up following the patrilineal line. We're talking about all the men. But you've really tried to bring the Dudley women to life as well, haven't you? You've put them back in the story. And Jane Dudley is a very interesting example. Can you tell us a bit more about her? Yeah, it is a real effort to recover women's voices, women's stories in recounting histories that are going to be not just male dominated in terms of the events, but the sources. The number of women's letters that you encounter is very, very small compared to men's. But she was raised alongside her future husband, John. Their relationship seems to have been a very loving one. They had some 13 children together

over the course of their marriage. At no point does John appear to have ever taken a mistress or to have left her for any period of time. And there's a letter to their son, John, at one point where they both sort of sign off. So there's a sense of a parenting team almost and this loving relationship between them that also is imparted onto their son as well like i said she makes connections at the court very readily appears to have been a close friend of Catherine Parr for instance who has quite a network in the Tudor court of Protestant intellectuals, many of whom are women. She's one of the very few present at the marriage of Catherine Parr and Henry VIII, for instance. And later on, she uses these networks in order to save her husband or to try to save her husband

and sons. So through that, we know how hard she was working to make and maintain these relationships. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, kings and popes who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts.

John Dudley really, I suppose, comes into his own in the reign of Edward VI because he is one of a small coterie who are well positioned to take power after Henry VIII's death, although among them is his great friend Edward Seymour, who becomes Lord Protector. What happens in the end to his friendship with Edward? I think that there's a whole book, or possibly TV show or film, that really just delves into that relationship. It's so fascinating because I didn't realise going into this how long that friendship goes back. They're on the battlefields of France together in 1523. They're working together on property deals essentially throughout the early 1530s. They clearly had a friendship that lasted decades. And so when Edward Seymour comes to power as

Lord Protector, there's this sense in which John Dudley is his right-hand man. And we have that great painting of Edward VI sort of seated and all of his ministers next to him. And it does go Edward Seymour, John Dudley. They are next to each other following the king. However, there are of course different ways of interpreting the fall of Edward Seymour. I think the criticisms that were raised against him appeared to have been fair. He wasn't listening to advice. He wasn't ruling with the council. He made a lot of mistakes in terms of economic and agrarian policies and none of that is terribly fascinating stuff to me but is very important in terms of how he was seen and that rebellion that you mentioned earlier comes out of these failures in his rulership essentially and so Edward Seymour is brought

down in large part by John Dudley. Now Dudley makes a couple of very interesting and almost endearing decisions at this point. He doesn't take the title of Lord Protector. He becomes President of the Council. So he's not interested in fulfilling that same role. He also is much better in some ways with these economic policies. He works very closely with Thomas Grasham, who of course revolutionizes in many ways the Tudor economy. And he also seeks to have Edward Seymour rehabilitated. He doesn't have him executed. And in fact, those who try to have

him executed, he confronts very violently, in fact, and says those who would have his blood would have mine also, with his hand on his sword. He's very clearly going to defend Edward and so brings him back into the council, gives him power and responsibility again and at least from John's perspective Edward blows it. He tries to take over again, he undermines John on several policies in particular to do with France and apparently plots to kill him. Whether or not that's actually true, Edward VI believed it. At Edward Seymour's trial, he says he did consider having the Duke of Northumberland killed, which you would think if that wasn't true, he wouldn't say it at his trial. So certainly there is the sense, I think almost of Hamilton here, in which the court was too small

for both Seymour and Dudley, and one of them had to go, and Dudley was determined that it wasn't going to be him, and so he has Seymour executed. Actually, many people will know John Dudley, now Duke of Northumberland, as you said, one of only three dukes in England, though the son of an executed traitor, as the duke who attempted to secure Lady Jane Grey as Queen of England. Now, I wonder what you make of his role in the crisis of 1553. I mean, some historians have been convinced that he was the prime mover, that it was his way of aspiring to control the crown through the marriage of Jane to his son, Guilford Dudley. Others hold that it was all Edward VI's idea and that Northumberland just sort of reluctantly went along with it. Where do you sit? There are two historical mysteries that I have to contend with in this book

that I really didn't come up with an answer to. I think it's complicated, it's difficult to unravel, and I think that's what's accurate. Certainly, Edward, at this point, he's 15, 16. He knows his own mind. If anyone has read his journal, for instance, or any of his letters to his half-sister, Mary, he knows his own mind. I often think that he's the sort of personality who would have been a bit of a tyrant later on in life had he survived. You can know your own mind without being a tyrant. You can, you can. But I think he is very zealous, certainly. And I think he has a real sense of righteousness.

There's a sort of Richard II about him. In any case, when you look at his device for the succession, which is the document in which he lands the crown on Lady Jane Grey or Lady Jane Dudley, as she would have been, the annotations are written by him. He wasn't sick enough at that point that he would have needed someone to sort of guide his hand or his pen. And all I think he was looking for a male heir, a Protestant male heir, of course, and neither Mary nor Elizabeth were anywhere near producing a male heir. Jane could have been carrying one. That male heir would have also been a Dudley. It's very convenient to the Duke of Northumberland. And he certainly supported Edward's decision. That being said, so did every other counsellor. There

were a few objections, they were quickly quieted, but the whole council was on board with this. At least it looked that way. So that isn't an answer to your question at all. I think the marriage between Guilford and Jane wasn't trying to position Guilford as king consort. I think it was trying to position the Dudleys close to the crown and to protect the Dudleys. It was a marriage that was part of a series of marriages that would have shored up networks of protection around the Dudley family. But it's a very, very difficult one and very, very difficult to disentangle. I think it's fair to say that the evidence is unclear and that you can argue it either way, depending on what you want the outcome to be. So it's actually the most honest historical position to say we don't know. You have a lovely line, one of many, I hasten to add, in which you

say, and this will give people a sample of your writing, the new queen was one of the oldest monarchs to have taken the throne and the only woman to do so since the Empress Matilda in the 12th century, unless you counted Jane, which was unwise. What happened to John Dudley in the reign of Mary I? So this is John Dudley's fall and it happens 42 years and a day or something very similar from the execution of his own father. So when Jane comes to the throne, everyone, even Mary's allies, think that she's not going to put up a fight, that she's either going to become arrested or she's going to flee. She simply can't deal with the military juggernaut that is the Dudley family. And everyone is wrong. And so Mary

realizes that Edward's about to die. And she flees away from London, starts gathering her forces. And eventually Dudley and his sons are forced to go after her. There is talk initially that it's going to be Jane Dudley's father who goes, but apparently not Queen Jane, quasi-Queen Jane, throws a bit of a fit and won't let him go. And so it's John Dudley who has to go. I think he's aware that in leaving London, the council might turn on him. And that's precisely what happens. They are persecuting people who are condemning the reign of Queen Jane in the morning. And then by the evening, they've declared for Queen Mary. So it happens in the space of a day, and John and his family are left adrift.

So he's brought back to London as a traitor, he's imprisoned, and he is fairly quickly executed. And he makes this astonishing conversion to Catholicism on the scaffold. Do you think this is to try and save his family? I think that there's a very good chance that that is the case. There is an interpretation of John Dudley that he's always instrumentalist about religion. He sort of flip-flops throughout his life. There isn't a lot of evidence for that. It is a contemporary accusation that's raised against him by John Knox. Well, I guess John

Knox is the opposite, you know, he's as extreme in belief as you can get. So anyone, by comparison, is a bit of a flip-flop. He's evangelical from the late 1520s, early 1530s. He executes Edward's reforms. He never seems to have any religious qualms about doing so. He writes to Mary enforcing Edward's belief that she should convert. There's nothing to suggest that he is anything but evangelical. On the day before he is executed, he makes a very public conversion to Catholicism and reinforces that in his scaffold speech. I suspect it is an attempt to save his

family. I don't think he thinks it's going to save his skin, and I don't think he thinks it's going to save his soul. I think he thinks it's for his children. And after two generations in which the line of the Dudleys had been tainted and executed as traitors, it's perhaps astonishing that the most famous Dudley of all came next. And he wasn't the firstborn son. He was of those, you've mentioned, Robert Dudley, later Lord Lester, who became, how should we put it, too close to Elizabeth I for comfort. But of course, he was also married, which I think probably brings us to what you were alluding to as the second mystery, which is the death of his wife, Amy Robsart.

You say that the narrative that was fitted to her death of suicide worked very well with the kind of idea of her being a despairing woman who'd been abandoned by her husband. What do you think? The death of Amy Robsart is a very, very difficult one. And unlike many other historical mysteries, it's not because we don't have a lot of information. It's because the information that we do have still doesn't make sense. So we have essentially what we might now call an autopsy. We have a very clear idea of the injuries she sustained. We know where she was found at the bottom of the flight of stairs.

We know her state of mind the day that she was found dead, that she appeared to be very distraught. We know the circumstances that she had sent dead, that she appeared to be very distraught. We know the circumstances that she had sent her servants off to the fair and insisted that they go and leave her alone. So we have all of this information and yet it yields very few clear answers. Certainly it didn't serve Robert to have her killed. That is what I think is very clear. His reputation as a wife killer did not endear him to those who might have otherwise supported his marrying the queen. The fact that he became single might have, but his reputation was tarnished from then on. Who did it serve? Well, William Cecil is very shady in all of this. He is spreading rumours

about Amy's death before it's known by the court. He's associating that with tarnishing Robert's reputation, with suggesting that he should not be anywhere near the Queen. He does well out of this. Does that mean William Cecil killed Amy Robsart? Not necessarily. I think the idea of an accident, which is what the official ruling is at the time, is possible. Often the argument against that is a misunderstanding of some Tudor vocabulary. A pair of stairs doesn't mean two stairs, it means a flight of stairs, and one could fall down a flight of stairs and die. Some of the wounds don't necessarily make sense with that. There's a sense in which there may have been an impact to her head that isn't necessarily explained by a fall down the flight of stairs

but maybe. The suicide suggestion to me does make sense. Often the argument against that is that she'd recently bought a new dress. There are reports of the time of her being very distraught while praying. Emotionally, clearly, she was experiencing highs and lows and that is in line with things that we are aware of today that could lead to suicidal thoughts or suicidal attempts. So I think it's possible. greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, Kings and Popes, who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were

by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. Again, I've just listed all the possibilities and not actually really told you what i think but i don't think it was robert now with regard to robert and elizabeth this is obviously probably mystery number three but i'm not going to ask you did they didn't they because i think the only answer is we don't know or probably not but we don't know obviously this is about whether they had sex or not but it is somewhat easier to chart the emotional relationship between Elizabeth and Robert.

What do you make of that? I think it's beautiful, actually. I really loved that part of, I'll call it the story, but of course, it's a history. But I thought that that was really touching. It has its moments of tension. She throws him out of the court a few times. There's that thing in the Netherlands which goes very badly. And his brother warns him that he'd be safer in the farthest corners of Christendom than ever coming back to England because she's so mad at him. But there is this sense that they're always there for each other. She's so mad at him.

But there is a sense that they're always there for each other, that even in those moments where Robert may have lost her favor, it is fairly quickly resolved. He sacrifices a very great deal in order to retain her favor and be that other half of a very powerful coupling that isn't a couple. And I didn't realize until I really spent time with the letters, how aware of that he was. There's this amazing letter that's been recovered where he's writing to essentially his mistress, Douglas Sheffield. And he essentially says that there's nothing I want more than a son to continue the Dudley line,

being now the last of my house, except retaining the Queen's favour. That is the priority. He maintains that for a very long time until he does marry again later in life. That last letter from him right before he dies that he writes to her, and it includes their little symbol to each other, the I's, the little lines over the O's in the letter. And she writes on it his last letter and keeps it with her until her own death. So I think there is a really beautiful connection between them. And to my mind, that does argue that it wasn't consummated because there's a sense in which if it had been,

the relationship might have burnt out. But instead, that sort of affection gets put into this ongoing friendship, this amorous friendship between them. What, though, do you make of the 1575 festivities at Kenilworth? Is he trying to persuade her to marry him at this late stage? You know, it doesn't matter anymore. You're probably not going to have children go and marry me anyway. Or is it something else? I think it's something else. I mean, I think if she turned around and said, all right, then he would have gone for it. I don't think he

would have said no. And it's wonderful, the Kenilworth celebrations. First of all, the main thing that the Kenilworth celebrations are about is Robert Dudley. It's a party for and about and by him. And it's an amazing amount of money that he puts into it, an amazing amount of work. And probably because he likes himself so much, we have records of almost everything that happens, which means we have a real sense of what it's all about and there isn't much in it that suggests that he is proposing to her in a very grand sense which is often an interpretation of the Kenilworth celebrations. There are paired portraits that are part of the Kenilworth celebrations which Elizabeth Goldring has done a lot of work on and they aren't representing Robert and Elizabeth as a married couple because then they would be facing each other in these paired portraits

they're both facing the same direction so they are paired and this is why I said a sort of coupling but not a couple they are powerful together but they aren't represented as a married couple. And if he had been suggesting that once again, we might have expected those to be presented in a different way. And we might have expected more from the pageants, for instance, that made that suggestion that she ought to marry him. I think it's a celebration of their very different kind of relationship. Now, earlier, we mentioned putting women back into the story, and there is another woman, one of his siblings, it would be nice to mention now, which is Mary Sidney, Mary Knee Dudley, the woman who nursed Elizabeth through smallpox and suffered as a result, and his mother to Philip Sidney. I mean, the women are really

important in this story, aren't they? Mary's fascinating. Mary is very well educated. Mary, I think, learns from her mother in terms of making court connections. She navigates the 1553 crisis and its aftermath very successfully, largely in some ways because of the work as well of her husband, Henry Sidney, who very early on seems to get on board with the, we're Dudleys. And there's a fantastic letter from Henry Sidney to Philip Sidney in which he essentially says, your mother's family is your family and you need to uphold that reputation of the Dudley family, which Philip obviously inculcates because he later goes on to say, I am a Dudley. And Mary does very well out of the ascension of Elizabeth. Henry spends a lot of time in Ireland. She goes back and forth, but obviously is very dedicated to Elizabeth. At the same time, she's also playing a lot of court games. And I think she and her brother work together a lot

in some way. If he wasn't in Elizabeth's bedchamber, she was. And she was his connection to that sort of inner working. And one of the events I recount in the book is her pivotal role in almost controlling, in some ways, I think, ambassadors. And meeting with them and feeding them certain rumors and assurances. ambassadors and meeting with them and feeding them certain rumors and assurances and playing on femininity in a really manipulative way that I think is fascinating suggesting that Elizabeth hasn't come to or hasn't articulated a decision about I think it's Archduke Charles at this point that is one of her suitors hasn't reached't reached a decision about that yet, because that's just the way women are, right? And they're coy. English women are like that. And I just think she's really fascinating. Towards the end of her life, she becomes a bit resentful.

She doesn't think that she is rewarded in the way that she ought to have been. Henry, her husband, feels the same. And they're both probably right. Elizabeth is like that sometimes and doesn't always reward loyalty. And I think the Sidneys are an example of that. They are never awarded any title, never given very significant properties. It is a bit sad, actually, in a way.

I mentioned early on that writing a history of the Dudleys is writing a shadow history of the Tudors what do you think that you have learned from changing your perspective? Gosh that's a difficult one because there's so many things that I picked up along the way some of which we've talked about But in terms of that sort of large sense of the period, I mean, I think one is the women's networks that we've mentioned a few times, the role of women, which of course we sort of know when we go, yes, of course, women were important. But to see that in action, I think is very powerful. The other thing that really came through for me in working on this and finishing it and having that perspective on the whole trajectory

is the importance of the relationships between the Tudor monarchy and the various families that surrounded it and the way in which they grew off of each other. There's a sort of violent symbiotic relationship that emerges. They need each other. For the Tudors, each one of them, and you can point to it very clearly, took something from the Dudleys, either by working with a member of the Dudley family, or of course, by having one executed. And I think there is more that can be done to think about those relationships and the importance of them and not viewing the Tudors or the Howards or the Dudleys or the Percys or whoever it might be in isolation,

but thinking about those relationships. Yes, for what it's worth, what I took from it was that your book does a very grand job of joining the dots. And what you've just called women's networks we can more broadly talk about with regard to men as well as friendship and friendship seems something that is too easy to overlook it mattered that people liked you or didn't like you in the age of a personal monarchy when so much was about personal relationships actually that really mattered yeah and we often talk about it in terms of popularity and i've used that a few times today as well. Friendship was everything in this period, and they talked about it in such emotional terms that when we read it in Shakespeare, you know, the 11-year-olds

giggle because it's almost romantic and sometimes very physically expressed. And I talked about women's networks. That struck me about male friendships as well. Going back to Edmund Dudley and his relationship with his brother-in-law, Andrew Windsor, all the way up to Robert and his brother Ambrose, who had a very, very close relationship throughout their life. Those, we can call them networks, connections, relationships, but I think you're right. Friendships are hugely important and we need to understand them it's a great read rush out folks and buy your copy of the house of Dudley by Joanne Paul Dr. Paul it has been a treat as ever thank you very much this was wonderful thank you so much

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