Dan Snow's History Hit - Life in Tudor England

Episode Date: December 2, 2022

What was life really like in Tudor England? This was a society where monarchy was under strain, the church was in crisis and contending with war, rebellion, plague and poverty was a fact of daily life. Yet it was also an age rich in ideas and ideals, where women asserted their agency and found a literary voice. In this episode of Not Just the Tudors, Professor Suzannah Lipscomb talks to Dr. Lucy Wooding, who has written a bold new history of the brilliant, conflicted, visionary world of Tudor England, presenting a starkly different picture of this famous era from the one we thought we know.The Senior Producer was Elena Guthrie. It was edited and produced by Rob Weinberg. If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe to History Hit today!Download History Hit app from the Google Play store.Download History Hit app from the Apple Store.

Hi there, History Hit fans. Let's let you know about another podcast we've got. Not Just the Tudors, with Professor Susanna Lipscomb. You know when I'm walking down the streets, you know what most people ask me? What's Professor Susanna Lipscomb like? So, you can find out for yourself, I say. Listen to her flipping podcast. It's right here, available wherever you get your pods. Not Just the Tudors. You know what that's about?

The Tudors, but Not Just the Tudors. She talks about the Aztecs. She talks about the Yuan Dynasty, the Ming Dynasty, the Mughals. She talks about the Aztecs. She talks about the Yuan dynasty, the Ming dynasty, the Mughals. She talks about everything that's going on in that wonderful age, the Renaissance, that remarkable age of growth, beauty, tragedy, terror and transformation,

the 16th and 17th centuries. You've got to go and check it out, folks. Go and listen. For all of your Tudor and Tudor Plus requirements, get involved in Susanna Lipscomb's podcast, not just the Tudor and Tudor Plus requirements. Get involved. This is our Ellipskin podcast, not just the Tudors, wherever you get your pods. To write a history of the long Tudor century from 1485 to 1603 must surely be a daunting task. To write one that incorporates political, social and religious

change for both the Tudor monarchs and ordinary people, that encompasses literature and plays, rebellions, warfare and the latest scholarship on the role of women is no mean feat. And on top of that, to write a history that demolishes historical fables, reassesses received wisdom, and puts forward new understandings of the period in clear, lucid prose. Well, that's something remarkable indeed. And that is the mammoth task that has been accomplished by today's guest in her new book, Tudor England, A History, published by Yale University Press. Its author is Dr. Lucy Wooding.

She is Langford Fellow and Tutor in History at Lincoln College, Oxford, and her other books include an excellent biography of Henry VIII. Dr. Lucy Wooding, thank you so much for inviting me to your rooms here at Lincoln College Oxford to talk about your wonderful book. This is Tudor England, A History, and it is a remarkable piece of work. It is now the authoritative guide, I think, to Tudor England. This is the one that everyone needs to pick up. It's remarkably clear-eyed and incisive and really takes account of all the new developments in the last half century of writing and you bring huge amounts of your own insight and perspicacity to it as well

so thank you so much for writing this and agreeing to speak to me about it no thank you very much that's incredibly kind of you and it's lovely to have you back this is your college so it's lovely to have you here it's always lovely to be here i very rarely ask people questions about the introduction because i always think they think i won't have read the rest of it if i say that but you start by making a number of quite intriguing and provocative statements about how people have thought about tudor england and you say that many modern depictions of the tudor past continue to distort the historical record and are often a travesty of the real thing and that these kind of fables these fabricated notions of the Tudor past continue to distort the historical record and are often a travesty of the real thing.

And these kind of fables, these fabricated notions of the Tudors prevail. Was it trying to defeat some of those myths and fables that drove you to write this book? I suppose in part, perhaps it was. It's lovely that there is so much interest in the Tudors. And we see it reflected in all sorts of TV series and films and books and so on. And I wouldn't for a minute want that not to be the case. It's great that people are interested, but I sometimes think that they're selling themselves a bit short because the complexities of this era are extraordinary and have emerged so much in recent decades from the academic work that's been done. recent decades from the academic work that's been done. And I sometimes think popular commercial view of the Tudors is a bit superficial, a bit over glamorized. And it would be even more

interesting if they paid just a little bit more attention to some of the work that's going on in academia. I think we should be able to talk to one another. So I think what the academic world is engaged in, it should be able to communicate with the wider world. I completely agree. This is a book that, of course, covers the monarchs, and we will talk about them. But it absolutely situates them in the wider world of Tudor England. And you say that to understand the Tudor era, we must situate our imagination within the natural world in which the Tudors lived and worked and fought and died. So you start by talking about landscape and seascape. Can you talk to me a little bit about that relationship between the Tudors and their world? If you can imagine yourself back into a world where predominantly people live off the land, where most people are engaged in agriculture, where the harvests fail on a regular

basis, maybe even five or six years, where people are living on the poverty line, you're going to be so powerfully attuned to the weather, to the rhythm of the seasons. It's going to be something that shapes your reality. Nowadays, we live in a much more urban environment. We are so divorced very often from our natural environment. But at the same time, also in the 21st century, we are becoming powerfully aware of the need to pay attention to the natural world, which we have damaged so irreparably. I think it's fascinating to look back to the Tudors, who kind of already knew this. They kind of already knew that they had to respect the land on which they depended. And so that's where I wanted to begin the book, by trying to

paint the landscape. One of the ways in which the Tudors were attuned to their environment was manifested in something that many people might not know outside of academia, which is their sleeping patterns. Can you tell us about how the Tudors slept differently to us? You don't ask these questions, do you? You make assumptions about what people live their lives in this way. Yes, you had two sleeps if you were living in Tudor England. You had the early sleep and then people would wake up around midnight and very often be very active. This was a time when you very often had letters to write or you might pray at great lengths. And then you had your second sleep. That's just fascinating, isn't it? Because of This was a time when you very often had letters to write, or you might pray at great lengths, and then you had your second sleep.

That's just fascinating, isn't it? Because of course it meant that they were going to bed when it got dark. Why burn candles that you don't need to? The other thing I was struck about in terms of thinking about their lives is just how much the parish and that sense of local community meant to them. You talk about the importance of beating out the bounds as part of parish life. That feels like something we've lost sight of as well. I think there are probably parts of this country and many parts of the world where that still obtains, where your day-to-day existence is still shaped by the community that you live in. But those of us who live in cities, yes,

it's a long way from the sort of things that the Tudors would have taken for granted. And I think we've lost something, actually, in that many people these days don't really know who their next door neighbour is. Many people don't have a support network that they can call upon. If we're lucky, then we have lovely neighbours, and very often neighbours rally around in times of crisis. But not anyone, by any means, can depend on that anymore. That would have been deeply puzzling, I think, to most people living in Tudor England, because your neighbours were an important part of your life. And you see them in the case of legal trials, the word of a neighbour could be all important. Was this person of good repute? You asked the

good women of the parish to give their opinion and, oh boy, did they give it. So, yes, I think that's another thing we have to kind of make the imaginative leap to understand. In this book, you engage with each of the monarchs, but in Disperse, look at each of those with chapters that consider other aspects of Tudor life. So I'm going to try and recreate that in our interview.

Let's turn now to the first Tudor life. So I'm going to try and recreate that in our interview. Let's turn now to the first Tudor monarch, Henry VII. And you say that his reputation today is as an avaricious, reclusive, very dull man, but that when alive he was known for his magnificence, his strength of character and his astounding achievements. Why do you think there's such a disparity? And how instead would you rather we remembered his reign? I think one of the reasons he has such a poor reputation is the consequence of his son, who fairly cold bloodedly, I think, massacred his father's reputation in his own interests. And one of the things that I've tried to bring out in this book is just what experts the Tudor monarchs were at self-fashioning, what perhaps in the modern world we might call propaganda, although in a way

that doesn't properly describe it. They were exceptionally gifted at projecting an image. And of course, everyone remembers the Henry VIII, the Holbein image, the larger than life colossus. But of course, you've got to remember that all of that was an exercise in smoke and mirrors. They were trying to conceal their very real weaknesses. And the Tudor claim to the throne, it was dubious. Civil war was a very real risk. So they project this image of stability, magnificence, security to cover up some really quite fragile moment in the reigns of each one of them. And I think that's what Henry VIII was doing. He's 17 years old. Okay, he's tall, athletic, beautiful, by all accounts, intelligent, but still far from secure on the throne. So he makes this image of himself as a generous king, someone who doesn't penny pinch. So this is the idea of Henry VII as a sort of Scrooge-like king. This is where it's emerging from. But Henry VII was very successful at making

a certain sector of society accountable. So the nobility, who could at times cause a lot of trouble, hemi-nism gets them to pay their taxes, or gets them to pay their dues, or holds the threat of a very heavy fine over them in order to make them behave. And surprise, they don't like it very much. Any more than exceptionally rich people and corporations in the modern world like being forced to pay their taxes. In fact, they put a lot of effort into avoiding doing so. So this young king comes to the throne.

He wants to project the right image. And he's also being very carefully manipulated, I think, by those around him to not be like his father, because it's very much in the interests of the elite, that he should not be quite as exacting. And I think he is taken in by their flattery. And so there's a kind of almost a silent pact to demolish Henry VII's achievements. And that's where it comes from, I think. Henry VII comes from nowhere. He has a very questionable claim to the throne. He spent his entire adult life in exile. There's a question mark over whether he actually had set foot in England. He's a Welshman before he landed. I went to see the place where he landed. It's very hard to get

to. It gives a very strong impression of just how cautious he was landing in this tiny bay out of sight in Pembrokeshire. And he didn't have very much by way of military backing at the time. He picked up quite a lot as he went through Wales and across England. But within months, he's defeated Richard III, been crowned king, married Elizabeth of York, produced the male heir, and he sets about consolidating his power which is challenged at every turn so no wonder he was on the defensive all the time you know he's forever facing threats at home and abroad and yet he prevails i think he deserves far more celebration than he gets yes his reputation certainly needs an overhaul. You mentioned Elizabeth of York. How

much does he owe his authority as king to women like Elizabeth of York and, of course, crucially, his mother, Margaret Beaufort? He owes them an enormous amount. And it's quite clear his first instinct whenever there's trouble is to send for the Queen and my mother. And this is one of the things I was trying to do with this book, because I'm very impatient of the fact that after all these years of extraordinary diligence by those who work on the history of women, that we still don't integrate women's history into mainstream history a lot of the time. And Henry VII is a brilliant example. His mother, it might be said, was the reason he came to the throne in the first place,

not just because he derived legitimacy from her lineage, but because she was just such a vigorous supporter. She was the one brokering the marriage with Elizabeth of York. And Henry knows how much he owes to Elizabeth of York, which is why he's very careful that no one should say so. He wants to be there on his own merits. So he emphasises the fact that God has chosen him as is evident from his victory at Bosworth Field. But of course, he owes an enormous amount to Elizabeth of York and her supporters, to be able to bring over the disaffected Yorkists who are appalled at Richard III's behaviour and connect them with the remains of the Lancastrian cause. This is the foundation on which he builds. And I think we've got a lot better recently at seeing how alongside institutional forms of power and the sort of more obvious elements of government,

the informal workings of kinship groups, of personal relationships, these were just as vital as, if not more so, in sustaining someone's authority. And of course, when it comes to soft power, women are just as important as political agents, as the men who appear more obviously in the historical record. Absolutely. And I'm struck by what you said about integration, because it seems to me that is the great achievement of this book. You have integrated women's history into the mainstream historical narrative. You've integrated top high political histories with the sort of bottom-up grassroots histories that have developed so much over the last half century perhaps in particular

you have integrated literary history as well as political and social and cultural histories and you've knitted together primary source work with deep knowledge of all of the trends and developments in history over the last decades. And it is that work integration that makes this such a valuable book. That's incredibly kind of you to say so. I'm really glad that you think that because that is what I was trying to do. And it was really difficult. There were days when I thought, gosh, is this actually possible? But yes, I think it's important that we stop keeping different kinds of history in different compartments. And in particular, some of the fabulous social history

that's been written over recent decades needed to be in this kind of book. And I don't think it ever has been sufficiently. That was what I was trying to do. It's great to hear someone say that they think I managed it and I think also with the literary history I'm passionate about literature as my students will tell you

any excuse to talk about Shakespeare and I started out thinking I will tell the total story if you like and then it rapidly became clear that there was not a book long enough to incorporate everything that could be said so I scaled down my ambitions a bit and said, I'm going to talk about the things that I feel passionately about. So yes, there is a lot of

literature in this, which I hope people will enjoy. And I suppose perhaps it reflects my view of human existence. I think we are so shaped by the books we read. And if you read the books published in the 16th century, it's incredibly vibrant literary culture and it's so wonderful to encounter. I kind of thought that I was justified in spending so much time talking about books. I hope everyone else agrees. You also spend, of course, much time talking about religion and you start with thinking about early Tudor religion,

that bit of it before the Reformation that perhaps has gone somewhat unregarded, at least in the popular sphere. And you argue that it was not the weakness of the late medieval church that brought about its downfall, but its strengths. If we're thinking in terms of popular religion, yes, obviously, there were institutional issues, which I think might be classed as a weakness. So that didn't help when Henry VIII gets that glint in his eye but yeah I'm very impatient in that the 16th century is labelled as the century in which England became Protestant okay it's a century in which England

began to turn Protestant but the majority of the Tudor period I think it was still more Catholic than anything else and that particular kind of late medieval Catholicism, which was extraordinary, vibrant and popular and so creative in the way that it expressed itself. I suppose it had centuries to hone its techniques of communication, but you've got to remember it's dealing with a largely illiterate populace. So it communicates through ritual and ceremony and visual imagery, as well as, of course, through sermons and music and all this kind of thing.

All of that meant it was very fertile ground for new ideas. And the 15th century had been full of people putting forward reform ideas and new devotional patterns had emerged. And so I think when the early stirrings of Protestantism happened, nobody knew it was going to be anything that different. Protestants made a great fuss about how they were going to have the Bible in English. But actually, in the late medieval church, people have been reading translations of the Bible in different forms for quite some time, and they had sermons in English. So I think the fact that Protestantism had the potential to completely destroy what had gone before, it was a long time before people realised that. And I think they thought that this was another reform current that could be assimilated into the existing religious tradition.

Yes, that intense flexibility, which had been such a feature of the late medieval church, meant that it allowed for this incumbrance without recognising what would happen. I love the picture that you painted, the way that the incense in church would have been so sweet to people who are normally surrounded with human smells and farmyard smells. And it does give that kind of powerful sense of how late medieval religion spoke to beauty and spoke to the imagination and helped people out of their everyday world. Protestants would come along and be deeply suspicious of this kind of thing and highly critical of bells and smells and all the rest of it, precisely because they could appreciate just how powerful these things were. the music and the beauty of the stained glass windows, you can appreciate the sort of aesthetic power of those surroundings, even if you don't buy into the belief structures. So we need to

spend more time thinking about the kind of sensory impact of religion generally. Even when it comes to Protestantism, I think what's increasingly appreciated now is that one of the great success stories of Protestantism was music. The fact that you could sing the psalms, sing hymns. And again, even if you don't buy into religion these days, I think we all love singing hymns. And I think it's interesting to think about how Protestantism made a virtue of what it stripped away. You had all the stained glass and you had the smiles and you had this intense sensory experience

in the late medieval church and then in France at least you've got the sort of bare whitewashed walls after the Calvinists have done their job and the people are kind of opting in to something that is a sensory experience of asceticism,

of a stripping away. So there's so much to focus on more. And of course, a lot of work has been done. But I think that's really right. Yes, I think also there's been work like Tara Hamling's work, where you can see that Protestants in the home can still use pictures and images to enormous effect. But aesthetic as you say of the church is perhaps not one that's as immediately appealing to some i don't know i think there's something in how it works in terms of deprivation as well in just the same way as having to fast and catholics not having meat on certain days it it produces a feeling of holiness. I think in certain ways that we see Protestants celebrating

what they aren't allowed to do and what they can't have in some ways. Yes, making a virtue out of austerity. And the very plain clothes. You wouldn't have colours and ribbons and jewellery inside. It would all be very minimalist. Post-Reformation, there's a great deal of religious division. And I think there's a great deal of religious confusion. It's clear that people were often not sure quite what they were supposed to be believing

or what they were allowed to do. So anything that marked you clearly out as a member of a religious community with a sense of identity, a sense of coherence, a sense of fellowship, that must have been appealing too. And this is really interesting because you make this point in the book that actually you think that in the end people are not choosing in the Reformation between two different intellectual propositions or two different theological propositions, but are choosing between two different ways of life, really. What they think matters in terms of patterns of life and the

manner of communication. All of these things we've been talking about. patterns of life and the manner of communication, all of these things we've been talking about. It must have been a different decision for pretty much every individual. And I don't want to diminish the importance of doctrine and the importance of intellectual propositions, because for many people, it's clear, those were all absorbing. And these were the reasons why they made the decisions that they did. But that, in a sense, we kind of know, because these tend to be the very literate, articulate individuals who write books explaining why they believe what they believe. I just wanted to try and add into the picture the people who don't perhaps grasp the full significance of justification by faith alone,

of justification by faith alone, but know which of their parish clergy they trust and respect and will follow accordingly. Because that sense of making a religious choice on the basis of a personal example, we don't pay enough attention to it. I don't know why, because if you look at how the Reformation begins, it's all as followers of a particular charismatic leader. You're a Lutheran or you're a Calvinist or you're a Zwinglian. Or in England, there were some inspirational early Protestants. So you followed Frith or Tyndale. The example of the Marian Protestants who were martyred for their faith was, again, inspirational to the succeeding generations. So it's a very personal matter and

it's about personalities. I guess it's because that is so ineffable. We can't grasp it centuries later. You can't feel charisma through the page in the same way as you would have done if you'd been in the room with any of these people. It's not something that transmits to a written document, no. But I think if you pay attention, you begin to see that those bonds of fellowship mean a lot and mean as much, perhaps, if not more to many people than the clear-cut questions of doctrine. Now, taking us back to the top of society

and our second Tudor monarch, Henry VIII, of whom you've written a wonderful biography before, we have focused a lot, you suggest, in our historical preoccupations on his religion, his administration, his court. But actually, one of the guiding passions of his life, you suggest, was war. Can we talk about that? Yes. Military history isn't very trendy these days, is it? Book sales might suggest otherwise, but maybe not in the academy. You can hear people being quite critical of military history. And to write about Henry VIII and to not pay attention, as a lot of people do, to his preoccupation with military matters is to really kind of lose sight of what was for him often the kind of centre of gravity. Henry VIII had huge ambitions, and this included his military ambitions.

He waged war on an unprecedented scale, not perhaps terribly successfully, and that's maybe one reason why we don't pay as much attention to what he was up to as we might. He longed to achieve a second Agincourt, but he never quite got there. It's not just the preoccupations of a playboy king who likes to show off on horseback. The very principle of kingship rests on your ability to prove yourself a warrior. And in later centuries too, a king who is not able,

or looks like he might not be able to defend his people in battle, is a king whose authority is likely to be compromised. So I think we need to pay more attention to that. But we also need to pay attention to the kind of social impact of that. If I can talk about a very cherished colleague, Steve Gunn's book, The English People at War in the Age of Henry VIII, attempts to do what he says we've seen Reformation histories do, i.e. get away from doctrine and structures and institutions and actually talk about the social impact of religious change. He says it's time we do the same with war.

We need to talk about the social impact of war. And in this it's time we do the same with war. We need to talk about the social impact of war. And in this book, he does this. It's fabulous. So there's a whole kind of world of military history waiting to be explored, I think. And I think that should be next on our list. You actually pose an interesting counterfactual in here that had Henry VIII died in 1529,

we might think of him as the second Henry V. Can you play out that thought experiment with us? Yeah. We're not really supposed to indulge in counterfact a bit frivolous. But I suppose the point I was trying to make is, can we please concentrate a little bit more on the first half of his reign? Because we are so used to seeing him as this bloated paranoid monster of his closing years and with good cause there were alarming aspects to the 1540s but to many of his contemporaries it's interesting even after he's died many of his contemporaries still reflect on him as that

very young beautiful vigorous martial king who was a gifted scholar a gifted musician very much the renaissance prince and clearly for contemporaries that image of their ruler stayed and was not driven out by what happened in the closing years or at least not so entirely that's interesting to think about nature of power now a little bit, you suggest that our idea about the Tudor period, going on from what you've said about Henry in that last decade, is of thinking of something despotic, that power, we imagine, was solely in the hands of the monarch, or that's the kind of popular image of it. And actually, you argue that we need to think about it as something far more negotiated and far more contingent and diffuse. And we need to think about it as something far more negotiated and far more contingent and diffuse.

And we need to think about the limitations on royal power. Can you explain that a little bit? Yes, I'm very tired of people going on about Henry VIII as the Tudor Stalin, because it's such a misrepresentation of how Tudor power works. And of course, Henry VIII could be scary. But even when he is at his most vindictive, it's interesting that he still has to abide by legal process. And also that if he wants something to happen, he just can't make it happen through a sheer act of will. He has to have allies. He has to be able to bring Parliament with him. He has to be able to bring the nobility with him.

Now, okay, he might do that by a series of bribes, threats, whatever it takes. But he just can't act alone. He doesn't have the mechanisms of power. He doesn't have that kind of institutional framework. He doesn't have a standing army. If he wants to go to war, he has to be able to persuade his nobility that this is a war worth fighting and one they want to have a part to play in. And of course, mostly they do. You don't want to offend your monarch, but it's not as if he can bring about anything just by royal fiat. One thing I thought was particularly interesting and incisive about your analysis that shows that the social hierarchy wasn't as fixed as we tend to think it was, was how many instances of nobility there are acquired in one generation. And also, because of course you're including the women in the story, for how many women of landowning rank, this was an age of opportunity.

What did it take for men and women to capitalise on that opportunity in the Tudor period? There are various routes, but it's usually personal connections. So if you could become a loyal servant to a monarch and make yourself indispensable. Charles Brandon was just really good at sport. And he ends up as Henry's brother-in-law. I suppose, obviously, if you're a woman, marriage is one route to power, but not necessarily. Again, some of the ladies-in-waiting at court who exercise quite a lot of influence. And also education. You've got to think about

the explosion in educational possibilities. Granted, only for the very elite women. It's not everybody like Elizabeth who's educated to speak multiple languages. But when they do, they again become power brokers. And yeah, and it's fascinating to watch. But then, of course, once you've achieved noble status, you pretend like you've always been noble. These wonderful Elizabethan nobles who are having genealogies constructed to make it look like they come from an ancient lineage. I think this happens in every age. And so interesting as well, your example about Charles Brandon, and also Earl of Bedford, another person who wins that ultimate position,

in part because he gets an arrow through the eye fighting one of Henry's wars. Yes, you need to prove yourself as a loyal servant, as a gifted soldier or statesman. Wolsey and Cromwell, again, come to mind, or Cecil. These are people of just extraordinary intelligence and skill, and they rise to the highest levels of society in consequence. There's a great deal of social mobility, or a great deal more than we might think. And it's often concealed by the fact that those who have benefited from it then staunchly deny its existence, because they don't want to make it obvious that they've just arrived. 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. In these years of kind of Reformation tumult, I suppose, we talk much about the dissolution of monasteries, as well we should because it's a huge thing that happens and I was struck by your suggestion that it's not just being destroyed as an institution but discredited as a concept. But beyond that, you also say we need to give more attention to the dissolution of the chantry under Edward and the way in which that would have had an effect on people in a much, perhaps not more personal way than the dissolution of the monasteries, but it would have certainly

felt close to home in terms of prayer for the soul and how people thought about salvation and the afterlife. Yes, it's another set of links, a view of the relationship between the living and the dead. And there's that strong sense of obligation to the dead. And yes, okay, if you're rich enough to endow a monastery, then you might have a very personal link to one of these religious houses. And people certainly left money to them in a very targeted way, which shows that they had some kind of a relationship with those houses. But chantries were just achievable to people, even if they didn't have vast amounts of money to leave. We think of a chantry as being an actual building, a chantry chapel. And of course,

if you're rich enough, yes, you endow a chantry chapel for the masses for your soul, as said there. But strictly speaking, a chantry is just any bequest of money for masses to be said. And it's fascinating to read people's wills. And again, the very precise instructions they give that these masses should be said at a particular altar dedicated to a particular saint, who is perhaps their patron saint or there's some connection with the family and that they specify the people to be prayed for not just themselves themselves but their father and their mother and their sister and their brother and all christian souls it always ends and all christian souls so again it's another way of weaving together that fabric of a christian commonwealth where everybody has an obligation

to everybody else and of course that's the ideal. I'm not saying that everybody lived in this harmonious society and that people never fell out or were unkind to one another. But there's a very clearly recognised aspiration for every member of society that they should somehow be joined together, be knit together in bonds of charity. And the dissolution first of the monasteries and then of the chantries, I think, just tore big gaping holes in that fabric. Your book is perhaps at its most radical when it comes to think about Mary I. You say that in recent years, we've come to realise we may have been almost completely wrong. How did contemporaries see her? I suppose I'm asking the same question I asked you about Henry VII. How should we set right our estimation of her? Yeah, it's very interesting

to see how Bloody Mary lives on in popular opinion. Academics have been working really hard for decades to point out that we really need to rethink Mary's reign. Because the assumption that her reign was a disaster was based on Protestant propaganda from the reign of Elizabeth, and some very vocal Protestant opposition actually during her reign. So if you think that England's destiny was to become a Protestant country, and if, by the way, although you might not say it in as many words, you think Protestantism is a superior brand of Christianity to Catholicism, which I think was the bias of British society for centuries, then clearly Mary's a disaster.

But first of all, not that prejudiced anymore. At least I really hope we're not. So we're not going to pass judgment on someone purely for their religion in that way. And second of all, we're much, much more attentive to ordinary people and what ordinary people think. Yes, a small Protestant elite in 1553 were appalled that Mary should be about to inherit the throne, so much so they were prepared to back Edward VI's attempt to subvert the succession and hand the crown to Lady Jane Grey, which is a very illogical proposition by any lines, unless it's on the grounds purely of Protestantism. A descendant of Charles Brandon, by the way, talking about... Well, we're talking about success stories, yes. There's a small number of people for whom this is bringing the world crashing down around them.

But for most ordinary people, it was a return to normality that Mary was going to take the throne and, of course, restore Catholicism. Everybody knew that was what she would do. She's known for her resistance to Protestantism. Her followers very ostentatiously, they ride through London displaying their rosary beads. Her household was much sought after by Catholic families who wanted their daughters to be a part of that Catholic community. So everyone expected it would be a return to the old ways. And so people start saying mass before even the instruction has gone out that they should. They start bringing out the statues of the Virgin Mary that they've had hidden at the back of the

wardrobe or wherever for years of Edward's reign. And they display them at the windows when she rides into London. So I think if we think in terms of ordinary folk, it's not been very long since they lost the Latin match. You've got to remember the Book of Common Prayer only comes in 1549. So this is, what, four years later that Mary comes to the throne. So the Book of Common Prayer must have still seemed very new, very awkward, rather jagged. I think nowadays we would appreciate the beauty of Cranmer's prose, and the Book of Common Prayer service is a beautiful thing. But I think at the time, it was just odd. It was in the wrong language. How could it work? If you think that the Mass

has special powers, it's said in an arcane and elevated language, only bits of which you understand. I think it adds to its mystery. And then to have this awkward news service brought in. Yeah, I think a lot of people must have been just so relieved to see Mary back. And that's what she thought too. She thought that the people loved her. And she was emphatic that she had come to the throne through popular backing. And we've always dismissed that claim as a stupid woman who didn't know what she was talking about, sort of thing. But actually, I think she might have had a point. She might have known better than all the generations of historians who later condemned her. And I was fascinated by your reflections on the way in which Mary's religion, which of course is always characterised as something quite extreme because of the nearly 300 Protestant martyrs, was in actual

fact much like that of her father. A kind of not very superstitious version of Catholicism, if I can put it like that. Even the burning of heretics. Henry VIII burnt heretics, as you point out. Yes, everybody burnt heretics, as you point out. Yes, everybody burns heretics, given half a chance. Even Edward VI burnt a couple, Anabaptists. Yeah, everyone who's anyone in the 16th century gets a really quite extraordinary education, a humanist education.

They're taught Latin. They're very often taught Greek. They are taught to respect the great works of classical antiquity. And they are taught to read the Bible and appreciate the complexity of its text. And Mary, as a princess of Wales, was given the same extraordinary education of all the other Tudor children. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Eleanor Yonaga. 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. And she is, I think, like her mother, like her grandmother. She is a forceful, intelligent, like her mother, like her grandmother. She is a forceful, intelligent, insightful woman. And she has a vision of her Catholic Church, which is not just reactionary. It's not just putting the clock back. She wants a Catholic Church which has been purged of any error, reformed and strengthened and inspired, so that she puts a huge amount of investment into the universities.

She sponsors some very interesting printed books in defence of Catholicism. She insists that her clergy should be educated and quite impressive individuals. And her cousin, Cardinal Paul, her Archbishop of Canterbury, calls a reforming synod at Lambeth, which brings in various reforms, including, interestingly, the idea that you should actually be educating your clergy specifically for ministry. So the idea of seminaries, which was to be a great counter-reformation idea.

But it was Mary's church that had that idea or first gave concrete expression to that idea. So her vision of Catholicism, I think, is quite an inspired one. And certainly it inspires almost universal refusal by Elizabeth's bench of bishops to accept the Elizabethan settlement. So Elizabeth faces an unprecedented level of opposition from the bishops when she takes over. And a great many people go into exile. So quite a lot of Mary in Oxford, when Elizabeth comes to the throne, they all disappear to places like Louvain. And they form Catholic communities there.

And the sort of strength of their resistance, I think, is a testimony to Mary's success, even in those five brief years, is a testimony to Mary's success, even in those five brief years, her success at building a really inspired vision of a Catholic church in England. Talking of Mary in Oxford, we of course need to mention the Oxford Martyrs, amongst them Thomas Cramer. And we are sat really only a few steps away from where he was burned and in the other direction from where he gave that final speech at the University Church of St Mary in Oxford and one thing I didn't know

to my shame before I read your book was that he broke down in tears in that final speech talking about the plight of the poor. The poorest members of Tudor society were facing terrible hardship at this time weren't they? Can you tell us a bit about what was happening in the middle years of the 16th century? The 1550s saw some very bad harvests, epidemics, including cattle epidemics, the really bad bout of influenza that killed Mary. Sometimes there was just a coming together of all sorts of unfortunate circumstances. And yeah, the 1550s was a bad time. So important we remember these circumstances

in which people are living as much as we think about these people at the top of society. I do want to ask you a question, though, about Elizabeth I. One thing I noticed in this book is that you keep historiography, the names of historians, out of the text. Obviously, deliberate decision. But at the same time time you are contesting it and on elizabeth i you say there's been a recurring usage of facile gender stereotypes

and that some historians or historians over the years many of them male have fallen foul of the same lack of perception that many of her contemporaries like the earl of essex had in that they basically underestimated her. Can you talk to me about some of those facile gender stereotypes? Yeah no the thing about leaving everybody's name out of it that was quite fun actually it was quite liberating to be able to do that because of course I had to work my way through all of the debates and decide what I thought but then I just put everybody's name into the footnotes so if if people are interested, they can go and find it. And if students need it, they can go find it.

But it was very liberating to write a book that didn't bring all this additional cast of characters in. It's frustrating, I think, that people still can't get their heads around women in power in the modern world. And certainly in their attitudes to history. Tudor notions of gender are very interesting and they're much more sophisticated than you might think. Elizabeth doesn't have any difficulty playing what we might think of as male roles. Neither did Mary.

I think I make the point that Mary's coronation, she was crowned as both king and queen. The rituals appropriate to both were employed and famously in her funeral sermon, the Bishop of Winchester says she was a queen and she was a king also. So they don't have any difficulty with that. They can't, of course, get around the biological problems of childbirth and the risks associated with it. And there are also those assumptions that a married woman must in some way be subject to her husband, which is highly problematic if you happen to be Queen of England.

So I'm not saying that gender wasn't an issue. It was an issue. And many of the men surrounding Mary and Elizabeth kind of assumed that they wouldn't be making their own decisions, that they would be listening to these grave statesmen who were giving them so much unsolicited advice. And when, of course, these queens quietly but firmly said, no, we will be doing this instead, they reproached them, they criticised them.

And even today, if you're going to criticise someone, you quite often bring some kind of gendered insult into play, don't you? So you get quite a lot of rather misogynist observations by Tudor counsellors and commentators. And these, I think, have just been kind of picked up by many modern historians who have just failed to see what an extraordinary job these women were doing, because they did sustain their authority, and they did win the respect of actually most of the people who served them. I think it's trickier with people like Essex, who has a very complex but exalted notion of his own role, his own obligations

in the political sphere. But yeah, I think actually both Mary and Elizabeth were quite good at commanding the respect, even if it was sometimes the grudging respect of those around them in the end. You write this wonderful chapter about performance and talk about how written records that of course are the thing that chiefly survives mean that we are in danger sometimes of forgetting that in Tudor England, almost all of these interactions would have been performed, enacted just as much as they were written. Can you give some examples that help us to grasp the importance of performance in Tudor social and political life?

We've had an obvious example recently. I think half the planet watched the late Queen's funeral procession. And it was an extraordinarily powerful sight. And there were not really many words involved, but the rituals of mourning, the rituals of respect, they were evident for all to see. So you only have to look at the roles of processions in Tudor politics. There's religious processions, which could be sort of small processions around the parish church,

or could be great processions through the streets of London. One of the things Mary's church was very keen to put back in place was these processions. You could think of funeral processions, you could think of processions at court, when the king is processing from his privy chamber through to the chapel royal. Yeah, these are occasions when authority is performed, and everybody can appreciate the message that is being got across. You see it when the assize courts, when the assize judges come, again, there is a process procession and people walk in procession with their badges of office carried in front of them so yeah you enact power and i think we know how to understand that

language but we have forgotten a lot of the time just how important it was and how far reaching so we know about elizabeth's progresses and we know that she liked to show herself to the people and we've got that record of how she always went to where the crowd was thickest to show herself off to people she hadn't invented that this is what you did you acted out your authority for all to see now this book weighs in at 708 pages yeah i'm really sorry it was actually the first draft was a lot longer you should have seen the look on my editor's face she was very tactful it isn't something you should apologize at all for because it's wonderful it's a really good read and at one point in it you say that that great Elizabethan Philip Sidney characterised the work of a historian loaded with old mouse-eaten records.

I wondered as I was reading it, however, did you marshal all the material to produce this enormous, century-encompassing book? Yeah, I wonder too, really, looking back. I mean, I've been teaching this stuff for years, actually for decades now, alarming as it is to admit to that. I mean, I've been teaching this stuff for years, actually for decades now, alarming as it is to admit to that. I have lived inside my imagination in Tudor England for a lot of that time. And so I suppose I have gradually worked my way around a lot of the sources. I did read an enormous amount that I hadn't encountered before. I quote all the time from 16th century books. I had such fun reading these. They're brilliant. They're just so idiosyncratic and

quirky and passionate and idealistic and touching all at the same time. Everybody knew how to use words, these people. Obviously, I dutifully read all the amazing things written by my colleagues in all the different fields connected with Tudor England. The brief for the book was that it was supposed to be an academic book, but it was also supposed to be a book that anybody could read and enjoy, which meant that I spent a lot of time putting things in, saying, I have to make this credible, I have to make this convincing, and then realising that this paragraph was sinking under its own weight. And then I had to take all this stuff out again. And yeah, there was a lot of movement back and forth.

But I also had some very lovely friends, including some of my students and former students who read bits of it for me and said, yes, this works, or you say a bit more about it. There was a lot of friendship went into this book, for which I will be everlastingly grateful. And of works, or you say a bit more about it. There was a lot of friendship went into this book for which I will be everlastingly grateful. And of course, as you well know, Oxford is full of brilliant early modern scholars. Whenever I had a doubt or a question, I had only to turn to them and they very graciously put me on the right track. So yeah, if Tudor society is all about the bonds of charity and the vision of the common will and everyone working together, Oxford doesn't do a bad job, actually, of emulating

that. I felt very kind of loved and affirmed by everyone as I was struggling with this leviathan of a book. It's a great achievement. And I'm grateful to you for making the time to let me take you all over it in the course of this conversation I recommend it to people and I thank you very much thank you very much you