Today

5 May 2022
Friend of Elizabethan exiles: the colourful life of Jane Dormer

Thomas Cromwell’s biographer Diarmaid MacCulloch once told me that my father’s family, the Dormers, had been servants of the great enforcer of Henry VIII’s Reformation. This may have been a tease. It is a matter of family pride that Jane Dormer’s great- uncle, the Carthusian monk Sebastian Newdigate, was executed for refusing to accept the Royal Supremacy. Jane, Duchess of Feria (1538-1612), was named after his pious sister, her grandmother. Most of Jane Newdigate’s Dormer descendants remained stubbornly Catholic over the centuries of persecution that followed, but they were never aggressive about it. Under Elizabeth I, the Dormers paid fines as recusants rather than attend Church of England services, and hid priests so they could hear the banned Catholic Mass.

Friend of Elizabethan exiles: the colourful life of Jane Dormer

Thursday

20 Nov 2014
Elizabeth I, queen of the waiting game

Women are ‘foolish, wanton flibbergibs, in every way doltified with the dregs of the devil’s dunghill’. So a cleric reminded Queen Elizabeth I. His sermon reassured her that her personal qualities made her exceptional. But Elizabeth was not merely an ‘exceptional woman’, snorts Lisa Hilton. She was also ‘an exceptional ruler’ — one who refashioned her kingdom as ‘a modern monarch, a Renaissance prince’. Elizabeth’s accession in 1558 coincided with the publication of John Knox’s notorious blast against the ‘monstrous regiment’ or ‘rule’ of women. Happily such views were ‘based more on hostility to Catholicism than to female rule per se’, we are told. Royalty ‘negated gender’, and Hilton believes Elizabeth would reign largely unrestricted by the issue.

Elizabeth I, queen of the waiting game

Thursday

21 Aug 2014
Thomas Cromwell: more Tony Soprano than Richard Dawkins

The travel writer Colin Thubron once told me that to understand a country and its people he first asks, ‘What do they believe?’ This is also a good place to begin when writing about the past, not least when your subject is Thomas Cromwell, a key figure in the English Reformation.  But Tracy Borman’s Cromwell doesn’t have beliefs so much as qualities: ones that will appeal to fans of the fictional Cromwell of Hilary Mantel’s Tudor novels. Borman’s Cromwell likes women, and is nice to the poor. True he fits up Anne Boleyn on treason charges, and has the illiterate nun Elizabeth Barton executed without a trial. But then he is a ‘pragmatist’, and much of his killing, torturing and bullying is ‘self-defence’. He is a loving husband, or at least there is no evidence that he isn’t.

Thomas Cromwell: more Tony Soprano than Richard Dawkins

Thursday

16 Jan 2014
The Thomas Cromwell plays would be stronger if they made him weaker 

Three things you might not expect of the RSC’s adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s Tudor novels. First, Mike Poulton’s plays have some great jokes. Laugh-your-head-off funny, you might say. Second, although Tom, Dick and Mary tell me they found Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies a more enjoyable read, Wolf Hall is the better play. Finally, the reinvention of the brutal Thomas Cromwell as someone you would have liked is, in the plays, a source of weakness as much as strength. Not that these are weak plays: six hours is a long time to spend on a theatre seat, yet I would happily see these plays back-to-back again tomorrow. They are beautifully staged, and many simple, wonderfully lit images linger in the memory: a funeral in the snow, a barge being rowed silently down the Thames in the rain.

The Thomas Cromwell plays would be stronger if they made him weaker 

Thursday

15 Aug 2013
Anne Boleyn’s last secret

With his wife, Anne Boleyn, in the Tower, Henry VIII considered every detail of her coming death, poring over plans for the scaffold. As he did so he made a unique decision. Anne, alone among all victims of the Tudors, was to be beheaded with a sword and not the traditional axe. The question that has, until now, remained unanswered is — why? Historians have suggested that Henry chose the sword because Anne had spent time in France, where the nobility were executed this way, or because it offered a more dignified end. But Henry did not care about Anne’s feelings. Anne was told she was to be beheaded on the morning of 18 May, and then kept waiting until noon before being told she was to die the next day. At the root of Henry’s decision was Henry thinking not about Anne, but about himself.

Anne Boleyn’s last secret

Thursday

13 Jun 2013
Royal bling with the Tudors at the Queen’s Gallery and the V&A

As soon as the battle of Bosworth was won, Henry VII’s politically astute mother sent him appropriate clothing for his state entry into London. A king was expected to look like a king, having ‘a prerogative is his array above all others’. Sumptuary laws policed the system under the Tudors, with everyone — in theory — wearing only as much glitter and flash as their rank permitted. You really were what you wore. The Great Wardrobe Accounts of Henry VII and Henry VIII offer numerous unexpected insights into contemporary events. One sinister detail I spotted during my research on the period is a warrant issued in November 1498 for black damask to be made into doublet for the pretender Perkin Warbeck, then a prisoner in the Tower.

Royal bling with the Tudors at the Queen’s Gallery and the V&A

Thursday

23 May 2013
Bosworth, by Chris Skidmore - review

Although Richard III was five foot eight, his spine was so twisted he stood a foot shorter. Imagine him hacking his way towards Henry Tudor at the battle of Bosworth; a furious human pretzel, ‘small in body and feeble of limb’, as a contemporary noted, he cut his way towards his rival ‘until his last breath’. Earlier this year, five million people watched the Channel 4 programme The King Under the Car Park which first revealed that Richard really did have slight bones, and one shoulder higher than the other, as the earliest sources had always claimed. It caught the national imagination with the details of the injuries he suffered at Bosworth bringing the violence of the battle to life. Chris Skidmore’s Bosworth could scarcely have been published at a better moment, and it is just the right book for all those whose interest has been piqued by the archaeology.

Bosworth, by Chris Skidmore - review

Saturday

3 Mar 2012
His dark materials

Like the dyslexic Faustus who sold his soul to Santa, the life of John Dee was a black comedy of errors. His vain and vulgar efforts to harness the occult for material ends often rendered him ridiculous. But there is a darker tale in Dee’s work for the Tudor state: a story of dodgy dossiers, fear-mongering and greed. During the Tudor period no clear distinction was made between science and magic. John Dee’s study at Cambridge of arithmetic, geometry and astronomy enabled him to become a navigational consultant, who worked with England’s greatest explorers. But it also helped him measure the rays of celestial virtue that emanated from the stars and influenced human affairs. Mathematics helped him predict the future — and that was a much sought-after skill.

His dark materials

Monday

3 Oct 2011
From this week’s Spectator: The Winter King

This review of Thomas Penn's biography of Henry VII, by Leanda de Lisle, is taken from the latest issue of the magazine. It is reproduced here for readers of this blog. There is something of Gordon Brown in the older Henry VII: an impression of darkness, of paranoia and barely suppressed rage, not to mention the terrifying tax grabs and tormenting of enemies. But Gordon was never quite as entertaining, or frightening, as Thomas Penn’s Winter King in this brilliant mash-up of gothic horror and political biography. David Starkey once declared Henry VII ‘boring’. But in writing his magnus opus on the supposedly more interesting Henry VIII he got so caught up in the drama of Henry VII’s court that Henry VIII is now largely being relegated to volume two of his own biography.

Saturday

1 Oct 2011
Against all odds | 1 October 2011

There is something of Gordon Brown in the older Henry VII: an impression of darkness, of paranoia and barely suppressed rage, not to mention the terrifying tax grabs and tormenting of enemies. But Gordon was never quite as entertaining, or frightening, as Thomas Penn’s Winter King in this brilliant mash-up of gothic horror and political biography.David Starkey once declared Henry VII ‘boring’. But in writing his magnus opus on the supposedly more interesting Henry VIII he got so caught up in the drama of Henry VII’s court that Henry VIII is now largely being relegated to volume two of his own biography.   The first Tudor King had no legitimate English royal blood and no legal right to the throne. His father was the product of a scandalous marriage between a Welsh chamber servant, Owen Tudor, and Henry V’s French widow, Katherine of Valois.

Saturday

10 Apr 2010
A Tudor mystery unravels

The fate of Lady Mary Grey, Queen Elizabeth’s prisoner and a potential heir to the throne, has never been resolved. Now Leanda de Lisle tells allAt the Prime Minister’s country residence at Chequers, scribbles on the walls of the 12-foot prison room bear testimony to the dreary misery of the woman Elizabeth I had kept there. An heir to the throne, a potential English queen, now buried in obscurity. If Lady Mary Grey is recalled today, it is as a historical footnote. She was the dwarf who married a giant, the curious youngest sister of the famous Lady Jane Grey. But Mary was a more significant figure than her stature in the literature suggests. And my discovery of lost manuscripts has helped me lay to rest a Tudor mystery that may interest the next prime minister, whoever that is, as he gazes at Mary’s portrait later this year.

A Tudor mystery unravels

Saturday

5 Jul 2008
A keen sense of duty

William Cecil, Lord Burghley, would be delighted that in his historical afterlife he remains the old man he died as, after 40 years of power. The frail flesh and white beard projects the image of the dull bureaucrat we remember: ideal cover for an ideologue who makes Donald Rumsfeld appear warm and fuzzy, and a spin doctor whose fictions retain, after 400 years, a powerful hold on the culture of the English-speaking world. ‘Terrifying’ is an adjective Stephen Alford deploys on more than one occasion to describe Cecil, and with reason. Cecil began his political career in the household of the future Protector Somerset, surviving his master’s fall to become Secretary of State to the boy King, Edward VI. In this role he helped introduce the most radical religious changes England saw before the Puritan Commonwealth.

Saturday

2 Jun 2007
The return of the maypole

The return of the king follows a death. As the Lord Protector of the three kingdoms draws his last breath a great storm rises up, blowing down houses, trees and ships at sea. To Charles Fitzroy it is as if the elements themselves were celebrating Oliver Cromwell’s passing. But it was expected that tempests should mark the death of great rulers and in 1658 the violent winds must have appeared less a celebration than a warning of coming bloodshed. There was no more dangerous a time in a nation’s life than the passing of a ruler when the succession was in doubt. Although Cromwell was not a king in name, the idea of monarchy had survived the trial and execution of Charles I. Even civil war and the establishment of the protectorate could not erase its resonances and mystery, and its absence had left the political elite traumatised.

Saturday

5 May 2007
The plot thickens

John Adamson’s The Noble Revolt asserts the crucial role of political ideas in the coming cataclysm of the English civil war. His focus is close: the 18 months before the final breach between Charles I and Parliament, but it is as scholarly in depth as it is cinematic in scope. Here is a dramatic retelling of a story we thought we knew well. The old Marxist interpretation of class struggle is put to rest and so is the revisionist view that the civil war was brought about by unfortunate conjunctions of personalities and events. Instead we discover how a small group of ideologically motivated noblemen came to dominate the state and attempted to reduced Charles I to a puppet king. Many of the noblemen in Adamson’s ‘Puritan Junto’ were related to Queen Elizabeth’s last favourite, Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, and the late Earl’s ghost is ever present behind the story.

Friday

9 Jun 2006

Friday

13 May 2005
Diary - 13 May 2005

The trouble with country life is that it is so unhealthy. Where I used to walk to the Tube I now take the car. Where I used to go out and see friends I now ruin my eyes watching television. After 20 years in Leicestershire I am almost blind and I have no muscle tone. But I have determined to go on a health and beauty drive. My first stop is the optician, where I demand tinted contact lenses — only to be told I can’t have them. They say you should suffer to be beautiful but, apparently, if you are long-sighted, stabbing at your pupils without blinking doesn’t earn you the right to be a violet-eyed lovely. Still, anything is better than glasses. For several days I practise putting in my new, colourless lenses. I have to strip naked to prepare for 30 minutes of panting and sweating until I get the hang of them, but at last I am ready to wear them — and to a party.