Tudor history

Margaret Tudor – queen, regent and hapless intermediary

20 July 2024 9:00 am

Aged 13, Henry VII’s eldest daughter was dispatched to marry James IV of Scotland. But a precarious truce between the kingdoms soon ended with the Battle of Flodden

At last we see Henry VIII’s wives as individuals

15 June 2024 9:00 am

Specialist knowledge of Tudor portraiture, book bindings, music and jewellery enables us to see each woman anew, possessed of a distinct life and afterlife

The perils of waiting on a Tudor queen

11 May 2024 9:00 am

Henry VIII considered the queen’s household a fruitful hunting-ground – for a mistress, a future wife, or a pawn, whose testimony could provide useful damaging evidence

The truth one year, heresy the next: The Book of Days, by Francesca Kay, reviewed

3 February 2024 9:00 am

A richly imagined novel unfolds in an Oxfordshire village as the accession of the child king Edward VI brings another round of ‘newfanglery’ in religion

Ghostly grandeur

12 August 2023 9:00 am

The history of the magnificent Thames-side palace, with its outrageous shenanigans spanning five centuries, is vividly brought to life by Gareth Russell

Wedge salad in the shadow of the Tudors: Sargeant’s Mess reviewed

30 June 2018 9:00 am

Sargeant’s Mess (2018) is a tourist catcher’s net in restaurant form by the Tower of London (c. 1078). It has views…

‘A verger’s dream: Saints Cosmas and Damian performing a miraculous cure by transplantation of a leg’. The Spanish altarpiece by the Master of Los Balbases depicts a vision described in Jacobus de Voragine’s late medieval Legenda Aurea. (From Medieval Bodies, by Jack Hartnell)

Will ‘I’m a Tudorbethan, Get Me Out of Here’ be hitting our screens soon?

28 April 2018 9:00 am

Are books becoming an adjunct to TV? Both of these are good reads, but both feel influenced by — and…

In 1600 Muhammad al-Annuri arrived in England, as the Moroccan ambassador, to propose an Anglo-Moroccan alliance. Shakespeare probably started writing Othello six months later

Gloriana and the Sultan — England’s unlikely alliance

2 April 2016 9:00 am

The idea for a mechanical cock was never going to work. In 1595 the English ambassador to Constantinople, Edward Barton,…