A Visitor's Companion to Tudor England

The sixteenth century is also one of the first periods from which we have an overwhelming amount of surviving material. Our documentary sources are vast: chronicles, letters, ambassadorial accounts, poems, plays, treatises and state papers fill our National Archives. We have portraits of the Tudor monarchs painted from life, unlike those that came

This book is intended to be both a practical handbook to fifty of the best and most interesting Tudor houses, palaces and castles, and a colourful introduction to the key characters, stories and events of the Tudor age. It is designed to be a companion both to the visitor to these fifty sites, and to the historical visitor to the Tudor period.

When the Channel Tunnel opened in 1994, the two figures chosen to represent England and France in great mock-ups were the sixteenth-century rival kings Henry VIII and Francis I.

the fate of Nonsuch: what was allegedly one of the greatest palaces in all of Europe was given by a disinterested king to a negligent mistress (Charles II to Barbara Villiers), who set about dismantling it to pay off her gambling debts.

In April 1534, every man in the country had been required to swear the Oath of Succession, in which they promised ‘to be true to Queen Anne [Boleyn], and to believe and take her for the lawful wife of the King and rightful Queen of England, and utterly to think the Lady Mary daughter to the King by Queen Katherine, but as a bastard, and thus to do

Perhaps surprisingly, torture was relatively rare, as only the Privy Council could authorise it. Nevertheless, there were forty-eight sanctioned cases of torture between 1540 and 1640.

Elizabeth I’s portraits show Tudor portraiture at its zenith. The image of her coronation (15 January 1559) actually dates from 1600. She is shown with crown, orb and sceptre, and exquisite robes woven with gold and silver thread, lined with ermine and decorated with the Tudor rose and fleur-de-lis of France (the robes had been used at Mary I’s cor