Sublime

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

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.

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

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.

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

when she was employed recently on the BBC production of Wolf Hall to be the hand double and weave some finger-loop braid,

Henry VIII started keeping four professional actors and their boy apprentice as part of his household just as the townsmen’s mystery plays were beginning to fade away under the eye of the Reformed Church.