The Tudors (89 page)

But in fact the story was not over. In 1574, five years before the birth of Denbigh, Leicester had had a son with Lady Douglas Sheffield, a daughter of the queen’s admiral Lord Howard of Effingham and therefore a royal cousin through the Boleyn connection. Lady Sheffield would later claim that she and Leicester had been married, but he would always deny this and she could produce no documentary evidence. (Possibly there had been a sham ceremony as part of an elaborate seduction scheme.) Leicester did, however, recognize the boy, whose name was Robert, as “my base son,” enrolling him at Oxford as
filius comiti
or earl’s son and providing for him in his will.

By the time of Elizabeth’s death, this new Robert Dudley was in his late twenties and, having married very young, was the father of a family that would soon grow to include six daughters. He was a true Dudley—tall and handsome, skilled not only in handling horses and dogs and the sports of the aristocracy but at mathematics as well—who at age seventeen had been temporarily exiled from court for kissing the maid of honor who later became his wife. Shortly after Elizabeth died, taking her jealous resentment of any wives and offspring of the Earl of Leicester with her, Dudley asked the Court of the Star Chamber to affirm that his parents had in fact been married and that he was, therefore, rightful heir to the earldoms of Warwick and Leicester. Whatever the merits of his case (they have been in dispute ever since), a finding in Dudley’s favor would have given rise to horrendous complications having to do with property already distributed to other heirs. (Among those other heirs were the Sidney family—Sir Philip Sidney, that most perfect of Elizabethan soldier-poet-courtiers, had a Dudley as his mother.) The court never ruled on Dudley’s legitimacy or lack thereof, instead taking an easy way out by dismissing his suit on technical grounds, locking up the evidence, and forbidding him to pursue the matter further.

Dudley then requested and received King James’s permission to go traveling. He departed for the continent, secretly taking with him his beautiful young cousin Elizabeth Southwell, who went disguised as a boy. In short order the pair reported from Lyon, France, that they had converted to Catholicism and married. It was one of the great scandals of the age.

Dudley and his bride proceeded to Florence, where he entered the service of the Medici grand dukes. His career there was long and distinguished:
he became a respected authority on all things maritime—sailing to the New World, designing and building ships and harbors, writing books on navigation—while also developing a “curative powder” of some kind and receiving a patent for a silk-weaving machine. He and Elizabeth had half a dozen sons, a fresh crop of Dudleys but now named Carlo, Fernando, Cosmo, and the like. At that point we lose track of them. If there are still Dudleys in Italy today, it is easy to believe that they must be dashing figures, and having fabulous adventures.

N
othing could be easier, in connection with the Tudors, than the assembly of an impressively weighty bibliography. The available literature, even the fairly
recent
literature, is so vast as to bring the concept of infinity to mind. And few exercises could be of less real value to the general reader for whom this book is intended. What may have some value—at least in a book that is an attempt at synthesis, without any claim to plowing new ground in original source materials—is an indication of which works the author has found to be particularly useful.

As to source notes, to the extent that the facts of the Tudor story are knowable (many are not, and after more than four centuries it is unlikely that they ever will be) they have by now been sifted and settled by something like fifteen generations of scholars and writers. Many of the facts, often the most significant or just plain interesting, recur so frequently in the literature of the Tudor era that to give sources for them would (while requiring dozens of pages) be no less pointless than a comprehensive bibliography. The author of the current work has elected, therefore, to provide sources in particular cases only: for quotations that do not appear to have become widely familiar as a result of frequent previous use, and—what seems especially necessary—for those facts and opinions that are most likely to challenge the reader’s preconceptions because they are most at variance with popular views of the Tudors. The resulting source notes appear below, along with citations of those books to which the author feels particularly indebted. Both things are arranged under headings corresponding to the four parts of this book.

In assembling and verifying the facts out of which his narrative has been constructed—dates and biographical details, for example—the author has relied heavily on one of the world’s most awesomely comprehensive and authoritative resources: the sixty-volume 2004 edition of the
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (DNB
in the notes below). Use has also been made of
The

Encyclopaedia Britannica
, and for the same reasons. Readers seeking to confirm statements of fact for which sources have not been provided, or to pursue additional information, are encouraged to begin by consulting those two works.

Studies dealing in depth with the reigns of all five Tudor monarchs have always been rare, at least in comparison to biographies of individual figures, and some of those that were once well known are now discredited and largely forgotten. Examples are the works of Macaulay and Froude, who survive as masters of style and of storytelling, but not of scholarship. An exception is the relevant part (volumes 4, 5, and 6) of John Lingard’s
History of England
(New York: Publication Society of America, 1912). Though inevitably superseded in many details since it first appeared early in the nineteenth century, this remarkable work (pioneering in its use and sophisticated evaluation of original source material) remains a fruitful and broadly reliable guide to sixteenth-century England, rich both in facts and insights. Lingard is obscure today mainly because he has
always
been obscure. He was too far ahead of his time, replacing fable with fact more than a century before England was ready for so much objectivity.

Noteworthy among much more recent treatments of the whole dynasty are works by G. R. Elton, especially
England Under the Tudors
(Methuen, 1955) and
The Tudor Constitution
(Cambridge University Press, 1960); John Guy’s
Tudor England
(Oxford, 1988); and Penry Williams’s
The Tudor Regime
(Oxford, 1979). These are scholarly achievements of a very high order and immensely useful, though not well suited—or indeed intended—for a general audience.

Duffy, Eamon
.
The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400–1580
, 2nd ed. Yale University Press, 2005.

Fraser, Antonia
.
The Wives of Henry VIII
. Vintage, 1994.

Griffiths, R. A., and R. S. Thomas
.
The Making of the Tudor Dynasty
. Alan Sutton, 1985.

Loades, David
, ed.
Chronicles of the Tudor Kings
. Bramley, 1996.

________.
Henry VIII: Church, Court and Conflict
. National Archives, 2007.

Mackie, J. D
.
The Earlier Tudors, 1485–1558
. Oxford, 1952.

Marius, Richard
.
Thomas More
. Vintage, 1985.

Mattingly, Garret
.
Catherine of Aragon
. Little, Brown, 1941.

Smith, Lacey Baldwin
.
Henry VIII: The Mask of Power
. Houghton Mifflin, 1972.

Starkey, David
.
Six Wives: The Queens of Henry VIII
. HarperCollins, 2003.

Williams, Neville
.
Henry VII
. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1973.

But because we have no eyewitness accounts …:
Good if conventional introductions to the Battle of Bosworth appear in Griffiths and Thomas,
Tudor Dynasty
, and Michael Bennett,
The Battle of Bosworth
(Sutton, 2000).

The detailed descriptions in countless books …
: The conventional understanding of Bosworth is seriously and responsibly challenged by Michael K. Jones in
Bosworth 1485: Psychology of a Battle
(Tempus, 2002).

On top of all his other blessings…:
As Lawrence Stone observes in
The Causes of the English Revolution, 1529–1642
(Harper & Row, 1972), p. 88, the concept of the divine right of kings figured importantly in the thinking of radical (anti-Roman) religious reformers from William Tyndale onward. Henry VIII’s exposure to and embrace of such thinking, and Anne Boleyn’s role, is shown in Fraser,
Wives
, p. 145, among other sources.

When the seemingly endless demands for new taxes
…: Popular resistance to the tax levies of the mid-1520s, and the shift of blame to Wolsey, is in Carolly Erickson’s
Great Harry
(Simon & Schuster, 1980), p. 173.

One of the mentors of Henry’s youth
John Fisher’s upholding of Henry’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon is in Fraser,
Wives
, p. 139.

Henry, clutching at straws, suggested
The question of how Leviticus should have been translated is an insuperable one for anyone lacking knowledge of Hebrew. Bernard,
King’s Reformation
, p. 17, and others take the position that Henry’s interpretation lacks merit. By contrast, Richard Rex in
The Tudors
(Tempus, 2002), p. 56, is more supportive.

About this, too, he was proved wrong
Bernard,
King’s Reformation
, p. 18.

“No one would ever have taken her …”
: This quote, and the one on the following page about Henry being “struck by the dart of love,” appear in the
DNB
entry for Anne Boleyn.

In one of the many letters he sent her …
:
DNB
entry for Anne Boleyn.

It is entirely possible …
: Bernard,
King’s Reformation
, p. 7, provides reasons why Henry might have chosen to defer consummation of his relationship with Anne.

“I close my eyes before such horror” …
: Scarisbrick
Henry VIII
, p. 216.

No easy solutions were open…
: The extent to which Clement VII had freedom of action in dealing with Henry’s annulment suit is one of the unresolved and probably unresolvable questions of Tudor history. The ambiguities and contradictions of the pope’s situation are explained in ibid., p. 197.

Instead of congratulating her
Erickson,
Great Harry
, p. 199.

To this group he delivered an address …
: Fraser,
Wives
, p. 155.

When it came back to him …
: Erickson,
Great Harry
, p. 223.

That Wolsey himself felt any compelling
While Scarisbrick,
Henry VIII
, p. 47, argues persuasively that Wolsey would have pursued very different policies had he aspired to the papacy, Elton,
England Under
, p. 84, says without offering much evidence that the cardinal wanted to be pope throughout all his years in high office.