Tudor history

The boy who would be king: The Pretender, by Jo Harkin, reviewed

19 April 2025 9:00 am

A magnificent imagining of the life of Lambert Simnel traces his progress from farm boy to coronation in Dublin to turnspit in the Tudor palace kitchens to plans of dark revenge

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,…