The Tudors: The Complete Story of England's Most Notorious Dynasty

by G.J. Meyer

collapse of the northern rising was followed by some eight hundred executions—extraordinarily savage vengeance for a movement that had petered out before becoming dangerous or even notably large. In fact, the revolt soon proved to have brought immense benefits to the Crown. The centuries-old quasi-independence of the northern nobility came to an end from which there would be no return—the Percys and Neville were only the most prominent of the proud old families ruined—and the administration of the north was put in the hands of officers of Elizabeth’s choosing.

was a monumental blunder nevertheless, by far the greatest mistake made by either side during the long conflict between the Tudors and the popes, and England’s Catholics paid a high price for it.

New legislation followed also—a Treasons Act increasing penalties for denial of the supremacy, for example, and an Act Against Papal Bulls. For the radical Protestants who were just now coming to be known as Puritans, these new opportunities to attack Catholics could not have been more welcome.

At the same time, she was refusing to allow the Puritans to reshape her church to fit their agenda, which was becoming so radical as to include demands for the elimination of bishops. She thereby alienated the Puritans to such an extent that they began to regard themselves as outside the established church, to spurn that church as beyond hope of reform, and to direct their energies toward the building of a power base in Parliament.

Thus there emerged three major and irreconcilable religious groupings: the Catholics, the Puritans, and an approved church the doctrines and practices of which were determined, essentially, by the queen alone.

The Puritans, too, though growing in numbers and clout, felt excluded and persecuted. Out of these divisions came conflicts and grievances that would poison the life of the kingdom for centuries.

Looming over it all, a living symbol of unresolvable conflict, was the forlorn figure of Mary, Queen of Scots. She was Elizabeth’s prisoner though England had no legal grounds for holding her, to the Protestants she was little better than the Whore of Babylon personified, and yet as Elizabeth grew older she remained—a horrible thought for many—the only plausible heir to the throne.

IT IS EASY, IN THINKING ABOUT THE INTERNATIONAL POLITICS of the Tudor century, to overlook the fact that there was another major player besides the Hapsburgs, the kings and queens of France and England, and a papacy that at various times became involved as referee, cheerleader, or freelance utility infielder. Easy, but a serious mistake. Because throughout the entire period a fourth force was at work, one more aggressive, more dangerous, and more powerful overall than any of the others. It was the Islamic empire of the Ottoman Turks,

The fields of force that it projected, like some vast dark star at the edge of the universe of European nations, are a major reason why Elizabethan England was able to preserve its autonomy in spite of being smaller and weaker than France or Spain and potentially a pariah kingdom in the aftermath of its withdrawal from the old church. By sapping the strength of its principal rival, the Hapsburg empire, Ottoman Turkey contributed importantly to the survival of Protestantism across much of northern Europe.

In 1453 they captured Constantinople, which had remained the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire and of the Orthodox Church for centuries after Rome itself fell, turning it into the principal metropolis of the Islamic world. And because they were Muslims with entirely non-Western cultural roots, their success in pushing northward and across and even beyond the Balkans was seen, not without reason, as a mortal threat to European civilization itself.

Suleiman the Magnificent,

his forebears, he was above all a soldier, having personally led campaigns that crushed a revolt in Damascus, captured Belgrade in Serbia and Buda in Hungary, taken much of the Middle East from the shah of Iran, expelled the Knights Hospitalers from the island of Rhodes, and twice laid siege to the Hapsburg capital of Vienna.

Fratricide on a grand scale became standard Ottoman practice; each new sultan, upon taking the throne, would have all his brothers and half-brothers murdered and those members of his predecessor’s harem who happened to be pregnant bundled up in sacks and thrown into the sea.

When Francis launched an attack on Milan in 1525, Charles not only destroyed his army but took him prisoner. But just a year later, with Charles occupied elsewhere, Suleiman invaded northward, inflicted a ruinous defeat on the Hungarians, and seized territories that the Hapsburgs regarded as theirs by ancient right.

One development that shocked many Europeans, who saw in it a betrayal of all Christendom, was Francis’s entry, in 1536, into an alliance with Suleiman and the Turks. Once again he was grasping at Milan, though he like Charles was very nearly at the end of his financial resources. An important side effect was that Henry VIII was left alone and unthreatened as he completed his break with Rome and fattened on the wealth of the church.

1541, as Charles tried and failed to restore Algiers to Spanish control, Suleiman resumed offensive operations in the north. He had sufficient success to impose a humiliating peace on the Hapsburgs: Archduke Ferdinand was obliged to renounce his claim to the throne of Hungary and to become a Turkish vassal, pledging to pay an annual tribute for the portion of Hungary he was permitted to retain.

Charles, spiritually and physically exhausted, was beginning the process by which, over the next two years, he would give the crown of Spain to his son and that of the Holy Roman Empire to his brother and retire to a monastery.

After Suleiman the Ottoman dynasty went into an abrupt decline. His successor, for whose sake the splendid young Mustafa had been eliminated, was a drunkard who reigned in a stupor for eight years before falling in his bath and fracturing his skull. His successor specialized in copulation, fathering 103 children in his twenty years as sultan, and every Ottoman ruler after him proved to be utterly incompetent or deeply degenerate or both. The empire, however, was slower to decay; its administrative machinery would wind down only gradually over the next three centuries.

The commander of the Holy League fleet was the twenty-four-year-old Don John of Austria, Charles V’s illegitimate son by a Bavarian girl of common stock. Second in command, himself only twenty-six, was Alessandro Farnese, great-grandson and namesake of Pope Paul III, son of Charles V’s illegitimate daughter Margaret, future Duke of Parma. The two, though scarcely more than boys, had changed the course of history. We will encounter both in connection with another of the great conflicts that shaped the Tudor century.

that extended from the English to the Spanish court, from Mary’s place of confinement to Rome and the Netherlands. In 1571 he crossed to the continent, traveling from place to place presumably to make arrangements for a Spanish invasion to occur simultaneously with a rising of England’s Catholics, the marriage of a liberated Scots queen to Norfolk, and Elizabeth’s removal. In actuality it was all talk—no one was doing anything serious in preparation for either an invasion or a rebellion—and almost all of it came from Ridolfi himself.

IT IS A MISTAKE TO ASSUME, UPON BECOMING AWARE OF how extensively Henry VIII and Elizabeth I used torture to terrorize their subjects and extract information about real or imagined enemies, that they were simply continuing a standard practice of the English Middle Ages.

Half a century later, when Elizabeth surpassed her father in the intensity and frequency of the tortures inflicted on people perceived to be a threat to her survival and even began to torture people because of their religious beliefs, the population was so repelled that after her death such practices soon fell into disuse and in due course were banned—forever, as it turned out—by Parliament.

Though by no means the Crown’s only torturer (the Tower of London’s warders or “Beefeaters” customarily operated such machinery as the rack, the scavenger’s daughter, and the iron maiden, while gentlemen merely did the questioning), he easily established himself as the leading practitioner of his dubious trade.

It is hardly surprising that historians wishing to emphasize the glories of Elizabethan England have rarely given much attention to the career of Richard Topcliffe. He is nearly as forgotten as Anne Bellamy, though in his own lifetime he became all too well known. At the time of his death—like that other reptilian arch-villain

villain Richard Rich, he died in his bed, an old and wealthy man—he was everywhere reviled. His own nephew had by then changed his name to escape the ignominy of being a Topcliffe.

THOMAS WOLSEY, THOMAS CROMWELL, EDWARD SEYMOUR, John Dudley, Thomas Cranmer—the history of the Tudor era is littered with the wreckage of more or less briefly brilliant careers. To rise too high or too swiftly, clearly, was to tempt the fates.

The age, as we saw earlier in connection with food, was one of conspicuous consumption, and of a growing gulf between rich and poor. All across England, families newly rich on church land were building lavish country homes; it was a way of showing off, of proving wealth and power, of staking a claim to aristocratic status.