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

by G.J. Meyer

The effects of so much good fortune were, perhaps inevitably, tragic.

Genuine and legitimate power, More said, comes to the prince not from above but from below, from the community that is governed, “so that his people make him a prince.”

almost the whole population believed—really believed—what the church taught. The result was not just consensus but something very close to unanimity, with all the advantages (a feeling of security, an immensely strong sense of community) and disadvantages (smugness, intolerance rooted in fear of the unfamiliar) that unanimity can bring.

By using it to cast a cloak of legitimacy over Henry VIII’s unprecedented expansion of royal power, Thomas Cromwell not only established Parliament as an essential element in England’s government but laid the foundations upon which, a hundred years later, it would become more powerful than the Crown.

When he was finished, it was no longer the king who was supreme in England but “the king in Parliament”—a subtle distinction, but ultimately an epic one.

Thus it was that May 15 became one of the most significant days not only of the Tudor century but in English constitutional history. It was the day on which, in the person of Archbishop Warham, the clergy of the Southern Convocation utterly, absolutely, and forever surrendered such independence as their church possessed to King Henry VIII and his heirs. In doing so, they abandoned rights and immunities that reached back into the dimmest early years of Christianity in England, prerogatives that their predecessors had fought repeatedly and sometimes sacrificed much to maintain.

One trait that Henry and Luther shared was a conviction that the whole world should agree with them, reinforced by an expectation that it would.

The idea that Christians owe unqualified obedience to the state became at that point deeply implanted in Lutheranism and therefore in the psyche of Protestant northern Germany. What was implanted in southern and western Germany and Austria, where the rebellion had been most widespread and the reprisals most savage, was a deep popular antipathy for the whole Lutheran phenomenon.

“Preserve My Friends from Such Favors”

except in times of exceptional shortage, the diet of the plain folk was much more healthful than that of their meat-and sugar-devouring masters.

an opportunity to cast off the dead weight of the past in favor of something cleaner, something capable of remaking the world.

childishly scatological rhetoric with which the German reformer defaced so much of his own writing.

Calvin soon went beyond Luther. He is best known for making explicit something that had remained implicit in Luther: the conclusion that, because fallen man has no free will and can do nothing to win salvation or escape damnation, some are predestined to be saved while others are predestined for hell. The saved are the elect, in Calvin’s system.

Calvin’s notion of “double predestination”—of some being marked for damnation just as surely as others are fated for salvation—has too often been regarded as the centerpiece of his theology. It is said to have made his God a kind of insanely cruel monster

Calvin regarded predestination as logically inescapable but otherwise beyond human understanding and in practical terms not of great importance. It was his followers who, after his death, moved predestination closer to the center of “Calvinist” belief.

Calvin’s own view was that the idea of predestination should make it possible for believers to set aside their anxieties about earning salvation and put their trust in the mercy of a gentle, compassionate divine ...

For Calvin, by contrast, the church and its clergy retained a unique authority, with not only the right but the duty to reshape the world in such a way as to make it a fit habitation for the elect.

Hence one of the defining characteristics of Calvinism (and the Puritanism to which it gave rise in England): a zealous commitment to making the world a fully realized part of Christ’s kingdom.

in the theological confusion of the sixteenth century, Calvin’s impregnable self-confidence and the clarity of his ideas brought him an eager audience.

In fact, however, by 1552 Edward was no one’s mere puppet.

It is difficult to comprehend, today, the extent to which his life as a juvenile king in an almost fantastically formal court had cut him off from normal human interaction. Not even Edward’s sisters could speak to him without first kneeling, and when either of them dined “with” him, she had to sit not at the same table but off at a distance, on a low cushion.

Everything reinforced in Edward the sense that he was a being apart, existing on a plane beyond the reach of ordinary humans.

On May 25 Lady Jane Grey, heir presumptive according to King Edward’s still-secret plan, was married to young Guildford Dudley (he was in his late teens, though his year of birth is not certain), fourth among the duke’s five sons.

set the stage for Dudleys—possibly Guildford himself, certainly any son that he and Jane succeeded in producing—to be kings of England.

The question of whether the scheme originated with Edward or with the duke remains unresolved.

Dudley himself was a charmless, graceless figure, resented at court for his rough style and for having risen so high after beginning as the son of an attainted traitor.

Dudley is unlikely to have harbored many illusions about the number and quality of his friends.

WHEN THE FIRST WOMAN EVER TO RULE ENGLAND TOOK the throne in 1553, she was already a tragic figure. For a quarter of a century she had been immersed in betrayal, loss, and grief. Her life had been blighted first by the egotism of a father who was quite prepared to destroy her, then by a young half-brother who regarded it as his sacred duty to save her from her own deepest beliefs and, when that could not be arranged, to save England from her. It was all doubly sad because Mary’s life had begun so brilliantly.

Francis would eventually repudiate his treaty with England and marry Orleans—the future King Henry II—to Pope Clement’s niece Catherine de’ Medici, who in the fullness of time would join the ranks of France’s most remarkable and ultimately tragic queens.)

If they were not all her friends, strictly speaking, at worst they were the enemies of her enemies.

And now, contrary to everyone’s expectations including her own, she found herself an unmarried female monarch in a world that scarcely knew what to make of such an anomaly.

Her situation seemed unnatural to almost everyone—certainly to Mary herself. It seemed contrary to nature that any woman, even a queen, should not be subordinate to some man.

These men believed, as did virtually everyone in those days, that no woman should attempt to rule without a husband.

she had spoken earnestly, almost tearfully of the duties rather than the powers of monarchs, and of her wish to fulfill those duties to the limits of her strength. The episode suggests the depth of Mary’s wish to rule well and wisely, and her lack of confidence in her own abilities. It is impossible to imagine her father, or her brother even at age nine, assuming such a posture or uttering such words.

Members of the council, even those opposed to a foreign marriage, found their dislike for the interloper overridden by their preference for dealing with a male rather than a female monarch. It seemed more natural.

(He took the lofty view that no one should become pope who actively wished to do so.)

Europe was entering one of those periods when the complexities of its politics matched its instability.

both ended in exhaustion and disillusion (the dark times having lasted well over ten years in Elizabeth’s case).

She was not only Protestant but militantly Protestant, and no more capable than her contemporaries of imagining that any nation could tolerate multiple faiths without weakening itself fatally.

When Elizabeth became queen, the Ottomans either ruled directly or controlled through puppet regimes not just Turkey but Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania, and much of Hungary.

At the heart of his regime—of the entire Ottoman enterprise—lay something worse than barbarism. Suleiman’s father, Selim I, himself a great conqueror who nearly tripled the size of the empire in only eight years as sultan, cleared the way for his favorite son to succeed him by killing his own brothers, his brothers’ seven sons, and all four of Suleiman’s brothers. Suleiman, decades later, would watch through a peephole as his eldest son and heir, a young man much honored for his prowess in war and skill as a governor, was strangled by court eunuchs to make way for a different, younger, and (as time would show) totally worthless son. 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.

The threat fell first and most heavily on young Charles Hapsburg, who became the seventeen-year-old king of Spain in the same year that Cairo fell to the Turks. By the time he was elected Holy Roman emperor two years later, the Turks had taken Algiers from Spain, the trade routes of Venice and the other seafaring cities of the Italian peninsula were in danger of being cut off by Turkish raiders, and the southern Hapsburg kingdoms of Naples and Sicily were under direct threat.

After Suleiman the Ottoman dynasty went into an abrupt decline.

In 1571, off the western coast of Greece, the Ottoman navy met the forces of Christendom in what was, for the latter, a desperate last stand. On the Turkish side were 222 galleys supported by numerous smaller vessels and carrying some thirty-four thousand soldiers.

it did bring the empire’s mastery of the Mediterranean to a permanent close.

The momentum of Turkish expansion was not yet entirely exhausted—the capture of Cyprus and recapture of Tunis still lay ahead—but the Ottomans would never again be quite the threat they had been in Suleiman’s time, and they had been deprived of the vast opportunities that a victory at Lepanto would have opened to them.

Actions, Reactions, Provocations

Added to all this was the emergence of a new set of social values—call it the Protestant ethic—that encouraged the prosperous to equate wealth with virtue and to regard the destitute as responsible for (even predestined to) their predicament.

An older worldview in which society was expected to provide a place for everyone, in which the poor were believed to have a special relationship with God and caring for them was supposed to be one of the primary moral obligations of every person, was inexorably passing away.

What is striking about the new laws that followed is the contempt for the poor that they reflect. This was something new to English life. An inclination to treat poverty as an offense deserving punishment came to dominate the Privy Council’s actions.