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Unit 4: the tudors.
During the Tudor period, England had one monarch, Henry VII, followed by his son Henry VIII, followed by his son Edward VI, followed by his sister Mary I, followed by her sister Elizabeth I.
The Tudor period is considered to be the most glorious period in English history. With the Tudor, England experienced one of the greatest artistic periods in its whole history.
Of all the Tudors, Henry VII is the less famous one. Henry VIII and Elizabeth I are more famous. The Tudors were a very powerful monarchy because Henry VII was a good king and created the foundation of the dynasty. The good decisions he took gave them the power they had. He knew that war was bad for the country because all the money that came from taxes was sent to war and not to the people, and also young men were dying instead of working and having kids, so he realized that England needed a period of peace.
One decision was that aristocrats couldn’t have a private army, only the king could have one. Another decision was to accept that England was an island. If it wanted to be richer, it had to have a fleet formed by, not only a navy, or military ships, but business ships. He decided not to use the money on fighting but on making a fleet. This decision created employment exporting products, which made a dynamic economy.
At the end of the Wars of the Roses there were no aristocrats, so it was easy for Henry VII to make these decisions.
Henry VII was a very popular king because the English people experienced a period of peace and prosperity. He was also very careful in the way he spent the money, which made him very popular too, but he is surprisingly not well known.
Henry VII got married with Elizabeth of York. He is very organised with the marriages of his children. Arthur was married to Catherine of Aragon, daughter of Ferdinand and Isabel. His daughter Margaret got married to the king of Scotland. The son Henry wasn’t married to anybody. Arthur dies soon after the wedding, and Henry VII organises the marriage of Catherine of Aragon to his son Henry.
Henry became the new Prince of Wales, so when Henry VII died, he becomes Henry VIII. He was nothing like his father; he was cruel, wasteful with money and always thinking in pleasing himself and not in the country. All of Henry VII’s decisions were made for the good of the country, but when Henry VIII took decisions, these were motivated for what was good for himself.
He would punish people because he was angry, without thinking on consequences. He was obsessed in becoming an important political figure in Europe. When he became king, the most powerful country was Spain, and the second most powerful was France. The English court became one of the most luxurious, expensive courts in Europe.
He got married to the nephew of the king of Spain, Catherine of Aragon. English people liked Catherine of Aragon and she was considered to be a very Christian and good wife. Henry VIII always had affairs, and she never did a scandal. They had a daughter, Mary. As years went by, Henry VIII became more and more obsessed with the idea of having a boy. Catherine was pregnant a few times, but the babies died soonly after the birth or she had miscarriages (accidental/natural abortions). By the year 1526, Henry VIII became really obsessed with the idea of having a boy, and the chances were decreasing. He was having an affair with an aristocrat called Anne Boleyn, who was younger than the current queen. He wanted to get divorced from Catherine to get married to Anne, thinking that she could give him a son.
OOOOOO (when Arthur died)
For a king to get divorced, he needed permission from the Pope. The pope denied Henry to divorce Catherine because the Spanish king was the most important king of Europe, so when the Pope asked him, he denied it.
Henry VIII gets very angry and looks for a solution for the two problems, the divorce and the lack of money, so he finds it: to separate England from the Church of Rome and establish the Church of England (reform of the English Church – exam ). He declares himself Head of the Church of England, so he can give himself permission to get divorced, and also confiscate all the territories belonging to the Church of Rome.
During this period, we have a lot of philosophers and theologists are questioning the Church of Rome (not Christianity). From this moment, they divide it into two blocks:
They question the decisions of men long after Jesus Christ. They are all Christians, but they suggest changes.
Henry VIII used this situation to separate the Church of England from the Church of Rome. He then divorced Catherine and married Anne Boleyn. It’s important to remember that Henry VIII continues being a catholic. He didn’t take this decision because of theological reasons, but because of personal reasons.
Catherine stays in England with her child, and Anne has a girl too. Anne Boleyn doesn’t give Henry VIII a son, and there are rumours that Anne Boleyn could be having an affair, so she’s accused of adultery and executed. A few days later, the king gets married to another English aristocrat called Jane Seymour. She gave him a son, Edward, and died a few days after. The little boy is always sick, and they worry that he could die any moment, so the king marries again to have more sons in case Edward died.
The minister of Henry VIII organises the wedding with Anne of Cleves. When she arrives to England, he doesn’t want to marry her. Anne is in a very difficult situation because she didn’t want to die as Anne Boleyn, but she didn’t want to go back home either because her brother and mother abused her. So she offers him a solution, if he accepted that she still lives in England under his protection, she would accept the divorce.
When he divorces Anne of Cleves, he is already having an affair with Katherine Howard, a young English aristocrat. There were comments about Katherine’s reputation. After being married for some time, she was accused of adultery and executed.
By this time, Henry VIII was very fat and ill, but he gets married to another aristocrat called Catherine Parr. She acted more like a nurse and she was very good at talking care of his children.
When Henry VIII died, Edward became Edward VI. He was very sickish and died being a teenager without children, so he was followed by his sister Mary, who became Mary I.
When Mary became Mary I, she wanted to unify Christians and Protestants, so she started killing protestant leaders. She earned the name of Bloody Mary.
These were very difficult times for England. There were a lot of social tensions because the Boleyn family put a lot of pressure on Henry VIII to make protestant reforms; when Edward was king, as he was underage, the Seymour family also were protestant, but when Mary became queen and started executing Protestants, it caused a lot of confusion in the country.
Caribbean, and she promoted importing and exporting, not only with the English colonies, but with everywhere in the world.
Elizabeth I was always paying attention to what Spain did, so if they started conquering the South and Central part of America, the English empire would start in the North.
The Spanish colonies were producing a lot of gold and silver. This gold and silver was being brought from the colonies to Spain by ships, and Elizabeth encouraged private ships to attack them. Her secret service gave the private owners the information of where the Spanish ships would be. This was the time of pirates.
She also encourages companies to export all over the world, and she crates the concept of chartered companies. They were English companies given a licence to operate on a specific region, or trade with a specific product by the queen. This gave them the exclusivity.
During the time of Elizabeth, we have a rising of culture, flourishing of the arts. Thomas More wrote a book called Ethiopia. He describes an imaginary country in which everything is perfect. It is also during the Tudor period the golden ages of the theatre, with playwrights such as Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson or William Shakespeare.
At the beginning of the Tudor period with Henry VII, and throughout the years, we see a change/evolution of the spoken English.
There are areas that use Angle’s, Saxon’s and Jute’s vocabulary. The Tudor period there is a period of unification in the vocabulary, and because the king and many aristocrats were living in London, people began to consider that the English spoken in that area was more correct than the rest of the country. There is a tendency of copying that accent. Not a lot of people could read and write, but they could go to the theatre. So this activity wasn’t just for entertaining, but for teaching.
Nota : El símbolo OO significa matrimonio (dos anillos con algo de imaginación).
