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5 things you (probably) didn't know about the Tudors
Ruth Goodman, who teaches our new HistoryExtra Academy course on Tudor life, shares five insights about the dynasty’s legacy
1. The Tudors brought peace and prosperity to England Bringing peace was probably the most important thing the Tudors did for us. The British countryside is littered with the sites of medieval battles – places where opposing forces stomped over crops, burned barns and rounded up people’s sons. For centuries, rival aristocrats made and broke alliances, and killed those who got in their way. Henry Tudor took the throne in exactly this way at Bosworth in 1485, when he persuaded a number of warlords to desert their king, Richard III. But there it stopped. Intrigue and power politics were thenceforth undertaken by more covert means. Everyone became a bit safer, the day-to-day became a bit more predictable, and lots of people got a little bit richer. Less war meant that more crops made it to market, more young men were available for work, and there was less damage done to buildings, less thievery with menaces and safer travel. In turn, this meant more trade and a greater willingness to invest. The peace the Tudors brought to their lands benefited all – rich and poor alike. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/10/GettyImages-540735906webready-614eaac.jpg" width="5572" height="3714" alt="An engraving shows Hugh Latimer, Bishop of Worcester during the Reformation, presenting an English translation of the Bible to Henry VIII (Image by Getty Images)" title="An engraving shows Hugh Latimer, Bishop of Worcester during the Reformation, presenting an English translation of the Bible to Henry VIII (Image by Getty Images)" /> 2. Henry VIII was a reluctant reformer When the Tudors came to power, the Catholic church was already struggling to maintain its grip upon the minds and souls of Europe. New ideas about the nature of God and the state of Christianity were circulating. So when Henry VIII lost patience with the pope, there were plenty of people delighted by the opportunity to rethink England’s official religious position. Read more | Tudor England had no standing army, but this humble hobby kept its people ready for war Henry himself seems to have been happy to leave the religion as was. He just wanted the power and money the pope had been leveraging from his kingdom. He was quickly convinced, though, that he should also have the money and assets of the monasteries. A significant number of influential and vocal people wanted much more, however, pushing for a ‘purer’ form of Christianity that did away with priests entirely and abandoned the rituals and traditions of Catholicism. Others, of course, wholeheartedly defended the time-honoured form of faith. The result was a fracturing of society. Hundreds, both Protestant and Catholic, were executed for refusing to change their form of faith and follow the state-sponsored format – one that changed radically several times. But for all the death and fear, the upset and soul-searching, a new freedom of thought also emerged. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/10/GettyImages-463916919webready-ea853dd.jpg" width="3432" height="2288" alt="A painting showing a person, holding the page of a book which sits on a table" title="During the Tudor era, literacy grew, in part because Protestantism emphasised reading the Bible rather than the word of God being mediated by a priest (Image by Getty Images)" /> 3. The Tudor era brought a rise in literacy A few years before Henry Tudor took the throne, in 1476, William Caxton printed his first book on English soil. As printing presses became established and the price of books plummeted, reading became affordable to many more people. There was also more choice. Alongside religious texts, books of popular stories, advice manuals, joke books, medical texts and scandal sheets were published. At the same time, there was a new religious pressure for Britons to learn to read. The Protestant faith required its adherents to stop relying on priests and to read the Bible for themselves. This applied to everyone: shepherds and ploughmen as well as nobles and merchants – even women. Teaching people to read became a new religious duty and literacy rates started to climb. Read more | What did the Tudors think was ‘good’ sex? These tips and tricks were key to relationships in the 16th century 4. They drove the expansion of industry The Tudor monarchs – Elizabeth, in particular – were very keen to kickstart new industries and update old ones. In order to do this, specialist workers from Europe were encouraged to resettle on these shores. Some came as refugees fleeing religious persecution in France and the Low Countries, bringing new textile-making skills. Others were purely economic migrants with mining expertise or knowledge of new glassblowing and brass-founding techniques. The strategy worked – and these new arrivals provided the core of know-how and experience around which English industry could grow. Read more | 5 things you (probably) didn't know about Victorian Britain 5. The health of the nation improved Rates of fatal illness fell during the Tudor period – though this was the result of sheer luck, as certain major diseases mutated into less virulent forms. When a new, often lethal form of the plague arrived in England in 1348 – the Black Death – it killed around a third of the population, suddenly and catastrophically. Plague returned to Britain many times over the centuries that followed but, by the start of the Tudor era, the outbreaks were becoming smaller and more people were surviving. Meanwhile, another major killer known as the sweating sickness – a mysterious disease causing rapidly developing symptoms including shivers, headaches, dizziness, pains and, soon afterwards, sweating and commonly death – came and went. The first epidemic broke out in 1485, just as the Tudor era was beginning, and the last came in 1551, after which it apparently vanished completely. With both of these big killers in retreat, the population began to grow. Ruth Goodman is a social and domestic historian and broadcaster. Her books include How to Be a Tudor (Viking, 2015) This article was first published in the December 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine Want to step even further into the world of the Tudors? In her brand-new HistoryExtra Academy series, Ruth Goodman takes you inside everyday life in the 16th century — from food and fashion to faith, work, and even love and marriage. The first three episodes are available now on the HistoryExtra app, with more to come soon. Start watching today Want to ask Ruth a question? Join our live virtual Q&A on 19 November. Find out more here
The Virgin Queen? Elizabeth I's forbidden love
In 1579, the queen embarked on a romance with a French duke she affectionately dubbed her “frog”. The pair seemed destined for marriage. Yet, writes Elizabeth Tunstall, the people of England had other ideas…
On 17 August 1579, a ship sailed up the Thames and dropped anchor in Greenwich. Moments later a duke emerged, dressed in the finest clothes that money could buy, and conversing with his entourage in French. The prince’s nationality might have provoked the suspicion – if not the outright hostility – of many residents of Tudor London. Yet this Frenchman was about to be welcomed into the heart of Richmond Palace. There he would be entertained lavishly, wined and dined at parties and balls. And all with good reason. For this Frenchman was being lined up to marry Queen Elizabeth I. Over the centuries, Elizabeth’s romantic travails have become one of the great soap operas of English history. When Elizabeth ascended the English throne in 1558 as a 25-year-old, it was widely expected that she would find herself a husband and produce an heir to carry on the Tudor dynasty for another generation. However, while the queen had several suitors over the years, each proposed match hit the rocks before she could be tempted to offer her hand in marriage. From English earls to Scandinavian kings, none quite fitted the bill. And so, by the time the party of Frenchmen disembarked in Greenwich in the summer of 1579, Elizabeth was well on her way to securing her place in the history books as the ‘Virgin Queen’: the woman who would, so we’re told, sacrifice her heart for the good of the nation. Yet she wasn’t done with trying just yet. As her 46th birthday closed in, Elizabeth would embark on one final bid to find a husband. And this one would take her closer to marriage than perhaps any courtship yet. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/07/FFWM82-cmyk-WL-0294cdd.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A cow stands in the middle of the image, being ridden by a man in a dark cloak and hat. Behind the cow, a man wearing light pink holds its tail, while another man milks the cow. In front of the cow stands Elizabeth I, dressed in white and another man dressed all in black" title="his painting, dating to the 1580s, depicts the fraught diplomatic backdrop to Elizabeth I’s courtship with the Duke of Anjou. The queen feeds a cow (representing the Dutch Provinces), which defecates on the duke (left). Philip II of Spain attempts, in vain, to ride the cow away, while Dutch leader William of Orange holds the animal steady by its horns (Image by Alamy)" /> So who was the Frenchman who almost changed the course of English history? And why – as she entered the embrace of middle age – was the queen considering marrying him now? The suitor’s name was François de Valois, Duke of Anjou, fourth son of King Henri II of France and Catherine de’ Medici. Anjou had begun life as a royal also-ran, with little prospect of ascending the French throne. Yet, by the early 1570s, he found himself heir to his childless brother, Henri III. The duke was now odds-on to succeed his sibling as King of France. That made him a figure of immense importance. Read more | Elizabeth I's accession day celebrations Anjou was also eager to make his mark on Europe by campaigning against Spanish forces in the Netherlands. And it’s this last fact that brought him into Elizabeth’s orbit in the late 1570s. With England becoming increasingly isolated from Europe – and relations with Spain deteriorating fast – Elizabeth’s advisors were desperate to forge enduring ties with allies across the channel. What better way to achieve exactly that than by suggesting a match between Elizabeth and the French duke? The union had been proposed as early as 1572, but it wasn’t until 1579 that Elizabeth herself fully committed to the courtship. At the outset, the queen’s interest in Anjou was purely the product of political necessity, for a marriage alliance with France would help stave off the growing military threat presented by Spain. But, as the two got to know one another in August 1579, the relationship became personal, the first courtship to do so since the queen’s flirtation with Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester two decades earlier. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/07/BAL106934cmyk-WL-17415c0.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A portrait of Elizabeth I in c1575–80. The middle-aged queen was 21 years older than her French suitor (Image by Bridgeman Images)" title="A portrait of Elizabeth I in c1575–80. The middle-aged queen was 21 years older than her French suitor (Image by Bridgeman Images)" /> French connections While Anjou was not a physically impressive figure – possessing bandy legs and a scarred face from a bout of smallpox – Elizabeth undoubtedly grew fond of him, calling him her “frog” on account of his appearance and his gravelly voice. He was highly attentive, which she very much enjoyed. The two conversed in French, as it was the only language they shared. And, despite the fact that Anjou was 21 years younger than the queen, they found plenty to talk about. Also playing to the duke’s advantage was the fact that he had made the journey to England at all. Throughout her many courtships, Elizabeth had stuck to the firm position that she “would never marry with any person whom she should not first herself see”. Her demand to meet a potential husband before committing herself to marriage was viewed at the time with astonishment. Royal courtships were long-distance affairs in the 16th century – to such an extent that even the marriage itself could be carried out with ambassadors standing in as proxies for the bride. Through each courtship Elizabeth had held her ground, yet no suitor had chosen to make the journey to her court. All that changed with Anjou. Read more | Anne Boleyn's youth: how her years on the continent made her a match for Henry VIII Violent opposition The duke could not stay in England for long and, on 29 August, sailed back to France. His visit had, to all intents and purposes, been a diplomatic and personal success. Yet there was a catch. And it was a major one. This had been a trip that the English government had attempted to keep secret. Anjou had travelled to London under a pseudonym: Seigneur du Pont de Sé. However, it didn’t take long for the true identity of the queen’s guest to seep beyond the confines of the court – and, once it did, it triggered a firestorm of opposition. But why? In short, Elizabeth was a Protestant; Anjou was a Catholic. And in a Europe riven by the Reformation and religious war, marriage between two people of differing beliefs was, to most, simply unthinkable. Within one week of Anjou’s visit, England was awash with a public outcry against the match. London preachers decried the marriage from their pulpits. Popular ballads made their rounds. Anonymous verses and pamphlets lampooned the match. Threats to meet French attention with violence began to appear in public spaces. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/07/J2WF3A-WL-ce28264.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="The English court laid on lavish dinners and balls at Richmond Palace (shown in an engraving) to impress the duke during his 1579 visit (Image by Alamy)" title="The English court laid on lavish dinners and balls at Richmond Palace (shown in an engraving) to impress the duke during his 1579 visit (Image by Alamy)" /> It was into this tumult that John Stubbs, a lawyer of Lincoln’s Inn, published a pamphlet with the catchy title ‘The discovery of a gaping gulf whereinto England is like to be swallowed by another French marriage, if the Lord forbid not the banes, by letting her Majesty see the sin and punishment thereof’. Stubbs’ work argued that the clandestine nature of Anjou’s visit demonstrated a “very strange this unmanlike, unprincelike, secret, fearful, suspicious, disdainful, needy French kind of wooing in monsieur”. It wasn’t only the French duke who Stubbs pursued in his work. He also questioned why Elizabeth would consent to marry “an imp of the crown of France”. In his view, and many others, at Elizabeth’s age any pregnancy would likely result in her death. If a child was born it was feared that it would result in England becoming a vassal state to France rather than securing an independent future for the Protestant realm. Upon learning of Stubbs’ pamphlet, Elizabeth was furious. For her, the matter of her marriage was deeply personal and a matter of royal prerogative. And it didn’t escape her notice that Stubbs’ arguments mirrored those that had also been raised against the Anjou match within her Privy Council. Could her own councillors have leaked information to the wayward lawyer? <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/07/HIP2806978WL-d5e2fa6.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A man with a ruff collar and wearing a black hat with a feathered embellishment on the left of it stands against a black background" title="A portrait of the future Duke of Anjou from 1572. The prospect of Elizabeth I marrying a Catholic Frenchman triggered a firestorm of hostility across England (Image by TopFoto)" /> It wasn’t long before the authorities attempted to suppress public opposition to the match. Stubbs was tried for seditious writing and taken to the public scaffold in the marketplace of Westminster on 3 November. There his right hand was removed with a cleaver before an unusually silent crowd. It was not only the wider public that challenged Elizabeth’s proposed marriage to Anjou. Sir Philip Sydney, the courtier and poet, wrote a letter to his queen that circulated in the court, and though he did not face the same punishment as Stubbs, he shared much of the same fears over the match. He argued that, should Elizabeth marry Anjou, her people’s “hearts will be galled, if not alienated, when they shall see you take to husband a Frenchman, a papist, in whom, howsoever fine wits may find further dangers or painted excuses, the very common people well know this: that he is the son of the Jezebel of our age”. To Sydney, Anjou represented the worst possible suitor, a Catholic Frenchman who would only lead Protestant England to ruin. A name but no power Despite the ferocity of these objections, the marriage negotiations continued. In late November, a delegation of Elizabeth’s Privy Council, led by William Cecil, Lord Burghley, worked with Anjou’s representative, Jean de Simier, to create a draft marriage contract. This document was based on the union of Elizabeth’s sister, Mary I, with Philip II of Spain, and would see Anjou granted the title of king but little real power in England. But it did have one new clause: it gave Elizabeth the right to withdraw within two months of signing the contract. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/07/RCXA6Xcmyk-WL-c6aab09.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A painting shows Elizabeth I being carried through the streets, surrounded by a large crowd of courtiers" title="Elizabeth I surrounded by her courtiers. The queen’s Privy Council ploughed on with marriage negotiations, even when it was clear that the public despised the idea (Image by Alamy)" /> And sign the contract is exactly what Elizabeth did. Now, with 1579 drawing to a close, the queen was further along the road to marriage than she would be at any point in her reign. Yet she wasn’t married yet. And such was the continuing strength of the hostility towards the match that within a few short weeks she felt she had no choice but to turn back. She wrote to Anjou that “I do not want this negotiation to trouble you thus any more”, but still hoped “that we may remain faithful friends and assured in all out actions”. Her contractual get-out clause was duly activated. Elizabeth’s change of heart would, you might think, signal the end of her courtship with Anjou. But it was revived on one more occasion. In April 1581 a French delegation arrived in England to discuss once more the prospects of a marriage alliance between the two kingdoms. Elizabeth herself had turned away from the courtship, but – with Spain still threatening English security – she allowed the negotiations to recommence. Those negotiations reached an impasse and would have faded away – but for the return of Anjou to England. Read more | “Elizabeth I was in charge of her fate. Perhaps that’s why Catherine de Medici despised her” On 31 October 1581, the duke arrived at Rye and then travelled onwards to Richmond Palace. In contrast with his first visit, he moved openly and spoke more of alliance than marriage. Both the duke and queen were fully preoccupied by the issues of their nations’ finances and conflict with Spain, but the question of marriage had not disappeared entirely. Three weeks after his arrival, as Elizabeth and Anjou walked along a gallery, they were approached by the French ambassador. The ambassador asked the queen what he could tell his king about the chances of her marrying. In response Elizabeth smiled and replied: “You may write this to the king: that the Duke of Anjou shall be my husband.” She then proceeded to give Anjou a ring from her finger, accompanied by a kiss. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/07/T1ME64cmyk-WL-72572d1.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A man and a woman sit opposite each other, both dresses in orange and black. They are on a black and orange checkered floor with an orange wall behind them" title="Like Philip II (shown with Mary I), Anjou would have been called ‘king’, but given little power in England (Image by Alamy)" /> Elizabeth’s response to the ambassador sent her court into uproar. That night her ladies expressed their shock. The next morning saw members of her council advising strongly against the match, as it would undermine her relationship with her people. With doubts playing on her mind in the cold light of day, Elizabeth performed yet another volte face, withdrawing her offer to Anjou and telling him that she would be a better friend than a wife. Anjou left London for the Netherlands on 1 February 1582. However, he did not travel the whole way alone. Elizabeth accompanied him as far as Canterbury where she said her farewell to her final suitor. As the duke sailed away from England, he took with him the queen’s last chance at marriage. Anjou’s departure also closed the door on the queen’s youth: at 48-years-old, the games of courtship were no longer hers, and her unmarried state would now define her reign. Today, more than 400 years after these events, it’s tempting to assume that Elizabeth was always destined to be the Virgin Queen – and it was a role in which she revelled. But in the first half of her reign, she engaged in numerous courtships and came close to marrying twice. These two men – the Earl of Leicester and Duke of Anjou – found a special place in the queen’s heart, even when it was unwise for her to allow them that space. On each occasion it was the resistance of her people that prevented her from taking that final step towards matrimony. Elizabeth understood that without the support of her subjects, she risked deposition and civil war. It was this cold, hard reality that prevented her from taking a husband. So maybe it’s time to look upon the Virgin Queen in a new light: as the creation of the people rather than the queen herself. The image of an untouchable woman who preserved the state through her own person was crafted, it seems, not by an individual but a nation. It was a role Elizabeth committed to as she bid Anjou farewell. And it was one that she would play until her final days. Romancing the throne Three other men who were in the frame to marry the Virgin Queen The dashing favourite When Elizabeth took the throne there was some support for the queen to marry an Englishman. But while most looked to the peers of the realm, it was Robert Dudley who had caught both her eye and her heart. Indeed, she once commented that “she thought she could find no person with better qualities”. Dudley was made Master of the Horse shortly after Elizabeth’s accession to the throne, a position that allowed him frequent access to his queen. After Dudley’s wife, Amy, died in September 1560 it appeared that Elizabeth might marry her dashing favourite. However, the suspicious circumstances of Amy’s death made the marriage impossible. While their chance was lost, the two would remain close friends until Leicester’s death in 1588. The controversial Catholic After closing the door on marriage with Leicester, Elizabeth consented to the opening of a courtship with Archduke Charles of Austria, the third surviving son of the Holy Roman Emperor, Ferdinand I. For the English, the archduke was seen as a means of easing the escalating tensions with Spain (based on his family ties with the king of Spain), while providing some safety from France. This idea of the match was first raised in 1559 but was only seriously explored from 1563. As with so many of Elizabeth’s foreign courtships, the question of religion proved unresolvable. The potential marriage of Elizabeth to a Catholic caused unrest, leading her to observe that “two persons of different faiths could not live peaceably in one house”, even if that house was England itself. At the end of 1567 she turned Charles down. The eager Swede Elizabeth was first approached by Swedish ambassadors about a courtship with Erik XIV of Sweden in 1558 while still a princess. Erik presented fewer difficulties than many of her other suitors, being a Protestant – and wealthy. This courtship was also elevated by its timing, as leading members of Elizabeth’s Privy Council sought to use his suit to counter that of Dudley. Erik was highly persistent and offered to travel to England to meet Elizabeth in person. Upon hearing of Erik’s intentions, Elizabeth wrote to him, asking “that you be pleased to set a limit to your love, that it advance not beyond the laws of friendship”. Elizabeth was thoroughly unconvinced by the arguments in favour of the match, and it all came to an end in 1562. Elizabeth Tunstall is a visiting research fellow at the University of Adelaide This article was first published in the July 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
Thomas Cromwell's death – a rapid descent from the pinnacle of power
Thomas Cromwell’s final six months were a Greek tragedy of hubris and political venom, all presided over by a tyrannical king. Diarmaid MacCulloch charts Cromwell’s rapid descent from the very pinnacle of power to the executioner’s block
As downfalls go, it was spectacular – and brutally swift. On 10 June 1540, Thomas Cromwell arrived at court for what should have been a routine meeting of the Privy Council. As this son of Putney was soon to discover, the meeting was anything but routine. On entering the council, Cromwell – Henry VIII’s immensely gifted chief minister and among the most powerful men in England – dressed in his formal splendid attire as Knight of the Garter, was arrested and humiliated by his old enemy the Duke of Norfolk. The duke ripped the collar of St George from Cromwell’s neck, while the Earl of Southampton, not to be outdone in malice, untied the garter from his knee. Cromwell was then bundled off to the Tower of London down the Thames by barge from Westminster. He would never see the king again. Cromwell’s anguished plea to Henry – “Most gracious prince: I cry for mercy, mercy, mercy!”, written in desperation in his Tower cell – was met with a stony silence. On 28 July, Cromwell was led out to the scaffold on Tower Hill to face his executioner. On that very same day, the king distracted himself by marrying a new wife, Catherine Howard. How had it come to this? How had a man who that April had reached the pinnacle of his success by being appointed 16th Earl of Essex and Lord Great Chamberlain suffered such a vertiginous fall? What led to Thomas Cromwell’s death? For once, the picturesque traditional story deserves priority. That story is the personal disaster of physical repulsion that destroyed the marriage of Henry VIII to his hapless wife, Anne of Cleves. The marriage had seemed such a neat idea to Cromwell – for it was his idea. Anne’s chief virtue for Cromwell as he sought to secure the king a fourth bride was that she was not the daughter of an English nobleman, and so as queen consort, she would not disturb the uneasy balance in English court politics between leading aristocrats. Diplomatically, advantages stacked up. Anne’s family had carried out their own Reformation in their ducal territories in western Germany, while not decisively breaking with the pope. They were also one of the counterweights to the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V inside his empire. Read more | Europe's holy war: how the Reformation convulsed a continent There’s another element to these negotiations that have for centuries been overshadowed by the Cleves debacle. Cromwell was actually orchestrating an international ‘Two-Princess Deal’, twinning the Cleves match with negotiations to marry Catherine of Aragon’s daughter, the Lady Mary, to Philip Duke of Bavaria, a German prince with similar credentials to those of Cleves. Remarkably, when Anne of Cleves arrived in England, Duke Philip was already there, discreetly making the right marital overtures to Mary. He even gave her a kiss in the garden of the abbot of Westminster in front of witnesses. Nothing came from this promising start, which was caught up in the unfolding nuptial disaster that was the Cleves marriage, and Mary would have to wait another 14 years before securing the hand of a continental royal: the prince (later king) of Spain. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/11/RV14286-9-2-5af1d26-e1731579620822.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="The debacle of Henry VIII’s marriage to Anne of Cleves (depicted in a portrait by Hans Holbein the Younger) heaped sexual humiliation on the king – and Thomas Cromwell took the blame (Photo by Roger-Viollet/TopFoto)" title="The debacle of Henry VIII’s marriage to Anne of Cleves (depicted in a portrait by Hans Holbein the Younger) heaped sexual humiliation on the king – and Thomas Cromwell took the blame (Photo by Roger-Viollet/TopFoto)" /> The symmetry of the diplomatic moves with Cleves and Bavaria made it all the more devastating when Henry departed from Cromwell’s script and loathed the Lady Anne at first sight at Rochester as she journeyed up to court, on New Year’s Day 1540. The reasons are locked for ever in the mystery that is Henry VIII; no one else could see much wrong with her. Henry’s efforts to find a legal way out of the marriage were all futile, and so from January 1540, he was trapped humiliatingly in Cromwell’s project. That revealed the minister’s vulnerability: from his first rise to power in 1532, he was always at the mercy of the king’s moods and demands. Like his predecessor and patron, Cardinal Wolsey, Cromwell would be high in favour only as long as he delivered a successful result for the king. But the Cleves debacle was more than just a diplomatic failure: it also heaped personal sexual humiliation on Henry VIII. From the first night that the ill-starred couple had shared a marital bed, the king found himself repelled at the thought of any physical intimacy with her. Now those who hated Cromwell simply for being Cromwell could play on the king’s emotional impulses, just as Cromwell himself had done in sealing the downfall of Henry’s second wife, Anne Boleyn, back in 1536. Cromwell had never been close to Boleyn, despite their common interest in religious Reformation. More important to their relationship was her central role in destroying his beloved master, Wolsey, whose memory Cromwell had ostentatiously commemorated in his heraldry even while Anne consolidated her position as Henry VIII’s bride. Anne’s execution in May 1536 brought Cromwell his first public honours that summer, which she had probably blocked previously: not just a knighthood but a peerage, Baron Cromwell of Wimbledon. He also acquired the very senior legal office of Lord Privy Seal: third-ranking office of state after the Lord Chancellor and Lord Treasurer, with control over a crucial stage in the production of documents for sealing after the initial royal signature on any grant or decision. Those promotions were galling for the existing nobility, led by the biggest snob in Tudor England, the Duke of Norfolk (whose peerage titles were all of six decades older than Cromwell’s new title). Thomas Cromwell's early brush with death In the crisis of autumn 1536, during the northern risings known as the Pilgrimage of Grace for the Commonwealth, this nearly brought ruin to the upstart. The pilgrims saw Cromwell as their chief enemy, and in their fury at the destruction of northern monasteries (which they blamed on him), they were not intimidated by the royal armies sent against them under Norfolk’s generalship. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/11/GettyImages-464427341-fa27132-e1731579829101.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A c1539 portrait of Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk. “The biggest snob in England” revelled in Thomas Cromwell’s fall from grace (Photo by Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images)" title="A c1539 portrait of Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk. “The biggest snob in England” revelled in Thomas Cromwell’s fall from grace (Photo by Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images)" /> There was a terrifying moment for Cromwell in the first week of November 1536, during which the king hesitated, pondering whether to sacrifice his minister as the centrepiece of sweeping concessions to the rebels. Henry changed his mind after retreating to his then rarely used Palace of Richmond, which happened to be significantly near a newly acquired Surrey country house of Cromwell’s at Mortlake. That vital element of face-to-face contact, which Cromwell’s enemies succeeded in preventing when he did eventually fall from power, brought Henry second thoughts. Instead of being destroyed by the king, Cromwell now enjoyed his increasing favour. Indeed, in summer 1537, Baron Cromwell celebrated a spectacular dynastic triumph. His teenage son, Gregory – much-loved, charming but otherwise not exceptionally talented – married Elizabeth Seymour, slightly older than him and already widow of a Yorkshire knight. More importantly, she was the sister of Henry’s current queen, Jane Seymour. The genealogical results of this wedding were intriguing: in an informal sense, they made Cromwell the king’s uncle by marriage, and in a specifically formal sense, Gregory Cromwell became uncle by marriage to the heir to the throne who was born that autumn (the future Edward VI). It was a formidable alliance: newly ennobled Seymours and a potential new English noble dynasty of Cromwells. That marked the Lord Privy Seal as a future danger to everyone else vying for power under the king, particularly those who felt that the greater antiquity of their noble titles was a sign that God singled them out for rule under Henry VIII. Thomas Cromwell played a dangerous game Parallel to that dynastic complication was the polarising effect of religion. With Anne Boleyn removed, Cromwell was the chief promoter of evangelical reformation amid the uncertain theological future of Henry VIII’s newly created Church of England. His quasi-religious office as ‘Vice-Gerent in Spirituals’ replicated the power that Cardinal Wolsey had enjoyed, but was now exercised under the king’s authority, not that of the pope. By 1538 it would be obvious to the politically well-informed that the Vice-Gerent was not always following initiatives from the king, but instead using the ill-defined power of an ill-defined office to push his own reformist agenda in such matters as enforcing circulation of the Bible in English or attacking traditional cults of saints and pilgrimage to shrines. There was much more activity of the same character behind the scenes. Read more | The dissolution of the monasteries: mindless violence or planned precision? Cromwell was playing a dangerous game if anyone chose to draw the king’s attention to what was happening – or more precisely, if the king chose to listen to that information. Henry always decided which noises rang most loudly in his ears at any one time, and during the 1530s the opposed voices had taken on a poisonous religious resonance. Around Cromwell gathered gentry and nobility (including the Seymours) who sympathised with his reformist aims in religion, in contact with Reformations in mainland Europe. Ranged against them was a wide spectrum of those who might feel any combination of dynastic or religious hostility towards the Vice-Gerent, and who would be alert to any opportunity to discredit him. Cromwell’s love for his only surviving child pushed him into ever more reckless confrontations with more established politicians. In late 1537, Gregory and his near-royal bride were sent to Sussex to constitute a local power for king and Cromwell on the south coast. The young couple were provided with the beginnings of a stately mansion that the Lord Privy Seal planned to convert from a major monastery in a fine spreading valley site below the hill-town of Lewes. It needed an accelerated surrender of Lewes Priory to make this rehousing work in time for the already pregnant Elizabeth Seymour. During autumn 1537 the haste was evidenced by a new departure in policy during the monastic dissolutions: for the first time all the Lewes monks were offered a pension if they co-operated with the surrender. Read more | Q&A: Where did the monks go after the dissolution of the monasteries? Then a year after all was safely settled, in late autumn 1538 Gregory committed some scandalous exploit in Sussex, the details of which are now obscured but were probably sexual in nature. That required his hasty removal with Elizabeth and son from Sussex to a conveniently vacant royal castle at Leeds in Kent. Lewes lost its chance to be the ancestral home of a great Cromwell dynasty. The prompt arrival of Gregory and his wife in the splendour of Leeds Castle in March 1539 was politically necessary to provide minimum propriety for one of Cromwell’s riskiest moves yet. That spring, the government carefully managed new parliamentary elections for the House of Commons county by county, to balance local political forces and produce an assembly that would co-operate with the king’s various plans. In Kent, however, the pairing of the leading representatives, the two ‘knights of the shire’, was bizarre. One was indeed the sort of eminent knight one might expect, Sir Thomas Cheyney. The other was Gregory Cromwell: a rackety teenager who within about a month of taking up residence in Kent, now occupied a place normally reserved for most respectable county gentry. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/11/2F2D995-e2a0a70-e1731579461245.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A Holbein miniature, long without an identification, but now said to depict Gregory Cromwell in 1537. That same year, Thomas secured his son possession of Lewes Priory (Photo by Maidun Collection/Alamy Stock Photo)" title="A Holbein miniature, long without an identification, but now said to depict Gregory Cromwell in 1537. That same year, Thomas secured his son possession of Lewes Priory (Photo by Maidun Collection/Alamy Stock Photo)" /> The oddity of that choice for parliament is emphasised by the fact that at no stage in 1539–40 can Gregory be found named as a justice of the peace in Kent. Whatever had happened in Sussex probably made that seem unwise for the moment, but to make Gregory a knight of the shire was the first sign of what became increasingly apparent over the next 12 months: Cromwell was losing his grip on his previously acute sense of what was not just politically possible but also politically sensible. It is significant that the trigger for this corruption of Cromwell’s judgment was dynastic: his love for the erratic, energetic boy who was his only legitimate heir. Why the Duke of Norfolk pushed for Thomas Cromwell's downfall The sheer scale of the problems facing any would-be reforming minister in Tudor England, Wales and Ireland, let alone the increasing political turmoil, would have stretched anyone’s powers of management, even someone with Cromwell’s exceptional talent and energy. From spring 1539, events revealed his deteriorating sense of discretion and control, and even what at first seemed a smart move, the Cleves marriage, proved the most toxic of mistakes. Cromwell’s bravura improvisations in politics and policy enraged traditionalist leaders in national politics, moving them towards the conclusion that he must be stopped. Most fatally for the minister, Thomas, Duke of Norfolk was now prepared to lead the charge. Read more | Thomas Cromwell: the best Italian in all England Over the previous few years Norfolk had normally been careful to cast the appearance of bluff friendship over his relations with Cromwell, even under the considerable provocation represented by the Cromwell/Seymour marriage in 1537. Now he was pushed over the edge by a move offensive in both religious and dynastic terms: the dissolution of a Cluniac priory at Thetford in Norfolk that served as mausoleum for the Howard family and their noble predecessors as earls and dukes of Norfolk. Howard had made plans to save the mausoleum by turning the priory into a non-monastic collegiate church, as happened to a number of other monasteries (most to become cathedrals) during the monastic dissolutions. In the end, the complete suppression of Thetford Priory in February 1540 was one of the very last to take place, postponed with surely deliberate delay to a few days after the duke had left England on a hastily organised embassy to France. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/11/BMNFD7-a36d9de-e1731579777920.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Thomas Cromwell’s decision to dissolve Thetford Priory enraged the Duke of Norfolk, who would soon relish the opportunity to exact retribution (Photo by Pictures Colour Library/Alamy Stock Photo)" title="Thomas Cromwell’s decision to dissolve Thetford Priory enraged the Duke of Norfolk, who would soon relish the opportunity to exact retribution (Photo by Pictures Colour Library/Alamy Stock Photo)" /> It was a direct blow to Howard’s always brittle family pride: later he and his stepmother went to the extraordinary length of moving Howard tombs and their occupants from Thetford Priory to two parish churches in Suffolk and at Lambeth. Whatever nuances we may now find in Cromwell’s supervision of monastic closures through the 1530s, his old enemy would see Thetford’s dissolution without a collegiate future as yet another calculated insult to Howard honour. Hence the prominent part that the Duke of Norfolk played in the dissolution of Cromwell in spring and summer 1540: not merely the drama in the Privy Council chamber, but much quiet priming of ambassadors to spread the right narrative quickly across Europe. Thomas Cromwell’s fall from grace Perhaps it was always inevitable that great ministers of Henry VIII would fall from grace, defeated by his impossible and incessant demands. That was accentuated by the fact that early Tudor England was always disadvantaged in European politics, not nearly as powerful or important as Henry thought it should be. For both Wolsey and Cromwell, the trigger for downfall was failure in foreign policy. Wolsey had found it impossible to persuade a pope intimidated by Charles V to annul the long-standing marriage of Charles’s aunt Catherine of Aragon to a selfish king of England. In Cromwell’s case, the problem was his understandable inability to deal with Henry VIII looking a gift horse from Cleves in the mouth. After that, with the king characteristically looking for a reason to blame someone else for his own decision, the jackals were free to gather. Any charge would do: treason or heresy. Cromwell was lucky not to be burned at the stake for heresy in 1540, instead suffering a comparatively swift (albeit still gruesome) death by the executioner’s axe. Maybe the tide was already ebbing on King Henry’s malice. How Thomas Cromwell got his revenge The minister’s enemies would suffer dearly for the role they played in his death Thomas Cromwell’s death did not immediately end the killing. Two days later a notorious event embodied Henry VIII’s idiosyncratic notion of ‘middle way’. Six priests were executed: three evangelicals burned for heresy, and three papalist Catholics hanged, drawn and quartered for treason. The evangelical clerics Robert Barnes, Thomas Garrad and William Jerome were clearly identified with Cromwell, and their clashes with the conservative bishop Stephen Gardiner had sparked much political turmoil in Cromwell’s last months. What is extraordinary is how little Cromwell’s friends suffered after that. From the moment that Henry was satisfied in his urgent quest not to be married to Anne of Cleves – through the legal pronouncement that the marriage was null because of non-consummation – his rage against Cromwell began cooling. In fact, by winter 1541 he was ranting at his councillors that “upon the pretexts of trivial faults that [Cromwell] had committed, they had laid several false accusations on him, by which [the king] been made to put to death the most faithful servant he ever had”. The king’s new mood soon benefited Gregory Cromwell. As early as December 1540, Gregory was granted a new barony in his own right, after his wife (Jane Seymour’s sister) had skilfully written to the king for mercy. After Henry VIII’s death in 1547, Cromwell’s Seymour allies, such as Sir John Dudley and Henry Grey Marquess of Dorset, formed an evangelical government for Edward VI. In effect, the opening weeks of the new reign saw a coup of Cromwellians against Thomas Cromwell’s enemies: a reversal of the debacle of 1540. The new regime spearheaded a religious revolution that followed the Protestant trajectory of Cromwell’s policies. It also marginalised or imprisoned some of the chief actors in his fall: Thomas Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton; Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk; Stephen Gardiner and Edmund Bonner. Cromwell’s posthumous revenge was a dish inevitably but still satisfyingly served cold. Diarmaid MacCulloch is emeritus professor of the history of the church and fellow of St Cross College and Campion Hall, University of Oxford This article was first published in the December 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine
Long road to paradise: the life of John Milton and how he created his masterpiece, Paradise Lost
John Milton was an English radical polemicist and poet, whose magnum opus, Paradise Lost, has influenced artistic endeavours since its publication. On the 350th anniversary of his death, Islam Issa explores the story of the man who lived in revolutionary times, and who lost two wives, his liberty and his sight – but never his hope
John Milton was an early riser. He woke each morning with poetry in his head, itching for it to be recorded. The verses came to him during the night, he said – a special delivery from his very own lyrical muse. By 1652, he had completely lost his sight, so the disgruntled Milton had to wait patiently for a scribe to arrive. In the popular imagination, one of them was his daughter, Deborah, who has been depicted putting pen to paper as her father dictates his intricate poetry. Milton’s biographer wrote that on some days, when it took longer than usual for someone to begin transcribing, the poet “would complain, saying he wanted to be milked”. That was in the mid-1660s, when Milton – in an effort to evade the Great Plague of London – had relocated to a cottage in Chalfont St Giles, rural Buckinghamshire. The move to the country had worked wonders for his writing, and he set to putting the final touches on a magnum opus that had occupied his thoughts for decades and taken years to complete. It hadn’t always been his intention to compose an epic poem. In the early 1640s he’d had in mind a drama, scribbling the outline for a tragedy titled Adam Unparadised. But the political and social turmoil of the couple of decades before his country sojourn had changed his mind about writing a play. Instead, he decided to compose a lengthy poem of more than 10,000 unrhymed lines. Its title was Paradise Lost. Tumultuous times John Milton was born in 1608 in the shadow of St Paul’s Cathedral, London, the son of a scrivener and composer, also named John. In early adulthood he had developed a habit of opposing the status quo, especially when it came to religion and politics. The Church of England was too hierarchical, he said, proposing that regular people should be able to read the scriptures without being influenced by religious leaders. As for the Roman Catholic church, its obsession with popery and rituals was a form of heresy. In 1642, Milton went to Oxfordshire to collect an interest payment from a landowner to whom his father had lent money years earlier. By the time he returned to London, he had tied the knot with the debtor’s daughter. This marriage to Mary Powell – at 17, half his age – lasted just a few weeks. It’s long been assumed that Milton must have been difficult to live with. A more obvious cause of the rift was politics: the first rumblings of the Civil War were growing, and the Powell family’s strong royalist views were incompatible with Milton’s staunch republicanism. In any case, when Mary abandoned him and returned to her family, Milton redirected his intellectual energies to addressing the topic of divorce. The law of the time offered a separation agreement “from bed and board” that didn’t go as far as terminating the marriage. Dissolution “from the bond of marriage” was valid only on grounds of adultery. Milton’s Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, published as an anonymous and unlicensed pamphlet, made the radical argument that a breakdown due to “indisposition, unfitness, or contrariety of mind” should be sufficient grounds. Milton was well ahead of his time. It was another three centuries before parliament passed the Divorce Reform Act 1969, legalising no-fault divorce on the grounds of an “irretrievable breakdown”. To his contemporaries, however, Milton’s justifications for divorce were likely the most controversial of all his opinions. They led to open attacks that reached parliament (by now his name was associated publicly with the book), where he was condemned and where members pushed for state control over unregistered books, including Milton’s contentious tract. Under the Licensing Order of 1643, every book produced had to be read and approved by a censor before publication. Milton penned a strong and impassioned case opposing the policy. In Areopagitica, which became his most famous polemic, he defended freedom of expression and compared suppressing books to killing humans – in fact, he wrote, it might be even more deplorable, because it “slays an immortality rather than a life”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/11/BAL348130-5dfa773-e1731929244146.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="The Milton memorial window in St Margaret’s Church, Westminster, made by Clayton & Bell in 1888. Here, Satan spies on Adam and Eve (Photo by Neil Holmes/Bridgeman Images)" title="The Milton memorial window in St Margaret’s Church, Westminster, made by Clayton & Bell in 1888. Here, Satan spies on Adam and Eve (Photo by Neil Holmes/Bridgeman Images)" /> Republican ideals Milton was most prolific when expounding his diehard republican beliefs. During the 1640s, he spent much of his time writing poetry and prose that supported the militant anti-monarchical movement. When the republican army’s commander-in-chief, Thomas Fairfax, besieged Colchester in 1648, Milton wrote a sonnet in praise of “Fairfax, whose name in arms through Europe rings”. That poem also suggested that the job of opposing the tyranny of inherited power remained unfinished: “O yet a nobler task awaits thy hand; / For what can war, but endless war still breed, / Till truth, and right from violence be freed.” Early the next year, parliament indicted Charles I. Fairfax, meanwhile, was overshadowed by a subordinate commander, Oliver Cromwell, who became the island’s most influential statesman – and in whom Milton placed high hopes. Listen | Browse the HistoryExtra archive of podcasts on the Civil War, from female spies to Charles I's killers Charles I’s trial lasted eight days in January 1649. During that time, Milton quickly put together the Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, its title page boasting “that it is lawful, and hath been held so through all ages, for any, who have the power, to call to account a tyrant, or wicked KING, and after due conviction, to depose, and put him to death”. On 30 January, the king was decapitated by a single axe blow and his head held up, blood dripping from the neck, to the cheering crowd. The monarchy and the House of Lords were swiftly abolished. Some years later, Cromwell became head of state, taking the (unmistakably regal) title of lord protector. Speaking in tongues Within six weeks of Charles I’s execution, Milton was called upon to serve the republican government in the role of secretary for foreign tongues. Tasked with translating official communications, largely from the period’s international language of Latin, Milton received a handsome annual salary of £288, 13 shillings and 6½d (around £45,000 today). Foreign governments were still wary of the new regime in Britain, so Milton’s talents were mainly channelled into writings in defence of the revolution. His Eikonoklastes (The Image Breaker), published in October 1649, attempted to justify the regicide. It was written in response to Eikon Basilike (The Royal Image), subtitled The Portraiture of His Sacred Majesty in his Solitudes and Sufferings, published shortly after the execution and purportedly written by the king himself before he died. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/11/GettyImages-1288501833-86a56ff-e1731928903323.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="The frontispiece of Eikon Basilike, purportedly written by Charles I, depicting the deposed monarch as a saintly martyr; Milton wrote in justification of the king’s execution (Photo by Sepia Times/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)" title="The frontispiece of Eikon Basilike, purportedly written by Charles I, depicting the deposed monarch as a saintly martyr; Milton wrote in justification of the king’s execution (Photo by Sepia Times/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)" /> Held in high regard by royalists, the title page of Eikon Basilike featured an allegorical image depicting Charles as a saintly martyr, engraved by William Marshall. That artist had earlier drawn Milton for his 1645 poetry collection – a depiction that the author hated. In retribution, Milton instructed Marshall to engrave a caption in Greek, describing the latter as “a rank beginner” and “a good-for-nothing artist” – barbs which, not speaking that language, he would have been unable to understand. Milton and Mary Powell had reconciled in 1645, but different problems soon arose. For one thing, the writer’s eyesight was weakening: by 1648, he’d lost all vision in one eye, and in 1652 he became permanently blind. In that same devastating year, Mary died from complications during the birth of their third daughter, Deborah. Milton’s second marriage, to Katherine Woodcock in 1656, appears to have been more amicable. Like his first wife, though, Katherine died in 1658 following childbirth. In one of his most emotive pieces, Milton writes about encountering his late beloved, whom he met only after losing his sight, during his vivid sleep: “But O as to embrace me she inclined, / I waked, she fled, and day brought back my night.” Perhaps tellingly, it was around this time that Milton – a blind man left to raise his three daughters alone – began to work on Paradise Lost. Despite the overthrow of the monarchy, on Oliver’s death in September 1658 the Cromwellian government reverted to dynastic succession. Richard Cromwell succeeded his father as lord protector, but lacked the qualities that had prompted Milton to describe his father as “chief of men… Guided by faith and matchless fortitude”. Parliament soon retook control, much to Milton’s delight. Within a few months, however, the army had dissolved parliament – something that Milton condemned in no uncertain terms. As the royalists regained power, and with the restoration of the monarchy looking inevitable, Milton remained outspoken in opposition. The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth proposed the formation of a permanent republican federation, or at the very least an elected sovereign. Yet such a scheme was, by 1660, hopelessly utopian. Writer on the run The monarchy was restored that May, when Charles II returned from exile and succeeded his father. Like his fellow republicans, Milton had to either run or hide. With an arrest warrant issued, and in real danger of assassination, he went into hiding. A proclamation was issued ordering that all of his books should be collected for burning, and Milton’s writings were consigned to the flames at the Old Bailey. Read more | Art, culture and science in the Restoration period Execution loomed, and many of his friends were put to death. A general pardon issued later in the summer of 1660 exempted Milton from suffering the same fate, but it didn’t mean that he was safe. By autumn, Milton had been arrested and imprisoned in the Tower of London. It’s not known why he was pardoned, around three months later; it may have been because of his visual impairment, or thanks to support from his friend Andrew Marvell, a poet who was also an influential MP. Still, Milton emerged from prison having lost many of his acquaintances, and in financial difficulty; he’d paid £150 – a large sum – to be released, and £2,000 of his savings had been seized. More detrimentally still, his dream of a republic – one in which he had believed, that he’d promoted and that had, for a short while, lived – had all but vanished. The Restoration complete, plague arrived to ravage England, driving Milton to take refuge in Buckinghamshire in July 1665. When that epidemic abated, he made his way back to London early the following year – only to be met by another disaster: the Great Fire of London. Though his house survived, the majority of his city was razed. Milton had spent the first half of the 1660s focusing on Paradise Lost, with an inevitably different outlook on life. “I now must change / Those notes to tragic,” laments the poem’s narrator. Milton was by then blind, lonely and essentially under house arrest, the powers he had challenged now restored: “fallen on evil days, / On evil days though fallen, and evil tongues; / In darkness, and with dangers compassed round, / And solitude.” Read more | Coffee, plague and the Great Fire: the pleasures and perils of living in Restoration London The well-read Milton alluded to the scriptures, poetry and tragedy from across the continent to tell his epic tale of humanity’s fall from grace. The result is a dramatic, imaginative take on Satan’s rebellion against God, and the subsequent fall of Adam and Eve. Set at the beginning of human history, it boasts an expansive setting, with Heaven at the top and Earth dangling from it, Hell at the bottom and a dark Chaos in between. Its story is one of ambition and rebellion, questioning the extent of free will and divine justice. Its characters – even God the Father and Son – are complicated and imperfect. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/11/GettyImages-463907993-5e42463-e1731929089161.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Satan Arousing the Rebel Angels, by William Blake, 1808. The English artist created the illustration for John Milton's Paradise Lost (Photo by Art Media/Print Collector/Getty Images)" title="Satan Arousing the Rebel Angels, by William Blake, 1808. The English artist created the illustration for John Milton's Paradise Lost (Photo by Art Media/Print Collector/Getty Images)" /> And no Miltonic character is more famous than the deeply intense Satan, who rallies the fallen angels with populist rhetoric but also contemplates his condition with psychological rigour: “Me miserable! Which way shall I fly / Infinite wrath, and infinite despair? / Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell.” It’s difficult not to read Milton’s politics into his great epic. In the preface, entitled ‘The Verse’, he explains why the poem doesn’t rhyme – a fact that appears to have disconcerted his publisher. Milton decries “the troublesome and modern bondage of rhyming”. Not only had royalist poets used rhyming couplets, but rhyme served as a symbol for the shackles of the ruling powers, he thought. By opposing rhyme and writing freely, Milton’s style was inherently nonconformist. Even more surprising is Satan’s often justified, if overambitious, opposition to the omnipotent but stubborn and out-of-touch God. It’s no surprise that this has long been interpreted as a metaphor for brave opposition against the seemingly immovable monarchy. In 1667, publisher Samuel Simmons paid Milton £5 for the rights to Paradise Lost; according to his contract, he received a further £5 once sales reached an agreed figure. In 1674, he republished the most authoritative version of Paradise Lost, in 12 books – like the classic epics with which he may have felt it was on a par. A few weeks later, Milton prepared his will, in which he mentioned the money still owed by his first wife’s father. He died in November that year. All is not lost It’s both intriguing and telling that Milton didn’t venture to North America. As well as Puritans and Quakers, many anti-monarchists crossed the Atlantic to set up republican structures in the colonies. Indeed, the founding fathers of the US drew on Milton’s work as they shaped the fundamental republican ideals of their new nation. In an alternative universe, he might have been America’s greatest poet. Yet though Milton was a radical, he was also an idealist who stayed put, believing that he could change the system. Read more | "They decided that God must be leading them to North America": the Puritan journey to the Mayflower He had seen some of the world beyond England, travelling to Italy, Geneva and France in 1638. He appears to have had no trouble mastering Italian, claiming that it’s “easily learned at any odd hour”. It’s even said that Milton rolled his letter R when he spoke in Europe, in an effort to differentiate himself from other embarrassing compatriots on the continent. That trip had a formative effect on Milton, evident in Paradise Lost. When Satan ventures from Hell to Eden with the intention of taking down Adam and Eve, his shield, “massy, large and round… Hung on his shoulders like the moon”. Satan is essentially carrying his shield like a big backpack: it looks like the moon only if “through optic glass the Tuscan artist views” it. That artist was the astronomer Galileo Galilei, who’d championed the idea that the Earth moves around the sun. This view was officially deemed “foolish and absurd… formally heretical since it explicitly contradicts in many places the sense of holy scripture”. By the time Milton met him, the Italian was elderly and blind. He had challenged authority but been forced to retract his beliefs, and was under house arrest – just as Milton was when writing Paradise Lost. No wonder Milton also challenged authority. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/11/GettyImages-600041375-c1a0392-e1731928957762.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A 19th-century painting of John Milton visiting Galileo Galilei in Florence in 1638, when the astronomer was blind and under house arrest – echoed in the poet’s later life (Photo by Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images)" title="A 19th-century painting of John Milton visiting Galileo Galilei in Florence in 1638, when the astronomer was blind and under house arrest – echoed in the poet’s later life (Photo by Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images)" /> Never to yield Yet there is much to suggest that a spark of idealism lived on. Adam, Eve and Satan seemingly all lose in Paradise Lost. But its ending sees the human couple locking hands as they step into a new world, free from Eden’s baggage – a world in which they can explore themselves and engage their free will. Even Satan, “in dubious battle… shook his (God’s) throne”. Here, Milton holds on to the thought that, for a short while, he played a part in shaking the establishment. “What though the field be lost?” Satan asks himself, before continuing to declare that “All is not lost; the unconquerable will… And courage never to submit or yield.” Milton’s influence on the English language is as profound as his views on politics and religion were radical. It’s claimed that he invented almost three times as many words as William Shakespeare did. Throughout his career, too, he conceived phrases, many of which speak to the enduring necessity of optimism. In his masque Comus, the character of the Lady spots a “cloud / Turn forth her silver lining”. And in the elegy Lycidas, Milton ends by confirming the temporary nature of grieving – that life must go on: “At last he rose, and twitched his mantle blue: / Tomorrow to fresh woods and pastures new.” John Milton’s artistic legacy In the 350 years since its creator’s death, Paradise Lost has inspired generations of painters, musicians and writers Painting and poetry Poet and painter William Blake quipped that Milton was “of the Devil’s party without knowing it”. The protagonist of Blake’s illustrated Milton: A Poem is that author, whose soul is re-embodied from Heaven. Describing blindness, the narrator of Paradise Lost mentions that a “cloud” of “ever-during dark Surrounds me”; in the first picture of his illustrated epic, Blake drew a naked Milton surrounded by darkness and clouds. In the 1800s, Blake also created a series of striking watercolour plates illustrating Paradise Lost. Sculpture Milton’s Satan is a complicated character with altered perceptions over the centuries. Jacob Epstein’s Lucifer is a towering and unsettling bronze statue completed during the Second World War. The figure’s asymmetry, suggestive stance and possible androgyny reflect Satan’s sexual tensions in Paradise Lost and the poem’s description of how “spirits when they please / Can either sex assume, or both”. Several decades earlier, Spanish sculptor Ricardo Bellver’s Fallen Angel portrayed Satan’s agonising fall from heaven – a move away from the stern and hypermasculine pre-Miltonic devil. Literature In Mary Shelley's 1818 novel, Frankenstein, the creature discovers a book inside an abandoned bag: Paradise Lost. He assumes that it’s a true story, and compares himself to lonely Adam and mistreated Satan. “Like Adam, I was apparently united by no link to any other being in existence,” he reflects, “I considered Satan as the fitter emblem of my condition, for often, like him, when I viewed the bliss of my protectors, the bitter gall of envy rose within me.” More recently, Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy drew heavily on the plot and themes of Paradise Lost. Its very title borrows the epic’s description of the mysterious elements that God employs during the act of creation. Landscape art A footpath in San Diego, California, takes the form of a beguiling serpent that turns Paradise Lost into a physical journey. Since 1992, artist Alexis Smith’s 170-metre-long Snake Path has invited individuals to walk through temptation, passing a small Edenic garden of fruit trees and a granite statue of an oversized book. It is carved with words from the finale of Paradise Lost, in which the angel Michael reminds Adam – and, in turn, readers – about the path to true bliss: “Then wilt thou not be loath / To leave this paradise, but shalt possess / A paradise within thee, happier far.” Stained glass During the 19th-century Gothic revival, Paradise Lost appeared in stained glass – a form that Milton described as “storied windows richly dight [ie adorned]”. The Milton memorial window in St Margaret’s Church, Westminster, made by Clayton & Bell in 1888, includes portraits of Milton at various stages of his life: at school, visiting Galileo, dictating to his daughters. Its Paradise Lost scenes show Satan rousing the fallen angels in one panel and spying on Adam and Eve in another. Music Themes and images from Paradise Lost have influenced countless musicians over the decades, from a metal band of the same name to the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Eminem. Lana Del Rey reimagined the epic story in her short film Tropico, with songs Body Electric, Gods and Monsters and Bel Air exploring the states of bliss, fall and redemption. It takes cues from Milton’s epic poem: there’s a “muttering thunder” when Adam and Eve eat the fruit, while at the end the first couple depart “hand in hand”. “It’s innocence lost,” sings Del Rey, “like Paradise, Paradise Lost.” This article was first published in the December 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine
Part eleven in our 20-part series looking at decisive moments of the last 1,000 years in British history explores 1500–1549. Henry VIII's new vision of kingship carried with it lofty ambitions of controlling the British Isles from Westminster, says john guy – but neighbouring nations weren't keen on the idea
Few events in England have rippled out to create a tsunami affecting the whole of the British Isles as much as those of 1534. In this year Henry VIII, who had divorced Katherine of Aragon and married Anne Boleyn, completed his break with the Pope by getting Parliament to acknowledge him as Supreme Head in Earth of the Church of England. This meant that Henry had the right to appoint the bishops, vet the articles of faith, and impose his will on the monasteries, all of which he did. To enforce his new powers, Henry revised and extended the treason law. Anyone disputing the royal supremacy, even by words alone, would be put on trial. To winkle out opposition, he set a test: an oath of supremacy and allegiance to the king and the “imperial Crown”, to be taken by those holding offices in Church and State, sitting in Parliament, or who were in religious orders until he dissolved them. Historians like to debate whether Henry ushered in a reign of terror, which misses the bigger picture. The effects weren’t just confined to England. To justify his actions, Henry announced a new theory of kingship based on Biblical and classical prototypes, giving an extra layer of meaning to the phrase the “imperial Crown”. In a nutshell, he claimed imperium (“empire”) with expansionist territorial overtones. When the Duke of Norfolk discussed this with a bemused Spanish ambassador, he cited the precedent of King Arthur, “emperor of Britain, Gaul, Germany and Thrace”. The ambassador could barely keep a straight face, saying it was a pity that Arthur hadn’t also been “emperor of Asia”. Soon no one was laughing. In 1534, Henry began a radical overhaul of provincial government. Implemented in its initial stages by Thomas Cromwell, its focus was Wales, Ireland, the northern borderlands, and finally Scotland. All but Scotland were Tudor dominions, although more in name than in fact. The crown’s writ ran unevenly north of the river Trent and was ignored in Wales and Gaelic Ireland: the people who really mattered in the outlying regions were the territorial magnates. Scotland was, of course, an independent kingdom ruled by the Stewart king, James V, except that he was Henry VIII’s nephew. This encouraged Henry to believe in Scotland’s dynastic dependency, awakening dreams of Anglo-Scottish union. Earlier in his reign, Henry had revived Edward I’s claim to be “superior” and “overlord” of Scotland. In and after 1534, he believed that Wales, Ireland and (increasingly) Scotland were “within the orb of the ‘imperial crown’ of England”. No grand theory of state formation underpinned Henry’s policy. He acted mainly out of fear. The northern border was a constant problem: it was vaguely defined and thieves crossed to and fro. Local magnates such as the Cliffords, Dacres or Percies kept the peace, but held their posts almost on a hereditary basis and were regarded by some as fifth columnists. While such criticism was often unfair, Henry was listening to their enemies. He especially questioned the loyalty of Lord Dacre of Gilsland against whom charges of treason had been made. 1534 in context The world was explored, the Reformation was imposed, wealth was redistributed (often towards the king) – and the poor got poorer A rapid demographic upturn marked this period. After 1500, the population rose by a third, but expansion brought problems. Prices and rents soared. Landlords began to enclose common land or amalgamate smaller farms into larger ones. Investors bought land for profit, so that tenants or copyholders were displaced. Many became wage-labourers or migrated to the towns. Speculators tried to sell foodstuffs in the dearest markets. Landlords prospered, but the poor got poorer. London dominated the cloth and luxury trades, but smaller ports shared in the boom. Cloth exports reached a peak by 1550. Wool exports declined, and trade was disrupted after 1544 by exchange-rate fluctuations: the result of coinage debasements. Bristol merchants led the search for the Northwest Passage to Asia. They reached the north-eastern shores of North America, and fished off the coast of Newfoundland. According to tree ring data, the period was one of the warmest before 1900. Although the Thames froze over three times, that wasn’t unusual before its flow was regulated. In 1526–7 and 1535 it rained for up to three months, followed in 1536 by a severe drought. Regional identities were strong, but the rise of printing and literacy shaped the culture. Although Celtic languages were widely spoken in 1500, no book appeared in Cornish, Irish Gaelic or Scottish Gaelic (spoken in the Highlands and Western Isles), while the first book in Welsh wasn’t printed until 1546. No printer worked in Ireland before 1551, and then only in Dublin. By 1550, the London and Edinburgh presses were turning southern English and Lowland Scots into the predominant languages. The biggest changes resulted from the Reformation, when Henry VIII broke from the Catholic papacy, and (in England and Wales) the Dissolution of the Monasteries. In London and the south-east, Lollardy and Protestantism made inroads. In most other places the Reformation was imposed from above. Parishioners weren’t always happy with their clergy, but identified with Catholic liturgies. Each region had its own distinctive saints and shrines: government attacks on images, pilgrimages and prayers and intercessions to saints were more disruptive than the break with Rome. When Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries and sold their lands, Cromwell had meant to use the money as a permanent endowment for the “imperial crown”. His policy failed, because Henry spent most of the cash. The impact was greatest in northern England, where religious houses were part of the social fabric. The redistribution of wealth and church patronage was the major change. The consequences for agriculture were fewer, as many of the monastic lands were already leased to the same gentry who bought them. The inefficiency of Tudor government is revealed by the Dissolution in Ireland. Outside the Pale, just half of the monasteries were dissolved – the others were so poor, it wasn’t worth the effort. They lived on as beacons of the papal Catholicism that Henry VIII detested. In Scotland, James V failed to exploit the rights he extracted from the Pope to nominate to vacant prelacies beyond acquiring the assets of six abbeys for his illegitimate sons. By 1560 the wealth of the monasteries had passed to the nobles. In several cases, their descendants still own these lands. Paranoia sets in A paranoid Henry came to believe that a group of nobles was plotting to overthrow him. Ireland posed the greatest threat, since outside the Pale (the area around Dublin where English rule was concentrated), the Gaelic lords were Catholics who refused to pay taxes or abandon Brehon law or customs (whereby disputes were arbitrated by Gaelic judges, the Brehons). Hitherto, their loyalty was secured by delegating royal power to a trusted magnate family: the Fitzgeralds, Earls of Kildare. By combining a sufficient following in the Pale with their power in the Gaelic community, they had performed a juggling act that had kept Ireland stable for almost 30 years. Wales was closer and the gentry more malleable, but still dangerous. English law was disregarded in the Principality and border marcher lordships, where conflicts of jurisdiction enabled suspects to flee from one lordship to another. Jurors could easily be corrupted, and guns had been fired into the courts. Henry regarded Wales as a haven for insurgents. He was the more concerned because Welsh levies and horses formed the backbone of the royal army, and the favoured route for transporting troops to Ireland was through the (then) port of Chester. In 1534, Henry pounced on Lord Dacre and the Fitzgeralds in a pincer movement. Dacre was put on trial for treason and surprisingly found not guilty, the only nobleman to be acquitted by his peers during the reign. This didn’t deter Henry. As soon as Dacre walked free, he was re-arrested and returned to the Tower. He paid an astronomical fine of £10,000 and undertook not to go more than ten miles from London without the king’s written permission. By then, Henry had the ninth Earl of Kildare in custody, intending to charge him with treason, but his detention sparked a spectacular revolt. Thomas Fitzgerald, Lord Offaly (“Silken Thomas”), the Earl’s heir, denounced Henry as a heretic and ordered those born in England to leave Ireland on pain of death. He threatened to ally with the Pope and the King of Spain, and claimed that 12,000 Catholic troops were on their way to Ireland. Soon the country was convulsed: Dublin Castle was besieged and the rebels went on an orgy of looting and burning, terrifying the citizens. It took a huge army until August 1535 to suppress the revolt, costing 1,500 English lives and £40,000. Henry executed the ringleaders, but their revolt had turned the struggle into something approaching a Gaelic war of independence, committing him to a costly, interventionist policy of “anglicising” Ireland. This explains why, in 1541, he altered his official style from “Lord” to “King” of Ireland. He was incensed by Irish taunts that his “regal estate” there was granted by the Pope, referring to Adrian VII’s bull Laudabiliter, which had granted lordship over Ireland to the Anglo-Normans and implied that Henry held Ireland as a papal fiefdom. When Henry’s threats backfired In Scotland, Henry meant to prevent James V from allying with Spain or France, if that meant Scotland continuing to support the Pope. Opponents of the divorce from Katherine of Aragon had already fled across the border. So had James Griffyd ap Powell, a silver-tongued Welsh rebel, who’d talked his way out of the Tower of London promising to buy horses in Ireland for Anne Boleyn. Instead, he fled to Scotland, where he asked James V to aid a Welsh uprising against Henry. Henry was angry with James for allowing Scots to join the Irish revolt. In 1534, he knew he couldn’t fight on two fronts, so he tried conciliation. He admitted his nephew to the Order of the Garter and sent him a letter justifying his theory of kingship and royal supremacy. When James ignored it, Henry switched to threats, provoking James into his own “imperial” claims and marriage to a French princess in 1537. When she died, James quickly chose another, Mary of Guise. Thereafter, Henry’s determination to conquer Scotland by fair means or foul preoccupied him until his death. In 1534, Cromwell sent a task force into Wales with orders to root out “papists” and try treasons and felonies using English law. His efforts culminated in Acts of Union of 1536 and 1543 which assimilated the medieval Principality and marcher lordships into 12 shires subject to English common law, complete with parliamentary representation at Westminster and a legal system modelled on the English assizes. Henry VIII’s vision of “imperial” kingship meant that royal ecclesiastical supremacy was closely linked to an expansionist, centralising impetus throughout the territories of the British Isles and Ireland – a highly explosive cocktail. In the longer term, the Reformation largely succeeded in England and Wales, whereas in Ireland the extirpation of Catholicism was always unrealistic. Tudor policy in Gaelic Ireland became identified with conquest and colonisation, whereas in Wales the gentry traded their cooperation for patronage. In Scotland, there was a Reformation but no royal supremacy: when eventually the Presbyterian Kirk came into conflict with the Anglican ecclesiastical supremacy, the results could trigger sectarianism almost as bitter as that between Catholics and Protestants. Even in the minds of anglophile Scots, England’s royal supremacy was a fundamental obstacle to union. While Thomas Cromwell’s task force was busy in Wales, its members travelled to Chester. At five o’clock in the morning of 15 September 1534, an earthquake shook the Castle, which “rocked like a cradle, to the great fear of us all therein”. This seismic event, creating panic as far away as Shrewsbury, might well be a metaphor for the half-century. When Henry VIII attempted to govern the outlying regions by a centralised system of command and control from Westminster, he bit off more than he could chew. He shoulders a large share of responsibility for what historians call the “British” or “Three Kingdoms” problem: the dilemma faced when the actions of political elites in one or two of these kingdoms trigger a hostile reaction in another, or when cross-border (especially religious) alliances could subvert or defeat crown policy. A major theme until the 20th century, the problem lingers on in contemporary debates about “Britishness”, the future of Northern Ireland, and Scottish and Welsh devolution. Population Facts: 1500–1549 England in 1500: 2.15m England in 1550: 3.01m Wales in 1500: 210,000 Scotland in 1500: 600,00 (approx) Ireland in 1500: unknown Dublin in 1500: 5,000 (approx) Key years: other important events in the first half of the 16th century 1504 – Empson and Dudley. Henry VII’s wife, Elizabeth of York, died. So did Reynold Bray, the king’s chief minister in all but name. Without their moderating influence, Henry would make Richard Empson and Edmund Dudley his agents of fiscal and prerogative enforcement leading to charges of rapacity. Henry married his eldest daughter, Margaret, to James IV of Scotland, the first step towards Tudor plans for dynastic union. 1509 – The Accession of Henry VIII. Henry began his reign by courting popularity. He imprisoned Empson and Dudley for a year before executing them. He promised full redress of subjects’ grievances, but carried on almost exactly as his father had done. He would need even more money to pay for wars and new palaces, and to finance his dreams of conquests in France and Scotland. No attention was paid to Ireland. 1515 – Wolsey made Lord Chancellor. Henry’s first minister was Thomas Wolsey. He’d risen to power as supremo for military procurement. He used church patronage to climb the ladder, but the key to his success was his seeming ability to achieve everything that Henry desired. He was the first to experiment with the printing press for government forms and propaganda. He would diagnose the need for reforms in Ireland, but reverted to supporting the Fitzgeralds when his attempts failed. 1517 – Bad outbreak of ‘the sweat’. A viral pulmonary disease swept through the land on a terrifying scale. The symptoms were myalgia and headache, leading to abdominal pain, vomiting, unbearable headache and delirium, followed by cardiac palpitation, paralysis and death, all in under 24 hours. Henry VIII fled to the countryside. 10,000 died during the year, including 400 Oxford students in a week. The first outbreak had been in 1485, the last in 1551. 1520 – The Field of the Cloth of Gold. Wolsey organised a meeting between Henry VIII and Francis I of France in search of a “universal peace”. Held just outside Calais, the kings talked to little lasting effect. The event was mostly about magnificent displays of power and wealth. The English built a temporary palace crammed with artworks, with fountains dispensing free wine or beer. The main activities were dancing, banqueting, and a full-scale tournament. Francis beat Henry at wrestling. 1527 – The divorce comes into the open. Henry VIII wanted to divorce Katherine of Aragon so he could marry Anne Boleyn. He was in love and wanted a legitimate male heir. Wolsey had to fix it, but Pope Clement VII was a virtual prisoner of Charles V, Katherine of Aragon’s nephew, and refused to give dispensation. Wolsey’s position was further eroded by a rebellion in East Anglia caused by his foreign policy, and Henry increasingly took charge. 1536 – The Pilgrimage of Grace. Anne Boleyn was executed for alleged adultery and incest. Cromwell started dissolving the monasteries and issuing articles and injunctions for the new Church of England. He triggered a massive revolt in Lincolnshire and the north. 40,000 rebels wore pilgrim badges to show they were loyal to the Catholic faith and supported the monasteries. They would be brutally dispersed, but Cromwell was fatally undermined. 1542 – The Battle of Solway Moss. Henry’s army defeated the Scots at the battle of Solway Moss. James V died shortly afterwards. His daughter, Mary Stewart, was Queen at six days old. Her mother, Mary of Guise, would act skilfully to protect her daughter. Henry VIII was determined to betroth her to Prince Edward, his young son by Jane Seymour. When the Scots frustrated his efforts, he would invade Scotland, poisoning Anglo-Scottish relations. 1549 – The overthrow of Protector Somerset. When Henry VIII died, his son Edward VI was nine years old. For two years, Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, was in charge. He too tried to conquer Scotland, but failed. Meanwhile, his push towards full-blooded Protestantism, currency debasements and inept social and economic reforms caused chaos. Mass protests in East Anglia were the closest thing to a Tudor class war. Somerset was overthrown, and the Duke of Northumberland restored stability. More turning points in British history Read next: 1588: The Spanish Armada Go back: 1453: Richard grabs the throne John Guy is a fellow of Clare College, Cambridge, specialising in the period 1450–1700. He received the 2004 Whitbread Biography Award and Marsh Prize for his biography My Heart is My Own: The Life of Mary Queen of Scots (Harper Perennial). Other publications include Tudor England (OUP, 1990) This article was first published in the February 2007 issue of BBC History Magazine
Kenneth Austin explores what impact the Reformation had on Europe’s Jewish communities.
Historian Kenneth Austin explores what impact the Reformation of the 16th century had on Europe’s Jewish communities and their relations with their Christian neighbours.
Your guide to Martin Luther, the theologian who launched the Reformation
When the 16th-century German theologian published his Ninety-five Theses, he sparked the Reformation in Europe – a movement that soon outgrew him – and drew the ire of both the Holy Roman Empire and the Catholic Church. Read on to learn more about Martin Luther, the man whose ideas would birth Protestant Christianity...
One summer’s day in 1505, a promising student named Martin Luther was walking back to the University of Erfurt when he got caught in a fierce thunderstorm. Lightning struck nearby, and the pious young man from Eisleben, Saxony – terrified at this sign from God – cried out a vow. If spared from the almighty tempest, he would stop studying law and become a monk. The storm didn’t harm him, and so the 21-year-old kept his word – and ultimately changed the course of Christianity. Later that year, Luther joined an Augustinian order in Erfurt (in modern-day Germany, then part of the Holy Roman Empire). His father, Hans, who made his money from mining and smelting, had driven his son’s education in the hopes of making him a lawyer. Instead, Luther chose a life of poverty and devotion. He was ordained within two years. Despite Luther’s commitment to his calling, he struggled constantly with his faith. A 1510 trip to Rome had exacerbated these religious concerns; he was profoundly disheartened by the corruption and vacuum of spirituality he had observed there and vowed never to return. What seems to have upset Luther most was the clergy’s money-making practice of selling indulgences – paying the Church to absolve one’s sins to reduce the time spent in Purgatory before being admitted into Heaven. What were the Ninety-five Theses? Luther’s anger at the sale of indulgences inadvertently propelled him to the forefront of Christian thought. On 31 October 1517, he unveiled his Disputation on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences, better known as his Ninety-five Theses. According to legend, he nailed them to the door of his city’s church in a public challenge to the Catholic Church, but it’s more likely that he sent the propositions in a letter to the Archbishop of Mainz to spark a debate. The contents of his Ninety-five Theses, Luther knew, were highly provocative. One point reads: “Why does not the pope, whose wealth today is greater than the wealth of the richest Crassus, build the basilica of St Peter with his own money rather than with the money of poor believers?” The Ninety-five Theses crystallised two guiding tenets of Luther’s beliefs: the Bible must be the central religious authority; and people will be saved through faith and the grace of God alone, not by worldly deeds or rigid compliance to church dogma. While not entirely new ideas, Luther planted them at the right moment to take root. The advent of the printing press meant his writings – not only the Ninety-five Theses, but the numerous works that followed – spread across Europe within months. His words became a polestar of the Protestant Reformation. Challenging the established teachings of the Catholic Church, however, put Luther at odds with the most powerful institution in Europe, and in 1518 he was summoned to meet with Cardinal Cajetan in Augsburg. Much to the papal legate’s anger, Luther refused to retract anything. What was the Reformation? Your guide to the religious revolution that tore apart the Christian world in the 16th century and established a new faith The Church continued to pressure Luther into renouncing his statements, but to no avail: Luther even burned an ultimatum to recant on a public bonfire. So, on 3 January 1521, Pope Leo X excommunicated Luther. That April, the reformer answered another summons by appearing at the Diet of Worms, an assembly of the Holy Roman Empire, where yet again he refused to recant: “Here I stand. I can do no other. God help me. Amen,” he said. The resulting Edict of Worms declared Luther to be a “notorious heretic”, branded his followers as outlaws and proclaimed that his books should be burned. What happened at the Diet of Worms, and what was the Edict of Worms? Historian Dominic Sandbrook explains... In the spring of 1521, Europe was in ferment. A few years earlier, Martin Luther’s Ninety-five Theses, challenging what he saw as the abuses of the Catholic church, had sent a tremor through Germany. Now Luther had been summoned to Charles V’s imperial assembly (the ‘Diet’) in the town of Worms, on the river Rhine, for one of the pivotal encounters in world history. On 17 April, Luther walked into the town hall, where “the emperor, the electors and the princes” were waiting. A thin, pale man of medium height, he admitted later that he was “physically fearful and trembling”. The presiding official, Dr Johann Eck, asked if Luther had indeed written the offending words, and invited him to retract them. “It would be rash and dangerous for me to reply to such a question,” Luther insisted, until he had had time to think it over. Very well, his interrogators agreed: they would meet again the following day. The next morning, Luther was summoned to meet Charles’s bishops. He would not, he said, retract his books attacking the abuses of the church. “If I now recant these,” he explained, “I would be doing nothing but strengthening tyranny.” He was not prepared to bow to the judgment of the pope; he had “no other guide but the Bible, the Word of God”, and could not act contrary to his conscience. “My God help me,” he said firmly. “Amen.” According to Protestant tradition, Luther ended with the words, “Here I stand, I can do no other,” but this was probably a later invention. What is certain is that a few days later, Luther disappeared, probably going into hiding. This was, it seems, a wise move: on 25 May, Charles V declared him a heretic and demanded his arrest. Though few at the time could have realised it, a great chasm had opened in Christendom. Luther's later life Luther went into hiding – protected by Frederick III, elector of Saxony – but he returned to Wittenberg the next year. Despite his absence, Lutheranism was developing as a branch of Protestantism, although not all the changes pleased him. He disagreed vehemently with more radical elements of the Reformation and some of its other leading figures, including the pastor Huldrych Zwingli and the scholar Erasmus. He also denounced the peasantry during the Peasants’ War (1524-25), a mass uprising in Germany inspired by his words. Europe’s holy war: how the Reformation convulsed a continent Although Luther eschewed the spotlight, in 1525 he still caused a scandal when he wed Katharina von Bora, a disgraced nun. They lived in Luther’s (now emptied) old Augustinian monastery and had six children. Luther continued to write, although he grew more irascible with age, calling the pope the Antichrist and penning anti-Semitic tracts Holy smoke, antipopes and power struggles: a guide to popes and the papacy In 1534, he published arguably his greatest achievement: the Bible, translated into German. Its popularity helped more people learn to read and also further challenged the authority of church leaders. No longer did worshippers need to rely on Latin-speaking priests to relay the word of God: they could now read it themselves, in the vernacular. It would be his final gift to the Reformation. After years of ill health, Luther died on 18 February 1546, aged 62. He was buried in Wittenberg’s church – on whose door he had allegedly nailed his Ninety-five Theses nearly 30 years earlier. Jonny Wilkes is a freelance writer specialising in history This article first appeared in the August 2020 edition of BBC History Revealed and has since been curated with content from the April 2014 issue of BBC History Magazine
What was the Reformation? Your guide to the religious revolution that tore apart the Christian world in the 16th century and established a new faith, Protestant Christianity...
Everything you wanted to know about the religious revolution known as the Reformation – from Martin Luther's Ninety-Five Theses to Henry VIII's break from Rome... What was the Reformation? The Reformation was a schism in the Catholic Church during the 16th century, which had major political, economic and religious implications and led to the creation of Protestant Christianity. Historian Diarmaid MacCulloch, author of The Reformation: A History, answers... How does the English Reformation relate to the wider European Reformations? “The English Reformation was the outwash of something much bigger, which started in northern Germany in 1517 with Martin Luther – and spread out from there. If you're thinking about the English Reformation, you simply cannot ignore the other Reformations. “These Reformations came in waves. The first wave was from Luther. Then, very quickly, there was another wave from Switzerland – and then successive waves that created different sorts of Protestantism. (So there is a Lutheran Protestantism. There is also what you could label a ‘Reformed Protestantism’, which some people might call 'Calvinism' – although that is just not good enough.) “With the English Reformation, the big variable was the immensely insecure Tudor monarchy. They were always preoccupied with their succession, partly because they didn’t have a very good claim to the throne, and, later on, because they had problems reproducing. "In the end, you get three children of King Henry VIII with different takes on reformation. Henry VIII had his distinct one. His son, Edward VI, had another take. Mary I had the absolute opposite stance: she was Catholic and attempted to restore the old church. And then finally, Elizabeth.” Listen: Diarmaid MacCulloch answers everything you want to know about the Reformation on the HistoryExtra podcast Why did the Reformation begin? Although there had been previous calls for change, the Reformation was firmly established in 1517 when German religious thinker Martin Luther wrote his Ninety-Five Theses. He argued for extensive reform of the Catholic Church, who were the dominant religious authority in Western Europe at the time. One of the issues that concerned Luther was the sale of indulgences, whereby the church allowed people to escape punishment for their sins, but for a fee. Did you know? According to legend, Luther nailed his Theses to the door of Castle Church in Wittenberg Luther's words tapped into existing frustrations about the state of the church, especially its wealth and power and the widespread corruption of some of its priests. These criticisms were not new – and nor was Luther the first to seek to reform the church. Yet, the recent invention of a printing press meant that his ideas spread quickly across Europe, where they reached receptive audiences. One of his most important publications was a 1534 German translation of the Bible, which allowed far more people to read it for the first time. The Bible had mostly been written in Latin and could only be read by the priests, but now people could form their own opinions of their faith. Diarmaid MacCulloch answers... When and why did the English Reformation start – and who started it? “There are two different answers. There is a groundswell from below in England in the form of dissatisfaction with the old church; this went back to the 14th century and is something distinctively English, a movement called ‘Lollardy. This dissent met Martin Luther's rebellion in the 1520s. “And then you have the extraordinary fact of Henry VIII and his dissatisfaction with his longstanding wife, Catherine of Aragon. Henry's attempt to find the ideal wife and create the ideal heir to the throne gets mixed up with this other, wider story. “And after that, there's always an official Reformation going alongside an unofficial Reformation in England. The fascination of the English Reformation is trying to sort them out and see how they related to each other.” Listen: Diarmaid MacCulloch answers everything you want to know about the Reformation on the HistoryExtra podcast How did Luther’s arguments lead to a split in the church? While Luther hoped to reform the church, he did not plan to divide it. His vision of Christianity, however, went against the basic tenets of the Church and the authority of the Pope, so set him on a collision course with the church hierarchy. In 1521, Luther was excommunicated by Pope Leo X. Read more | In 1525, an army of revolting peasants seemed unstoppable – but a brutal end was on the horizon Europe’s growing Protestant movement (so-called because they were religious protestors) began to develop outside the Catholic sphere and Protestantism branched out into a number of different strands, including the Lutherans and Calvinists, named after another reformer, John Calvin. What happened in Britain? Why did Henry VIII 'break from Rome'? Although some churchmen and thinkers supported reform in England, King Henry VIII initially remained a staunch supporter of the Catholic church. But that all changed when he decided he wanted to divorce his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, and marry Anne Boleyn. The Pope refused to allow the divorce, and so Henry and his advisors split the church away from Rome, a process completed in 1534. Henry became head of the Church of England and, with no need to defer to the Pope, married Anne Boleyn. Listen | Diarmaid MacCulloch responds to listener queries and popular search enquiries about Henry VIII’s break from Rome and the seismic events that followed Taking advantage of his new authority, Henry ordered the disbanding of England’s monasteries in order that he could seize their wealth for himself. Despite these changes, Henry continued to be fairly traditional in his religious beliefs, and the Church of England did not take on a fully Protestant character until the reigns of his more reform-minded children, Edward VI and Elizabeth I. 5 surprising Tudor facts As for Scotland, it had its own reformation led by John Knox, a follower of John Calvin. The Scottish reformers followed England’s lead and broke their church away from Rome in 1560. Diarmaid MacCulloch answers... Would the English Reformation have happened if there'd been no love affair with Anne Boleyn? "The answer is yes and no. An English Reformation would have happened, but not the very odd tangled one which happened under Henry VIII. "At the heart of Henry VIII's problems was his attempt to find an heir, but also the fact that he absolutely fell passionately in love with the young lady at court, Anne Boleyn. "In the later 1520s, you've got this extraordinary attempt to get out of the marriage to Catherine of Aragon and create a marriage to Anne Boleyn, who rather interestingly could have stayed a mistress – but did not want to. She was determined to be queen. This would take an enormous amount of diplomacy and the only person who could really untangle it in the 1520s was the Pope. "The Pope, for very good reasons, didn't want to. The most powerful man in Europe was the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, and he was the nephew of Catherine of Aragon; he simply put pressure on the Pope to stop this. "It becomes an absolutely impossible situation, which Henry, with his enormous ego 'solved' by breaking his loyalty to the Pope and declaring that he, Henry, could make a decision on his marriage. So in that sense, Anne Boleyn is really crucial to the way the official Reformation in England started." Listen: Diarmaid MacCulloch answers everything you want to know about the Reformation on the HistoryExtra podcast How did the Catholic Church respond to the Reformation? The Catholic Church fought back with the Counter-Reformation, a movement beginning in the reign of Pope Paul III (1534-49). The Counter-Reformation sought both to challenge the reformers and to improve some aspects of the church that originally inspired the Reformation. In general, the Counter-Reformation won out in southern Europe, while the Reformation remained stronger in the north of the continent. Diarmaid MacCulloch answers... Was Anne Boleyn a catalyst for the English Reformation or is too much made of her influence on religious reform? "Oh, she was a catalyst, no question. The distinctive thing about Anne Boleyn and her brother George was that they were already enthusiasts for reform in the church. "Anne had spent time in France, in the French court, where she would have met people already interested in reform before Luther, (or independently from Luther). So she had a real enthusiasm for reform, which you wouldn't expect in a royal mistress. "I should emphasize that her brother, George, was also important. They were both enthusiastic for reform. And so Anne Boleyn did influence Henry VIII, particularly once she was queen because she could influence who became bishops in his new Church of England. As vacancies happened on the episcopal bench, she could get her proteges in (examples being the great Protestant preacher, Hugh Latimer, and the Archbishop Cranmer, who had been chaplain to the Boleyn family)." Listen: Diarmaid MacCulloch answers everything you want to know about the Reformation on the HistoryExtra podcast What was the legacy of the Reformation? The Reformation was without doubt one of the most important events in European and world history, leading to the formation of all the branches of Protestantism that exist today. It also resulted in a great deal of violence, as Protestant and Catholic powers battled for supremacy in Europe for centuries afterwards. In some places, these wounds have still not completely healed. Diarmaid MacCulloch answers... Was Henry a willing participant or just a pawn during the English Reformation? "He was both. He fancied himself as a reformer, but not really a Protestant reformer (you could never, ever say that Henry VIII was a Protestant). But Henry was a huge fan of Erasmus – that great reforming influence in Europe in the early 16th century – and sort of fancied himself as a mini Erasmus. But this is not really Protestantism; it's Henry's own agenda. "So was he a willing participant? A participant, yes. But pawn? Now, this is where it becomes interesting. Two key players Henry had put into power were Thomas Cranmer – a former Cambridge don who, to everyone's surprise, Henry made Archbishop of Canterbury – and Thomas Cromwell, who Henry chose to be a royal minister at the beginning of the 1530s. The truth about Thomas Cromwell "Cromwell had been Cardinal Wolsey's employee for a very specific purpose: to look after Wolsey's tomb design. Henry VIII, when he effectively destroyed Cardinal Wolsey, inherited Cromwell and the tomb, which was now going to be the king's tomb. "So this is where Cromwell entered the story – and Henry very quickly recognised his talent. Now, Cromwell had a huge enthusiasm for the Reformation and had his own agenda (which he could very often often bend Henry VIII to). So, in that sense, Henry was a pawn in the hands of Cromwell from time to time." Listen: Diarmaid MacCulloch answers everything you want to know about the Reformation on the HistoryExtra podcast This article was first published in the July 2015 issue of BBC History Revealed Diarmaid MacCulloch's answers are taken from a 2020 podcast interview on the Reformation, which you can listen to here
The 1618 Defenestration of Prague explained
The Defenestration of Prague in 1618 saw three Catholic officials thrown from a top-floor window of Prague (Hradčany) Castle by an angry mob of Bohemian Protestant activists. The imperial emissaries escaped uninjured, but the events of 23 May 1618 proved to be the catalyst for the bloodiest war in European history, the Thirty Years' War. Author Derek Wilson investigates...
Prague Castle (Hradčany in the national language) is massive – reputedly the largest castle complex in the world. It is impressive particularly when lit up at night and viewed from the Old Town on the other side of the Vltava. It must have been even more dominating four centuries ago, when there were fewer buildings between it and the river. What happened there on that fateful spring day – 23 May 1618 – had a long back story and appalling, long-term results. It would herald the beginning of a Bohemian revolt against the Habsburg emperor Ferdinand II, which in turn helped spark the Thirty Years' War. The background At the root of the trouble lay the powerful forces of religion and nationalism. The Holy Roman Empire was in the early 17th century a conglomeration of principalities, dukedoms and city states under the authority of an emperor. Though the imperial title was conferred by a body of electors, representing the major constituents of the empire, it had, in fact, been held by the Austrian branch of the Habsburg dynasty since the 15th century and was widely regarded as hereditary [Rudolf IV of Habsburg was elected German king as Rudolf I in 1273 and Frederick V was the first Habsburg crowned Holy Roman emperor – as Frederick III – in 1452]. But that did not mean that the emperors were dictators: important policies were decided by members of the imperial parliament, or “diet”, and individual states jealously guarded their semi-independence. One thing that bound them all together was their allegiance to the Roman Catholic church – until the Reformation, that is. The Reformation – a breakaway from Catholic Christendom – was begun in Bohemia by the theologian, martyr and national hero Jan Hus, in the 15th century. A hundred years later Martin Luther, in Saxony, started a much more wide-ranging religious movement. Other teachers throughout Europe followed with their own versions of Protestantism and, by 1618, the Empire had become not only a political patchwork, but also a religious miscellany of states following the doctrines of Luther, John Calvin, Ulrich Zwingli and various, even more radical, Anabaptist leaders [Anabaptists were a fringe movement of the Reformation who were opposed to infant baptism and believed in the separation of church and state. They considered adult baptism to be the only proper baptism]. Nowhere was the mélange of religious opinion more marked than in Bohemia. As well as Utraquists [a branch of the Hussites who believed that ordinary people, like the clergy, should receive the Eucharist – aka the Holy Communion], the population consisted of Lutheran, Calvinists and Catholics. Peaceful rule there was only possible with a measure of toleration and, in 1609, the Emperor Rudolph II granted freedom of worship to the major religious groups in an edict known as the Letter of Majesty. King of Bohemia All was well until Ferdinand, Archduke of Austria, was elected king of Bohemia in 1617 (he later became Emperor Ferdinand II in 1619). He believed passionately – some would say fanatically – that dynastic, territorial and religious unity were inseparable. He never deviated from his conviction that he had a divine calling to restore the glory days of the Catholic empire. As far as Bohemia was concerned, Ferdinand had a more material interest. With its flourishing agricultural, mercantile and industrial activities – not to mention its gold and silver mining – Bohemia was the wealthiest province and a vital contributor to the imperial coffers. All this was known to the national leaders in Prague, who viewed the new regime with apprehension. The question in the forefront of their minds was whether Ferdinand would honour the Letter of Majesty. The new king gave formal assurances that he would do so, but in fact this was a lie intended to put the nationalists off their guard and to buy time until he was ready to strike. For a few months Ferdinand’s tactics were successful. Protestant Bohemians watched the king and his Catholic supporters warily. It was a tense situation that needed only a tiny spark to set ablaze tinder-dry mutual hostilities. That spark, it transpired, was church building. The Lutherans [Protestant Christians who identified with the teachings of Martin Luther] wanted to erect two new places of worship – a freedom which was covered by the Letter of Majesty. But the king sequestered the land they planned to build on and instead granted it to the Catholic church. When the local people staged a protest, the Catholic deputy-governors arrested them. Were the Protestants pushing to see how far they could go, or was the king being deliberately obstructive in order to provoke a crisis? It matters not who started the fight; the important fact is that various interested parties came together to accuse the king of infringing their rights to own property and to enjoy freedom of worship. The Protestant leaders demanded the release of the prisoners. When this was refused, they campaigned throughout the land for their supporters to converge on Prague for a mass demonstration. The date was set for 23 May 1618. Listen | Professor Lyndal Roper explores the life of the father of the Reformation, Martin Luther, and considers his impact on Protestant history What happened on the day? By dawn a large crowd had gathered outside the castle under the leadership of the veteran soldier Count Jindřich Thurn [who had served in the imperial army against the Ottoman empire]. When the Protestant deputies arrived for a showdown with their Catholic counterparts they were followed into the building by their angry supporters. Arrived in the small room where four Catholic deputies sat, the Protestant leaders demanded to know whether Ferdinand had ordered his Bohemian subjects to bow to his will on pain of death and whether the Catholic deputies had encouraged him to adopt this intransigent stance. Two of the deputies satisfied their accusers of their innocence and were allowed to leave the church. That left behind Count Villem Slavata and Count Jaroslav Martinitz quaking before the impassioned mob that stood between them and the door. Thurn turned to his followers and urged them to show no mercy to the men who had urged the king to wage religious war on his Protestant subjects. They must not, he insisted, be allowed to escape with their lives. At that the mob surged forward, pinning the deputies (who were screaming to the Virgin for protection) against the tall windows. Someone unfastened the casement and flung Martinitz out. Slavata put up more of a fight and clung desperately to the window frame. One of the assassins struck him a blow on the head and he fell senseless into the abyss. For good measure the attackers threw the deputies’ gibbering secretary, Philip Fabricius, out after them. The three victims fell 21 metres to certain death on the flagstones below. Only, they didn’t. Thurn and his men, crowding round the open window, were astonished to see Martinitz and the secretary get up and scurry away, while some of Slavata’s servants carried their unconscious master to safety. How did the men survive? This was the Defenestration of Prague, and it left several questions for historians to address. The obvious one was, “How could three men have escaped with their lives from such a fall?” By a stretch of the imagination we might persuade ourselves that one or two of the men had avoided not only death but incapacitating injury. But all three? The secretary could, feasibly, have survived by landing on top of his superiors. But, even if the men had escaped unscathed, why did the revenge-crazed mob not rush down to the courtyard to finish the job they had begun? Legends claiming to provide answers were quick to emerge. The Catholic explanation was simple: the frantic prayers of the doomed men had been heard in heaven and angels had been sent to lower the deputies gently to the ground. This, the Catholics were convinced, provided dramatic proof of whose side God was on. The Protestant response was, more literally, ‘down to earth’: the victims had landed in a dung heap, they said. Does that story stack up? In the centuries before efficient sewage disposal such middens did exist and were periodically cleared by carters employed for the unsavoury task. In a large castle complex such as Hradčany, which was occupied by hundreds of officials, courtiers and servants, human waste must have accumulated quite quickly. So the Protestant version of events is perhaps feasible, though it does sound like a tardy counterblast to the ‘divine miracle’ theory. Any attempt at an alternative analysis of the events of 23 May 1618 leads us into the thickets of speculation. Might Thurn’s mob have been aiming at humiliation, rather than assassination? Could the three royal representatives have been thrown from a lower window as a demonstration of contempt? Well, an earlier event in Prague’s history – and one that must have been familiar to the perpetrators – suggests they knew exactly what they were doing, or trying to do. Almost 200 years earlier (30 July 1419) a Hussite protest had turned nasty. The demonstrators had entered the town hall and defenestrated [threw out of the window] the mayor and several other municipal officials, all of whom were killed. Other not dissimilar events had occurred in Bohemian history, so while it would be an exaggeration to describe the 1618 defenestration as a “traditional” event, it was certainly not without precedent. To Bohemians it was an appropriate way of dealing with those who trampled on the freedom of the people. What were the consequences? We may today be no further forward in solving the mystery of the escaping deputies, but about the effects of their treatment there is no doubt whatsoever. The Defenestration of Prague was the catalyst that activated the worst war in European history, the Thirty Years’ War. The rebels deposed Ferdinand II, set up a provisional assembly and raised an army of 16,000 troops for the nation’s defence. The crown of Bohemia was offered to Frederick V, the Elector Palatine, whose wife was the daughter of James I of England. Europe’s apocalypse: the Thirty Years' War Going Dutch: the Glorious Revolution of 1688 The Bohemian problem was like a lit match thrown into a box of fireworks. The politico-religious instability that was Europe exploded in a series of conflicts over the next 30 years. As well as the Austrian and Spanish Habsburgs and the states of the Empire, France; the Dutch Republic; Denmark and Sweden put armies in the field. From nations not involved per se, idealists and soldiers of fortune arrived to sell their services as mercenaries. Central Europe was shattered, burned, broken, raped and trampled into oblivion. It is no exaggeration to call the Thirty Years’ War the worst war in European history. The combatant nations lost between 25 and 40 per cent of their populations to military action, famine and disease. Cities became empty, smouldering shells. Farmland took a generation to recover. The Swedish army alone destroyed in Germany 1,500 towns; 18,000 villages and 2,000 castles. The great 20th-century historian Dame Veronica Wedgwood described it with searing succinctness: “Morally subversive, economically destructive, socially degrading, confused in its causes, devious in its course, futile in its results, it is the outstanding example in European history of meaningless conflict.” Derek Wilson is the author of Superstition and Science – Mystics, sceptics, truth-seekers and charlatans (Robinson, 2017)​ and ​The Queen and the Heretic – How two women changed the religion of England (Lion Books, 2018). To find out more, visit www.derekwilson.com
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