HistoryExtra
type: channel
link: https://www.historyextra.com
description: The official website for BBC History Magazine
date: 2025-10-20T11:36:46.000Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
items: 5 things you (probably) didn't know about the Tudors
items: The Virgin Queen? Elizabeth I's forbidden love
items: Thomas Cromwell's death – a rapid descent from the pinnacle of power
items: Long road to paradise: the life of John Milton and how he created his masterpiece, Paradise Lost
items: 1534: Henry VIII declares his ‘empire’
items: How did the Reformation impact Jews?
items: Your guide to Martin Luther, the theologian who launched the Reformation
items: What was the Reformation?
items: The 1618 Defenestration of Prague explained
items: The English Reformation: everything you wanted to know

5 things you (probably) didn't know about the Tudors
type: item
date: 2025-10-20T08:00:29.000Z
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Tudor
subject: Historical people
subject: Tudor kings and queens
subject: Tudor life
description: Ruth Goodman, who teaches our new HistoryExtra Academy course on Tudor life, shares five insights about the dynasty’s legacy
encoded: 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 Eng…

GettyImages-804458972webready-4299cf9.jpg
width: 4297
height: 2865

The Virgin Queen? Elizabeth I's forbidden love
type: item
date: 2025-07-04T08:00:14.000Z
subject: Elizabethan
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Tudor
subject: British queens
subject: Historical people
subject: Life in Elizabethan England
subject: Tudor kings and queens
description: 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…
encoded: 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 …

Elizabethan-knot-garden-WL-LEAD-e9226b7.jpg
width: 2056
height: 1369

Thomas Cromwell's death – a rapid descent from the pinnacle of power
type: item
date: 2024-12-13T16:10:45.000Z
subject: Period
subject: Tudor
subject: Trends-Entertainment
subject: Wolf Hall
description: 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
encoded: 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 …

2A2W9CA-547566c-e1731579352300.jpg
width: 620
height: 413

Long road to paradise: the life of John Milton and how he created his masterpiece, Paradise Lost
type: item
date: 2024-12-12T09:00:52.000Z
creator: Professor Islam Issa
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Stuart
subject: Historical people
subject: Poetry
description: 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
encoded: 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 intere…

GettyImages-1447241430-1ccabc9-e1731928820653.jpg
width: 620
height: 413

1534: Henry VIII declares his ‘empire’
type: item
date: 2021-12-27T07:11:19.000Z
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Tudor
subject: Turning points in British history
description: 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
encoded: 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 wh…

TP-Images-with-overlay11-5d5175d.jpg
width: 620
height: 413

How did the Reformation impact Jews?
type: item
date: 2020-12-03T12:31:17.000Z
subject: Membership
subject: Tudor
subject: Period
subject: Judaism
description: Kenneth Austin explores what impact the Reformation had on Europe’s Jewish communities.
encoded: 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.

Podcast-Kenneth-Austin-Web-large-9dc4128.jpg
width: 620
height: 413

Your guide to Martin Luther, the theologian who launched the Reformation
type: item
date: 2020-08-11T12:20:25.000Z
subject: Period
subject: Tudor
description: 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...
encoded: 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 t…

GettyImages-596958418-9a27219.jpg
width: 600
height: 413

What was the Reformation?
type: item
date: 2020-06-04T18:00:23.000Z
subject: Period
subject: Tudor
subject: Family and parenting
subject: Tudor kings and queens
description: 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...
encoded: 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 t…

GettyImages-1160953763-59eb7ca.jpg
width: 1024
height: 680

The 1618 Defenestration of Prague explained
type: item
date: 2020-05-23T02:30:00.000Z
subject: Period
subject: Stuart
subject: Castles
description: 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...
encoded: 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 al…

Prague-2-a37d3d3.jpg
width: 1024
height: 513

The English Reformation: everything you wanted to know
type: item
date: 2020-05-17T11:05:14.000Z
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Tudor
subject: Everything you wanted to know about history (podcast series)
description: Diarmaid MacCulloch responds to listener queries and popular search enquiries about Henry VIII’s break from Rome and the seismic events that followed
encoded: In the latest of our series tackling the big questions on major historical topics, historian Diarmaid MacCulloch responds to listener queries and popular search enquiries about Henry VIII’s break from Rome and the seismic events that followed. Explore the rest of the free ‘Everything you wanted to know’ series, including episodes on the Norman conquest, Roman Britain, the Tudors, and British prehistory

Podcast-Reformation-Web-large-6b092cc.jpg
width: 620
height: 413