HistoryExtra
type: channel
link: https://www.historyextra.com
description: The official website for BBC History Magazine
date: 2025-10-08T16:04:24.000Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
items: What did the Tudors think was ‘good’ sex? These tips and tricks were key to relationships in the 16th century
items: Thomas Cromwell's death – a rapid descent from the pinnacle of power
items: Why did Henry VIII send Anne Boleyn to the block?
items: Katherine Parr: life of the week
items: The women behind Henry VIII's queens
items: Anne Boleyn: a modern woman?
items: All you need to know about Katherine Parr – the truth about the wife who 'survived'
items: The wife who not only survived, but thrived: why Tudor queen Katherine Parr was a firebrand
items: Anne Boleyn: your guide to the life and death of Henry VIII's second queen – plus 11 little-known facts
items: From service to survival: what happened to the households of Henry VIII’s six wives?

What did the Tudors think was ‘good’ sex? These tips and tricks were key to relationships in the 16th century
type: item
date: 2025-10-08T15:53:59.000Z
creator: Isabel King
subject: Elizabethan
subject: Period
subject: Tudor
subject: Discover / Apple News
subject: Historical people
subject: Tudor life
description: From the importance of female pleasure to why you might need ribbons in the bedroom, historian Ruth Goodman explores the world of Tudor sex
encoded: Is there any better way to understand the deadly politics and high drama of the Tudor era than through the lens of their audacious romantic entanglements? After all, King Henry VIII had six wives, instigating the Reformation in the name of love (and presumably lust, too), meanwhile Queen Elizabeth I grew a cult of personality around her virginity, developing it into a sharp instrument of power and control. Sex, or lack thereof, was clearly important to the Tudor royals. But away from the courts of kings and queens, what role did intimate romance play in the lives of ordinary Tudors; the people who were farmers, millers, bakers and blacksmiths? What did they get up to in the bedroom, and what was the role of sex in their lives? Good vs bad sex “[Sex] was seriously important to people in Tudor Britain,” says Ruth Goodman, speaking in her newest HistoryExtra Academy course, Tudor Life, “it marked the moment of adulthood. A single person [as opposed to someone who was married] wasn’t considered to be fully adult”. Watch now | Ruth Goodman on Tudor life As a watershed moment in a person’s life, sex was incredibly important, both practically and symbolically. However, it wasn’t necessarily straightforward – there were social norms that dictated how people should be having sex. Sex was only considered ‘good’ if it took place within marriage and, as Goodman explains, “so long as it fulfilled one of two purposes: one was to bond a couple together, and the other was procreation”. No matter what sort of sex it was, if it happened outside of the marital bed, it was immoral. Anything that fell outside of the “traditional marriage picture of a man and a woman creating babies” was a transgression and ‘bad’ sex. But that didn’t mean that the Tudors discouraged pleasure. The importance of pleasure One of the main Tudor beliefs about sex was that a woman could only conceive if she was enjoying the act, and this would ideally include a female orgasm. “Just as a man needed to be intere…

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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 …

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Why did Henry VIII send Anne Boleyn to the block?
type: item
date: 2024-11-13T10:11:14.000Z
creator: Professor Suzannah Lipscomb
subject: Period
subject: Tudor
subject: British queens
subject: Tudor kings and queens
description: Was she ensnared by a conspiracy, the victim of her own loose tongue, or simply guilty as charged? Suzannah Lipscomb tries to unearth the real reason why Henry VIII sent his second wife, Anne Boleyn, to the block
encoded: On the morning of 19 May 1536, Anne Boleyn climbed the scaffold erected on Tower Green, within the walls of the Tower of London. She gave a speech praising the goodness and mercy of the king, and asked those gathered to pray for her. Then she removed her fine, ermine-trimmed gown, and knelt down – and the expensive French executioner that Henry VIII had ordered swung his sword and “divided her neck at a blow”. Her death is so familiar to us that it is hard to imagine how shocking it would have been: the queen of England executed on charges of adultery, incest and conspiring the king’s death. And not just any queen: this was the woman for whom Henry VIII had abandoned his wife of nearly 24 years, waited seven long years to wed, and even revolutionised his country’s church. Yet just three years later her head was off – and the reason for her death remains one of the great mysteries of English history. To this day, historians cannot agree why she had to die. Had Henry and Anne’s relationship gone into terminal decline, prompting Henry to invent the charges against his wife? Was Thomas Cromwell responsible for Anne’s demise? Or was she indeed guilty of the charges laid against her? Evidence is limited – but there is enough to appear to support several very different conclusions. A timeline of the days before Anne Boleyn's execution There are a number of undisputed facts relating to Anne’s fall. On Sunday 30 April 1536 Mark Smeaton, a musician from the queen’s household, was arrested; he was then interrogated at Cromwell’s house in Stepney. On the same evening the king postponed a trip with Anne to Calais, planned for 2 May. Read more | He was the court musician who condemned Anne Boleyn: but was Mark Smeaton telling the truth? The next day, 1 May, Smeaton was moved to the Tower. Henry attended the May Day jousts at Greenwich but left abruptly on horseback with a small group of intimates. These included Sir Henry Norris, a personal body servant and one of his closest fri…

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Katherine Parr: life of the week
type: item
date: 2024-07-23T11:45:25.000Z
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Tudor
subject: Life of the week (podcast series)
description: Elizabeth Norton considers the life and legacy of Katherine Parr, the Tudor queen who 'survived' Henry VIII – and why she deserves to be known for so much more
encoded: She was the most-married wife of England's most-married king, but there was so much more to Katherine Parr. Speaking to Kev Lochun, Tudor historian Elizabeth Norton explores the circumstances that brought the twice-widowed Katherine to the attention of Henry VIII, how she almost lost her head, and why her greatest legacy is not as a wife, but as an author and stepmother. View Green Video on the source website

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The women behind Henry VIII's queens
type: item
date: 2024-07-15T06:00:23.000Z
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Tudor
subject: Long reads (podcast series)
description: Nicola Clark unveils the lives of six ladies-in-waiting who witnessed the tumultuous Tudor court of Henry VIII
encoded: Banished. Exiled. Died. Widowed. Berated. Survived. The ladies-in-waiting to Henry VIII’s wives were serious political operators with unparalleled access to the royal inner sanctum. In this Long Read written by Nicola Clark, we reveal how six of the most influential navigated the vipers’ nest that was the Tudor court. HistoryExtra Long Reads brings you the best articles from BBC History Magazine, direct to your ears. Today’s feature originally appeared in the June 2024 issue, and has been voiced in partnership with the RNIB.

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Anne Boleyn: a modern woman?
type: item
date: 2024-07-04T04:34:04.000Z
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Tudor
subject: Henry VIII's wives
description: Estelle Paranque charts the biography – and betrayal – of Anne Boleyn, to offer a new perspective on the Tudor queen
encoded: Anne Boleyn is one the most famous queens in history, but what do we get wrong about Henry VIII's tragic second wife? Speaking to Lauren Good, historian Estelle Paranque sheds new light on this iconic Tudor queen by taking a look at the influences that shaped her. View Green Video on the source website

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All you need to know about Katherine Parr – the truth about the wife who 'survived'
type: item
date: 2024-06-14T15:45:23.000Z
creator: Derek Wilson
subject: Period
subject: Tudor
subject: British queens
subject: Henry VIII's wives
subject: Tudor kings and queens
description: The sixth and last wife of Henry VIII, Katherine Parr (1512–48) has gone down in history as the wife who 'survived'. But despite the common misconception that she was a middle-aged, pious 'frump', Katherine Parr was in fact the cleverest and most passionate of Henry VIII's six wives, says Derek Wilson
encoded: Of all the wives of Henry VIII, the one most often misunderstood, if not largely ignored, is Katherine Parr. Her story, as usually told – when told at all – lacks the romance of 'sex-bombs' Anne Boleyn or Catherine Howard; the heroic fortitude of Catherine of Aragon; the political intrigue surrounding the lives of Jane Seymour and Anne of Cleves. Wife number six is famous for 'surviving'. She was the twice-widowed, matronly bluestocking who patiently, submissively (and boringly?) tended the sick, aged, irascible king through the painful last years of his life and then disappeared from the 'front page' of history. The truth, however, is much more complicated. For my money Katherine was the cleverest, most devout and – yes – passionate of Henry VIII's bedfellows. Who was Katherine Parr? In 1543 when Henry proposed, Katherine was no middle-aged frump. She was probably 30 years of age, had been born into a courtier family and held a place in Tudor high society. She loved fine clothes, jewels and intelligent company. She was in many ways an excellent choice to be England's 'first lady' – or so the king thought, and he was, by now well experienced in such matters. Katherine also had about her the radiance of a woman in love – more of that anon. For the moment let us try to gain a clear impression of the woman who was coming to terms with a royal offer of marriage. Why was Katherine Parr chosen by Henry VIII? The first point to note is that Katherine Parr, aka Lady Latimer, was Henry's choice. Former spouses had been urged upon the king by politicians, diplomats and ambitious aristocratic clans: the Howards, the Boleyns, the Seymours and Thomas Cromwell had dangled their candidates before Henry and each had their own agendas. But there is no evidence of any faction pushing the recently widowed Katherine into the king's presence. Indeed, the common view in elite circles seems to have been that Henry would not risk a sixth disappointment. Then there is the issue of sex. Ever…

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The wife who not only survived, but thrived: why Tudor queen Katherine Parr was a firebrand
type: item
date: 2024-06-14T15:21:15.000Z
creator: Lauren Mackay
subject: Period
subject: Tudor
description: Wife number six, Katherine Parr, has long been cast as the queen who nursed an ailing Henry VIII through his final years. Yet, argues Lauren Mackay, there was a lot more to this scholar, role model and passionate religious reformer than that
encoded: During late summer 1544, Katherine Parr, sixth and final wife of Henry VIII, wrote a letter to her husband. Imbued with passion, love and a profound sense of duty, each line of Katherine’s missive is a testament to her devotion to the king. “Thus love maketh me in all things to set apart mine own convenience and pleasure, and to embrace most joyfully his will and pleasure whom I love,” Katherine declared. “God, the knower of secrets, can judge these words not to be written only with ink, but most truly impressed on the heart.” Henry received the letter while laying siege to the town of Boulogne, during what would be his final military campaign in France. Here was a leader embroiled in the great affairs of state. Yet so, too, was his queen. For, in his absence, Henry had appointed Katherine regent of England, an honour he had only bestowed on one of his previous five wives, Catherine of Aragon, decades earlier. Born in 1512, Katherine could not claim a royal upbringing, but she carried out her role of queen consort (1543–47) to perfection. She was a devoted wife, a loving stepmother, a unifier and a role model. Above all, as the responsibility she was given in the summer of 1544 demonstrates, she wielded influence – and commanded the respect of the king. Beneath her royal mantle of dutiful wife, she was a fiercely spiritual woman, of passionate religious and personal convictions. However, Katherine has not captured our imagination to the same degree as Henry’s first two queens, Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn. Historian Susan James argues that Katherine has been marginalised primarily due to a lack of research into her life, as well as our lack of understanding of her role in the politics of Henry’s final years. Perhaps it is also a question of timing. The dramatic personal, political and religious events that engulfed the first three tumultuous decades of Henry’s reign shaped our view of the era for centuries to come, leaving little interest in the later part of…

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Anne Boleyn: your guide to the life and death of Henry VIII's second queen – plus 11 little-known facts
type: item
date: 2024-03-19T15:30:00.000Z
subject: Period
subject: Tudor
subject: British queens
subject: Evergreen
subject: Tudor kings and queens
description: Anne Boleyn is the most famous of Henry VIII's six wives, queen of England from 1533 to 1536. Did you know that she nearly died of the sweating sickness, and was the second cousin of Jane Seymour, who became the king's third wife after Anne Boleyn's execution? Dr Elizabeth Norton brings you a guide to life of the Tudor consort, plus 11 facts surprising…
encoded: Anne Boleyn was born around 1501, in Norfolk, to Sir Thomas Boleyn and his wife, Elizabeth Howard, daughter of the Duke of Norfolk. She was the second of three surviving children. Boleyn is known to history as the second wife and queen of King Henry VIII, who broke from Rome and created the Church of England in order to divorce his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, and marry Boleyn. They went on to marry in secret on 25 January 1533. Boleyn was the mother of Elizabeth I, the second daughter of the Tudor king. She reigned between 1533-36, before being arrested for adultery and incest, taken to the Tower of London and later executed on 19 May 1536 at Tower Green. She was succeeded by Jane Seymour, Henry VIII’s third wife. Read more | Who were Henry VIII’s six wives? Your guide to the Tudor king's queen consorts Timeline: The rise and fall of Anne Boleyn Written by Professor Suzannah Lipscomb 1501 (or possibly 1507): Anne Boleyn's birth Anne is born at Blickling, Norfolk, to Thomas Boleyn and his wife, Elizabeth (daughter of Thomas Howard, later second Duke of Norfolk). Historians debate whether Anne was born in 1501 or 1507; the former is more plausible 1513: The first post Anne is appointed a maid-of-honour at the court of Margaret, archduchess of Austria; she later leaves to serve Mary, queen of France, wife of Louis XII (and Henry VIII’s sister). After Louis’ death, Anne remains at the court of the new French queen, Claude, for seven years 1521: The repatriation Anne is recalled to England by her father 1 March 1522: The court appearance Anne makes her first recorded appearance at Henry VIII’s court, playing the part of Perseverance in a Shrove Tuesday pageant. At that time, Henry was having an affair with Anne’s sister, Mary c1526: The object of love Henry VIII falls in love with Anne. A letter from him, dated to 1527, states that for more than one year Henry had been “struck by the dart of love” and asks Anne to “give herself body and heart to him” 1532/33: The ro…

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From service to survival: what happened to the households of Henry VIII’s six wives?
type: item
date: 2023-06-09T15:34:21.000Z
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Tudor
subject: Henry VIII's wives
subject: Tudor kings and queens
description: The fates of the six wives of Henry VIII are well known, but what happened to the households of these queens when their mistress was divorced, beheaded, or had died in the midst of their service? James Taffe explores how the king’s marital instability impacted the lives and careers of the men and women who served each of his queens
encoded: When, in 1527, King Henry VIII began seeking an annulment from his marriage to his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, it would have far-reaching political, diplomatic and religious repercussions, resulting in England’s schism with the Catholic Church. Catherine herself was banished from court and refused permission to see her daughter, Mary, before her death in 1536. But the separation also had severe consequences for the former queen’s household. The king reportedly “felt himself so much aggrieved at the expense of her allowance”, that “he would not defray her expenses, nor the wages of her servants”. The household was banished along with Catherine, ostracised from king and court, meaning that her servants could no longer hope to gain from the nonmonetary perquisites and rewards accrued in royal service. Richard Wood, Catherine’s page, is said to have “sustained great losses without recompense”. Read more | Catherine of Aragon: Henry's greatest queen The queen’s servants must have feared that their careers were all but over, and few men and women now aspired to serve her. Thomas, Lord Vaux, who had been dispatched by Henry to administer Catherine’s household, remarked in 1533 that he would “rather die in some other of the King’s service than continue here much longer”. Sir Richard Baker refused such an appointment, as he was “loath now to serve anybody but the King” and “hath rather chosen to abide his fortune and so trust unto the King’s gracious goodness than to serve” Catherine. A queen’s household – established before or shortly after she married the king – would be swiftly discharged when she no longer wore the crown. For those who rallied behind Henry’s queens when they had fallen out of favour, they risked incurring the king’s wrath. Both María de Salinas, Lady Willoughby, whom Catherine loved “more than any other mortal”, and Elizabeth Stafford, Duchess of Norfolk, who “spoke too freely, and declared herself more than they liked for the Queen”, were discharge…

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