Timeline - Overview

The Tudor dynasty was one of strong personalities and strong leadership; Henry VIII and his daughter Elizabeth I remain two of Britain’s most famous monarchs. The period over which they reigned was one of huge change: the artistic Renaissance swept across England; explorers discovered a New world and the Protestant Reformation shook the old world to the core.

Reformation

The six wives of Henry VII have become a comic diversion for school history lessons but the king’s desperate need for a male heir to maintain the line of succession and prevent another civil war, led him to make one of the most decisive ruptures in English history. After two decades of marriage with no living male issue, Henry petitioned the Pope for a divorce so that he could separate from his post-menopausal wife and marry anew to someone younger and more fertile. When the Pope refused, Henry VIII broke with the Roman Catholic Church and declared himself head of the new Protestant Church of England. At this time, a wave of Protestantism, which began with Martin Luther nailing his 95 Theses to a church door, was sweeping across Europe. The divide between the two faiths was viewed as more than a matter of life and death as religious denomination determined whether the eternal afterlife was one of damnation or resurrection. To Henry VIII however, the Reformation was inspired by pragmatic rather than ideological motives; the break with Rome and the sacking of the monasteries were moves calculated to increase his economic and political clout. To the end of his life Henry remained a Catholic however his descendants and the rest of the country were deeply divided by their faith. Protestants and Catholics treated each other with suspicion for generations and, to this day, the heir to the British throne is forbidden to marry a Roman Catholic.

The Golden Age

The period of English history presided over by Elizabeth I is often seen as a golden age. After the destruction of the War of the Roses and the upheaval of the Reformation, the short-lived reign of her half-brother Edward V and the unpopular rule of her Catholic half-sister ‘Bloody’ Mary, Elizabeth I provided a stable and largely prosperous respite.
Like her father Henry VIII, Queen Elizabeth was a charismatic leader, however unlike her father and the Stuart kings who followed her, Elizabeth could be pragmatic and restrained; despite her commitment to maintain the Protestant religion which made had made her the legal heir to the throne, she resolved not to ‘look into the hearts’ of her subjects and so ended the campaign of religious persecution which had led Mary I to burn Protestants at the stake. The Queen’s religious tolerance and economic restraint gave rise to a period of stability that allowed the arts to flourish and so it was under the reign of Elizabeth that the Renaissance finally took hold in England.

backward to Middle Ages

forward to the Renaissance

 

Contemporary literature from the period

Philippa Gregory's series of Tudor novels

 

Film set in the period