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Introduces Bosworth Field and explains the unstable political background that allowed the Tudors to rise. It traces the collapse of Plantagenet authority and the civil wars that created an opening for Henry Tudor.
On the 22nd of August 1485, two armies met at Bosworth Field in the English Midlands.One led by King Richard III and the other by Henry Tuda.By the end of the day, Richard was dead and Henry had been proclaimed as King Henry VIIth of England.This was the latest dramatic shift in the Wars of the Roses that had been raging for 30 years.But Henry's ascent was different.Ultimately, he became one of England's greatest kings.Who were the Tudtor?And how did this halfwelsh family rise from obscurity to become England's royal family?This is the story of the House of Tuda.
England's history is full of improbable dynasties.In 1714, for example, a 54year-old man from northern Germany who couldn't speak English succeeded as ruler of Great Britain.King George I founded the Hannavverian dynasty.William the Conqueror became King William I in 1066 on the basis of a very loose claim to the throne.He was the descendant of a Norse warlord who had coerced the king of France into giving him a piece of northern France if he would stop attacking the city of Paris.The Tudtor followed in this line of improbable English ruling dynasties.But in order for a family with little claim to the throne to actually seize the crown, there had to be a period of instability and a lack of alternative candidates with better claims in blood.15th century England produced this kind of unstable environment.On the surface, the royal house of Plantaginet had been secure in its control over England in the 14th century.
The long reigning king Edward III had lots of healthy sons and they had a growing number of children as well by the time Edward died in 1377.Nonetheless, his grandson who succeeded him, King Richard II, ended up displaying an autocratic streak which the nobles of the realm were unwilling to tolerate.His first cousin, Henry Bowlingbrook, deposed Richard in a brief rebellion in 1399 and secured the throne for the Lancastrian faction of the House of Plantaginet as King Henry IVth.He and his son Henry V ruled relatively successfully until 1422.But Henry V's premature death left his infant child on the throne as King Henry V 6th.He grew up to be psychologically unstable and suffered a mental collapse in August 1453.This in turn set off a series of events which led to the Wars of the Roses that led to the Yorkist contender for the throne becoming King Edward IV in 1461.
He ruled down to 1483 with the exception of a brief window in 1470 and 1471 when the Lancastrians reclaimed the throne temporarily.The Tudtor became a surprisingly important family as a consequence of these civil wars.
Explains the Tudor family’s Welsh roots and how they adapted to English rule over generations. It follows Owen Tudor’s marriage to Catherine of Valois and the birth of Edmund and Jasper, who became central to the dynasty’s future.
Royal donastic history in Europe is based on paternal lines.That means that in tracing the origins of a royal family, we have to go back to find the male ancestor.On the male side, the Tudtor were essentially a Welsh family.The first prominent individual amongst them was Edna Vidvan Appreg.He served in the 1230s and 1240s as Senell to two kings of Gwyneith, a kingdom covering the northern part of Wales.A senell was a Norman French title which meant the steward of a household.But it evolved over time to mean different things in England, Wales, and Ireland.In 13th century Wales, it meant that Ednavid served as chief minister to King Slewellin Abureworth and King David Abslewellin.Ednavid's son, grandson, and greatgrandson all carried the personal name Tedr and built up a strong power base around Penman in the Anglesy region of North Wales.Wales was more comprehensively conquered in the late 13th century by King Edward I of England and as the country was anglicized, members of the family adapted the personal name Tuda and began using it as their new surname.
They also conformed outwardly to English rule in the 14th century, though their Welsh identity remained intact underneath the surface.When the Welsh prince Oangur led a rebellion against English rule in Wales between 1400 and 1415, the Tudtor joined with him.This means that King Henry VIIth's great-grandfather Meredith Aptid and his brothers were open rebels against the English crown at the start of the 15th century.A fact that the Tudtor were anxious to cover up when they later became the ruling family of England.
Owen Tuda, the son of Meredith Aptid, was born in the final years of the 14th century.He therefore grew up against the backdrop of the great rebellion in Wales.Surprisingly, little else is known about his youth.Instead, he bursts onto the historical record in the 1420s.Evidently, he conformed quickly to English rule after the Welsh rebellion was defeated and became an English courtier.At some point in the mid-420s, he began a relationship with Katherine of the widow of King Henry V and the mother of the infant King Henry V 6th.They married at an unspecified date, most likely in 1428 or thereabout.This was considered scandalous at the time.Customs stipulated that Queen Daajers were not to remarry after a king died.But Catherine was a 20-year-old woman when her first husband died and she decided to remarry.She and Owen had six children together before Catherine died in 1437.
Of these, the two important ones were Edmund, born around 1430, and Jasper, born late in 1431.Edmund was the father of King Henry VIIIth and thus the father of the Tuda dynasty.while Jasper would play a critical role in the rise to power of his nephew.
Describes how Edmund’s marriage to Margaret Beaufort gave Henry Tudor a dynastic claim through the Lancastrian line. It then follows Henry’s childhood, exile in Brittany, and eventual victory over Richard III at Bosworth.
As Edmund and Jasper grew up, they became more prominent at the English court due to being the half-brothers of King Henry V 6th.This by itself did not give them a claim to the throne as they had no blood ties to King Henry V and his predecessors.Instead, the tutors acquired their claim to the throne via Edmund's marriage to Margaret Bowfort in 1455.Margaret was the daughter of John Bowurt, first Duke of Somerset.He was a grandson of John of Gaunt, the Duke of Lancaster, claimement to the Kingdom of Castile in Spain, and crucially a son of King Edward III, who had ruled England between 1327 and 1377.This meant that any son of Edmund Tuda and Margaret Bowfort's marriage would be a great great great grandson of King Edward III on Margaret's side.There was only one son to take up that claim.The future King Henry VIIIth was born on the 28th of January 1457 in Pemrook Castle in Wales.
He would never know his father on any level.Edmund Tuda had already died 3 months earlier on the 3rd of November 1456 from the bubonic plague while imprisoned by the Yorkists during the first phase of the Wars of the Roses.As half brothers of King Henry V 6th, the Tuda brothers had become supporters of the Lancastrian cause.When King Edward IV secured the throne for the Yorkists in 1461, Jasper Tuda fled into exile in France.He spent many years there while his nephew was raised in England.He rejoined the Lancastrian cause in 1470 when Henry V 6th was briefly restored to the throne.When the Yorkists reclaimed the crown the following year, Jasper once again left for France.This time his nephew, who was entering his teenage years, joined him.They lived in Britany for years to come, often having to fight off efforts to have them sent to England to remove them as a threat to the Yorkists.
Meanwhile, Henry's mother, Margaret, who married four times in all, remained in England, quietly considering how to press her son's claim to the throne, should the opportunity ever arise.
The death of Edward IVth in 1483 and the usurpation of the throne by his brother Richard III provided the window of opportunity for Henry Tuda to become king of England.Richard was disliked for the manner in which he had treated his brother's family and resistance to him as king escalated in 1484 and 1485.Henry became a source of intrigue in France and by 1485 he and Jasper had a large number of troops ready to cross to Britain and challenge Richard.A previous invasion attempt in 1483 was poorly planned and was foiled by bad weather during the crossing of the English Channel.There was no repeat of these mistakes in 1485.The Tudtor and their supporters landed in southern Wales in early August and then progressed north.They met Richard III in combat at the Battle of Bosworth Field in the English Midlands on the 22nd of August 1485.
Richard was killed in the fighting and Henry was proclaimed as King Henry IIth of England.Although he faced numerous rebellions from pretenders like Perkin Warbeck and Lambert Simnel in the late 1480s and 1490s, Henry ultimately managed to stabilize the political and military situation and brought the wars of the roses to an end inpart by marrying Elizabeth of York, the daughter of King Edward IVth, thus uniting the Lancastrian and Yorkist lines into the new House of Tuda.
Covers Henry VII’s efforts to stabilize his new reign through marriage alliances and careful succession planning. It also introduces the early tensions that would later drive Henry VIII’s break with Rome.
Henry VIIth was a shrewd political leader and was determined to cement his family in power in the long term.After all, there had been periods of peace during the long-running turmoil of the 15th century in England only for a monarch to be overthrown.To make the Tudtor more secure, Henry organized several donastic alliances.For instance, he married his eldest daughter Margaret to King James IVth of Scotland.The Scots had played a major role in the Wars of the Roses, and Henry wanted to prevent the ruling House of Stewart there from undermining his family's position by forming a donastic alliance.Equally important was the marriage of Henry's eldest son and heir, Prince Arthur, to Catherine of Araggon in November 1501, when Arthur was only 15 years old.The goal was for Arthur and Catherine to have children as quickly as possible and further cement the line of succession.
Unfortunately though, Arthur died 4 months after the marriage, perhaps from tuberculosis or the mysterious sweating sickness that was affecting England in that era.Unperturbed, Henry VIIIth contacted Catherine's parents in Spain and proposed that she would simply marry his next son and heir, Prince Henry.However, a dispute arose over Catherine's diary and various other elements of the arrangement.In the end, it was not until June 1509 that Henry and Catherine were married.He had ascended as King Henry VIII of England 6 weeks earlier.
The first half of Henry VIII's reign was very different from what followed it in the second half.In the 1510s and for most of the 1520s, Henry was perceived as an amiable and energetic monarch.His primary concerns were medieval pursuits like jousting, hunting, and waging war against France.He also began a family with Catherine.She became pregnant numerous times, and a healthy daughter, the future Queen Mary, was born on the 18th of February, 1516.There was no son yet, but Henry and Catherine were still relatively young, and there was time for a male heir.In the interim, Henry went to war on multiple occasions with France, often allying with Spain.He primarily viewed these conflicts as a means of reigniting the H 100red Years War, but he never managed to reconquer any major territory from King Francis I of France.Beyond this, Henry was happy to delegate enormous power to his chief minister, Cardinal Thomas Woolsey, the Archbishop of York.
Still, there were already signs of Henry's more ruthless streak.In 1521, he had Edward Stafford, third Duke of Buckingham, the most senior noble of the realm and a potential claimant to the throne, executed after he was found guilty of plotting Henry's overthrow.It is possible that Buckingham was plotting against the Tudtor, but it is more likely that mere suspicions had triggered Henry into moving against Buckingham.
By the 1520s, there was increasing concern about the succession.Katherine of Aragan was 5 years older than Henry VIII.She turned 40 years of age in 1525.Moreover, while she had given birth to one healthy daughter, Catherine had suffered several miscarriages and still births in the 1510s.By the start of the 1520s, it was increasingly unlikely that she would ever give birth to a healthy baby boy.While female succession was not prohibited in England, in contrast to kingdoms like France, however, Henry clearly did not favor the idea of Mary succeeding him.The Tuda dynasty's hold on England remained comparatively tenuous and on the sole occasion that a king of England had tried to have his daughter succeeded him, it had resulted in a lengthy civil war.This was when King Henry I died in 1035 and the English nobles refused to accept his daughter Matilda as queen, triggering the conflict known as the anarchy that lasted for the better part of two decades.
On top of this precarious succession issue, Henry became smitten with Anne Berlin, the daughter of an English diplomat and government minister, Thomas Berlin.By 1527, Henry was indicating that he wanted to divorce Catherine and marry Anne.The argument that was developed was that Catherine had consumated her marriage to Arthur back in 1501 and that it had therefore been unacceptable under church law for Henry to marry his own sister-in-law.The problem was that Rome had been captured by the Spanish that same year, and Pope Clement IIIth was in no position to grant Henry his wish.The king's great matter, as the obtaining of his divorce became known, dominated English politics for the next 6 years.It led to Woolseie's fall from power in 1529 and the rise of his proteéé, Thomas Cromwell.
Explains Cromwell’s rise, Henry VIII’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon, and the creation of the Church of England. It also covers Anne Boleyn’s execution, Jane Seymour’s marriage, and the first major phase of religious reform.
Cromwell's religious views remain an enigma.He plausibly still considered himself to be an adherent of the universal western Christian church down to his death in 1540.But there is no doubt that he leaned towards some of the reformist views of the Protestants who had multiplied from 1517 onwards as the religious schism started by Martin Luther in Germany spread around Europe under the influence ofCromwell and the future Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer.Henry was convinced that he could obtain his divorce from Catherine by splitting from Rome's authority and proclaiming himself as the new supreme head of the Church of England.He could then grant himself a divorce and marry Anne.All things which he did in 1533.She gave birth to a child later that year, but much to Henry's dismay, it was another girl.They named her Elizabeth and would never give birth to a son.
In response, Henry, who was now prone to mood swings after suffering a severe injury due to a jousting accident in January 1536, appears to have had salacious allegations concocted about her being engaged in adultery at court.Though it remains impossible to determine if these claims were accurate or not 500 years later, Anne was tried and executed on the 19th of May 1536.Henry married Jane Seymour 11 days later.On the 12th of October 1537, she finally gave birth to the healthy, legitimate baby boy that Henry had waited so long for.They named him Edward.
While Henry was cycling through wives in the mid 1530s, the politicians and churchmen who had orchestrated the act of supremacy that had made him supreme head of the church of England in 1534 were busy at work initiating thefirst stages of the English Reformation.Henry was a doctrinal Roman Catholic until the day he died.But reformers like Cranmer had acquired a strong enough position in the mid 1530s that they were able to introduce a number of changes to the church along Protestant lines.These attempted to root out superstition and corruption.Then in a more aggressive move they began dissolving England's monasteries, convents and abbies.Collectively, these religious houses constituted the single biggest landholder in England, and 2% of all adult males in England were in religious orders.These monasteries, convents, and abbies were now dissolved, and their enormous wealth and land was transferred to the crown.
The measures were violently opposed.In October 1536, a popular rebellion known as the pilgrimage of grace began across northern England.It was crushed violently by the spring of 1537, though the pace of religious reform slowed considerably in its wake and there was a conservative backlash in the 1540s.
Describes Henry VIII’s later marriages, the expansion into Ireland, and renewed war with France and Scotland. It then shifts to Edward VI’s minority, Protestant reforms, and the unrest that weakened Somerset’s government.
After Jane Seymour's death, a diplomatic alliance with the German Protestant princes was sealed through a marriage between Henry and Anne of Cleves.However, Henry ordered that marriage to be enulled almost immediately as the politics of the royal court shifted towards a conservative reaction against the religious reforms of the 1530s.Thomas Cromwell was overthrown and executed and the Duke of Norfolk rose to prominence again.Henry took the Duke's niece, Katherine Howard, as his fifth wife, who was executed before long after allegations of infidelity emerged.Then Henry married his final wife, Catherine P, to whom he remained married for the rest of his life.The final years of his reign in the 1540s involved the backlash against the Protestant Reformation.While in Ireland, a more aggressive approach to expanding the small colony around Dublin was adopted.In 1541, an act for the kingly title was passed by the Irish Parliament, elevating Henry to become king of Ireland.
All of his predecessors since the 12th century had carried the lesser title of Lord of Ireland.A protracted policy of regional conquest and colonization was adopted in Ireland in tandem.Meanwhile, Henry launched a fresh war against the French and Scots in 1542.In France, he squandered the windfall from the dissolution of the monasteries to secure control over the town of Bolognia, which was handed back to the French in 1550.While the war with the Scots evolved into the rough wooing after the death of King James V in December 1542 and the succession of his one weekek old daughter Mary, Queen of Scots, the rough wooing was a campaignwhereby Henry sought to coersse the Scottish into sanctioning the marriage of Mary and Edward.The idea being that Scotland would be absorbed into England through this donastic marriage.The Scots resisted the proposal with French support and the war was still underway when Henry died on the 28th of January 1547 at 55 years of age.
Henry VIII was succeeded by 9-year-old King Edward V 6th.The senior politicians of England would have been apprehensive about this.On every occasion that a king had succeeded while still a child in England for hundreds of years, conflict had ensued.Edward V had been overthrown by his uncle.Richard II had faced multiple rebellions and was overthrown in 1399.There was a lot of unrest as well during Edward V 6th minority.His uncle Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, became Lord Protector of the realm in February 1547 and ruled England on Edward's behalf for the next 2 and 1/2 years.After this, John Dudley, Duke of Northland, became the new head of government.Both Somerset and Northumberland pursued a policy of adopting Protestantism.Unlike with the reign of Henry VIII, this was a more puritanical form of Protestantism.Cranmer was now able to oversee a more dramatic shift in the theology of the Church of England, issuing the Book of Common Prayer in 1549 as a reformed liturgy.
While churches were stripped of their ostentation and anything that could be deemed to be iconography, a host of additional reforms surrounding clerical marriage and the sacraments were instituted, too.The English people were still broadly Catholic at the time and Somerset faced immense opposition in the summer of 1549 as a result of these reforms.Most notably the Prayerbook Rebellion in the West Country and Ket's rebellion in Norfolk.This unrest along with a failure to defeat Scotland and the war which Somerset's government had inherited from Henry VIII led to Somerset's overthrow in October 1549.
Covers Edward VI’s final illness, the failed attempt to install Lady Jane Grey, and Mary I’s accession. It then explains Mary’s Catholic restoration, her marriage to Philip II, and the succession of Elizabeth I.
By the start of 1553, the day was nearing when Edward would be old enough to rule England himself.He turned 15 years of age in October 1552.Fortunately for Northumberland, Cranmer and others who wanted to further the new Protestant settlement.Edward was a Protestant, having been raised and educated by reformed Protestant tutors.If he had survived and ruled England for decades, then the country would not only have continued on as a Protestant country, but would have become a Calvinist or puritanical one.That didn't happen, though.Edward became very ill at the start of 1553 with most likely tuberculosis, though it could have been a multiffactorial illness.He briefly recovered in the spring before deteriorating again and dying on the 6th of July 1553.Northumberland and other Protestant lords and courtiers had prepared for this.Henry VIII's will had laid out the succession in such a way that Mary would now become queen as his eldest surviving legitimate daughter while Elizabeth was next in line.
The problem was that Mary was a staunch Roman Catholic and there would be a severe backlash against the Edwardian Reformation if she came to the throne.North umberland consequently organized it with the aid of King Edward to alter the succession so that Jane Gray, a royal cousin, would succeed him with the argument being that neither Mary nor Elizabeth were legitimate heirs.To try to cement the attempted royal coup, North Thumberland organized for Jane to marry his son, Guilford.However, the plot failed.Mary gathered her supporters as soon as Northland tried to execute his plan, and she removed Jane from her place as pretender.After 9 days, Northland was executed and Jane was also later killed after a separate rebellion against the government led by Thomas Wyatt in early 1554.
Mary Tuda has become almost a caricature in the popular perception of early modern England.Bloody Mary, the queen who violently tried to reimpose Catholicism across the country and who burned huge numbers of people at the stake to try to achieve her purpose.The reality is different.Mary did reimpose Catholicism, but the vast majority of people in England were still Catholics anyway when she became queen in 1553.Many people viewed her as a savior after the religious changes of Edward's reign.She also did not hand complete power over the church back to Rome.Instead, she maintained some of the powers her father had acquired in the 1530s.She also made no effort to undo the dissolution of the monasteries.She sanctioned the burning at the stake of about 287 people across her reign.But this was not unusual by the standards of the European Wars of Religion.
What was much more controversial was her decision to marry her Spanish cousin, the future King Philip II of Spain, and to make him her co-ruler in 1554.This created the fear that England would end up becoming a vassel of the Spanish Empire.For this reason, some observers were glad that Mary and Philip's marriage did not produce children before she died on the 17th of November 1558.An event which led to her halfsister Elizabeth, the daughter of Anne Berlin, becoming queen of England.
Elizabeth's accession led to the fourth bout of religious changes in a quarter of a century.In the course of 1559 and 1560, royal proclamations and parliamentary acts established the Elizabeth Religious Settlement.This established the Church of England and Anglicanism as a very moderate form of Protestantism.Many of the teachings of Martin Luther were adopted as the doctrine of the church and the superstition of the pre-reformation Catholic Church was done away with.However, Elizabeth liked the pageantry of the old religious ways and was certainly not as radical in her religious outlook as the reformers of Edward's reign.Thus, churches were allowed to keep their ornate interiors, although the issue of things like the decoration on clerical vestments was something which arose repeatedly in Parliament throughout her 45-year reign.A cohort of more radical Protestants also emerged across England known as the Puritans.They would play a role in the history of both the English Civil Wars and the colonization of North America.
As it was groups of these Puritans that headed across the Atlantic and settled in New England from the arrival of the Mayflower there in 1620 onwards.
The biggest issue of Elizabeth's reign early on was the topic of her marriage.She was already in her mid20s when she became queen and it was imperative for her to marry and have children to secure the dynasty.Unfortunately, Elizabeth did either.Although a string of different suitors were considered throughout the 1560s and 1570s, she never married.This created a grave problem for her leading ministers like William Ceell, Lord Burley and Sir Francis Walssingham who were committed Protestants.They did not want a Catholic to succeed Elizabeth and potentially restore Catholicism as Mary had.One of the foremost claimments to the throne in the event of Elizabeth's early death was Mary, Queen of Scots, the daughter of King James V of Scotland.After being deposed in 1567 for incendurary behavior in Scotland in favor of her infant son, King James V 6th, Mary fled south to England.
She spent 19 years there under house detention in various castles in the north of the country, posing a constant security threat to the Protestant regime from the perspective of Elizabeth's ministers.It was only early in 1587 that they convinced Elizabeth to order her execution after they uncovered Mary's complicity in a Catholic conspiracy against Elizabeth and the Protestant establishment.
Shows how Tudor exploration and privateering laid groundwork for later empire, even before England had major colonies. It also covers the Anglo-Spanish War, the Irish conflict, and the costly end of the war at Kinsale.
Of all the strange elements of the 118 years that the Tudas ruled over England, the most unusual of all must be their role in the formation of the British Empire.Traditionally, the Tuda monarchs, especially Elizabeth I, are viewed as having laid down the roots of a future empire.But the peculiar thing about this is that at the end of the TUDA era in6003, England did not have a single functioning colony in the Americas, Africa, or Asia.The first permanent colony in North America was only established at Jamestown in6007.How can this anomaly between perception and reality be explained?A huge amount of the groundwork for the future empire was undertaken by the Tudtoris.An English expedition led by the Italian navigator John Kat was the first confirmed European expedition to make contact with North America since the Vikings 500 years earlier when it reached Canada in 1497.
The Muskavee Company was set up in the 1550s and launched expeditions to try to find the Northeast Passage over Russia to the Far East.Similar ventures to locate the Northwest Passage over Canada to the Pacific Ocean were led by English explorers like Martin Frobisher and Humphrey Gilbert in the 1570s.They didn't find the passage.It was impossible to do so in all practical senses in the 16th century, but they did map a large part of the eastern seabboard of North America in the process.Armed with this knowledge, Walter Raleigh organized the establishment of a colony at Rowanoke in the mid 1580s in what he called Virginia, yet which is actually a part of North Carolina today.The colonists vanished under mysterious circumstances a few years later.However, again, a lot of useful information was gathered to prepare the groundwork for 17th century English colonial activity.
Similarly, the circumnavigation of the globe by the English privateeer Francis Drake between 1577 and 1580 paved the way for the English East India Company to begin its operations in India and Asia under the Steuarts.Without the preparatory work financed by Queen Elizabeth I in the 16th century, England's path to empire in the 17th would have been far slower.
A lot of this overseas activity has to also be seen in the context of England's developing conflict with Spain during Elizabeth's reign.Philip II of Spain had briefly been king of England between 1554 and 1558 and was immensely displeased when his former sister-in-law pulled England back into the Protestant camp after she became queen.Relations between Spain and England declined thereafter.Drake's circumnavigation and his plundering of Spain's colonies in the Americas on the way to Asia was a factor.But the real spark that led to the outbreak of the Anglo Spanish War in 1585, was England's military and financial support for the Dutch Republic, a state that had broken away from Spanish rule in the late 1560s, inpart over religious conflict.The war between England and Spain is famous for the Spanish Armada of 1588 that was scattered by a storm after reaching the English Channel.
However, this was only one of numerous Armadas and counter Armadas during a war that lasted 19 years.The most successful ones were actually launched by England, notably the English capture of the Spanish city of Kadis in the summer of 1596 by Robert Dero, second Earl of Essex.
The Anglo Spanish war reached its conclusion not in England or in Spain, but around a small port town called Kinsale on the southern coast of Ireland at Christmas 16001.The conquest of Ireland had progressed in fits and starts since the 1540s when Elizabeth's father was declared to be the first English king of Ireland by act of parliament.For instance, a plantation was undertaken in the Irish Midlands in the 1550s, but it descended into a long and costly guerrilla war with the local Okconors and Omore.This made Elizabeth wary of Irish entanglements and she tried to rule the country in a cheap manner through a program of administrative assimilation that would coers the broadly independent Irish lords into accepting English rule.Unfortunately, this policy approach didn't work.The Irish reacted against it and Elizabeth's reign was characterized there by frequent rebellions which then necessitated costly military interventions followed by state organized plantations.
In 1593, the biggest war of the Tuda era commenced in Olter when Hugh O'Neal, Earl of Terrone, began a war against the English crown.By the end of the 1590s, it had spread countrywide and England was in genuine danger of losing control of the island entirely.It was at this juncture that King Philip III agreed to send a long promised armada to Ireland.It landed on the south of the island in the late autumn of6001.O'Neal and his allies then marched south to join up with the Spanish who had occupied the town of Kinsale.But the English military commander Charles Blount, Lord Mount Choi, made it to Kinsale before the Irish and prevented the two forces from uniting.Having defeated the Irish and Spanish at the battle of Kinsale at Christmas 16001, Mount Joy engaged in a scorched earth campaign which forced O'Neal into surrendering in March6003.
Negotiations to end the war were already underway with the Spanish by then.Under the terms of the Treaty of London of6004, both sides agreed to return to the status quo from before the war.Neither made any concessions or lost any lands, but they had both squandered vast sums of money over the course of a 19-year war.
Follows the Earl of Essex’s rebellion, Elizabeth’s final years, and the smooth-looking but uncertain succession to James VI and I. It concludes by assessing the Tudors as a comparatively peaceful dynasty that helped set England on the path to empire.
The war in Ireland led to the last major rebellion of the Tuda era.It came from a truly unexpected source.Robert Devo, second Earl of Essex, had emerged in the 1590s as England's most vocal leader in the war against Spain.He was opposed by the Ceils, William and his son Robert, who were more pragmatic and wanted to end the war to stop the drain on England's finances.Essex had the added advantage of being a court favorite of Elizabeth, one of a series of men whom she showered favor on during her reign and who had an especially close relationship with her.He replaced Walter Raleigh in this respect in the 1590s.Essex reached the peak of his powers with the Kadis expedition of 1596.Then he dithered and Robert Ceil outflanked him.In 1599, Essex headed to Ireland to oversee the campaign there, believing that if he could end the rebellion, he would be confirmed as the preeeminent political figure in English politics.
Instead, he met with O'Neal in secret before returning with permission to England.When he did so, Elizabeth dismissed him from court and he was stripped of his privileges.In February6001, he rebelled in desperation, but it was a botched semi coup that ended in him being arrested and executed.
By the time Essex launched his terribly planned rebellion, which was really more of a misjudged act of protest, Elizabeth was an elderly woman heading into her late60s.She was prematurely aged as well from a decadesl long regimen of poisonous cosmetics filled with substances like mercury and arsenic.These accelerated her decline at the end.She was in poor health from the summer of6002 and died at 69 years of age on the 24th of March6003.In retrospect, it appears as though the succession was inevitable, that King James V 6th of Scotland of the House of Stewart was always going to succeed Elizabeth.His claim was by right of being the great great grandson of King Henry VIIth, whose daughter Margaret had married King James IV of Scotland back in 1503, exactly 100 years before Elizabeth died.From this perspective, it can look as though James was destined to become King James I of England in6003.
But there were other potential contenders, some of them linked to Roman Catholic dissident on the continent.Thus, while the House of Stuart came to power in England following the death of Elizabeth in6003, the first years of the new reign were marked by multiple conspiracies and plots to overthrow the new king.These included the buy and maine plots and the plan orchestrated by Guy Forks and others to try to blow up Parliament while James was opening the assembly in6005.Therefore, while the succession seems smooth in retrospect, the transition from the House of Tuda to the House of Stewart could plausibly have descended into religious civil war after Elizabeth died.Civil war would follow anyway across the three kingdoms in the 1640s.
The Tudtor ruled England for 118 years between 1485 and603.The most notable thing about that period of English history is that it was largely peaceful.This is not to say that the country did not have a considerable number of problems under the Tudtor.However, these were limited in scale, restricted to certain parts of the country and caused by specific issues.For instance, Henry VIIIth faced a few threats from the remnants of the Yorkists.Henry VIII created a huge amount of discontent through his split from Rome and the dissolution of the monasteries, which in turn threatened to spill over into a national revolt.Mary's reign was depicted afterwards as being a window of tudtor history in which a tyrannical queen persecuted her Protestant subjects.But this was a distortion of historical fact.Although Elizabeth's reign did involve many existential threats to the Protestant settlement.However, the Tudtor did not go through a period of national civil war.
There was nothing like the anarchy of the 12th century.the baronss wars of the 13th century between crown and aristocracy, the wars of the roses in the 15th century or the civil wars and glorious revolution of the 17th century.Tuda rule was comparatively peaceful for all the failings of Henry VIII, Mary I, and Elizabeth I.That period of relative peace allowed for England to set out on the path to becoming a prosperous trading and colonial power, one that was launched quickly on the path towards empire in the 17th century.The rule of the five tuda monarchs was chaotic at times, but compared with the violence that gripped France, Germany, the low countries, and Italy during the 16th century, they were a good dynasty to live under.
Wraps up with a brief call for viewer reflection on the Tudor legacy. The video ends with thanks and a final sign-off.
What do you think of the Tudtoris?Did this dynasty lay down the foundations of the subsequent British Empire?Or was the dynasty actually quite chaotic in its own ways?Please let us know in the comment section.And in the meantime, thank you very much for watching.
Booby hey everybody.