Who were the Tudors? Key figures of Tudor England

Who were the Tudors? The five monarchs in order

The Tudor dynasty began on 22 August 1485, when Henry Tudor beat Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth, ending the Wars of the Roses, and ended on 24 March 1603, when Elizabeth I died. There were five crowned Tudor monarchs:

Lady Jane Grey, Edward VI's Protestant cousin, was proclaimed queen for nine days in July 1553 before Mary took the throne; she was executed in 1554. What defined the Tudor century was religion. England began it Catholic, swung between Catholic and Protestant four times in thirty years, and ended it with a national Protestant church headed by the monarch. Around that sat a strong, centralising crown, a growing role for Parliament, printing, overseas voyages, and a court that used portraits, pageants and plays as propaganda.

Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn: the break with Rome

Henry VIII (1491 to 1547) was a second son who became heir when his brother Arthur died in 1502, and he married Arthur's widow, Catherine of Aragon, daughter of Isabella I of Castile. In 1521 he wrote, with help, a defence of the seven sacraments against Martin Luther, and the Pope named him Defender of the Faith. When Catherine gave him a daughter, Mary, but no surviving son, he argued from the Book of Leviticus that marrying his brother's widow had been a sin. The Pope would not annul the marriage, so Henry had Parliament cut England off from Rome: the Act of Supremacy of 1534 made him Supreme Head of the Church of England. Between 1536 and 1540 his minister Thomas Cromwell closed every monastery and the crown took their lands. Opponents died, among them Thomas More (1535), and Cromwell himself (1540).

Henry's six wives, in the order schoolchildren remember as “divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived”: Catherine of Aragon (marriage annulled 1533), Anne Boleyn (executed 1536), Jane Seymour (died 1537 after giving birth to Edward), Anne of Cleves (annulled 1540), Catherine Howard (executed 1542) and Catherine Parr (outlived him). Strictly, Henry never divorced anyone: he had marriages declared invalid.

Anne Boleyn (about 1501 to 1536; her birth year is disputed) was educated at the courts of Margaret of Austria in the Netherlands and Queen Claude in France. She refused to become Henry's mistress, and for about six years he pursued her; seventeen of his love letters to her survive in the Vatican Library. She owned William Tyndale's The Obedience of a Christian Man and showed it to Henry; the book argued that kings, not popes, should rule the church. They married in January 1533, and their daughter Elizabeth was born that September. In May 1536 she was tried for adultery, incest and treason and beheaded on 19 May; most historians think the charges were invented, though they disagree on whether Henry or Cromwell drove her fall.

Elizabeth I: the last Tudor

Elizabeth I (1533 to 1603) was declared illegitimate after her mother's execution and spent part of her sister Mary's reign under suspicion, held in the Tower of London in 1554. She became queen on 17 November 1558 at twenty-five. Her religious settlement of 1559 created a Protestant church with some traditional forms, broad enough that many people could conform. She never married, though she negotiated for years, including with two sons of the French queen mother Catherine de' Medici, and used the question of her marriage as a political tool. After Pope Pius V excommunicated her in 1570, Catholic plots multiplied; she signed the death warrant of her cousin Mary, Queen of Scots, in 1587 and then claimed it had been sent against her wishes. In 1588 the Spanish Armada failed, defeated by English fireships, the fighting off Gravelines and storms on the way home round Scotland and Ireland.

Her most famous line, that she had “the body of a weak and feeble woman” but “the heart and stomach of a king”, comes from the speech at Tilbury in August 1588, but the text survives only in a letter by Leonel Sharp printed in 1654. Treat it as probably close to what she said, not as a verbatim record. Her reign also saw the long, brutal Nine Years' War in Ireland and the first English slave-trading voyages.

Beyond the throne: Drake and Shakespeare

Sir Francis Drake (about 1540 to 1596) was a Devon seaman who first sailed on his cousin John Hawkins's slave-trading voyages in the 1560s. In 1572 and 1573 he raided Spanish Panama in alliance with the Cimarrons, communities of Africans who had escaped slavery. Between 1577 and 1580 he led the second voyage round the world, in the Golden Hind, returning with Spanish treasure, and Elizabeth knighted him on board the ship in 1581. He raided Cadiz in 1587, served as vice admiral against the Armada and died of dysentery off Panama in 1596. The story that he finished a game of bowls before sailing against the Armada was first written down decades later and is probably legend.

William Shakespeare (1564 to 1616) wrote most of his plays under Elizabeth and the rest under James I, and his company performed at court for both. His history plays did much to fix the Tudor version of the past: Richard III shows the king Henry Tudor defeated at Bosworth as a murderous villain, a picture historians have argued over ever since. Late in his career he co-wrote Henry VIII with John Fletcher; during a performance on 29 June 1613 a stage cannon set fire to the Globe's thatched roof and the theatre burned down. See Shakespeare Day for more.

Tudor timeline

Big themes and debates in Tudor history

• Did England want the Reformation? A. G. Dickens's The English Reformation (1964) argued that Catholicism was already weak. Eamon Duffy's The Stripping of the Altars (1992) showed how strong and popular traditional religion was, which makes the change look imposed from above.
• Love, sons or power? Henry's break with Rome was about a male heir, his feelings for Anne and royal control of church wealth all at once. Ask students to rank the causes and defend the ranking with sources.
• Why was Anne Boleyn destroyed? Historians such as Eric Ives and G. W. Bernard disagree sharply about whether the charges had any basis and who brought her down.
• Golden age or propaganda? Elizabeth's portraits, such as the Armada Portrait, were carefully managed images. The same reign had plague, poor harvests, harsh laws against vagrants and Catholics, and war in Ireland.
• Women and rule. Mary I and Elizabeth I were the first queens to rule England in their own right. Contemporaries such as John Knox, in his First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (1558), argued that female rule was against nature. Elizabeth's speeches answer that argument.

Primary sources to read

• Henry VIII's love letters to Anne Boleyn (about 1527 to 1528): short, personal, and easy to read in modern spelling.
• The Act of Supremacy (1534): one page that changed English religion.
• John Foxe, Acts and Monuments, known as Foxe's Book of Martyrs (first English edition 1563): the Protestant account of Mary's burnings, with woodcuts. Read it as propaganda as well as evidence.
• Elizabeth I's speeches: to Parliament on marriage (1559 and 1566), at Tilbury (1588) and the Golden Speech (1601).
• Richard Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations (1589): includes the account of Drake's voyage round the world.
• Hans Holbein's portraits of Henry VIII and his court, and the Armada Portrait of Elizabeth: images as sources.
• Shakespeare, Richard III, Act 1, Scene 1: the Tudor view of the last Plantagenet king.

The UK National Archives publishes many Tudor documents with classroom notes, and our guide on how to analyze a primary source gives a method.

How to study the Tudors: projects

• Read a portrait. Pick one Tudor portrait and list every object in it, then explain what each was meant to say about the sitter.
• Put Anne Boleyn's trial on trial. Use the dispatches of the imperial ambassador Eustace Chapuys and the letters of Sir William Kingston, the Constable of the Tower, to decide whether the evidence holds up.
• Map Drake's voyage, marking where he took Spanish ships, where Thomas Doughty was executed and where he landed on the Pacific coast of North America, and add whose land each place was.
• Speech and counter-speech. Write John Knox's argument against women rulers in two minutes, then answer it using only Elizabeth's own words.
• Interview a queen. Use the questions to ask Elizabeth I and practise by voice with Elizabeth I on Yuga, an AI recreation built from her speeches, letters and the record. It is not the real queen and can be wrong, so cite her Collected Works, not the app.