Special Guest Post by Melita Thomas, Author of 1000 Tudor People #HistoryWritersAdvent24

Available from Amazon UK and Amazon US

The product of years of diligent research, this ambitious title brings the incredibly varied lives (and deaths!) of 1000 Tudor people into a single, accessible volume. Illustrated with historical portraits and a wealth of detail, including specially designed family trees to chart the links between major Tudor figures.

If you came to adulthood in the 1480s, around the time that Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, defeated Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth to take the crown of England as Henry VII, your life would not have been significantly different from that of anyone who had been born in the previous century or so. Your food, your work, your social life, your pastimes, and most importantly, your religion, would have been familiar to your great-grandparents. 

But a whole host of political, economic, social, educational, technological developments, and most significant of all, religious revolution, transformed the life led by your great-grandchildren, who matured around 1603 when Elizabeth I, the last monarch of the Tudor dynasty, gave way to her Stewart cousin, James VI of Scotland.

Most people are familiar with the Tudor monarchs and the psychodrama of the royal court and, as the Tudor monarchs did not just reign but also ruled, their part in the changes of the period is, of course, important, but they did not change the world single-handed. The point of 1000 Tudor People was to look beyond the monarch to explore some of the other movers and shakers and also the lives of more ‘ordinary’ people. 

Of course, people are only in the historical record if they are of high rank, or they have done something unusual, so it would not be true to say that the people in this book necessarily lived typical lives, but hopefully, there is enough of a cross-section of society here to enrich readers’ knowledge of the Tudor World.

 
One of the things that even not-very-attentive readers will soon discover is the paucity of first names. A child’s name was chosen by a godparent of the same sex, and conformed to a fairly standard routine of naming after parents followed by paternal, then maternal grandparents. Thomas Howard, 2nd Duke of Norfolk, had twenty-two children by two wives (who were themselves cousins). 

By the time he got half way through the second family, he was starting again, with a Thomas, an Elizabeth, and a John in both families. The result of this repetition of names across families (beyond the frustration of genealogists everywhere) means that in my sample of 1000 people, 105 were named Thomas and sixty-eight were called Elizabeth!

 
Another grisly statistic from the book is the number of unnatural deaths – 130 of the people in it died by murder or judicial execution of which the most shocking example was the death of two people by boiling. This horrible punishment was instituted after an alleged assassination attempt on Bishop John Fisher by his cook, Richard Rous. Rous maintained that he had put a powder given to him by someone else in the pottage as a joke – it was only supposed to give the recipients an upset stomach.

 
Turning to some of the Christmas-related events mentioned in 1000 Tudor People, an early one is the Christmas court revels of 1514, when Henry VIII danced with his wife’s new maid-of-honour, Bessie Blount. Henry and Bessie embarked on an affair that last about five years, and she bore the king’s only acknowledge illegitimate child, Henry Fitzroy. 

 This was not the only court Christmas celebration that resulted in love or marriage. In 1588, Robert Cecil, son of Elizabeth I’s chief minister, Lord Burghley, fell deeply in love with Eizabeth Brooke, the daughter of Lord Cobham. Despite his distinguished father, Robert was hesitant in matters of love, as he had a physical disability. 

He asked his sister-in-law to approach Elizabeth and ask her whether her ‘myslyke of [his] person be such, as it may not be qualified by any other circumstances.’ Fortunately, Elizabeth could see beyond Robert’s physical nature, to appreciate his inner nature – or else her father thought an alliance with the Cecils would be a good move since Robert was a privy councillor. The couple were married in 1589, but it was a short-lived union, as Elizabeth died in 1597. Robert did not marry again, mourning her for the rest of his life.

 
As well as opportunities for matchmaking, Christmas was characterised by the performance of plays, often satirical in the spirit of misrule and the inversion of ordinary hierarchies that was part of the Christmas tradition. In 1526, Simon Fish of Gray’s Inn played Cardinal Wolsey in a play which the cardinal thought went beyond the acceptable boundaries of irreverence. 

The playwright was imprisoned and Fish, worried he would meet the same fate, ran away to Antwerp, where he started work on A Supplicacyon for the Beggars, which became one of the most famous texts in the early English Reformation. This was in the best knock-about, anticlerical tradition, with the usual sexually-rampant friars and their whores, but it contained an attack on purgatory that was deemed heretical. Nevertheless, the pamphlet was widely distributed, and Fish even managed to get a copy of it smuggled into the court, to end up n front of Anne Boleyn, the king’s inamorata, who showed it to Henry VIII. 

According to John Foxe, Henry received Fish’s wife, and gave him a safe-conduct to return to England. If Fish did have a safe-conduct from the king, it was not enough to prevent him being condemned as a heretic in 1530, although he was fortunate enough to die before the sentence could be carried out.
A more cheerful Christmas play was enacted at Gray’s Inn in 1594, when Luce Baynam, who was a brothel-keeper in Clerkenwell saw herself being represented on the stage as ‘abbess of Clerkenwell’ charged with bringing a choir of ‘nuns’ to join the party. 

Another play that we know was first staged at Christmas was by perhaps the greatest Tudor of them all, William Shakespeare, whose Twelfth Night was performed at Middle Temple to close the Christmas festivities in 1602. These are just a few of the people and stories that you can meet in 1000 Tudor People.

Melita Thomas

# # #

About the Author

Melita Thomas is the author of non-fiction works The King’s Pearl, and The House of Grey and co-author of the Tudor Times Books of Days series of gift books. She is a doctoral candidate at UCL, researching the social and political networks of Mary I and is the co-founder and chief contributor for Tudor Times, a repository of information about the Tudors and Stewarts 1485 – 16625. In her spare time, Melita enjoys long distance walking. You can find her on https://melitathomas.com/ and on Twitter @melitathomas92 and @thetudortimes.