Tag Archives: tudor history

Discovering Tudor London: A Journey Back in Time, by Natalie Grueninger

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Second paragraph of Part III (on All Hallows in the Tower):

Before long, the early wooden structure was replaced by a stone church, which was enlarged and altered over the centuries. The church’s tower was rebuilt in 1659, following a devastating fire, an, along with some sections of the church’s outer walls, was all that survived the blitz of 1940-41. Interestingly, it was from the top of the tower that Samuel Pepys watched the Great Fire consume London in 1666, noting in his diary for 5 September, ‘I up to the top of Barkeing steeple, and there saw the saddest sight of desolation that I ever saw; everywhere great fires … the fire being spread as far as I could see it’.

I still aspire to take some time off one of these years and do some writing about my Tudor ancestor, but it’s receding a bit into the distance right now. In the meantime I still have plenty of books on the period to read. I’m also of course fascinated by London as a place, even though I haven’t actually been since November.

This is a nice little guide book to the sites in London with strong Tudor associations. The longest section looks at ten houses and palaces where substantial parts of the fabric survive from Tudor times or earlier, of which I think I have been to three – Eltham Palace, the Tower of London and Westminster Hall. Of the rest, I am now particularly keen to visit the Guildhall and Hampton Court. The next section looks at thirteen churches, where I think the only one I have been to is Westminster Abbey, though in general they have been much more messed around with since. And the final section runs through the museums in London with substantial Tudor content, starting of course with the British Museum and the Museum of London, but also looking at the Museum of the Order of St John and the Garden Museum which were not previously on my list.

It’s a breezy gazetteer, which assumes that the reader already has a decent framework knowledge of the Tudor period (as I like to think I do). I would have preferred, however, to have a geographical structure rather than a thematic one; I felt that we jumped around the map rather a lot. But these things are difficult to organise – certainly I scratched my head a lot when planning how to present the Hansche ceilings.

This was the non-fiction book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves; you can get it here. Next on that pile is Hallelujah: The Story of a Musical Genius & the City That Brought His Masterpiece, by Jonathan Bardon.

The Hidden Lives of Tudor Women: A Social History, by Elizabeth Norton

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

Infancy was also the stage of experimentation and play, universal for children of all social classes, which could begin in earnest when the swaddling was finally removed. It was Cecily Burbage who was responsible for taking Princess Elizabeth out of her cradle to play,4 and it was she who, when Elizabeth was around a month old, released her hands from the swaddling bands, after which her arms were covered by loose little sleeves.5 This was the first freedom of movement Tudor babies enjoyed, allowing them to ‘use and stir’ their hands.
4 Harrison, op. cit., f34v.
5 Guillimeau, op. cit., p.22

An interesting look at the experience of half of the English people during the reigns of the five Tudor monarchs, going from top to bottom – linking the lives and deaths of princesses and queens to what is known of the rest of the population. The framework is around Shakespeare’s Seven Ages of Man, taken as applying to all of us, so from infancy to old age and the various options between.

There are some very good bits here; the chapters on crime and religion in particular are fertile ground for the imagination. It’s also interesting to learn of Katherine Fenkyll, a multiply married businesswoman in the City of London. As usual with this sort of book, sadly, the word “Ireland” is missing from the index, and there’s not even much about Wales. But it’s good to come at a well-known subject – life in Tudor England – from a different direction, and I certainly learned as much as I had hoped from it. You can get it here.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2018. Next on that pile is The Unsettled Dust by Robert Aickman.

Elizabeth I and Ireland, ed. Brendan Kane and Valerie McGowan-Doyle

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Second paragraph of third chapter (“Elizabeth on Ireland”, by Leah S. Marcus):

In shortchanging Ireland in our volume of Works we were doubtless influenced by an anachronistic view of Britain as comprising its present territories and therefore including Scotland, but not most of Tudor Ireland. We were likewise influenced by the fact that James VI of Scotland went on to become James I of England. But we were, I suspect, also motivated by a desire to present Queen Elizabeth I in a positive light. The project of editing her writings was hatched during the heyday of second-wave feminism: we wanted to show that a woman could demonstrate all the skills and savvy that were usually attributed to men, and Elizabeth was for us a prime example. We avoided Ireland, perhaps, because the story of Elizabeth in relation to Ireland is not, by and large, a success story. Most of Elizabeth’s biographers – especially the most hagiographic among them – have also had disproportionately little to say about Elizabeth in Ireland.

Back in 2009 I had immense fun attending a conference on Elizabeth I and Ireland, held at the Storrs campus of the University of Connecticut. This is the book of that conference, with a number of the papers that were presented, refined for the delectation of an academic audience.

Lots of interesting stuff here. I admit that some of the literature chapters sailed over my head – my Irish is not up to epic poetry, even in short doses, and my tolerance for Spenser is rather low as well. But this is amply compensated by the chapters on politics and what might be called ideology; what did the rulers of Ireland, including Elizabeth herself, think that they were doing, or trying to do? Of course, it’s a messy picture, with individuals located along a spectrum ranging from those who wanted to engineer a durable political settlement to those who were just in it to get as much property as possible. But it’s lovely to have so much evidence, from different perspectives, gathered in one set of covers, and it took me back to that exciting weekend in 2009, of which I still have fond memories.

My not very secret agenda in reading books about Elizabethan Ireland is to look for mentions of my ancestor, Sir Nicholas White, who as Master of the Rolls was one of the leading Irish politicians of the day. I spotted three: Ciaran Brady describes him as one of “the most far-seeing members of the English-Irish elite”, and Valerie McGowan-Doyle mentions him twice, once briefly as the object of a patronage dispute but also quoting at length from one of his letters to Burghley, defending the right of the Queen’s loyal subjects in Ireland to complain about high taxes. All very useful if I ever get my project of writing his biography off the ground.

This was the unread non-fiction book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that pile is The Deep State of Europe: Welcome to Hell, by the late great Basil Coronakis.