Tudor Era
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Tudor Era’
It was a bitter moment for Anne Boleyn when she saw that what she herself had done to poor Catherine of Aragon, Jane Seymour was about to do to her.
Jane Seymour, sister of the Duke of Somerset, was maid of honour to Queen Catherine, wife of King Henry VIII, and later to Queen Anne, who took Catherine’s place and crown in 1533. To Anne’s consternation, and apparently to her surprise, Jane supplanted her in Henry’s affections and within a fortnight of Anne’s execution in 1536, Henry and Jane were married.
In 1607, settler Captain John Smith was captured by the Algonquin near the English colony at Jamestown, and watched his captors’ ceremonies with rising anxiety.
In 1607, English settlers founded a colony called Virginia on the east coast of North America, and established Jamestown in honour of King James I (r. 1603-1625). Settler John Smith (1580-1631), telling the story of the colony, recorded that in December that year he was captured by the Algonquin and would have been summarily executed, but for the intervention of a young girl.
Sir Walter Raleigh was within his rights to experiment with the Native American habit of smoking tobacco, but he should have told his servants first.
In 1585, Walter Raleigh led an ambitious project to found a colony at Roanoke Island in North America. The settlers returned after just one year, bringing with them a habit picked up from the Native Americans of that region: smoking tobacco leaves. His scientific adviser Thomas Harriot (?1560-1621) thought tobacco’s health benefits in our foggy isle so many that to list them ‘would require a volume by it selfe’.
When young Walter Raleigh first came to the court of Queen Elizabeth I he had little more than his wardrobe in his favour, and he wore it wisely.
Walter Raleigh was not always popular in England, as in John Aubrey’s phrase he was ‘damnable proud’, but his gracious demeanour in the weeks preceding his execution in 1618 changed that. One of the best-loved tales of Sir Walter goes back to the early 1580s, when he was still a relative unknown at court with little more than the clothes on his back — though they were all he needed.
Henry VIII and his mistress Anne Boleyn were disappointed once again in their hopes of catching Thomas More with his fingers in the till.
After the breakdown of Henry VIII’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon, the King and his new love Anne Boleyn explored every avenue to the removal of Henry’s Chancellor Thomas More, who was the country’s chief judge and Catherine’s most outspoken champion. William Roper tells us that they hoped to catch him out in accepting some bribe, however small, but were never able to do so.
Henry VII made sure that he had eyes and ears wherever they were needed to put an end to thirty years of political conspiracy.
King Henry VII, so Sir Francis Bacon tells us, aspired to be held in awe by his subjects, rather than in love. To this end he employed spies not only in the courts of his European neighbours but also in England, and kept abreast of all that was going in his own court by compiling private notebooks in which the words and deeds of every courtier were carefully recorded.