Tudor Era
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Tudor Era’
In the days of Henry VIII, eminent Scottish historian John Major looked back to the reign of Richard the Lionheart and sketched the character of legendary outlaw Robin Hood.
In his Historia Majoris Britanniæ (1521), the eminent Scottish historian John Major (1467-1550) reflected at length on the life of King Richard I. Then all of a sudden he began to speak of Robin Hood (or Robert, as he called him), thus becoming the earliest authority we have for the tradition that Robin was a contemporary of Richard and John.
King Henry VIII was riding out with Queen Catherine one May Day, when they found themselves waylaid by Robin Hood and two hundred archers.
At the close of the reign of Elizabeth I, historian John Stow (1525?-1605) looked back over the May Day celebrations in the time of her father Henry VIII. Those were the early, happier years (1515 by Stow’s reckoning) when Henry still rode out with his Spanish wife Catherine of Aragon, and before the country was thrown into turmoil and bloodshed by the English Reformation.
On July 5th, 1535, the night before he was to be executed by order of King Henry VIII, it seemed that Sir Thomas More was the only man in the Tower of London who was happy.
So highly did Henry VIII regard Sir Thomas More (1477-1535) that he made him Chancellor in 1529, even though More took Catherine of Aragon’s part in the divorce saga. Three years later the opening moves in the Protestant Reformation drove More to resign, and in 1534 he was confined to the Tower, awaiting execution. There on July 5th, 1535, Sir Thomas Pope paid him a farewell visit.
In 1585, Sir Walter Raleigh’s first attempt to found an English colony in the New World failed, but two years later he was keen to try again.
In 1584, an exploration party of two ships organised by Walter Raleigh came back and told Elizabeth I that ‘Roanoak’, Roanoke Island off the coast of what is now North Carolina, would make an excellent English colony. The following year, Raleigh (now Sir Walter) sent out hundred and eight settlers as founding fathers but a year later they came home. So in May 1587, Raleigh tried again.
At the height of the Inquisition, King Philip II of Spain sent a glorious fleet against England to bring the nation back to his Church.
When Mary I of England died in 1558, her devoutly Catholic widower Philip II of Spain felt he should have inherited her crown. Instead it went to Mary’s Protestant half-sister Elizabeth, who gave asylum to Dutch Protestants suffering under Philip’s Spanish Inquisition, harassed his Atlantic trade, and in 1587 executed her most plausible Catholic rival, Mary Queen of Scots. A year later, Philip took drastic action.
When the Rising of the North went all wrong in 1569, rebel leader Thomas Percy turned to trusted ally Hector of Harlaw for help.
In 1558, Mary I died and her half-sister Elizabeth, a Protestant, assumed the crown. Both the Pope and Philip II of Spain, Mary’s widower, were wrathful but no reaction came until September 1569. Mary Queen of Scots, a Catholic, had fled to cousin Elizabeth’s protection, and two Catholic nobles spotted an opportunity for change. George Carleton, Bishop of Chichester, takes up the tale of ‘the Rising of the North.’