Lacey Baldwin Smith re-evaluates the Tudor mania for conspiracy in the light of psychological and social impulses peculiar to the age. Originally published in 1986. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
King-makers - Conspirators - Criminals - Nobles - Seducers 'A riveting story, splendidly told' DAILY TELEGRAPH 'Gripping and gruesome' BIG ISSUE IN THE NORTH 'Fascinating close-ups of outlandish Tudor behaviour' DAILY MAIL The Howard family - the Dukes of Norfolk - were the wealthiest and most powerful aristocrats in Tudor England, regarding themselves as the true power behind the throne. They were certainly extraordinarily influential, with two Howard women marrying Henry VIII - Anne Boleyn and the fifteen-year-old Catherine Howard. But in the treacherous world of the Tudor court no faction could afford to rest on its laurels. The Howards consolidated their power with an awesome web of schemes and conspiracies but even they could not always hold their enemies at bay. This was a family whose history is marked by treason, beheadings and incarceration - a dynasty whose pride and ambition secured only their downfall.
Under the Tudor monarchy, English law expanded to include the category of "treason by words." Rebecca Lemon investigates this remarkable phrase both as a legal charge and as a cultural event. English citizens, she shows, expressed competing notions of treason in opposition to the growing absolutism of the monarchy. Lemon explores the complex participation of texts by John Donne, Ben Jonson, and William Shakespeare in the legal and political controversies marking the Earl of Essex's 1601 rebellion and the 1605 Gunpowder Plot. Lemon suggests that the articulation of diverse ideas about treason within literary and polemical texts produced increasingly fractured conceptions of the crime of treason itself. Further, literary texts, in representing issues familiar from political polemic, helped to foster more free, less ideologically rigid, responses to the crisis of treason. As a result, such works of imagination bolstered an emerging discourse on subjects' rights. Treason by Words offers an original theory of the role of dissent and rebellion during a period of burgeoning sovereign power.
Adventure, friendship, treason and betrayal. A dazzling historical novel from the award-winning Berlie Doherty. Will Montague is a page to Prince Edward, son of King Henry VIII. As the King's favourite, Will gains many enemies in Court. His enemies convince the King that Will's father has committed treason and he is thrown into Newgate Prison. Will flees Hampton Court and goes into hiding in the back streets of London. Lost and in mortal danger, he is rescued by a poor boy, Nick Drew. Together they must brave imprisonment and death as they embark on a great adventure to set Will's father free. 'Doherty paints a very vivid picture... almost Shardlake for young readers' Independent on Sunday
With Elizabeth and Henry VIII dominant, the Tudor world still captures the popular imagination today. Yet how did the court change from Henry's ruggedly masculine environment to Elizabeth's feminine world? This book meticulously analyses events from the school room of Edward, through Mary and Philip's reign and right through to the era of Elizabeth's loving virgin circle. It charts how the court changed through a series of plots, affairs and religious rollercoasters that sent seismic waves reaching to the heart of the royal family.For readers interested in the early monarchy.
One of the most dramatic periods of British history, the Wars of the Roses didn't end at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485. Despite the death of Richard III and Henry VII's victory, it continued underground into the following century with plots, pretenders and subterfuge by the ousted white rose faction. In a brand new interpretation of this turning point in history, well known historian Desmond Seward reviews the story of the Tudors' seizure of the throne and shows that for many years they were far from secure. He challenges the way we look at the reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII, explaining why there were so many Yorkist pretenders and conspiracies, and why the new dynasty had such difficulty establishing itself. King Richard's nephews, the Earl of Warwick and the little known de la Pole brothers, all had support of enemies overseas, while England was split when the lowly Perkin Warbeck skilfully impersonated one of the princes in the tower in order to claim the right to the throne. Warwick's surviving sister Margaret also became the focus of hopes that the White Rose would be reborn. The book also offers a new perspective on why Henry VIII, constantly threatened by treachery, real or imagined, and desperate to secure his power with a male heir, became a tyrant.
In 1352 King Edward III had expanded the legal definition of treason to include the act of imagining the death of the king, opening up the category of "constructive" treason, in which even a subject's thoughts might become the basis for prosecution. By the sixteenth century, treason was perceived as an increasingly serious threat and policed with a new urgency. Referring to the extensive early modern literature on the subject of treason, Imaginary Betrayals reveals how and to what extent ideas of proof and grounds for conviction were subject to prosecutorial construction during the Tudor period. Karen Cunningham looks at contemporary records of three prominent cases in order to demonstrate the degree to which the imagination was used to prove treason: the 1542 attainder of Katherine Howard, fifth wife of Henry VIII, charged with having had sexual relations with two men before her marriage; the 1586 case of Anthony Babington and twelve confederates, accused of plotting with the Spanish to invade England and assassinate Elizabeth; and the prosecution in the same year of Mary, Queen of Scots, indicted for conspiring with Babington to engineer her own accession to the throne. Linking the inventiveness of the accusations and decisions in these cases to the production of contemporary playtexts by Udall, Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Kyd, Imaginary Betrayals demonstrates how the emerging, flexible discourses of treason participate in defining both individual subjectivity and the legitimate Tudor state. Concerned with competing representations of self and nationhood, Imaginary Betrayals explores the implications of legal and literary representations in which female sexuality, male friendship, or private letters are converted into the signs of treacherous imaginations.
"Beginning early in Mary Tudor's turbulent reign, [this book] explores the lives of a pair of sisters as dangerously close to the throne as their sister Lady Jane Grey, who died on the executioner's block at the age of 16, after being queen for nine days"--
After 35 years in power, Henry VIII was a bloated, hideously obese, black-humoured old man, rarely seen in public. He had striven all his life to ensure the survival of his dynasty by siring legitimate sons, yet his only male heir was eight-year-old Prince Edward. It was increasingly obvious that when Henry died, real power in England would be exercised by a regent. The prospect of that prize spurred the rival court factions into deadly conflict. Robert Hutchinson spent several years in original archival research. He advances a genuinely new theory of Henry's medical history and the cause of his death; he has unearthed some fabulous eyewitness material and papers from death warrants, confessions and even love letters between Katherine Parr and the Lord High Admiral.
