Originally published on February 6, 2023 (Episode 302)
Introduction
On October 11, 1537, Henry VIII finally received the son he had longed for: the future Edward VI. London responded with an outpouring of religious and civic celebration—bells rang, fires were lit, volleys of gunfire echoed from the Tower. Yet beneath the spectacle lay Tudor anxieties: dynastic insecurity, shifting religious loyalties, and the projection of military power, all wrapped in classical symbolism.
As Lucy Wooding demonstrates in Tudor England: A History (Yale University Press, 2022), the Tudors’ story is not simply one of monarchs but of an entire society transformed. Decades of war, poverty, disease, and destruction combined with changes in governance, economy, and religion to produce an era of profound upheaval. Outpourings of words and new ideological frameworks remade English culture at its core.
About the Guest
Lucy Wooding is Langford Fellow and Tutor at Lincoln College, University of Oxford. A leading scholar of Tudor political and religious history, she is the author of Tudor England: A History and numerous works on Reformation thought and practice.
For Further Investigation
Lucy Wooding, Tudor England: A History (Yale University Press, 2022)
—, Henry VIII (Routledge, 2015)
Robert St. George (ed.), Material Life in America, 1600–1860, for all your early American atropopaeic needs
Related Conversations
Scott Newstok on Shakespeare, the grammar school education of Tudor England, and what we can learn from it
For even more Tudors, see Dominic Sandbrook on Henry VIII in Adventures in Time
Stephen Berry on mortality and the transformation of modern health in Count the Dead
💬 Listen & Discuss
What explains the Tudors’ ability to project both grandeur and fragility? Was their reign more about continuity or rupture in English society? Share your reflections in the comments, and pass this episode along to anyone fascinated by Tudor drama and transformation.
