AUTHOR’S NOTE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

HIDDEN IN THE CLOSED ARCHIVES OF BELVOIR CASTLE IS A mysterious Tudor codex. This book bears no title. You open it to find sixty double pages of names and titles linked with inky black lines. In timescale these genealogies stretch back to the mythological last King of the Britons. In reach there are royal names, and those of mere gentry. Odd details stand out: a traitor highlighted, a monarch ignored. It reads like a puzzle waiting to be solved.

Why is Elizabeth Tudor’s father unnamed? Her mother, Anne Boleyn, features, and under her name is written in Latin, ‘Queen of England, wife of Henry VIII, decapitated’. Everyone of the period knew Anne’s execution was followed with a parliamentary statue declaring Elizabeth illegitimate in law. Is this why she is not listed in the Tudor line, but only in her maternal grandmother’s? Surely no one would have dared place her outside the royal family after she became Queen? Yet under Elizabeth’s name it states she is ‘regina angliae presens’: ‘The present Queen of England’.

The author may have copied information from earlier herald scrolls, updating details as he did so. This would explain why the bastardized Mary Tudor is not mentioned at all, although her husband, Philip of Spain, is listed as ‘King of England’. But what was the purpose of this codex? The lines connecting different families read like a political map, navigating the bloodlines of those with power, status, land, and the precious royal blood of the family chosen by God to rule. It is likely that whoever commissioned this codex wanted to see how they fitted into it. Here was the basis of their self-esteem. Seeing themselves as part of a line with a past and a future they boosted their intense loyalty to family and to the land on which their wealth and power was based. The man (and in a patriarchal society it was almost always a man) at the head of a great family was steward of his estates, which it was his duty to pass on to his heirs. It was also for him to assert the family honour, and maintain the authority of his line.

In the fifteenth century the head of a family was owed not only the service and fidelity of his servants and tenants, but also his kin, who would follow him onto battle – as Owen Tudor’s bastard son, Sir David Owen, did for his half nephew, Henry VII. A century later, kin were no longer bound to act in blood for the head of the family, especially against the crown. But family still represented an ideal of stability, which had a spiritual and well as a worldly dimension. In the early period knights were buried in tombs mounted with their effigy on armour, and where prayers were said regularly for their souls. And even after the Reformation, when the prayers had stopped, families still had heraldic symbols engraved where they were buried. These are masculine symbols, but for women family honour and authority was as important as it was for the men, and their role also significant, particularly in the protection and promotion of their sons.

With Elizabeth I time was running out for the Tudor line. This, my third book on the Tudor succession and the culmination of fifteen years of research, attempts to record their story, amongst the secrets and behind the riddles. My last two books cover later Tudor history and it was intimidating to consider how I might approach the earlier reigns. It was something David Starkey wrote in his biography of the young Henry VIII – Virtuous Prince – that encouraged me to begin before Bosworth: ‘The story of how Henry Tudor [(i.e. Henry VII)] survived against the odds, and won his throne and his bride against even greater odds, is one of the world’s great adventure stories.’ It sounded irresistible, and indeed how could one understand the king, if you only began his life in 1485?

As I began my research in 2008 I came across another inspiring piece of writing: an article written in the TLS by the eminent historian Cliff Davies. It said, essentially, that there was no such thing as the Tudors, and the word was hardly used or known during the Tudor period. You might think that given I was writing a big, fat book on the Tudors I might not be too thrilled by that, but I read further articles he had written on this and found them all fascinating. I believe the Tudors did have a strong sense of family – even if they did not exactly boast about their humble Welsh origins – but Cliff Davies helped me shift perspective, to examine more closely not how we see the Tudors from our end of the telescope, but how they saw themselves. The Tudors constantly looked to the past as a guide to their actions. To understand what they did and why, we have to know that past. It helped me answer why the princes in the Tower were ‘disappeared’ in 1483, and why Henry VII didn’t investigate their disappearance in 1485 – the source of so many conspiracy theories. It helped explain why Anne Boleyn was beheaded with a sword (clue: Henry VIII was not wondering how she would like to die); it also led me to discover what Henry is really supposed to have quarrelled about with his niece Margaret Douglas in 1547.

As with my last book I found that separating later comment on the lives of Tudor women from their actual lives was very revealing. Women of this period were often later depicted as either useless, or suspiciously successful, in which case somewhere along the line it is suggested they are ‘unnatural’ or a bit mad. Like Frances Brandon, Margaret Beaufort has been much maligned, as has Mary Tudor, and while I don’t sugar-coat their actions I hope I have helped further erase their old caricatures. I was also very interested in the life of Margaret Douglas. The importance of her place in the succession issues and family politics of the 1560s helped add another dimension to what I already knew about that decade from the work I had done on Katherine Grey for my biography of the Grey sisters – but it is the whole sweep of Margaret’s life that is so extraordinary, from the dramatic circumstances of her birth, to her years at Henry VIII’s court, to her plotting her son Darnley’s marriage to Mary, Queen of Scots, and, after her death, her grandson, James, becoming King of England. Where I cover the Greys again I have tried to add material to my earlier biography of the sisters; it was looking at Jane from Mary’s perspective, for example, that led me to conclude that it is (ironically) with Mary that the legend of the Innocent Traitor originates.

This may seem difficult to believe, but I have endeavoured to keep names to a minimum. Many well-known figures don’t get a mention. Those people who do get named are sometimes referred to by their title and sometimes not: the choice depends on what I think will be easier for the reader to remember. If, for example, they change title in the space of a few pages or chapters, or follow hard on the heels of someone else by the same title, or share the same title (like Jasper Tudor and William Herbert) I will stick to their name to avoid confusion. Stewarts and Stuarts are all spelled Stuart – although there was no ‘Stuart’ spelling before Mary, Queen of Scots, it is simply easier to grasp they are the same family when they are spelled the same way. Since I focus on family members, readers may also find the family trees helpful. I have not gone into detailed arguments over every contentious area in the text, but I hope that the Notes will answer most queries.

It can be a lonely old business writing books, but I am very lucky to have made many friends amongst Tudor historians. In particular I spoke regularly to Eric Ives. While I was doing my biography of the Grey sisters he was doing a biography of Jane and we were in occasional contact then. There was a lot we didn’t agree on, but we became good friends, and with this book, if I had a flash of inspiration or was puzzled about something, I would immediately call him (we still didn’t always agree). I have missed him very much since his death in 2012.

The knights in shining armour who very generously agreed to read drafts of this book in Eric’s place were Peter Marshall and Tom Freeman. Tom is one of the most brilliant people I know and has been extremely busy researching his own work as well as teaching some lucky students, so I am truly grateful that he found time to give me his advice on parts of an early draft and especially for sending me his as yet unpublished essay on Foxe and Katherine Parr. Peter read a later and full draft while working on his own forthcoming book on the Reformation. I really cannot properly express my appreciation of his incredible generosity with his time and his knowledge.

Many historians, archivists and librarians have been very helpful answering queries and helping in other ways. I would like to thank in particular, John Guy (who drew my attention to vital MSS concerning Thomas Bishop after I discussed my suspicions that there had never been a quarrel between Margaret and Henry VIII), Cliff Davies, Ralph Griffiths, Rosemary Horrox, Sean Cunningham, James Carley, Julia Fox, Susan Doran, Michael Questier, Stephan Edwards, Claire Ridgway, Andrea Clarke and Kathleen Doyle at the British Library, Mark Bateson at Canterbury Cathedral archives, Christine Reynolds at Westminster Abbey Muniments, Clare Rider and Eleanor Cracknell at St George’s Chapel Archives and Chapter Library, Windsor, Anne Burge at Little Malvern Priory Archives, Carlotta Benedetti at the Vatican Archives, and Peter Foden at the Belvoir archives. I would also like to thank the staff at the wonderful London Library and especially Gosia Lawik in the Country Orders department.

I very much appreciate the guidance of my friends Henrietta Joy and Dominic Pierce, and I hope Henrietta notices I begin Chapter 1 as she instructed. Thank you also to Zia Soothill for patiently listening to my weekly rants and massaging my aching hands. I would like to thank my new editor at Chatto, Becky Hardie, whose razor-sharp efficiency I much appreciate, and also the contributions of Juliet Brooke. Finally I have the best agent in the world in Georgina Capel: it is worth becoming a writer just so you can have someone like Georgina in your life.