Also, from the Press office of BBC magazine,

“The July issue of BBC History Magazine, on sale now, includes a feature entitled ‘Buccaneers of state’, which reveals how English pirates could be useful troublemakers for Elizabeth I and her successor James I. The article was written by Claire Jowitt, a professor of Renaissance English literature at Nottingham Trent University. Claire will also be discussing England’s Tudor pirates on BBC History Magazine’s new podcast – coming soon to www.bbchistorymagazine.com“

I went to DC and visited the Shakespeare Folger Library, the only Tudor related place that I was really able to see.  (Not many of those in the United States- HA!)

Here are some photos..

Shakespeare’s First Folio – Read more here

A page from Henry V (Queen Katherine to Owen Tudor)

Measure for Measure- photo of Phillip of Spain II

Men in Tights: A Brief History

Some misc links:

Check out this Henry VIII tour

Jonathan Rhys-Meyers shines as Henry VIII for round four of the Tudors

An article about Henry from the Economic Voice

“It is one of a series showing the seven Stewart kings and queens who ruled Scotland from 1406 until the Union of the Crowns with England in 1603.

TV historian Neil Oliver launched the stamp series at Stirling Castle, the historical home of the Stewarts.

He said the Stewart monarchy was a fascinating period of Scottish history, with “many dramatic characters and events”.

The house of Stewart stamps include portraits of James I to VI, as well as Scotland’s most famous Queen.

It is the first time Mary, who was executed in 1587 at the age of 44, has appeared on a Royal Mail stamp.”

Read more

Excerpt:

“Katherine has been described as the queen who came from nowhere, yet her pedigree was similar to that of Henry’s other English queens and she was well educated. The Parrs were originally a northern Yorkist family, knighted but not ennobled, who had risen during the Wars of the Roses. Both Katherine’s parents were courtiers but marriage took Katherine first to Lincolnshire and then to Yorkshire. Her life had been dramatic even before she became Henry’s wife. Twice widowed and childless, she had learned, while married to Edward Borough, how to manage a domestic tyrant of a father-in-law, Thomas Borough, Baron of Gainsborough, and raised the two motherless children of her second husband, Lord Latimer.

In 1537 she was held hostage by an angry mob in her home, Snape Castle near Ripon, during the Pilgrimage of Grace, the northern protest against Thomas Cromwell’s religious reforms. She feared also for her absent husband. Coerced by the rebels into joining their cause, he was caught between local fury and royal censure. Latimer survived the king’s wrath but, moving south at his wife’s behest, did not fully restore his reputation. In 1543, after a long illness, he died at his London home. With her brother and sister established at court, Katherine was left a comfortably-off widow with good connections. She hoped now to please herself in the choice of a third husband. Fate, however, was to decree otherwise. “

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Zazzle

An article about Kings College from the Wall Street Journal-

Excerpt:

After founding King’s College in 1441, King Henry VI spent several years buying and leveling a large swathe of Cambridge’s formerly flourishing commercial center, closing streets and cutting off access to the river to enclose what he hoped would be England’s largest and greatest college. The chapel’s foundation stone was laid in 1446 but, as in so many current urban-renewal projects, it would take an additional 65 years to finish the stonework and 40 years on top of that for the interior, as the town’s economy languished.

In the meantime, Henry VI was murdered in 1471 at the order of Edward IV, who had seized the throne. Edward IV was replaced in 1483 by another usurper, Richard III—an enthusiastic financial backer of the chapel until he was killed at the Battle of Bosworth Field. Thus, in 1485, the project again halted. It took a few years, but the victorious Henry Tudor, who had become Henry VII, saw the usefulness of supporting the chapel to buoy up the legitimacy of his reign. What finer propaganda than associating himself with a building devoted to the glory of God—”an act of patronage,” according to Ms. Hicks, “that would help to save his soul, advance learning and, above all, emphasize his family’s rightful hold on the crown”? Better still, the stained-glass windows, which Ms. Hicks says were the most powerful decorative art of the Middle Ages, offered a direct, storytelling opportunity for Henry to ally himself and his family with the prophets of the Old Testament and the apostles and disciples of the New—not to mention with the Holy Family itself.

Embellished with emblems of Tudor glory and heraldry, the 2,300 separate glass panels of the painted windows were installed between 1515 and 1546, during the reign of Henry VIII, by Flemish craftsmen, many of whom had fled religious wars on the continent only to find themselves castigated as job-stealing “alien strangers” and “denizens” by the less-skillful workers of the London guilds.

The basic format of the windows followed the medieval theological typology in which stories from the Old Testament in the upper register provided prototypes for the New Testament below—the Ascent of Elijah in his chariot predicted Christ’s Ascension, for example. The typology provided all sorts of opportunities for educational but also political messages. Henry Tudor’s son, who had succeeded him as Henry VIII in 1509, showed almost no interest in the chapel until his adviser Cardinal Wolsey argued that they needed the university’s support in his contentious divorce from Katharine of Aragon, followed by the split with Rome. The royal coffers reopened in 1526 and Cambridge came through. Ms. Hicks laughingly cites Window 4, installed around 1541, in which Solomon and Sheba above prefigure the visit of the Three Kings below. Henry VIII’s monogram, HR for Henricus Rex, is inserted on the shield of a cherub—but, more important, Solomon’s face is that of Henry, who is thereby shown as a powerful king, anointed by God, a fount of wisdom and poetry, and even a renowned lover.

Read more

Excerpt:

His ideal present would have been a baby boy. Henry was only the second Tudor king, so to make him feel secure he needed a son to succeed him.

The first Christmas of his reign, his wife Katharine of Aragon miscarried a baby girl, but by his second she was pregnant again – and this time, with a boy.

The future Henry IX was born early on New Year’s Day. In London, bonfires were lit, bells pealed, wine flowed and the cannon at the Tower thundered out a welcome to the future king.

In the royal nurseries, there was a crimson draped cradle and the wet nurses were standing by.

But just weeks later, the little Prince died. Henry’s best Christmas had turned to disaster.

But while he wrestled with his anguish, how were his subjects celebrating the year’s greatest festival?

The pacing of a Tudor Christmas was very different to our own.

Celebrations lasted for 12 days but, king or commoner, you’d start the day hungry.

When Henry wanted to divorce Katharine and marry Anne Boleyn, he broke away from Rome and set up his own Church, but he still kept the Roman Catholic rituals.

The weeks before Christmas were a time of fasting and on Christmas Eve you ate fish, not meat.

Luckily for carnivores, the Tudor definition of fish was elastic: you could eat a gull, because it tasted of its fishy diet.

We have a lot of mistaken ideas about how the Tudors ate. They didn’t gnaw chicken greedily and throw bones on the floor, and there were no dogs fighting over scraps under trestle tables.

In a well-conducted house, the dogs – except for little spaniels – were exiled to kennels. Table manners were strict and refined.

Knowing how to cut your bread and what to do with your napkin was an infallible social signal that separated a gentleman from an oik, and every young noble learned to serve at table and to carve.

We’re sometimes told that the whole Tudor nation was vitamin deficient and never ate vegetables. But the fact is that because people grew their own, vegetables didn’t figure in household accounts.

They were eaten, in season, with enthusiasm – Henry loved artichokes – and intricate layered salads were popular in richer households.

There would be no salads in the depth of winter, though, and potatoes had not yet come to England, but for the Christmas table there would be root vegetables, perhaps roasted with honey in the comforting way we enjoy them today.

Turkey was introduced to England in the 1520s, but it was not a Christmas food – it was regarded as nutritious for invalids.

Goose was the popular Christmas meat, and the gilded, decorated head and forequarters of a boar were a fine display of a kitchen’s skill.

Joints of meat were often cooked in thick pastry cases to keep them moist, and the pastry was then discarded. To get a rich golden sheen on your meat, you could paint it with saffron and melted butter.

The most spectacular centrepiece at a rich man’s table was a young peacock, cooked and then re-inserted into its skin and feathers, the glowing tail spread and its neck stretched upright on a wire frame.

The Tudors liked food that looked like fun and this was certainly something they liked to exploit at Christmas time.