Tudor Read Online Free

about the Ascham story is that, in common with an Italian story describing Jane being bullied by her parents into marrying Guildford (for more on which see the Appendix on Guildford), Frances is only ever mentioned in conjunction with her husband, not as the dominating figure she has become in modern literature, in which she has been used very much as Mary I has been used with Elizabeth I, that is as the shadow that throws the heroine into a more brilliant light.
    It is quite probable that Frances and her husband were strict – loving parents of this period were expected to be ‘sharp, severe, parents’. But Jane’s Italian tutor, Michel Angelo Florio, observed that Jane was particularly close to her mother and in 1559, when Frances died, both her remaining daughters were at her side.

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 fittedinto 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.