On 11 October 1537, Henry VIII finally received the son for which he had been waiting for decades. The day before the future Edward VI was born, friars, priests, livery companies, and the mayor and aldermen of London all processed through the city streets, praying for the Queen’s safe delivery. With his birth te deums were sung in London’s churches, bells were rung, fires were lit in every street, and volleys of gunfire resounded from the walls of the Tower of London  It was a classic Tudor event, combining as it did fears of a failed royal secession; civic drama; at times contradictory religious impulses and emotions; thrusting military power; and seemingly endless classical images and allusions. 

Tudor England is not composed  simply of the reigns of the Tudor monarchs but by “decades of war and poverty, disease and destruction…a subtle but strong transformation in the nature of government, and complex shifts within economy and society… an outpouring of words [and] an ideological revolution in religious belief…” With me to touch on some of the characteristics of this tumultuous era is Lucy Wooding, Langford fellow and and Tutor at Lincoln College in the University of Oxford, and author of Tudor England: A History.

For Further Investigation

Scott Newstok in Episode 186 on how Shakespeare benefited from an English grammar school education

If you can't get enough of Henry VIII, then travel through time with Dominic Sandbrook in Episode 226

Stephen Berry in Episode 279 explains why he think constant deaths took their toll

Robert St. George, ed., Material Life in American, 1600-1860, for all your atropopaeic needs.