Steven Gunn

Early Tudor government, 1485-1558

Preface - Introduction - Lordship - Justice - Livelihood - Empire - Conclusion - Abbreviations - Notes Bibliography

War and the State in Early Modern Europe: Widening the Debate

While the debate on the role of war in state development in early modern Europe has ranged widely, the participants have not answered its most fundamental question to the satisfaction of most historians. The difficulty has been how to assess whether war was more important than other factors as a driver of state formation. In practice it is more fruitful to study the role of war within a multi-causal model, but to do this the interaction between war and other factors such as judicial, religious, ideological, and social change must be studied, preferably in detail but in comparative context.

The Structures of Politics in Early Tudor England

Something of the atmosphere of trench warfare, with its immobility and its desperation, has overcome the historiography of early Tudor politics. The most spectacular impasse concerns the fall of Anne Boleyn. Three scholars have recently set out and defended against one another divergent explanations of her fall. Professor Ives and Professor Warnicke can agree that Dr Bernard is wrong: Anne cannot possibly have been destroyed by a masterful and jealous king who may reasonably have believed her guilty of multiple adultery as charged. Dr Bernard and Professor Ives can agree that Professor Warnicke is wrong: Annes fall cannot be attributed to her miscarriage of a deformed foetus, awakening the kings fears of witchcraft and its sixteenth-century stablemates, sodomy and incest. Professor Warnicke and Dr Bernard can agree that Professor Ives is wrong: Anne cannot have been ousted by a factional plot at court, coordinated by Thomas Cromwell and cynically using fabricated charges of adultery to hustle the king into destroying the queen and her partisans at a single blow.

Charles Brandon's Westhorpe: an Early Tudor Courtyard House in Suffolk

This paper describes the courtyard house built in the 1520s and 1530s by Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, at Westhorpe in Suffolk. Discussion is based on a newly-discovered survey of the house made in 1538 and on an eye-witness account by the antiquary Thomas Martin of its demolition in the eighteenth century.

Edmund Dudley and the Church

Edmund Dudley, minister of Henry VII, was a man both personally extraordinary and yet representative of his age. He abandoned the normal cursus honorum of the legal profession to enter the kings service more suddenly than any of his contemporaries; yet he was one of many common lawyers newly influential in the kings councils of the later fifteenth and earlier sixteenth centuries. He was probably the only layman in Henrys inner circle to have studied at a university; yet within fifty years of his death most English statesmen of the first rank would have done so. In pursuing the kings interests, Dudley generated sufficient animosity to make himself one of the two scapegoats for Henrys policies tried and executed in 1509–10; yet it was more his manner, his efficiency and his political isolation than any difference of intent that distinguished him from Henrys other ministers. In pursuing his own interests he built a large landed estate faster than any of his colleagues, but their aims and eventual achievements were not so different from his. The one respect in which Dudley was unique was that he had leisure, while under arrest in the Tower of London, to commit to paper his thoughts on English government and society. The resulting treatise, The tree of commonwealth , enables us to juxtapose his stated ideals with his actions as a royal minister and as an influential layman. Thereby we may hope to shed new light on the relations between Church, State and lay elites on the eve of the English Reformation.

Elizabethan naval administration

The Elizabethan navy is a topic of endless fascination. Its colourful leading characters sailed around the world defeating the Spanish Armada and building the foundations of empire. Its less famous...

War And Identity In The Habsburg Netherlands, 1477–1559

The nature of the available evidence has inevitably drawn studies of national identity in the Burgundian-Habsburg Low Countries towards social and cultural elites. As the Burgundian-Habsburg polity faced the supreme challenge of repeated warfare on multiple fronts, we can test whether such action and cooperation took place, and infer what those outcomes tell us about the effect of the governments appeals. One way in which war did enforce adherence to supra-provincial identities was in the intensified application of treason law. Individuals may hold several identities at once, provided those identities do not place unbearably conflicting demands upon them, as may have happened to some Netherlanders, when attachments to prince and province began to clash in the years after 1566. In the Burgundian-Habsburg Low Countries many such identities were available, not only social, religious, or gendered identities, but political ones too. Keywords: Habsburg Netherlands; national identity; warfare

Cardinal Wolsey: Church, State and Art.

List of plates List of figures Preface List of abbreviations Introduction S. J. Gunn and P. G. Lindley 1. Wolsey and the Tudor Polity John Guy 2. The domestic building works of Cardinal Wolsey Simon Thurley 3. Cardinal Wolseys collegiate foundations John Newman 4. Wolsey and stained glass Hilary Wayment 5. Cardinal Wolsey and the goldsmiths Phillippa Glanville 6. Wolseys foreign policy and the domestic crisis of 1527-8 S. J. Gunn 7. The cultivation and promotion of music in the household and orbit of Thomas Wolsey Roger Bowers 8. Wolsey and ecclesiastical order: the case of the Franciscan Observants Keith Brown 9. Cardinal Wolsey and the satirists: the case of Godly Queen Hester re-opened Greg Walker 10. Playing check-mate with royal majesty? Wolseys patronage of Italian Renaissance sculpture P. G. Lindley 11. The fall of Wolsey E. W. Ives Index.