Category: Tudor History news and events

From The Mail Online:

Henry VIII is perhaps best known for his six wives and founding the Church of England.

But a leading academic has revealed that the bloated Tudor monarch has another claim to fame: inventing the stairlift.

David Starkey, well known for his TV documentaries on historical royals, discovered that Henry VIII used a bespoke ‘stairthrone’ during research.

Described in royal records as ‘a chair…that goeth up and down’, the stairlift is thought to have been operational at Whitehall Palace in London where it would have hauled the King up a 20ft staircase.

Full article

I wish I could have seen that in action…

From The Times Online:

Early in Henry VIII

From Forbes.com:

A collector of old books turns his fixation on the Tudors into a big exhibit celebrating England’s most colorful ruler.

Henry VIII is best known for lopping off heads, marrying six times and expanding his gut. But his legacy, insists antiquarian-book collector and Tudor enthusiast Arthur Schwarz, runs much deeper. An accomplished theologian and sportsman, Henry wrote poetry and music and displayed a keen interest in astronomy and maps. Perhaps most important in Schwarz’s view, Henry VIII broke from Rome and established the Church of England, laying the ground for an expansion of British power.

Full article

Be sure to check out the slide show and video

Exhibition Link

Kathy offered over at the Q&A blog to pass on any questions to Alison Weir (if the change arises) at the Feb. 7 workshop at the Smithsonian. Please submit any questions you have over there in that thread. Thanks for offering Kathy!

From The Scotsman:

Deep in an archive, more than two dozen letters written by Mary, Queen of Scots, lie largely unseen for centuries.

Many are written in a secret code as Mary fought to preserve and protect the Catholic faith in Scotland after the 1560 Reformation which saw the country break with Rome.

But soon the letters, which in recent years have only been seen by a select group of historians, will be available to view on-line.

Visitors to the Scottish Catholic Archives website will be able to examine the letters, which also contain details of Mary’s power struggle with her Protestant cousin, Queen Elizabeth, who was on the throne in England. The struggle eventually led to Mary’s execution in 1587.

Full article

Scottish Catholic Archives website

(Thanks to Linda for the reminder of this article… it fell through the cracks during the computer migration!)

Since I’m in a rush today, I’ll just link to the blog for the Lady Jane Grey Reference site, where you can see links to a recent Q&A about Lady Jane in the Telegraph.

And over at Executed Today – Edward Seymour, deposed Lord Protector.

This is not the same project that I posted about back in November and 85% of this project is available for free. See more info below:

Putting the Complete Calendars of State Papers Online
www.british-history.ac.uk

British History Online is pleased to announce that 200 volumes in the AHRC-funded State Papers project are now live. The goal of the project is to complete the digitisation of the Calendars of State Papers in verbatim transcriptions of at least 99.9% accuracy.

The Calendars of State Papers are summaries of hundreds of thousands of handwritten documents relating to the administration of England, and its foreign relations, in the early modern period. Highlights of the AHRC project are Letters and Papers of Henry VIII, State Papers Foreign, Elizabeth I, and State Papers, Colonial; these important documents are now freely accessible to the academic community and the general public alike.

In order to foster scholarly collaboration we have also included a feature which allows any interested user to update, correct, or enhance the calendars for the benefit of all. We plan to make the remaining 150 books in this project live within the next twelve months.

The total number of volumes on British History Online is now just over 800, of which 85 percent are completely free; the remainder

This one is here in the States, at the Smithsonian in Washington DC. Link to full details are at the bottom of the post.

Queen Elizabeth I

I’ve been compiling a “master list” of events, exhibitions, conferences, etc. taking place to celebrate the 500th anniversary of Henry VIII’s accession. I’m going to put a permanent link to it over on the side bar and I’ll update it as new information comes in. Please email me (lara [at] tudorhistory.org) or post a comment if you know of things that I don’t have listed. I haven’t gone looking for stuff yet (just posting what people have emailed to me) so I’m sure there are things out there I’m missing.

And… If anyone gets a chance to attend any of these, I’d some write-ups to post here on the blog. I seriously doubt I’m going to get to any of these so I’ll have to live vicariously though all of you who do get to them!

http://tudorhistory.org/files/henry500.html

(edited July 2013 – the page was removed a couple of years ago after the events had passed)

I’ve started making a page to keep track of all of these events and exhibitions. I’ll upload it over the holidays and update it as more news comes in.

From the BBC:

A special exhibition to mark the 500th anniversary of Henry VIII’s accession to the throne is launching at Windsor Castle, the monarch’s one-time home and final resting place.

Henry VIII was proclaimed king on 23 April 1509, just before his 18th birthday, and reigned for almost 38 years until his death in 1547.

The exhibition explores the life of one of the most significant figures in the history of the English monarchy, bringing together treasures from the Royal Collection and the archives of St George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle.

Full article

Information from the Royal Collection

Yet another celebration of Henry VIII’s 500th!

From the British Library website:
Henry VIII: Man and Monarch

22 April

Another event next year to mark the big Tudor anniversaries of 2009:

Tudor power, pageantry and propaganda

A one-day conference to celebrate the 500th anniversary of Henry VIII’s coronation and the 450th anniversary of Elizabeth I’s coronation

Saturday 21 March 2009

This one-day conference celebrates the 500th anniversary of Henry VIII

In the vein of the 450th anniversary Elizabeth I coin, the Royal Mint is producing a

A virtual tour of the Young Henry VIII exhibition at Hampton Court Palace is now available on their website. For people like me stuck on the other side of the Atlantic, it is as close as I can get to seeing it in person. There are some neat paintings on display there and you can enlarge and zoom them. The rooms themselves are gorgeous too (I’m a sucker for old wood-paneled rooms).

Thanks to Tudor J. for the link and for creating such a great site!

Remaining section of the Old Palace at Hatfield – Elizabeth’s residence when she became Queen.

“A Dominum factum est illud, et est mirabile in oculis notris”
“It is the Lord’s doing and it is marvelous in our eyes” – 118th Psalm

According to legend, these are the words that Elizabeth said upon hearing that her sister Mary had died and she was now Queen of England. I got a message from Heather at ElizabethI.org that the flowers we were collecting for have been sent. I doubt we’ll get a picture, but if we do I’ll be sure to post it.

And since this is also the anniversary of Mary I’s death, I’d like to say Requiscat in Pace – Rest in Peace.

Update – The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography has Elizabeth as the Life of the Day today.

[Comments are closed on older posts. If you wish to make a comment, please contact Lara via the link in the sidebar.]

The article from the Telegraph focuses on Henry VIII’s letters to Anne Boleyn, but I’m sure a lot of you know what other treasures are in those papers. Being able to search them in this way is going to be wonderful. (Not to mention the book versions are darn heavy!)

From the article:

King Henry VIII’s passionate love letters to Anne Boleyn are to be made available to the public online for the first time.

The letters, penned by the King in 1527 when he was still married to Catherine of Aragon, reveal him to be besotted with the woman who would eventually become his second wife.

The private correspondence is among tens of thousands of Tudor documents which will be made available on the internet this week.

The documents, which are known as the State Papers and which were collected by the all-powerful Secretaries of State, provide a unique insight into key historical events such as the Reformation, the defeat of the Spanish Armada and the execution of Anne Boleyn.
…
Visitors to the site, which goes live on Tuesday 18 November, can draw up material by typing any word into its search engine. Key royal documents include those relating to the funeral of Henry VII and the succession of Henry VIII, love letters from Henry VIII, and the Dispensation by Archbishop Cranmer which allowed Henry VIII to marry Jane Seymour, who became his third wife.
…
State Papers Online, which is launched on Tuesday, contains thousands of original documents as well as summaries and translations known as calendars which were compiled in the nineteenth century.

At the moment only the papers for the period 1509 to 1603 are available. But by 2010 the site will be expanded to cover the years leading up to 1714.

Full article

State Papers Online site

The “request a free trial” implies that this will be a subscription service (presumably along the lines of the OED and ODNB), so I hope my university subscribes!