House of Tudor
The House of Tudor was an English royal house of Welsh origin, descended in the male line from the Tudors of Penmynydd. Tudor monarchs ruled the Kingdom of England and its realms, including their ancestral Wales and the Lordship of Ireland from 1485 until 1603, with five monarchs in that period; the Tudors succeeded the House of Plantagenet as rulers of the Kingdom of England, were succeeded by the House of Stuart. The first Tudor monarch, Henry VII of England, descended through his mother from a legitimised branch of the English royal House of Lancaster; the Tudor family rose to power in the wake of the Wars of the Roses, which left the House of Lancaster, to which the Tudors were aligned, extinct. Henry Tudor was able to establish himself as a candidate not only for traditional Lancastrian supporters, but for the discontented supporters of their rival House of York, he rose to the throne by the right of conquest, his victory at the Battle of Bosworth Field was reinforced by his marriage to the English princess Elizabeth of York, daughter of Edward IV, symbolically uniting the former warring factions under a new dynasty.
The Tudors extended their power beyond modern England, achieving the full union of England and the Principality of Wales in 1542, asserting English authority over the Kingdom of Ireland. They maintained the nominal English claim to the Kingdom of France. After him, his daughter Mary I lost control of all territory in France permanently with the fall of Calais in 1558. In total, five Tudor monarchs ruled their domains for just over a century. Henry VIII was the only son of Henry VII to live to the age of maturity. Issues around the royal succession became major political themes during the Tudor era. In 1603 when Elizabeth I died without heir, the Scottish House of Stuart supplanted the Tudors as England's royal family through the Union of the Crowns; the first Stuart to be King of England, James VI and I, descended from Henry VII's daughter Margaret Tudor, who in 1503 married James IV as part of the Treaty of Perpetual Peace. For analysis of politics and social history, see Tudor period; the Tudors descended on Henry VII's mother's side from John Beaufort, 1st Earl of Somerset, one of the illegitimate children of the 14th century English prince John of Gaunt by Gaunt's long-term mistress Katherine Swynford.
The descendants of an illegitimate child of English royalty would have no claim on the throne, but the situation became complicated when Gaunt and Swynford married in 1396, when John Beaufort was 25. The church retroactively declared the Beauforts legitimate by way of a papal bull the same year, confirmed by an Act of Parliament in 1397. A subsequent proclamation by John of Gaunt's legitimate son, Henry IV recognised the Beauforts' legitimacy but declared them ineligible to inherit the throne; the Beauforts remained allied with Gaunt's legitimate descendants from his first marriage, the House of Lancaster. However the descent from the Beauforts, despite the above, did not render Henry of Richmond a legitimate heir to the throne nor did the fact that his father's mother had been a Queen of England make him an heir; the legitimate heir, or, in this case, was the Countess of Salisbury, descended from the second son of Edward III, Duke of Clarence and his fourth son, the Duke of York. This is verified by the Tudor family tree which appears in this article.
Henry Tudor had, one thing that the others did not. He had an army which had defeated and killed the last Yorkist King, Richard III and therefore the support of powerful nobles, his son Henry VIII made sure there were no other claimants to the Throne when he wiped out all the remaining Plantagenet heirs including the Countess of Salisbury and her family the Poles. One Pole alone survived, he became Archbishop of Canterbury under the Catholic Mary I. On 1 November 1455, John Beaufort's granddaughter, Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond and Derby, married Henry VI's maternal half-brother Edmund Tudor, 1st Earl of Richmond, it was his father, Owen Tudor, who abandoned the Welsh patronymic naming practice and adopted a fixed surname. When he did, he did not choose, as was the custom, his father's name, but chose that of his grandfather, Tudur ap Goronwy, instead; this name is sometimes given as Tewdwr, the Welsh form of Theodore, but Modern Welsh Tudur, Old Welsh Tutir is not a variant but a different and unrelated name, etymologically identical with Gaulish Toutorix, from Proto-Celtic *toutā "people, tribe" and *rīxs "king", corresponding to Germanic Theodoric.
Owen Tudor was one of the bodyguards for the queen dowager Catherine of Valois, whose husband, Henry V, had died in 1422. Evidence suggests that the two were secretly married in 1429; the two sons born of the marriage and Jasper, were among the most loyal supporters of the House of Lancaster in its struggle against the House of York. Henry VI ennobled his half-brothers: Edmund became Earl of Richmond on 15 December 1449 and was married to Lady Margaret Beaufort, the great-granddaughter of John of Gaunt, the progenitor of the house of Lancaster. Edmund died on 3 November 1456. On 28 January 1457, his widow Margaret, who had just attained her fourte
Rising of the North
The Rising of the North of 1569 called the Revolt of the Northern Earls or Northern Rebellion, was an unsuccessful attempt by Catholic nobles from Northern England to depose Queen Elizabeth I of England and replace her with Mary, Queen of Scots. When Elizabeth I succeeded her half-sister Mary as Queen of England in 1558, her accession was disputed due to the questioned legitimacy of the marriage of the Queen's parents – Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. Under Henry VIII and his advisor Thomas Cromwell, power was shifted from regional institutions to royal control; this course was encouraged by Elizabeth's counsellors such as William Cecil and a policy of centralization was the approach favoured by Elizabeth herself at least in regards to the northern border region. Opponents of Elizabeth looked to Mary, Queen of Scots, as the descendant of Henry's sister Margaret Tudor; the claims were put forward by Mary's father-in-law, King Henry II of France, but Mary upheld them after her return to Scotland in 1561.
Many English Catholics a significant portion of the population, supported Mary's claim as a way to restore Catholic ideology. This position was strong in Northern England, where several powerful nobles were Catholics. Supporters of Mary hoped for aid from France and Spain. Mary's position was strengthened by the birth of her son, James, in 1566 but weakened again when she was deposed in July 1567; the rebellion was led by Charles Neville, 6th Earl of Westmorland, Thomas Percy, 7th Earl of Northumberland. Seven hundred knights assembled at Raby Castle. In November 1569 Westmorland and Northumberland occupied Durham. Thomas Plumtree celebrated Mass in Durham Cathedral. From Durham, the rebels marched south to Bramham Moor, while Elizabeth struggled to raise forces sufficient to confront them. But, hearing of a large force being raised by the Earl of Sussex, the rebels abandoned plans to besiege York, captured Barnard Castle instead, they found little popular support. Sussex marched out from York on 13 December 1569 with 10,000 men against the rebels' 6,000, was followed by 12,000 men under Baron Clinton.
The rebel earls retreated northward and dispersed their forces, fleeing into Scotland. A questionable role in the rebellion was played by an early sympathiser of Mary. At the outbreak of the rebellion, he travelled to Elizabeth's court at Windsor to claim the heritage of his young nephew, the 5th Baron Dacre. After the latter's untimely death in 1569, this had descended to his sisters, all married to sons of the Duke of Norfolk. Dacre returned to Northern England, ostensibly a faithful partisan of Elizabeth, but his intentions remain unclear. After the retreat of the rebels, he seized Greystoke Castle and fortified his own Naworth Castle, where he gathered 3,000 Cumbrian troops and tried to keep up the appearance of good relations with the Queen, he held out against a siege of the royal army under Baron Hunsdon but attacked the retreating army at Gelt River. Though Hunsdon was outnumbered, he charged Dacre's foot with his cavalry, killing 300–400 and capturing 200–300 men. Dacre escaped via Scotland to Flanders.
Of the rebellion's leaders, the Earls of Northumberland and Westmorland had fled into Scotland. Northumberland was captured by James Douglas, 4th Earl of Morton, turned over to Elizabeth in 1572, who had him beheaded at York. After having been hidden at Ferniehirst Castle, Westmorland escaped to Flanders, where he died impoverished, his family lost their ancestral homes and his wife, Jane Howard fled to the Continent. She lived the rest of her life under house arrest, her brother, the Duke of Norfolk, was first imprisoned pardoned. He was imprisoned again following the Ridolfi plot in 1571 and executed in 1572. Norfolk's treason charges included "comforting and relieving of the English rebels that stirred the Rebellion in the North since they have fled out of the realm." Altogether, 600 supporters of Mary were executed. Queen Elizabeth declared martial law, exacting terrible retribution on the ordinary folk of the Yorkshire Dales, despite the lack of any popular support for the Earls' Rising, with her demand for at least 700 executions.
The victims of this purge were, as a contemporary account said "wholly of the meanest sort of people", so that hardly a village escaped the sight of a public hanging. In 1570, Pope Pius V had tried to aid the rebellion by excommunicating Elizabeth and declaring her deposed in the papal bull Regnans in Excelsis, but the document did not arrive until the rebellion had been suppressed; the bull gave Elizabeth more reason to view Catholics with suspicion. It inspired conspiracies to assassinate her, starting with the Ridolfi plot. In 1587, Elizabeth brought Queen of Scots, to trial for treason; the Rising of the North is the main conflict in the historical drama film Mary Queen of Scots. Desmond Rebellions Prayer Book Rebellion Pilgrimage of Grace Fletcher and Diarmaid MacCulloch. Tudor rebellions. Kesselring, Krista; the Northern Rebellion of 1569: Faith and Protest in Elizabethan England. Lowers, James K. Mirrors for rebels: a study of polemical literature relating to the Northern Rebellion, 1569. Http://www.tudorplace.com.ar/Documents/NorthernRebellion.htm http://www.timetravel-britain.com/05/July/raby.shtml
The Pale
The Pale or the English Pale was the part of Ireland directly under the control of the English government in the Late Middle Ages. It had been reduced by the late 15th century to an area along the east coast stretching from Dalkey, south of Dublin, to the garrison town of Dundalk; the inland boundary went to Naas and Leixlip around the Earldom of Kildare, towards Trim and north towards Kells. In this district, many townlands have French names; the Pale was a strip of land, centred on Dublin, that stretched from Dundalk in Louth to Bray in Wicklow and became the base of English rule in Ireland. The Norman invasion of Ireland, beginning in 1169, brought much of Ireland under the theoretical control of the Plantagenet Kings of England. From the 13th century onwards the Hiberno-Norman occupation in the rest of Ireland at first faltered waned. Across most of Ireland, the Normans assimilated into Irish culture after 1300, they made alliances with neighbouring autonomous Gaelic lords. In the long periods when there was no large royal army in Ireland, the Norman lords, like their Gaelic neighbours in the provinces, acted as independent rulers in their own areas.
The Lordship controlled by the English king shrank accordingly, as parts of its perimeter in counties Meath and Kildare were fenced or ditched, it became known as the Pale, deriving from the Latin word palus, a stake, or, synecdochically, a fence. Parts can still be seen west of Clane on the grounds of; the military power of the crown itself was weakened by the Hundred Years War, the Wars of the Roses. The Parliament of Ireland was created sitting at Drogheda until the Tudors took greater interest in Irish affairs from 1485 and moved it back to Dublin; the Pale consisted of fertile lowlands which were easier for the garrison to defend from ambush than hilly or wooded ground. For reasons of trade and administration, a version of English became the official language, its closest modern derivative is said to be the accent used by natives of Fingal. In 1366, so that the English Crown could assert its authority over the settlers, a parliament was assembled in Kilkenny and the Statute of Kilkenny was enacted.
The statute decreed that intermarriage between English settlers and Irish natives was forbidden. It forbade the settlers from using the Irish language and adopting Irish modes of dress or other customs, as such practices were common; the adoption of Gaelic Brehon property law, in particular, undermined the feudal nature of the Lordship. The Act was never implemented even in the Pale itself; this inability to enforce the statute indicated that Ireland was withdrawing from English cultural norms. By the Tudor period, the Irish culture and language had regained most of the territory lost to the colonists: “even in the Pale, all the common folk... for the most part are of Irish birth, Irish habit and of Irish language”. At a higher social level, there was extensive intermarriage between the Gaelic Irish aristocracy and Anglo-Norman lords, beginning not long after the invasion. By the late 15th century, the Pale became the only part of Ireland that remained subject to the English king, with most of the island paying only token recognition of the overlordship of the English crown.
The tax base shrank to a fraction of what it had been in 1300. A proverb quoted by Sir John Davies said that “whoso lives by west of the Barrow, lives west of the law.” The earls of Kildare ruled as Lords Deputy from 1470. This lasted until the 1520s, when the earls passed out of royal favour, but the 9th earl was reinstated in the 1530s; the brief revolt by his son "Silken Thomas" in 1534–35 served in the following decades to hasten the Tudor conquest of Ireland, in which Dublin and the surviving Pale were used as the crown's main military base. A book A Perambulation of Leinster and Louth, of which consist the English Pale expressed contemporary usage; the word pale derives from the Latin word pālus, meaning "stake" a stake used to support a fence. A fence made of pales ganged side by side, a palisade, is derived from the same root. From this came the figurative meaning of "boundary" and the phrase beyond the pale, as something outside the boundary — i.e. uncivilised. Derived from the "boundary" concept was the idea of a pale as an area within which local laws were valid.
The term was used not only for the Pale in Ireland but for various other English colonial settlements, notably English Calais. The term was adapted by other nations: the term Pale of Settlement was applied to the area in the west of Imperial Russia where Jews were permitted to reside; the Pale boundary consisted of a fortified ditch and rampart built around parts of the medieval counties of Louth, Meath and Kildare, leaving out half of Meath, most of Kildare, southwest County Dublin. The northern frontier of the Pale was marked by the De Verdon fortress of Castle Roche, while the southern border corresponded to the present day M50 motorway in Dublin, which crosses the site of what was Carrickmines Castle; the following description is from The Parish of Taney: A History of Dundrum, near Dublin, Its Neighbourhood: In the period after the Norman Settlement was constructed the barrier, known as the "Pale," separating the lands occupied by the settlers from those remaining in the hands of the Irish.
This barrier consisted of a ditch, raised some ten or twelve feet from the ground, with a hedge of thorn on the outer side. It was constructed, not so much to keep out the Irish, as to fo
Kintyre
Kintyre is a peninsula in western Scotland, in the southwest of Argyll and Bute. The peninsula stretches about 30 miles, from the Mull of Kintyre in the south to East Loch Tarbert in the north; the area north of Kintyre is known as Knapdale. Kintyre is long and narrow, at no point more than 11 miles from west coast to east coast, is less than two miles wide where it connects to Knapdale; the east side of the Kintyre Peninsula is bounded by Kilbrannan Sound, with a number of coastal peaks such as Torr Mor. The central spine of the peninsula is hilly moorland; the coastal areas and hinterland, are rich and fertile. Kintyre has long been a prized area for settlers, including the early Scots who migrated from Ulster to western Scotland and the Vikings or Norsemen who conquered and settled the area just before the start of the second millennium; the principal town of the area is Campbeltown, a royal burgh since the mid-18th century. The area's economy has long relied on fishing and farming, although Campbeltown has a reputation as a producer of some of the world's finest single malt whisky.
Campbeltown Single Malts include the multi-award-winning Springbank. Kintyre Pursuivant of Arms in Ordinary, one of the officers of arms at the Court of the Lord Lyon, is named after this peninsula. Kintyre, like Knapdale, contains several stone age sites. Remains from the Iron Age are no less present, with the imposing Dun Skeig, a Celtic hillfort, located at the northern edge of Kintyre; the history of the presumed Pictish inhabitants of Kintyre is not recorded, but a 2nd century BC stone fort survives at Kildonan, it is not implausible that they continued to use Dun Skeig. The tip of Kintyre is just 12 miles from Ulster, there has long been interaction across the straits of Moyle, as evidenced by neolithic finds in Kintyre, such as flint tools characteristic of Antrim. In the early first millennium, an Irish invasion led to Gaelic colonisation of an area centred on the Kintyre peninsula, establishing the Gaelic kingdom of Dál Riata; the latter was divided into a handful of regions, controlled by particular kin groups, of which the most powerful, the Cenél nGabráin, ruled over Kintyre, along with Knapdale, the region between Loch Awe and Loch Fyne and Moyle.
The kingdom thrived for a few centuries, formed a springboard for Christianisation of the mainland. Sanda, an island adjacent the south coast of Kintyre, is associated with Ninian, the first known missionary to the Picts, contains an early 5th century chapel said to have been built by him. In 563, Columba arrived in Kintyre, to pay his respects to the kings of Dal Riata, before continuing to Iona, where he established a base for missionary activity throughout the Pictish regions beyond. Dál Riata was destroyed when Norse vikings invaded, established their own domain, spreading more extensively over the islands north and west of the mainland. Following the unification of Norway, they had become the Norwegian Kingdom of the Isles, locally controlled by Godred Crovan, known by Norway as Suðreyjar, meaning southern isles; the former territory of Dal Riata acquired the geographic description Argyle: the Gaelic coast. In 1093, the Norwegian king, launched a military campaign to assert his authority over the isles.
Malcolm, the king of Scotland, responded with a written agreement, accepting that Magnus' had sovereign authority of over all the western lands that Magnus could encircle by boat. The unspecific wording led Magnus to have his boat dragged across the narrow isthmus at Tarbert, while he rode within it, so that he would thereby acquire Kintyre, in addition to the more natural islands of Arran and Bute. Magnus's campaign had been part of a conspiracy against Malcolm, by Donalbain, Malcolm's younger brother; when Malcolm was killed in battle a short time Donalbain invaded, seized the Scottish kingdom, displaced Malcolm's sons from the throne. Donalbain's apparent keenness to do this, weakened his support among the nobility, Malcolm's son, was able to depose him. A few years following a rebellion against Magnus' authority in the Isles, he launched another, expedition. In 1098, aware of Magnus' actions, the new Scottish king, quitclaimed to Magnus all sovereign authority over the isles, the whole of Kintyre and Knapdale.
In the mid 12th century, the husband of Godred Crovan's granddaughter, led a successful revolt against Norway, transforming Suðreyjar into an independent kingdom. After his death, nominal Norwegian authority was re-established, but de-facto authority was split between Somerled's sons and the Crovan dynasty; the exact allocation to Somerled's sons is unclear, but following a family dispute, Somerled's grandson, acquired Kintyre, together with Knapdale and Jura. Donald's father, established Saddell Abbey, in 1207. In the mid 13th century, increased tension between Norway and Scotland led to a series of Battles, culminating in the Battle of Largs, shortly after which the Norwegian king died. In 1266, his more peaceable successor ceded his nominal authority over Suðreyjar to the Scottish king by the Treaty of Perth, in return for a large sum of money. Although Alexander III g
Order of the Garter
The Order of the Garter is an order of chivalry founded by Edward III in 1348 and regarded as the most prestigious British order of chivalry in England and the United Kingdom. It is dedicated to the image and arms of England's patron saint. Appointments are made at the Sovereign's sole discretion. Membership of the Order is limited to the Sovereign, the Prince of Wales, no more than 24 living members, or Companions; the order includes supernumerary knights and ladies. New appointments to the Order of the Garter are announced on St George's Day, as Saint George is the order's patron saint; the order's emblem is a garter with the motto Honi soit qui mal y pense in gold lettering. Members of the order wear it on ceremonial occasions. King Edward III founded the Order of the Garter around the time of his claim to the French throne; the traditional year of foundation is given as 1348. However, the Complete Peerage, under "The Founders of the Order of the Garter", states the order was first instituted on 23 April 1344, listing each founding member as knighted in 1344.
The list includes Sir Sanchet D'Abrichecourt, who died on 20 October 1345. Other dates from 1344 to 1351 have been proposed; the King's wardrobe account shows Garter habits first issued in the autumn of 1348. Its original statutes required that each member of the Order be a knight and some of the initial members listed were only knighted that year; the foundation is to have been inspired by the Spanish Order of the Band, established in about 1330. The earliest written mention of the Order is found in Tirant lo Blanch, a chivalric romance written in Catalan by Valencian Joanot Martorell, it was first published in 1490. This book devotes a chapter to the description of the origin of the Order of the Garter. At the time of its foundation, the Order consisted of King Edward III, together with 25 Founder Knights, listed in ascending order of stall number in St George's Chapel: King Edward III Edward, the Black Prince, Prince of Wales Henry of Grosmont, Earl of Lancaster Thomas de Beauchamp, 11th Earl of Warwick Jean III de Grailly, Captal de Buch Ralph de Stafford, 1st Earl of Stafford William de Montacute, 2nd Earl of Salisbury Roger Mortimer, 2nd Earl of March John de Lisle, 2nd Baron Lisle Bartholomew de Burghersh, 2nd Baron Burghersh John de Beauchamp, 1st Baron Beauchamp John de Mohun, 2nd Baron Mohun Sir Hugh de Courtenay Thomas Holland, 1st Earl of Kent John de Grey, 1st Baron Grey de Rotherfield Sir Richard Fitz-Simon Sir Miles Stapleton Sir Thomas Wale Sir Hugh Wrottesley Sir Nele Loring Sir John Chandos Sir James Audley Sir Otho Holand Sir Henry Eam Sir Sanchet D'Abrichecourt Sir Walter Paveley They are all depicted in individual portraits in the Bruges Garter Book made c.
1431, now in the British Library. Various legends account for the origin of the Order; the most popular involves the "Countess of Salisbury", whose garter is said to have slipped from her leg while she was dancing at a court ball at Calais. When the surrounding courtiers sniggered, the king picked it up and returned it to her, exclaiming, "Honi soit qui mal y pense!", the phrase that has become the motto of the Order. However, the earliest written version of this story dates from the 1460s, it seems to have been conceived as a retrospective explanation for the adoption of what was seen as an item of female underclothing as the symbol of a band of knights. In fact, at the time of the Order's establishment in the mid-14th century, the garter was predominantly an item of male attire. According to another legend, King Richard I was inspired in the 12th century by St George the Martyr while fighting in the Crusades to tie garters around the legs of his knights, who subsequently won the battle. King Edward recalled the event in the 14th century when he founded the Order.
This story is recounted in a letter to the Annual Register in 1774: In Rastel's Chronicle, I. vi. under the life of Edward III is the following curious passage: "About the 19 yere of this kinge, he made a solempne feest at Wyndesore, a greate justes and turnament, where he devysed, perfyted substanegally, the order of the knyghtes of the garter. And afterwarde they were called the knyghtes of the blew thonge." I am obliged for this passage to Esq.. Hence some affirm, that the origin of the garter is to be dated from Richard I* and that it owes its pomp and splendor to Edward III. *Winstanley, in his Life of Edward III says that the original book of the institution deduces the invention from King Richard the First. The motto in fact refers to Edward's claim to the French throne, the Order of the Garter was created to help pursue this claim; the use of the garter as an emblem may have derived from straps used t
Anne Boleyn
Anne Boleyn was Queen of England from 1533 to 1536 as the second wife of King Henry VIII. Henry's marriage to her, her execution by beheading, made her a key figure in the political and religious upheaval, the start of the English Reformation. Anne was the daughter of Thomas Boleyn, 1st Earl of Wiltshire, his wife, Lady Elizabeth Howard, was educated in the Netherlands and France as a maid of honour to Queen Claude of France. Anne returned to England in early 1522, to marry 9th Earl of Ormond. Early in 1523 Anne was secretly betrothed to Henry Percy, son of the 5th Earl of Northumberland, but the betrothal was broken off when Percy's father refused to support their engagement. Cardinal Wolsey refused the match in January 1524 and Anne was sent back home to Hever Castle. In February or March 1526, Henry VIII began his pursuit of Anne, she resisted his attempts to seduce her, refusing to become his mistress, which her sister Mary had been. It soon became the one absorbing object of Henry's desires to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon so he would be free to marry Anne.
When it became clear that Pope Clement VII would not annul the marriage, the breaking of the Catholic Church's power in England began. In 1532, Henry granted Anne the Marquessate of Pembroke. Henry and Anne formally married on 25 January 1533, after a secret wedding on 14 November 1532. On 23 May 1533, newly appointed Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer declared Henry and Catherine's marriage null and void. Shortly afterwards, the Pope decreed sentences of excommunication against Cranmer; as a result of this marriage and these excommunications, the first break between the Church of England and Rome took place and the Church of England was brought under the King's control. Anne was crowned Queen of England on 1 June 1533. On 7 September, she gave birth to the future Queen Elizabeth I. Henry was disappointed to have a daughter rather than a son but hoped a son would follow and professed to love Elizabeth. Anne subsequently had three miscarriages, by March 1536, Henry was courting Jane Seymour.
In order to marry Jane Seymour, Henry had to find reasons to end the marriage to Anne. Henry VIII had Anne investigated for high treason in April 1536. On 2 May she was arrested and sent to the Tower of London, where she was tried before a jury of peers – which included Henry Percy, her former betrothed, her own uncle, Thomas Howard – and found guilty on 15 May, she was beheaded four days later. Modern historians view the charges against her, which included adultery and plotting to kill the king, as unconvincing; some say that Anne was accused of witchcraft but the indictments make no mention of this charge. After the coronation of her daughter, Anne was venerated as a martyr and heroine of the English Reformation through the works of John Foxe. Over the centuries, she has inspired, or been mentioned, in many artistic and cultural works and thereby retained her hold on the popular imagination, she has been called "the most influential and important queen consort England has had", as she provided the occasion for Henry VIII to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon and declare the English church's independence from Rome.
Anne was the daughter of Thomas Boleyn Earl of Wiltshire and Earl of Ormond, his wife, Lady Elizabeth Howard, daughter of Thomas Howard, 2nd Duke of Norfolk. Thomas Boleyn was a well respected diplomat with a gift for languages. Anne and her siblings grew up at Hever Castle in Kent. However, the siblings were born in Norfolk at the Boleyn home at Blickling. A lack of parish records from the period has made it impossible to establish Anne's date of birth. Contemporary evidence is contradictory, with several dates having been put forward by various historians. An Italian, writing in 1600, suggested that she had been born in 1499, while Sir Thomas More's son-in-law, William Roper, indicated a much date of 1512, her birth was most sometime between 1501 and 1507. As with Anne herself, it is uncertain when her two siblings were born, but it seems clear that her sister Mary was older than Anne. Mary's children believed their mother had been the elder sister. Most historians now agree that Mary was born in 1499.
Mary's grandson claimed the Ormonde title in 1596 on the basis she was the elder daughter, which Elizabeth I accepted. Their brother George was born around 1504; the academic debate about Anne's birth date focuses on two key dates: 1501 and 1507. Eric Ives, a British historian and legal expert, advocates the 1501 date, while Retha Warnicke, an American scholar who has written a biography of Anne, prefers 1507; the key piece of surviving written evidence is a letter Anne wrote sometime in 1514. She wrote it in French to her father, still living in England while Anne was completing her education at Mechelen, in the Burgundian Netherlands, now Belgium. Ives argues that the style of the letter and its mature handwriting prove that Anne must have been about thirteen at the time of its composition, while Warnicke argues that the numerous misspellings and grammar errors show that the letter was written by a child. In Ives' view, this would be around the minimum age that a girl could be a maid of honour, as Anne was to the regent, Margaret of Austria.
This is supported by claims of a chronicler from the late 16th century, who wrote that Anne was twenty when she returned from France. These findings are contested by Warnicke in several bo
Sir William Sidney
Sir William Sidney was an English courtier under Henry VIII and Edward VI. He was eldest son of Nicholas Sidney, by Anne, sister of Sir William Brandon. In 1511 he accompanied Thomas Darcy, 1st Baron Darcy de Darcy into Spain as a volunteer against the Moors, when Darcy, finding his assistance not required, returned immediately to England and several of his companions remained behind in order to see Madrid, he declined the honour of knighthood from him. As captain of the ‘Great Bark’ he took part in the naval operations before Brest in April 1513, in the year commanded the right wing of the English army at the battle of Flodden, he was knighted for his services, on 23 March 1514 obtained a grant in tail male of the lordship of Kingston-upon-Hull and the manor of Myton forfeited by the attainder of Edmund de la Pole. In October he accompanied his cousin Charles Brandon, 1st Duke of Suffolk and Thomas Grey, 2nd Marquess of Dorset to Paris, to witness the coronation on 5 November of the Princess Mary as consort of Louis XII, took a prominent part in the subsequent jousts and festivities.
In the following summer he again went to France, charged with the delicate task of announcing the approaching second marriage of the Princess Mary, to the Duke of Suffolk. Sidney was appointed a squire of the body to Henry VIII, married in 1517, he accompanied the king to the Field of the Cloth of Gold in 1520, in 1523, during the war with France, took part in the expedition commanded by the Duke of Suffolk. In March 1538 he was appointed steward of the household to Prince Edward. In 1539 he received a large grant of lands in Kent and Sussex in exchange for those held by him in York and Lincoln, his wife died on 22 October 1543, on 25 April 1552 Edward VI added to his estates in Kent the manor of Penshurst. Sidney died at Penshurst on 10 February 1554, was buried in the parish church. Sidney married daughter of Sir Hugh Pakenham. Henry Sidney was their son. In the chancel of St John the Baptist, Penshurst is the tomb of Sidney with a memorial tablet, on the sides of which are engraven the escutcheons of his four daughters and their husbands: Mary, eldest daughter, who married Sir William Dormer of Wing, Lucy, who married Sir James Harington of Exton Hall, Rutland.
Frances, who married of Thomas Radcliffe, 3rd Earl of Sussex. Richardson, Douglas. Everingham, Kimball G. ed. Magna Carta Ancestry: A Study in Colonial and Medieval Families. III. Salt Lake City. ISBN 144996639X. Attriution This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Dunlop, Robert. "Sidney, Henry". In Lee, Sidney. Dictionary of National Biography. 52. London: Smith, Elder & Co. pp. 210–217
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Sussex, Thomas Radclyffe, 3rd Earl of". Encyclopædia Britannica. 26 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 164–165.
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the