How to Be Tudor

Did she plot against the crown? Did she, as the regime alleged, burn the evidence that incriminated her? Or was there, as she claimed, nothing worth burning?

Henry VIII came to the throne in 1509. Charles Brandon’s power as a court favourite endured till death removed him in 1545. How did he do it?

Our current royal family doesn’t have the difficulties in breeding that pandas do, but pandas and royal persons alike are expensive to conserve and ill-adapted to any modern environment.

Mary’s bishops wanted recantations more than they wanted executions. There was always the possibility of a last-minute change of heart; this would not free the condemned person from the stake, but it would send the charred soul to heaven, or at least purgatory.

Whatever emotion she felt when she found herself sentenced to death, it can’t have been surprise.

‘You don’t want to see him,’ said the porter at Corpus, when Charles Nicholl went to Cambridge to look at the portrait that is probably Christopher Marlowe. ‘He died in a tavern brawl.’