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it a contemporary rather than historical aesthetic. It also constitutes, as Ramona Wray contends, ‘an extraordinarily detailed take on the reign’ 2 of Henry VIII and is ‘with a total of thirty-eight episodes and a combined running time of almost thirty-five hours’, as Sue Parrill and William B. Robinson observe, ‘by far the longest filmic event ever to deal with the Tudor dynasty’. 3 SCREENING HENRY
Early modern Westminster is familiar as the location of the Royal Court at Whitehall, parliament, the law courts and the emerging West End, yet it has never been studied in its own right. This book reveals the often problematic relations between the diverse groups of people who constituted local society - the Court, the aristocracy, the Abbey, the middling sort and the poor - and the competing visions of Westminster's identity which their presence engendered. There were four parishes in Westminster at the turn of the sixteenth century. The parishes of St Martin's and St Margaret's have been identified as two of only eighteen English parishes for which continuous and detailed parish records survive for the turbulent period 1535-1570. Differences in social organization, administrative structure and corporate life in the two parishes also provide a study in contrasts. These crucial differences partly shaped forms of lay piety in each parish as well as their very different responses to the religious reformations of Henry VIII and his children. The death of Henry VIII heralded important changes in Westminster. Most strikingly, however, this was a period of major religious change, in stark contrast to the piecemeal changes of Henry's reign. The dissolution of Westminster's abbey gave rise to special problems. The book examines individuals who wielded the most influence at the local government; as well as the social identity of these parish elites. Finally, it explores the interaction of religion with the social and political developments observed in the post-Reformation town.
Each age has used the debate about the English Reformation in its own way and for its own ends. This book is about the changing nature of the debate on the English Reformation, and is a study of Reformation historiography. It focuses the historiography of the Reformation as seen through the eyes of men who were contemporaries of the English Reformation, and examines the work of certain later writers from Thomas Fuller to John Strype. The book discusses the history of the sixteenth-century Reformation as written by modernist professional historians of the later nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries. All through the Tudor times the tide of Reformation ebbed and flowed as the monarch willed. The book sets out modern debates concerning the role of Henry VIII, or his ministers, the Reformation and the people of England, and the relative strength of Protestantism or Catholicism. Catholics and Protestants alike openly used the historical past to support their contemporary political arguments. Additionally, the nature of religious identities, and the changes which occurred in the Church of England as a result of the Reformation are also explained. The history of the Reformation in the 1990s and 2000s has to be viewed within the context of research assessment and peer review. The book shows how persistent the threat of postmodernist theory is to the discipline of history, even as leading academic authorities on the Reformation have rejected it out of hand.
Moving images of the British monarchy, in fact and fiction, are almost as old as the moving image itself, dating back to an 1895 dramatic vignette, The Execution of Mary Queen of Scots. Led by Queen Victoria, British monarchs themselves appeared in the new 'animated photography' from 1896. Half a century later, the 1953 coronation of Elizabeth II was a milestone in the adoption of television, watched by 20 million Britons and 100 million North Americans. At the century's end, Princess Diana's funeral was viewed by 2.5 billion worldwide. Seventeen essays by international commentators examine the portrayal of royalty in the 'actuality' picture, the early extended feature, amateur cinema, the movie melodrama, the Commonwealth documentary, New Queer Cinema, TV current affairs, the big screen ceremonial and the post-historical boxed set. These contributors include Ian Christie, Elisabeth Bronfen, Andrew Higson, Steven Fielding, Karen Lury, Glyn Davis, Ann Gray, Jane Landman, Victoria Duckett, Jude Cowan Montague, James Downs, Barbara Straumann, Deirdre Gilfedder, Jo Stephenson, Ruth Adams, Erin Bell, Basil Glynn and Nicola Rehling.
father Henry VIII and become King Edward VI, was five years old in December 1542. If he were to marry the young Scottish Queen, and they were to have children, the English and Scottish Crowns would be permanently united. The potential gains for England were obvious, and on hearing of James V’s death, English agents did not even wait for their King’s permission before beginning to pursue Edward’s candidacy.2 From the beginning, therefore, the political stakes of this new reign were alarmingly high. This contest over Mary, Queen of Scots’s marriage would dominate the next
26 • debating tudor policy in sixteenth-century ireland • 1 • Conquest or conciliation? The policy debate in Henrician Ireland, c.1515–15461 As with so much else in the Tudor dominions the reign of Henry VIII was of critical importance in defining how government policy was shaped in Ireland during the sixteenth century. Historians of the period, long aware of this fact, have closely examined a number of treatises written on Ireland at the time with a view to determining how the Tudor conquest of Ireland or indeed efforts to constitutionally ‘reform’ the
Chapter 12 Tudor Propaganda In England, where indeed the Catholic Church had been rooted out by the Henrician reformation of the 1530s, Henry VIII’s minister Thomas Cromwell is said to have launched ‘the first campaign ever mounted by any government in any state of Europe’ to exploit the propaganda potential of the printing press. Henry VII, the founder of the Tudor dynasty, had always been acutely aware of the importance of propaganda as a means of consolidating his power. Henry was determined to legitimize his dynasty in the eyes of God, the Pope, and Europe
Englishness of Korda’s new British-based adventure would be epitomised in the screen logo he dreamed up for his company – Big Ben, sited at the very heart of parliamentary democracy. But London Film Productions’ first great success, The Private Life of Henry VIII , was still more than eighteen months away as ‘the foundations of British hopes for waging a successful campaign against Hollywood’s domination of world markets’, 6 were initiated by the much-travelled would-be mogul then still at the comparatively young age of thirty-eight. As plans for Henry VIII gestated