Steven Gunn is Professor of Early Modern History at Merton College, Oxford. His current research concerns accidental death and everyday life in sixteenth-century England stemming from an ESRC-funded project on coroners’ inquests in Tudor times. He was published extensively on a wide range of aspects relating to Tudor government. Additionally, he writes for BBC History Magazine and History Today, contributes to radio and television programmes such as ‘Our Time’, and is a trustee of the Royal Armouries.
About the event
Henry VII’s court is often overshadowed by those of his Tudor successors. His great palaces at Richmond and Greenwich are lost and he had no Holbein or Hilliard to paint his courtiers. Yet this lecture will argue that his court was a vital centre of politics, government and cultural change and that we cannot understand his reign without looking at his court.
This marvellous new book sets the developments in the government of England under the early Tudors in the context of recent work on the fifteenth century and on continental Europe.
Reconstructs the lives of Henry VII's new men-low-born ministers with legal, financial, political, and military skills who enforced the king's will as he sought to strengthen government after the Wars of the Roses, examining how they exercised power, gained wealth, and spent it to sustain their new-found status.
War should be recognised as one of the defining features of life in the England of Henry VIII. Henry fought many wars throughout his reign, and this book explores how this came to dominate English culture and shape attitudes to the king and to national history, with people talking and reading about war, and spending money on weaponry and defence.