A listener's guide to the Tudors

The Tudors are the most dramatised century in English history and the most badly understood, because almost everyone meets them through the wives. Six wives, a rhyme about their fates, and a fat king in a portrait.

The wives are genuinely the story, but not for the reason the rhyme implies. Henry's marital problem was a succession problem, the succession problem became a religious problem, the religious problem became a political revolution, and the revolution outlived every person who made it. That is one story with a beginning and an end, and it is much more interesting than a list of six women.

Here is the order to hear it in.

Start before Henry, or none of it makes sense

The Wars of the Roses, about twelve minutes. Thirty years of dynastic civil war ending with a nobody from Wales on the throne. Every anxious decision Henry VIII ever made about sons traces to this, because his father won the crown in a field and everybody knew it.

Henry VII of England, about eleven minutes. The most competent and least famous Tudor. He stabilised a stolen throne through accountancy, arranged marriages, and a genuinely frightening intelligence network, and left his son the richest treasury in English history. His son spent it.

Then the reign, through the marriages

Henry VIII, about eleven minutes. The overview. Do this one before the wives rather than after, because it gives you the shape.

Catherine of Aragon, about eleven minutes. Twenty-four years married, one surviving daughter, and a refusal to accept an annulment that held up against the king, the court and eventually the church. She is usually written as the first act. She was the immovable object the whole century broke against.

Anne Boleyn, about sixteen minutes. Not a mistress who got lucky. A politically sophisticated woman with reformist sympathies who held out for the crown and then failed to produce a son fast enough to survive the consequences. Her daughter reigned for forty-five years.

Jane Seymour, about seventeen minutes. The one who delivered a son and died of it. The longest of the wives' entries, and the one that shows how quickly the court reassembled itself around whoever was next.

Anne of Cleves, about eleven minutes. The marriage that failed in four months and the only wife who came out of the whole thing wealthy, respected and safe. She outlived all of them.

Catherine Howard, about fifteen minutes. A teenager married to a man in his fifties, in a court where everyone around her had a use for her. It is the bleakest of the six.

Catherine Parr, about twenty-three minutes. The longest entry here and the most underrated life in the century. Three husbands before Henry, a serious published theologian, nearly arrested for heresy, and the person who brought Mary and Elizabeth back to court and had them educated properly. A great deal of what Elizabeth became starts here.

Then the revolution the marriages caused

The English Reformation, about eleven minutes. This is the entry that turns the soap opera into history. A king's annulment becomes a national break with Rome, and a break with Rome becomes a change in what every person in England was allowed to believe.

Thomas Cromwell, about fifteen minutes. The lawyer's son who ran the country by being better at administration than anyone else alive, engineered the break with Rome, and was executed on a trumped-up charge by a king who regretted it within months.

Thomas More, about fifteen minutes. Cromwell's opposite and the other great mind of the reign. He would not swear the oath and he knew exactly what that cost. Listen to these two back to back.

The dissolution of the monasteries, about nine minutes. The largest transfer of property in English history before the twentieth century. This is the part that made the Reformation permanent, because once the gentry owned the abbey lands, no restoration could ever undo it.

Then the three children

Edward VI, about twelve minutes. Nine years old at accession, dead at fifteen, and in between a genuinely radical Protestant programme run by his councils.

Mary I of England, about eleven minutes. The reign everyone reduces to a nickname. Five years, a Spanish marriage, an attempt to reverse the whole Reformation, and the burnings that made Protestantism permanently English.

Elizabeth I, about sixteen minutes. Forty-five years, no marriage, and a religious settlement deliberately vague enough that most people could live inside it. The best political operator of the family and possibly the most careful.

Mary, Queen of Scots, about sixteen minutes. The cousin, the rival claim, and nineteen years of imprisonment ending in the only execution of an anointed queen by another queen.

The Spanish Armada, about fourteen minutes. The moment the settlement survived a real test, and the founding story England told itself for the next three hundred years.

Where to add the texture

The Tower of London, about eleven minutes, for the building that most of the above passed through. Nine hundred years of a fortress that was a palace, a mint, a zoo, and last of all a prison.

How long this takes

Nineteen entries, roughly four hours. That is a fortnight of commutes.

The thing that happens with the Tudors, more than any other period we have watched people listen through, is that they go in for the wives and come out interested in the administration. Cromwell does that to people. So does the dissolution. It is the rare case where the boring-sounding entry is the one that reorganises the whole century for you.

Start with Anne Boleyn. Then listen to Thomas Cromwell for another part of the story.

Follow the story.