Curated category
1500s births
- Anne BoleynAnne Boleyn went to the scaffold on the 19th of May 1536 wearing a red petticoat beneath a loose grey gown of damask trimmed in fur, and she laughed.
- Pierre BontempsPierre Bontemps carved the faces of French kings and queens in stone, and yet most people who have stood beside his work never knew his name.
- Fernão Lopes de CastanhedaFernão Lopes de Castanheda was born around 1500 in Santarém, Portugal, and spent a decade on the far side of the world gathering the raw material for one of…
- Elizabeth Somerset, Countess of Worcester (1502–1565)Elizabeth Somerset, Countess of Worcester, sat to the left of Anne Boleyn at the queen's coronation feast, close enough to hold a cloth before the queen's…
- Jane SeymourJane Seymour entered the world at Wulfhall in Wiltshire, though some historians suggest West Bower Manor in Somerset as her birthplace.
- George Boleyn, Viscount RochfordGeorge Boleyn, Viscount Rochford, stepped onto Tower Hill on the morning of the 17th of May 1536 to face the axe. The crowd watching was, by all accounts…
- Edward Seymour, 1st Duke of SomersetEdward Seymour, 1st Duke of Somerset, rose from a minor English noble family to become the effective ruler of England for two years, all because his sister…
- Nicholas Bourbon (the elder)Nicholas Bourbon the elder arrived in England in 1535 carrying a debt he could not repay with money. The French poet and teacher had spent years imprisoned…
- Garcia de OrtaGarcia de Orta sailed out of the Tagus river in March 1534 carrying a set of questions that European medicine had never properly answered.
- Thomas TallisThomas Tallis died on the 23rd of November 1585, and by the time his body was carried to the chancel of St Alfege Church in Greenwich, he had served four…
- William Carey (courtier)William Carey died on the 22nd of June 1528, and the man who recorded his passing captured something strange about the moment.
- Bálint BakfarkBálint Bakfark was so good at the lute that monarchs across Europe tried to poach him from one another, and he refused them all.
- Henry Percy, 6th Earl of NorthumberlandHenry Percy entered the household of Cardinal Thomas Wolsey as a young page, learning the ways of aristocratic society in the early 1500s.
- Fernão Mendes PintoFernão Mendes Pinto left Lisbon on the 11th of March 1537 on a journey that would take him to the bottom of a slave market in Mocha, onto the Great Wall of…
- Garcilaso de la Vega (poet)Garcilaso de la Vega entered the world in Toledo between 1498 and 1503. His father Garcilaso de la Vega served as a nobleman and ambassador to the royal…