"Whose Faith? Which Sacraments?"

"The deaths of three men define England in the 1530s: Thomas­ Cardinal Wolsey, who died en route to trial and execution in 1530; Thomas More, executed after conviction in a carefully staged trial in 1535; and Thomas Cromwell, bundled to execution without trial by virtue of an act of attainder in 1540. 'If I had served God as diligently as I have done the king,' lamented Wolsey, 'He would not have given me over in my grey hairs.' And he went on to add a pointed warning to future royal councillors: 'Be well advised and assured what matter you put in his head: for you shall never pull it out again.' Thomas More weighed things up a little differently in his final account, saying that he died 'the king's faithful servant, but God's first.' He also protested that he died 'in and for the faith of the Holy Catholic Church'—and no one was in any doubt as to which church he meant. Cromwell was more guarded: 'I intend this day to die God's servant.' His protestation that he died 'in the Catholic faith,' and his avowals of loyalty to its laws and sacraments were, as MacCulloch remarks, a touch ambiguous."

Richard Rex at First Things reviews Diarmaid MacCulloch's Thomas Cromwell: A Revolutionary Life.

"To Colour Their Faces with Such Sibbersauces"

"During her reign, Elizabeth became an icon to worship—the Protestant object of a 'royal cult' that, Montrose reports, clashed with and contested the Catholic worship of the Virgin Mary. This 'cult of Elizabeth,' which emphasized her virginity and beauty, provoked a range of responses among Britons, who 'sustained, elaborated, and appropriated [the cult] to their own ends' during her time in power. Living inside it all, Elizabeth clearly seemed to realize her presentation of a mask that didn't slip was critical to her survival.

Rebecca Onion at Slate discusses the importance of makeup to Elizabeth I.

"If Physics Can Live With Maddening Truths, Why Can't Literature and History?"

"However, 'Wolf Hall' poses questions not just political but literary. When such a distortion of history produces such a wonderfully successful piece of fiction, we are forced to ask: What license are we to grant to the historical novel?
"For all the learned answers, in reality it comes down to temporal proximity."

Charles Krauthammer in The Washington Post ponders fact and fiction.

"There Is, of Course, Much That Historians Can Learn from Novelists"

"Fifteenth-century history is highly contested, and much of what Jones must navigate his way through has been the subject of intense historiographical debate: how much was William de la Pole, Earl and later Duke of Suffolk, chief minister to Henry VI, to blame for what went wrong in the 1440s? Jones does not interrupt his narrative to introduce the disputed nature of events, but he does give a strong line of argument, and those who wish to know the terms of the argument must head to his notes. This is not to suggest any antithesis between history as research and narrative: one paragraph, about the library of Katherine de la Pole, abbess of Barking Abbey, struck me as taking a phenomenal amount of research to construct, but Jones rises elegantly to the challenge."


In New Statesmen, Suzannah Lipscomb reviews Tracy Boorman's Thomas Cromwell: the Untold Story of Henry VIII's Most Faithful Servant and Dan Jones's The Hollow Crown: the Wars of the Roses and the Rise of the Tudors.

The Winter of His Disinterment

"The injury appears to confirm contemporary accounts that he died in close combat in the thick of the battle and unhorsed – as in the great despairing cry Shakespeare gives him: 'A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!'"

Maev Kennedy in The Guardian reports the confirmation of the discovery of Richard III's remains in Leicester, England.

"A Fool for Love"?

"Far from the reformist evangelical heroine of the Protestant myth, he suggests that she was not a major player in bringing any form of Lutheranism to England, and points to a sermon from her almoner who made a plea for the preservation of church ritual. He suggests she was no theologian and did not lead the assault on the papacy but was more the passive beneficiary when Henry took the power of the pope and declared himself free of his first wife, Catherine of Aragon.
"This much will trouble those who like to see Anne as a heroine."

In the Los Angeles Times, Philippa Gregory reviews G.W. Bernard's Anne Boleyn: Fatal Attractions.