The making of Tudor England

The new men’s role in Henry VII’s regime must be set amid the contribution made to his reign by other royal councillors and servants, bishops, lesser clerics, peers, and courtiers. Yet their efforts did much to give his government its distinctive flavour. Their careers as upwardly mobile agents of royal power were not unprecedented, but were notable in their impact, paralleled those of their contemporaries in other European polities, and foreshadowed those of later sixteenth-century statesmen. Their importance was evident to those interpreting Henry’s reign in the decades that followed, into the generations of Holinshed and Stow, Shakespeare, and Bacon. Critical contemporaries were right that they mixed self-help liberally with public service, but they were central to the making of Tudor England.