Lucy Wooding

Two conflicting versions​ of Thomas More continue to have particular resonance. One is the principled, compassionate statesman who lays down his life for his convictions in Robert Bolt’s play A Man for All Seasons. The other, more or less diametrically opposed, is the zealot and vindictive persecutor of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, who takes savage delight in flogging heretics. The...

Few​ things expose the potential for illogicality, hypocrisy and cruelty within the Christian tradition more clearly than its attitude to sex. Throughout the centuries, the struggle to comprehend divine instruction and apply it to everyday life has revolved with particular intensity around the question of what people might want to do, and what they should be permitted to do, in their sexual...

The life​ of a Tudor statesman could be a painful one. Even if dignified by a measure of moral integrity or, conversely, sweetened by the fruits of corruption, it still required long hours of unremitting labour. In the 16th century, when the political process rested less on institutions and more on informal networks and shared expectations, a regime was only ever a few steps away from...

There were​ more than a million women in early 16th-century England, yet we remain obsessively interested in the life and death of just one. The usual, if sensational, explanation is that Anne Boleyn was a woman of unconventional but irresistible charm, with exceptional wit and charisma, who brought the most powerful man in the country to his knees: as John Guy and Julia Fox describe her,...

London​ in the time of Henry VIII had many colourful, even flamboyant, inhabitants. Stephen Vaughan was not one of them. His was a small life, full of frustrations; his chief characteristic was a pragmatic diligence, which gave him a good, if not brilliant, head for business. He was a merchant, a financier, a minor diplomat and an occasional low-grade spy. It seems that he was also a useful...