Tudor Times is the online repository for all things Tudor and Stewart (1485–1625)

On 9th April 1582 Richard Bertie, second husband of Katherine Willoughby, Dowager Duchess of Suffolk and Baroness Willoughby de Broke, died. Bertie was the Duchess’ gentleman usher, a useful role for forming close relationships. Read our review of David Baldwin’s biography of Katherine here. Like his wife, he was a radical in religion, and when they were exiled during the reign of Queen Mary, they travelled to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. On return to England with their two children, the couple were not welcomed by Elizabeth I, but Bertie was returned as an MP several times and acted as a Justice of the Peace.

On 8th April 1580, William Herbert, 3rd Earl of Pembroke, was born. He was the grandson of Anne Parr, sister of Queen Katherine Parr, and the son of Henry, 2nd Earl and Mary Sidney, sister of the poet, Sir Philip Sidney. William became Earl in 1601 and held a number of important posts, particularly in South Wales, where his ancestor, Sir William Herbert, had been a rival for power to Edmund and Jasper Tudor. Pembroke had a complicated private life. He refused to marry the bride chosen for him, Lady Bridget de Vere, grand-daughter of Sir William Cecil, when terms could not be agreed for the lady’s dowry. He had illegitimate children by ladies of good birth, Mary Fitton (for which he was imprisoned when he refused to marry her) and by his cousin, Lady Mary Wroth. He married Lady Mary Talbot but had no children by her. In his role as Lord Chancellor of the University of Oxford, he was honoured by the use of his name in the founding of Pembroke College. William and his brother, Philip, Earl of Montgomery, are the dedicatees of the First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays.

Picture is by Daniel Mytens, c.1625

On 7th April 1498, Charles VIII of France died, after hitting his head on a stone door-lintel. He was only twenty-eight but had been King from the age of thirteen, and had packed a lot into his reign. For the first years, his sister, Anne of Beaujeu, acted as Regent. It was during that period that the French crown gave moral and financial aid to Henry Tudor’s successful campaign for the English throne. Charles also amalgamated the independent Duchy of Brittany into France, through his forcible marriage to the fourteen year old Duchess, Anne. Charles’ real ambitions, though, were in Italy. Invited by the Pope to press his claims to the Kingdom of Naples, he invaded France and unleashed sixty-five years of war as the Spanish and French crowns fought for dominance in the Italian peninsula. Read about the European alliances of the 1490s here