And so, Edmund's son John served the man who had his father judicially murdered. In Tudor England, however, serving the king was the only game in town. Anyone who wonders how the 'virtuous prince' Henry VIII turned into an old monster should consider the possibility that he did it in the easiest possible way, by starting out as a young monster. Reviled for his role in the king's ruthless fiscal exactions and, like Richard Empson, lacking the aristocratic connections that might have saved him, he became a disposable sop to public opinion for the new monarch and was executed on trumped-up charges of treason in 1510. Three of its members perished on the block, yet the family bounced back from utter disgrace to twice being on the verge of siring the dynasty that might have replaced the Tudors.Įdmund Dudley was a minor gentleman who rose to be a minister to Henry VII. see Derek Wilson does a good, if sometimes uneven, job of bringing to life the curious intertwined history of the Dudleys, who rose from just about nowhere to become one of the most prominent families in Tudor England. Thus the fortunes of this astonishing family rose and fell with those of the royal line they served faithfully through a tumultuous century.
The most famous of them all, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, came the closest to marrying Elizabeth I, was her foremost favourite for 30 years and governed the Netherlands in her name, while his successor, Sir Robert Dudley, was one of the Queen's most audacious seadogs in the closing years of her reign, but fell foul of James I. Yet Edmund Dudley was instrumental in establishing the financial basis of the Tudor dynasty, and John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, led victorious armies, laid the foundations of the Royal Navy, ruled as uncrowned king and almost succeeded in placing Lady Jane Grey on the throne.
They were universally condemned as scheming, ruthless, over-ambitious charmers, and one was defamed as a wife murderer. During those years the Dudleys were never far from controversy.
In the political ferment of the Tudor century one family above all others was always at the troubled centre of court and council.
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