Six key questions, 118 years

A breadth study is not a story. AQA sets six key questions that run right through 1485–1603, and every essay you write is really an answer to one of them:

• How effectively did the Tudors restore and develop the powers of the monarchy?
• In what ways, and how effectively, was England governed?
• How did relations with foreign powers change, and how was the succession secured?
• How far did intellectual and religious ideas change, and with what effects?
• How important was the role of key individuals and groups?
• How important were economic and social developments?

Why this matters for marks: a Level 5 answer at A-level does not narrate 1485 then 1509 then 1534. It argues a line across the period and supports it with precise evidence from more than one reign. Get used to thinking in decades and dynasties, not events.

Securing a usurper's dynasty

Henry Tudor won the crown at Bosworth on 22 August 1485 with a thin Lancastrian claim. Everything he did afterwards flowed from one problem: insecurity.

• Dynastic: married Elizabeth of York (January 1486), uniting the houses; dated his reign from the day before Bosworth so that those who fought for Richard III could be attainted as traitors.
• Pretenders: Lambert Simnel, crowned in Dublin as 'Edward VI', was defeated at the Battle of Stoke Field, 16 June 1487. Perkin Warbeck, claiming to be Richard of York, threatened from 1491 and was executed in 1499.
• Nobility: ruled through bonds and recognisances — written financial threats hanging over noble families — and used Acts of Attainder (138 passed in the reign) and the Council Learned in the Law (from 1495, run by Empson and Dudley).
• Rebellion: the Yorkshire rebellion (1489) and the Cornish rebellion (1497) were both driven by taxation — a warning about the limits of royal demands.
• Diplomacy: Treaty of Medina del Campo (1489) with Spain; Treaty of Étaples (1492) with France; Intercursus Magnus (1496) restored the Antwerp cloth trade.

Continuity or novelty? Almost every device Henry VII used — attainder, the council, bonds — existed under the Yorkists. The historian's question is whether he was an innovator or simply an unusually persistent user of old tools. That is a genuine A-level debate: argue it, don't dodge it.

How Henry VII controlled the nobility

Wolsey, the Great Matter and the break with Rome

Henry VIII inherited a solvent, secure throne and spent it. The dominant question of the reign is whether the break with Rome was driven by dynastic accident (the need for a male heir) or by deeper religious and political forces.

• Wolsey, Lord Chancellor 1515–1529, ran government, justice (Star Chamber) and foreign policy; the Amicable Grant (1525) — a forced loan — collapsed in taxpayer resistance and damaged him.
• The Great Matter: the annulment of the marriage to Catherine of Aragon was blocked after 1527, partly because Charles V's troops controlled Rome. Wolsey fell in 1529.
• The statutory Reformation, driven by Thomas Cromwell: the Act in Restraint of Appeals (1533) — declaring England 'an empire' with no appeal to Rome; the Act of Supremacy (1534) making Henry Supreme Head of the Church of England; the Treasons Act (1534), under which Thomas More and John Fisher were executed in 1535.
• The Dissolution: the Valor Ecclesiasticus (1535) valued Church wealth; the smaller houses went in 1536 and the greater houses by 1540 — the largest transfer of land in English history before the twentieth century.
• Reaction: the Pilgrimage of Grace (October 1536), led by Robert Aske, was the most dangerous rebellion any Tudor faced — put down by promise and then by execution.
• Reversal: the Act of Six Articles (1539) reasserted Catholic doctrine; Cromwell was executed in 1540.

Precision earns marks: 'Henry broke with Rome in the 1530s' is a C-grade sentence. 'The 1533 Act in Restraint of Appeals removed the legal route to Rome before the 1534 Act of Supremacy asserted the royal headship' is an A-grade one.

Which statute did what?

The so-called 'mid-Tudor crisis'

Edward VI was nine at his accession in 1547; Mary I ruled 1553–1558. For a generation of historians this was a period of crisis: minority rule, religious whiplash, rebellion, inflation, military failure.

• Somerset as Lord Protector (1547–1549) faced the two great risings of 1549: the Western (Prayer Book) Rebellion against the new Book of Common Prayer, and Kett's Rebellion in Norfolk over enclosure and local misgovernment. He fell that autumn.
• Northumberland (1549–1553) restored order and drove the Reformation further with the 1552 Book of Common Prayer; his attempt to divert the succession to Lady Jane Grey collapsed in nine days in July 1553.
• Mary I restored papal authority, faced Wyatt's rebellion (January–February 1554) against the Spanish marriage, and burned leading Protestants for heresy — Ridley and Latimer in October 1555, Cranmer in March 1556. Calais, England's last continental possession, was lost in January 1558.

But was it a crisis? Revisionists including Jennifer Loach and David Loades argued that government machinery kept working, taxes were collected, and Mary's regime pursued serious naval and financial reform. The word 'crisis' may say more about the Protestant, Elizabeth-centred tradition of writing than about the 1550s themselves. In an essay, define the term before you use it.

Whose reign?

Tap a development, then tap the reign it belongs to. Breadth studies live or die on chronological control.

Settlement, threat and the 'triumph' of Elizabeth

Elizabeth's central achievement was survival: a female, excommunicated, unmarried Protestant ruler who died in her bed after forty-four years.

• The Settlement (1559): the Act of Supremacy (Supreme Governor, not Head) and the Act of Uniformity; doctrine fixed by the Thirty-Nine Articles (1563). Deliberately ambiguous wording bought conformity.
• Catholic threat: the Revolt of the Northern Earls (1569); the papal bull Regnans in Excelsis (1570) excommunicating Elizabeth and releasing subjects from allegiance; the Ridolfi (1571), Throckmorton (1583) and Babington (1586) plots, all circling Mary, Queen of Scots — executed 8 February 1587.
• War: the Spanish Armada (1588) failed, but the Anglo-Spanish war ground on to 1604 and the Nine Years War in Ireland (1594–1603) was ruinously expensive.
• The last decade: bad harvests in the 1590s, monopolies, factional strife, and the failed Essex rebellion (February 1601). Elizabeth died on 24 March 1603.

Beware Gloriana. The 'Golden Age' is partly a construction of Elizabethan propaganda and Victorian retelling. The 1590s — dearth, plague, war taxation, unrest — are the corrective, and examiners reward students who know them.

The Settlement's careful words

Build the Tudor spine

Tap the events in the order they happened, earliest first. If you cannot date these, you cannot argue about change.

Three debates you must be able to referee

A-level History is interpretation-heavy. Examiners reward students who know that historians disagree — and why they disagree.

Exam habit: never write 'historians say'. Name them, date them, and say what kind of evidence made them think that. Duffy read churchwardens' accounts and wills; Elton read the state papers. Different archives, different Reformations.

Interpretation → historian

Tap an argument on the left, then the historian who is most associated with it.

Using an interpretation properly

Population, prices and the poor

The social and economic key question is the one students most often drop — and examiners notice.

• Population rose across the century, pushing up demand for food and land while wages lagged: the so-called price rise, worsened by the debasement of the coinage under Henry VIII and Somerset.
• Enclosure and rack-renting fed grievance — a central complaint of Kett's Rebellion (1549), and the subject of repeated (largely ineffective) government proclamations.
• Poverty was reconceived. Vagrancy legislation became steadily harsher, but the great codifying statutes — the Poor Law of 1598 and the 1601 Act for the Relief of the Poor — established a parish-based, rate-funded system that lasted until 1834.
• The 1590s brought a run of bad harvests, dearth and disorder — the sharpest social strain of the whole period.

Link, don't list. The best answers connect strands: dissolution → land market → a richer gentry → a more assertive House of Commons. That is a breadth argument.

The long shadow of 1601

What the paper actually asks of you

AQA Component 1 is a 2 hours 30 minutes paper worth 80 marks and 40% of the A-level.

• Section A (30 marks): one compulsory question on three primary sources. You evaluate their value for a given enquiry — using provenance, tone, emphasis and, decisively, your own contextual knowledge. Never simply describe a source.
• Sections B and C (25 marks each): you answer two essays from a choice of three. Each is a judgement question: 'To what extent…', 'How far…', 'Assess the validity of this view.'

The single biggest upgrade: a sustained argument. Decide your judgement in the first paragraph, defend it, and let the counter-argument be genuinely strong before you defeat it. Balanced-then-fence-sitting is a Level 3 answer; balanced-then-decisive is Level 5.

Dating the dynasty

Security abroad, security at home

AQA's third key question links foreign relations and the succession — and in Tudor England they were the same problem.

• Henry VII bought security cheaply: Medina del Campo (1489), Étaples (1492), the marriage of Arthur to Catherine of Aragon (1501) and of Margaret to James IV of Scotland (1503) — the marriage from which the Stuart claim to England would eventually descend.
• Henry VIII spent it: expensive, largely fruitless war in France, and the pursuit of glory. The dynastic anxiety that drove the break with Rome was itself an anxiety about the succession.
• Mary I tied England to Spain and lost Calais (1558). Elizabeth refused to marry, refused to name a successor, and thereby kept every faction hoping — a strategy of deliberate ambiguity that worked, but left the succession unresolved until 1603.

The linkage that scores: the succession was never merely dynastic. After 1534 it was religious — because whoever inherited would decide which Church England had. That is why the Elizabethan plots all revolved around Mary, Queen of Scots.

The big ideas to carry into the exam

You now have the spine of AQA 1C — and, just as importantly, the arguments historians have had about it. Press Finish to see your score.