OCR A-level History A (H505) · Unit Group 1: British Period Study and Enquiry — England 1485–1558: the Early Tudors
Mini-Lesson
England 1485-1558: The Early Tudors
This is an optional route. OCR History A is option-based. England 1485–1558 is one of thirteen options in Unit Group 1 (British period study and enquiry). You take one unit from Unit Group 1, one from Unit Group 2 (non-British period study), one from Unit Group 3 (thematic study and historical interpretations), plus the Y100 topic-based essay. Your three topics must span at least 200 years.
This mini-lesson covers the whole of the early Tudor period: Henry VII (1485–1509), Henry VIII (1509–1547), and the reigns of Edward VI and Mary I (1547–1558). Unit Group 1 is distinctive: it combines a period-study essay with a source-based enquiry, so you must be equally good at argument and at evidence.
Work through each screen, answer the questions as you go and collect ⭐ stars. Look out for the Interpretations flags — A-level History is judged on how well you weigh competing arguments. Press Start when you're ready.
Henry VII · 1485–1509
A usurper who died in his bed
Henry Tudor's claim was weak and his throne was contested. Everything he did was shaped by the need to make the dynasty permanent.
Bosworth, 22 August 1485; marriage to Elizabeth of York, January 1486, uniting Lancaster and York.
Pretenders:Lambert Simnel, crowned in Dublin, was defeated at Stoke Field, 16 June 1487 — the last battle of the Wars of the Roses. Perkin Warbeck troubled him from 1491 and was executed in 1499, alongside the Earl of Warwick.
Controlling the nobility:Acts of Attainder; bonds and recognisances — written financial threats held over noble families; the Council Learned in the Law (from 1495), run by Empson and Dudley, whose exactions were so hated that Henry VIII executed them in 1510.
Rebellion: the Yorkshire rebellion (1489) and the Cornish rebellion (1497) — both provoked by taxation, and both a warning about the limits of what subjects would bear.
Diplomacy:Medina del Campo (1489) with Spain; Étaples (1492) with France; the Intercursus Magnus (1496) restoring the Antwerp cloth trade. Henry's foreign policy was defensive, cheap and dynastic.
The debate: was Henry VII an innovator who built a 'new monarchy', or a conservative who used Yorkist tools with unusual ruthlessness? Almost every instrument he used already existed. The strongest answers argue that his novelty lay in intensity and consistency, not invention.
Quick check
Henry VII's grip on the nobility
?How did bonds and recognisances allow Henry VII to control the nobility without confrontation?
Henry VIII · 1509–1547
Wolsey, the Great Matter, and the royal supremacy
Henry VIII inherited security and money, and spent both. The central question is why England broke with Rome — dynastic accident, or something deeper?
Wolsey, Lord Chancellor 1515–1529, dominated government, justice and diplomacy. The Amicable Grant (1525) — a forced levy — collapsed amid resistance and exposed the limits of his power.
The Great Matter: after 1527 Henry sought annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. Rome would not oblige — Charles V, Catherine's nephew, dominated Italy. Wolsey fell in 1529.
The statutory revolution, driven by Thomas Cromwell: the Act in Restraint of Appeals (1533) cut off appeals to Rome; the Act of Supremacy (1534) made Henry Supreme Head of the Church of England; the Treasons Act (1534) made denial of it a capital offence — Thomas More and John Fisher were executed in 1535.
Dissolution of the monasteries: the Valor Ecclesiasticus (1535), then the lesser houses (1536) and the greater (by 1540) — a colossal transfer of land that bound the gentry to the new settlement by self-interest.
Resistance: the Pilgrimage of Grace (October 1536), led by Robert Aske — the most serious rising any Tudor faced. Its suppression, by promise and then by execution, is a study in royal ruthlessness.
Reaction: the Act of Six Articles (1539) reasserted Catholic doctrine; Cromwell was executed in 1540.
Quick check
The order of the Reformation statutes
?Why did the Act in Restraint of Appeals (1533) have to come before Cranmer could annul Henry VIII's first marriage?
Edward VI · 1547–1553
A minority, a Reformation, and two rebellions
Edward VI was nine when he acceded in January 1547 — the first royal minority since the fifteenth century, and the great test of Tudor government.
Somerset as Lord Protector (1547–1549): repealed the treason and heresy laws, moved the Church in a Protestant direction, and pursued a ruinously expensive war in Scotland. His government faced the two great risings of 1549.
The Western (Prayer Book) Rebellion (1549) in Devon and Cornwall protested against the new Book of Common Prayer; Kett's Rebellion (1549) in Norfolk was a protest against enclosure and local misgovernment. Somerset fell in October 1549.
Northumberland (1549–1553) restored order, ended the wars, reformed the coinage, and drove the Reformation further — the more clearly Protestant 1552 Book of Common Prayer and the Forty-Two Articles.
The succession crisis: Northumberland's attempt to divert the crown to Lady Jane Grey collapsed within days in July 1553. Mary's accession by popular acclaim is powerful evidence of the strength of dynastic legitimacy.
Analytical point: the striking fact about 1549 is not that there were rebellions but that the regime survived them and the dynasty was never seriously threatened. That is the strongest argument against calling this period a 'crisis'.
Mary I · 1553–1558
Restoration, burnings and Calais
Mary I ruled for just over five years, and her reign has been more comprehensively rewritten than any other in the period.
The Spanish marriage to Philip of Spain provoked Wyatt's rebellion (January–February 1554), which reached London before it failed.
Religion: papal authority was restored in 1554 and the heresy laws revived. Ridley and Latimer were burned in October 1555; Cranmer in March 1556. The burnings were recorded — and shaped for posterity — by John Foxe's Acts and Monuments (1563), a book whose influence on the English Protestant memory is impossible to overstate.
War and loss: drawn into Philip's war with France, England lost Calais in January 1558 — its last continental possession.
Achievement: Mary's government pursued serious financial and naval reform, and Cardinal Pole's programme for a reformed Catholic Church was cut short only by the deaths of both, on the same day, 17 November 1558.
Interpretation alert. The traditional picture of a barren, failed reign owes an enormous amount to Foxe and to the Elizabethan Protestant tradition that followed him. Jennifer Loach and David Loades led a substantial revision, emphasising administrative competence and genuine achievement. Judging Mary means first noticing who wrote the story you inherited.
Sort it
Whose reign?
Tap a development, then the reign it belongs to.
🌹 Henry VII
⚔️ Henry VIII
✝️ Edward VI & Mary I
Quick check
Reading Foxe
?Why must a historian handle John Foxe's 'Acts and Monuments' (1563) with particular care as evidence for Mary's reign?
Chronology
Build the early Tudor spine
Tap the events in chronological order, earliest first.
Interpretations · the debates
Elton, the Reformation, and the 'mid-Tudor crisis'
Three quarrels dominate the historiography of this unit. Know all three.
1. A 'Tudor revolution in government'?G.R. Elton (The Tudor Revolution in Government, 1953) argued that Thomas Cromwell transformed the 1530s: from household to bureaucratic, national, statute-based government. Critics — including the contributors to Christopher Coleman and David Starkey's Revolution Reassessed (1986) — argued the change was slower and patchier, and that the household remained central. Penry Williams stressed continuity.
2. Was the Reformation imposed or welcomed?A.G. Dickens (The English Reformation, 1964) saw a decaying late-medieval Church and Protestantism spreading rapidly from below. Eamon Duffy (The Stripping of the Altars, 1992) and Christopher Haigh (English Reformations, 1993) replied that traditional religion was vigorous and popular and reform was slow, contested and driven from above. Note their evidence: Duffy read churchwardens' accounts and wills; Elton read state papers. Different archives, different Reformations.
3. Was there a mid-Tudor crisis? The term implies that 1547–1558 was a period of near-breakdown. Revisionists — Jennifer Loach, David Loades — pointed to administrative continuity, real reform under Mary, and the survival of the dynasty through a minority, a female accession and two rebellions. Define the word 'crisis' before you use it, or the essay writes itself into a corner.
Match it
Interpretation → historian
Tap an argument on the left, then the historian most associated with it.
The argument
The historian
Exam technique · Unit Group 1
The enquiry and the period study
OCR's Unit Group 1 paper is 1 hour 30 minutes and 50 marks — 25% of the A-level. It has two very different halves.
The enquiry is source-based: you are given contemporary sources and must use them, together with your own knowledge, to reach a judgement on a specific historical question. The examiners' single biggest complaint is students who paraphrase the sources in turn. Do not. Group them by what they argue, weigh their provenance and purpose, test them against what you know, and build one argument.
The period study is an essay across the wider period — analytical, argued, and reaching a judgement.
Provenance is not biography. 'This was written by a Catholic, so it is biased' earns nothing. 'This was written by a Catholic exile in Louvain in 1560, for a Continental audience, at a moment when the Elizabethan settlement was still reversible — so it exaggerates the strength of English Catholic feeling' is an argument. The situation of the writer, not their label, is what does the analytical work.
Group · weigh · test · judgeThe four moves of a Level 5 enquiry answer.
Quick check
The enquiry question
?What is the commonest way students throw away marks in OCR's source enquiry?
Quick check
Why the Pilgrimage of Grace mattered
?Why is the Pilgrimage of Grace (1536) regarded as the most dangerous rebellion any Tudor faced?
Key question · government and the localities
How England was actually governed
Tudor government looks impressive from Westminster and thin on the ground. Both are true, and the tension is examinable.
The centre: the King's Council, and from the 1530s the smaller, formalised Privy Council; the prerogative courts (Star Chamber); and, increasingly, Parliament as the instrument of the Reformation — statute became the sovereign tool.
The regions: the Council of the North (reorganised after 1537) and the Council in the Marches of Wales; the Acts of Union with Wales (1536–43).
The localities: everything depended on unpaid Justices of the Peace — local gentlemen who enforced statute because it suited them to. There was no standing army and no professional police force.
The consequence, and it is the heart of the period: the Tudors could only govern with the co-operation of the gentry. That is why the dissolution of the monasteries was so shrewd — by selling monastic land to the gentry, the Crown gave the governing class a direct financial stake in the Reformation being permanent.
Quick check
Why the Dissolution was politically brilliant
?Beyond the money, why did the sale of monastic lands strengthen the Reformation?