Did you think you knew all there was to know about the Tudors?  Join us on 17th May to hear more about recent intriguing discoveries.

A study day of 3 hour-long lectures revealing more about the Tudor Age:

The New Discoveries in Tudor Royal Furniture

In 2010, the elaborately carved, incomplete oak bed frame was removed from the honeymoon suite of a hotel in Chester, to be auctioned as a Victorian relic. The speaker has spent six years studying and attributing it, now featured in press around the world. Featuring five royal arms, six single roses, and deeply esoteric symbols of fertility, it turns out to be covered in medieval paintwork, and its proportions respect the mural of the lost Painted Chamber of royal Westminster Palace abandoned in 1512. Scientific analyses, documentation and art history agree to demonstrate it is an astonishing national treasure: the marriage bed of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York, made by 18 January 1486.

The True Meaning of the Tudor Rose

This talk distills three years of original research on a much-overlooked aspect of royal iconography: the use of flowers as symbols in the late Middle Ages. The 'Tudor rose' has been one of Britain’s foremost emblems for half a millennium. But does the later name 'Wars of the Roses' truly reflect York and Lancaster's heraldry as white and red roses? And was the ‘Tudor rose' really a combination of these two heraldic devices to symbolize the united bloodlines of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York from 1486?

Finding Anne of Cleves

Anne of Cleves, the fourth wife of King Henry VIII, was divorced from him after just six months of marriage during 1540. After her death, she was dismissed as the 'Flanders Mare'. Yet she enjoyed the ultimate triumph of being laid to rest in a tomb by the Coronation Pavement of Westminster Abbey. This talk follows a trail of evidence spanning the centuries to find clues to what happened in the years following the divorce and discover the kind of residence she kept. It begins in a church in rural Bedfordshire...