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It was to Queen Elizabeth and Margaret Beaufort, rather than Henry VII, that the early Tudor court owed its reputation for splendour. Margaret penned a book that laid out the minutiae of royal etiquette and it was adhered to well into the next reign; Elizabeth, who as Edward IV’s daughter had grown up at a court praised for its luxury and pomp, helped add a sophisticated lustre to the royal household that it might otherwise have been lacking. And Henry needed these women to help him. What is often overlooked about Henry VII is that he spent the first fourteen years of his life in Wales and the next fourteen in Europe, so in 1485 he found himself king of ‘a country he neither knew nor understood.’ New palaces arose, with the many-towered riverside wonder at Richmond proving a particular high point of the Renaissance style in northern Europe; the court glittered, its behaviour monitored by the king’s mother and its style augmented by his wife. The queen’s cousin, the Duke of Buckingham, appeared at state events wearing a sumptuously bejewelled outfit, said to have cost £ 1,500, at a time when the average weekly wage for a skilled worker was about forty pence and in the period pre-decimalisation of the currency there were 240 pence in every pound. All of the glamour was designed to project an image of a monarchy sedate in its magnificent. Margaret Beaufort and Queen Elizabeth helped create a system which recast a man who had lived life in a kind of shadow as the leading figure in an elaborate political show. The decision to retain many of the advisers who served Henry VI or Edward IV was another reflection of the king’s conservatism as well as the necessity of having people at his side who actually understood England and the English.
— An Illustrated Introduction to the Tudors, Gareth Russell
Europeans thought the English were a lusty race and Spanish visitors to London in the 1550s were shocked to see women bare their ankles as they crossed puddles or kiss men on the lips as a form of greeting. Engaged couples were allowed to start having sex with each other before marriage, because their commitment had apparently created a ‘pre-contract’ of commitment. However, the Tudor parliaments also instituted the first laws which made sex between two adult males a capital crime and one aristocrat, Lord Hungerford, was even executed under the terms of the Buggery Statute. Contraception was rudimentary, with the favourite being the imperfect withdrawal method. Or, as the Tudors colourfully called it, ‘hard pissing’.
— An Illustrated Introduction to the Tudors, Gareth Russell