How successful were the tudors in dealing with their problems?

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The Tudors faced a great deal of problems in their reign between 1485 and 1603. Their start of their reign was the start to modern age. All rulers of The Tudors experienced very difficult problems.

First of all, Henry VIII experienced a lot of problems; Henry had married his brother's widow, Catherine of Aragon, in 1509. Catherine had produced only one surviving child - a girl, Princess Mary, born in 1516. By the end of the 1520s, Henry's wife was in her forties and he was desperate for a son. The Tudor dynasty had been established by conquest in 1485 and Henry was only its second monarch. England had not so far had a ruling queen, and the dynasty was not secure enough to run the risk of handing the Crown on to a woman, risking disputed succession or domination of a foreign power through marriage. Henry had anyway fallen in love with Anne Boleyn, the sister of one of his many mistresses, and tried to persuade the Pope to grant him a cancellation of his marriage on the grounds that it had never been legal. However, a previous Pope had specifically granted Henry a licence to marry his brother's widow in 1509. In May 1529, Wolsey failed to gain the Pope's agreement to resolve Henry's case in England. All the efforts of Henry and his advisers came to nothing; Wolsey was dismissed and arrested, but died before he could be brought to trial.

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Henry's second marriage had raised hopes for a male heir. Anne Boleyn, however, produced another daughter, Princess Elizabeth, and failed to produce a male heir. Henry got rid of Anne on charges of treason which were almost certainly false, and she was executed in 1536. In 1537 her replacement, Henry's third wife Jane Seymour, finally bore him a son, who was later to become Edward VI. Jane died in childbed, 12 days after the birth in 1537.

Another problem that Henry had faced in his reign was when he had a quarrel with the Pope, when the Pope was ...

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