The Tudors Trivia
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50 free The Tudors trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
The Tudors ruled England for 118 years and packed them with a king found under a modern street, a queen who reigned for nine days, a wife spared the axe for a sword, a lost colony, a disease that killed by nightfall and a palace torn down to settle a card debt. Every question here is one of those stories. The 50 questions run from the battle of 1485 and the pretenders who troubled the first Tudor king, through the break with Rome and the fall of the monasteries, the short reign of the boy king and the nine-day queen, the burnings under his elder sister, and on to the plots, explorers, playhouses, prodigy houses and the Armada of the long last reign. A few visit the wives and the Showtime drama; the dynasty itself is the subject. It suits a pub quiz, a history classroom or anyone who has stood in a Tudor great hall and wanted the story behind it. Play it on your phone with instant answers, or print it for the table.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Richard III's remains, lost since his death at Bosworth in 1485, were found in 2012 under what in Leicester?
A car park
A car park of Leicester City Council lay over the lost Greyfriars friary church where the king had been buried after the battle; the dig began on 25 August 2012 and found him on the site.
Q 02Which noblewoman, heir under the dying boy king's 'Devise for the Succession', reigned nine days in July 1553?
Lady Jane Grey
Lady Jane Grey, nicknamed the Nine Days Queen, was deposed by the Privy Council in favour of her cousin Mary and beheaded in February 1554, aged about sixteen.
Q 03Which French port, English since 1347, fell in 1558 and, Mary I reputedly said, would be found lying in her heart?
Calais
Calais had been England's last possession on the European mainland; French forces took it in January 1558, ten months before Mary died, and the loss haunted the end of her reign.
Q 04Which of Henry VIII's queens was beheaded by an expert swordsman instead of the usual executioner's axe?
Anne Boleyn
Anne Boleyn was granted a skilled swordsman instead of the axe and was beheaded inside the Tower on 19 May 1536; Henry married Jane Seymour eleven days later.
Q 05Which king, once Mary I's husband and so Elizabeth I's brother-in-law, sent the Armada against England in 1588?
Philip II of Spain
Philip II of Spain had been king consort of England from 1554 until Mary's death; his 1588 Armada aimed to depose his former sister-in-law and restore Catholicism, but was repulsed and then wrecked by storms.
Q 06Which mysterious disease, first recorded in England in 1485, the year of Bosworth, could kill within hours?
Sweating sickness
Sweating sickness returned in outbreaks up to 1551 and then vanished for good; its cause is still unknown, and a victim could go from the first shivers to death inside a day.
Q 07Which ship, renamed from the Pelican mid-voyage for a patron's crest, carried Francis Drake around the world?
Golden Hind
The Golden Hind took its name in 1578 from the crest of its patron Hatton, a female red deer, and Elizabeth I had Drake knighted aboard her at Deptford in April 1581.
Q 08Which royal house took over in 1603, when the childless Elizabeth I died and Scotland's king inherited England's throne?
The Stuarts
The Stuarts came in through Henry VII's elder daughter, married into Scotland's royal line in 1503; her great-grandson James VI rode south as James I, uniting the two crowns under one king.
Q 09Which playhouse, built in 1599 from the timbers of a dismantled Shoreditch theatre, became Shakespeare's home stage?
The Globe
The Globe was raised on Bankside by Shakespeare's company, the Lord Chamberlain's Men, and it burned down on 29 June 1613 when a cannon fired during a performance of Henry VIII set the thatch alight.
Q 10Which word, carved on a post, was the only clue to Roanoke's vanished colonists when a relief ship arrived in 1590?
Croatoan
Croatoan was the name of a nearby island and its people, so governor White read the carving as a sign that the settlers had moved there, yet what became of the colony is still unknown.
Q 11Which Welsh courtier married Henry V's widow, Catherine of Valois, and passed his surname to a royal dynasty?
Owen Tudor
Owen Tudor was beheaded at Hereford in 1461 after the Lancastrian defeat at Mortimer's Cross, and his grandson Henry, raised by Owen's son Jasper, took the crown at Bosworth twenty-four years later.
Q 12Which heiress, who bore the future Henry VII at Pembroke Castle aged thirteen, passed him her claim to the throne?
Margaret Beaufort
Margaret Beaufort went on to found Christ's College, Cambridge, in 1505 and to begin St John's College, which her executors finished in 1511 after her death.
Q 13Which boy pretender, crowned in Dublin in 1487, was pardoned by Henry VII and put to work in the royal kitchen?
Q 21Which bride, chosen by Henry VIII from a Holbein portrait, saw her marriage annulled unconsummated after six months?
Anne of Cleves
Anne of Cleves agreed to the annulment and, with a generous settlement, came to be known as the King's Beloved Sister; the match had been pressed on Henry by Thomas Cromwell, who fell from power that same year.
Q 22Which 1516 book by Thomas More, later Henry VIII's chancellor, describes an imaginary island and coined a word?
Utopia
Utopia, written in Latin and taking its name from the Greek for 'no place', came from a man later beheaded for refusing to accept Henry as head of the English Church, and canonised in 1935.
Q 23Which monastery's last abbot, Richard Whiting, was hanged, drawn and quartered in 1539 on the hill above his church?
Lambert Simnel
Lambert Simnel had been passed off as the Earl of Warwick; his Yorkist backers were crushed at Stoke Field in June 1487, he turned the spit in the royal kitchen and, when he grew older, became a falconer.
Q 14At which castle on the Welsh border did Arthur, Prince of Wales, die in 1502, months after marrying Catherine of Aragon?
Ludlow
Ludlow was the seat of the Council of Wales and the Marches, which Henry VII revived for Arthur; Catherine fell ill there too but recovered, and married his brother Henry seven years later.
Q 15Where was Perkin Warbeck, the pretender who claimed to be the younger Prince in the Tower, hanged in 1499?
Tyburn
Tyburn, the gallows site near today's Marble Arch, was where Warbeck read out a confession before he was hanged; Henry VII had kept him at court after his 1497 surrender until he tried to escape.
Q 16Which Scottish king, later killed at Flodden, wed Henry VII's daughter in 1503, uniting the crowns a century on?
James IV
James IV signed a Treaty of Perpetual Peace with England before the wedding, yet invaded the realm of his brother-in-law Henry VIII in 1513; his great-grandson James VI still inherited England's throne.
Q 17Which catch-22, named for Henry VII's chancellor, held that thrifty nobles had savings and lavish ones clearly had cash?
Morton's Fork
Morton's Fork is named for Archbishop John Morton, Henry VII's Lord Chancellor, though it was Francis Bacon, over a century later, who pinned the tax collectors' trick on him.
Q 18Which royal bodyguard, formed by Henry VII just after Bosworth, is the oldest British military corps still existing?
Yeomen of the Guard
The Yeomen of the Guard still attend the monarch on state occasions and ceremonially search the cellars of Parliament before each State Opening, a ritual recalling the Gunpowder Plot of 1605.
Q 19Which family, headed by Henry Tudor's stepfather, held back at Bosworth before charging in to kill Richard III?
The Stanleys
The Stanleys hedged their bets: Lord Stanley had married Henry's mother in 1472, yet kept his force out of the fight until his brother Sir William's charge surrounded and cut down the king.
Q 20Which Venetian navigator sailed from Bristol with Henry VII's backing in 1497 and reached the North American coast?
John Cabot
John Cabot crossed in the Matthew, a ship of about 50 tons, expecting to reach Asia; his landfall was the first known European visit to North America's coast since the Norse.
Glastonbury
Glastonbury had drawn pilgrims since its monks announced in 1191 that they had found King Arthur's tomb; Whiting, who had signed the Act of Supremacy, was executed when he resisted the surrender of his house.
Q 24Which archbishop wrote the 1549 Book of Common Prayer, then was burned under Mary I after withdrawing his recantations?
Thomas Cranmer
Thomas Cranmer, who had declared Henry VIII's first marriage void, held the hand that had signed his recantations in the flames first, calling it 'that unworthy hand'.
Q 25Which novelist won the Booker Prize twice, for Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, her novels about Thomas Cromwell?
Hilary Mantel
Hilary Mantel finished the trilogy with The Mirror & the Light in 2020, and the BBC filmed Wolf Hall with Mark Rylance as Cromwell, a role he returned to for the final book in 2024.
Q 26Which Tudor king, the only surviving son of Henry VIII and his third wife, was crowned at nine and died at fifteen?
Edward VI
Edward VI was the first English monarch raised a Protestant; he died at Greenwich Palace on 6 July 1553, having named a Protestant cousin as heir to shut out both his half-sisters.
Q 27Which 1549 uprising, led by a Wymondham yeoman, camped 16,000 men on Mousehold Heath outside Norwich over enclosures?
Kett's Rebellion
Kett's Rebellion ended on 27 August when the Earl of Warwick's army broke the rebels at Dussindale, and Robert Kett was hanged from the walls of Norwich Castle that December.
Q 28Which title did Lord Protector Seymour, uncle of the boy king crowned in 1547, hold when he was beheaded in 1552?
Duke of Somerset
The Duke of Somerset had created the title for himself within weeks of Henry VIII's death; the rival who toppled him, John Dudley, then took the dukedom of Northumberland and backed a nine-day queen.
Q 29Which warship of Henry VIII sank in the Solent in 1545 as he watched from Southsea Castle, and was raised in 1982?
Mary Rose
The Mary Rose went down leading an attack on French galleys; her wreck was located in 1971, raised in 1982 in one of the most complex salvage projects ever attempted, and is displayed with her artefacts in a purpose-built museum.
Q 30Which object, painted as a distorted smear across the floor, hides in Holbein's 1533 double portrait The Ambassadors?
A skull
A skull in anamorphic perspective, a memento mori, snaps into shape only when the viewer stands high on the right or low on the left; the painting has hung in London's National Gallery since 1890.