Taster Bundle

Today, Linlithgow Palace is best known as the birthplace of Mary, Queen of Scots. Yet it was also the favourite residence of Mary's grandmother, Margaret Tudor, for whom it was a site of leisure and relaxation, and the location of several major life events. Dr Rachel Delman guides us through this marvellous Renaissance palace.

Lambert Barnard was a prolific, ambitious and extremely talented artist who transformed the buildings on which he painted with designs of breathtaking scale and vivid colour. Dr Owen Emmerson guides us through the surviving works of arguably the most remarkable painter of regional art in Tudor England.

Henry VIII's gardens at Hampton Court have long since disappeared, but they were considered one of the most magnificent gardens of the sixteenth century in England and rivalled some of the best of Europe. Alexandra Stevenson guides us through the glittering, dazzling, fantastical buildings created for Henry VIII's gardens at Hampton Court.

Queen Elizabeth I's visit to Cambridge University in 1564 was a spectacle of pageantry by both the Queen and the University, offering the latter an opportunity to impress and entertain the monarch. Julian Humphrys delves into the detail of Elizabeth I's only visit to Cambridge.

The monasteries in the north of England strenuously resisted state efforts to close them but ultimately it was to no avail. Dr Emma J Wells looks at the fall of the mighty northern monasteries - Furness, Rievaulx, Fountains - providing a glimpse of the scale of the destruction wrought on these buildings and communities.

Today, only a remnant of one wing remains of the Old Manor of Langley in Oxfordshire, once a royal hunting lodge conveniently located close to Woodstock Palace. Sarah Morris delves into the history of the manor house, its Tudor connections and the fragments of it which survive.