Writing the Tudor Voice

The Tudor voice is the hardest period voice in historical romance.

Regency has been written and rewritten so many times that the conventions are settled. There’s a kind of Regency dialect — quite, rather, I beg you, upon my word — that readers know, and that you can use as scaffolding while the rest of the scene does its work. The reader knows where they are. The voice doesn’t have to fight for it.

Tudor doesn’t have that. Tudor English is strange to modern ears, in ways that are easy to do wrong, and the modern ear is unforgiving. One thee in the wrong sentence and you’ve broken the spell.

What I’ve learned

Three rules I work by.

One: the register, not the vocabulary. It’s tempting to load a Tudor scene with archaic words. Forsooth, my lady, dost thou take my meaning? It reads, almost always, like costume. The better move is to pick a register — the formality, the indirectness, the long sentences — and write it in mostly-modern words. The reader will hear the period in the shape of the sentence even when every individual word is one they could use today.

Two: rank governs everything. A Tudor scene is, first, a scene about rank. Who enters the room first. Who speaks first. Who curtsies. Who turns away. The romance has to be written into the rank, not against it. Two people of different ranks talking honestly is a Tudor scandal in itself; you don’t need to invent another one.

Three: the letter, not the conversation. Tudor courtiers wrote constantly. Every relationship had a paper trail. The romance in a Tudor scene is more often in the letter than in the conversation, because the letter is where they could say the thing they could not say in the gallery. If you can write a good Tudor letter, you can write a Tudor romance.

A small example

Here’s a sentence I worked on for The Queen’s Lady-in-Waiting until it sat right:

He had not written. He had written once, briefly, in October, the kind of letter a man writes to a woman whose father has died. She had read it twice and put it in the back of her Book of Hours, where she had not put anything else.

It’s mostly modern English. The Tudor is in the long sentence, the formality of “the kind of letter a man writes,” and the small physical detail of where she keeps it. The Book of Hours is the period anchor. The rest is just careful pacing.

Tudor romance is, more than any other period, a romance of what is not written. Write the letters. Write the silences. The reader will fill the rest in themselves.