Introduction

William Paulet was not an intellectual. As far as we know he never had any constitutional or theological ideas which were thought worth recording and that may have made survival easier. There is no historiography of William Paulet. As becomes his status, he has a suitable entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, as he did in its predecessor, but apart from one North American thesis written nearly 40 years ago and a handful of articles, no work has been specifically devoted to him. William Paulet, because of his personality, long life and relationship with four successive Tudors, was one of the most important perhaps the most important of the ties which held this potentially volatile structure together. He was solid, and rather unexciting, but for that very reason represented an essential element in the political structure of Tudor England.