Tudors is an interesting angle to approach this question. Sex is of course baked into the show's DNA; the Henry who made Culpepper part of his privy chamber looked a bit less this and a bit more this. And in the vast majority of cases, it is indeed sex. Seductive/strategic sex, to be sure, with powerful men ultimately winning consent of the women they desire through their beauty and power (but also the implicit or explicit promise of material reward)--but it is not rape.

This contrasts rather strikingly with the typically widespread use of rape in medievalist media: to delineate the irredeemable from the redeemable bad guys (Pillars of the Earth), to give women the chance to prove their awesomeness by resisting (Vikings), to illustrate the brutality of the world (Game of Thrones)(I was going to use Braveheart but the first one might bear more resemblance to actual history). And it is a purposeful decision on the part of Tudors. The show's portrayal of sex in contrast to medievalist-media sex places it on a dawn-of-modernity trajectory--just like the actual early modern era invented the myth of primae noctis to paint itself as civilized and ordered in contrast to the 'Dark Ages' where a lord could commit adultery and rape with his peasants at will.

But with Thomas Culpepper, the show has a bit of a problem. It's not that Tudors is married to historical accuracy, of course, but it is married to finding the lurid and explosive anecdotes in actual or fictionalized sources. As it turns out, a letter exchange between a couple of German merchants at the time of Culpepper's execution mentions that, two years before, he had been pardoned by Henry for rape and murder:

...one of the king's chamberlains, [who] two years before, or less, had violated the wife of a certain park-keeper in a woody thicket, while, horrid to relate! three or four of his attendants were holding her at his bidding. For this act of wickedness he was, notwithstanding, pardoned by the king, after he had been delivered into his custody by the villagers on account of this crime, and likewise a murder which he had committed in his resistance to them, when they first endeavoured to apprehend him.

(ed. and trans. Robinson, p. 227)

But that event raises its own questions. Are they in a world where noble lords collaborate to rape at whim and receive pardons left and right when the king needed the bribe money? Or a world where rape is so shocking that townspeople are willing to pay with their lives to apprehend a rapist, and are able to push the rapist through the legal system to the point where he needs a royal pardon?

Naturally, the broader medieval and early modern source record on rape is just as contradictory, and scholarly interpretations of the evidence tend to vary based on preconceptions of the later Middle Ages as a deepening hellhole for women versus a patriarchal and often sucky world in which women lived. The difficulties are magnified by approaching the topic through a specifically class-power angle as with noble men and commoner women. I'll discuss three basic groups of sources: normative (legal, theological), court records, and literary.

From a normative perspective, there is no question that late medieval society condemned rape outside marriage. Theologically, Thomas Aquinas carries the banner in divorcing rape, which involves violent force, from seduction. (The Latin Middle Ages had no concept of rape within marriage; husbands and wives automatically incurred a "marital debt" of sex on demand. Within Church rules.) There is typically much more consternation attached to raping a virgin or a widow, a pattern that we will also see reflected in court records.

Secular authority agreed. The "Westminster II" statutes of 1285 made rape a capital crime. One hundred years later (1390), Parliament passed the Statute of Pardons to limit (though not eliminate) the king's ability to pardon three specific crimes: treason, murder, and rape. Note that the people passing these laws are noble men.

But who were they thinking of? One of the more frustrating developments of later medieval law is the increasing codification of women as the legal property of men. (Open questions: (1) did this work in practice as strictly as in law (2) was this a new innovation or merely a new record of existing norms). For example, over time, laws gradually eroded (or abruptly ended) women's ability to sue in court on their own--they needed representation by a male guardian. And in England, specifically, a gradual conflation of the crimes of abduction and rape points to a concern for family consequences. Lords did not want their daughters (or sons) to use rape/abduction as a legal cover to marry outside their parents' will.

On the basis of the normative evidence alone, therefore, it is hard to say whether noble men accepted the idea of noble men raping women (peasant or otherwise) at whim. The laws they passed condemned the practice, but did they condemn the practice primarily in light of the social and economic cost of having a raped daughter?

Court records can take us a step closer, sort of. I must start by pointing out that serf women would not have had legal recourse to the courts at all, although that would not have been a factor by 1540. So for more strictly or stereotypically "medieval", there is a giant black hole that may well be filled with horror stories. Even outside serfdom, of course, lack of material resources would have hindered women's ability to pursue a rape appeal or indictment. The court rolls that do exist are only a little better. From 14th century England, rape comprises 0.5% of court cases; by the 17th century, the number had climbed to a whopping 1%. It is, shall we say, highly unlikely that court records accurately reflect the prevalence of rape in medieval society.

From 16th century England emerges one line of evidence that bears, I think, directly on OP's question. Accused rapists unsurprisingly defended themselves in large part by tarnishing the victim. But their common narrative, as Garthine Walker showed, emphasized how that "simple poor woman" had been lured to perjure herself by "promises and rewards" from others. The denial of women's agency is baked in (women must be persuaded to lie by men), but so is the monetary motive. The major defense for rape in the 16C was that women stood to gain financially from participating in the accusation. Although court records do not record the social class of the women involved, that narrative speaks a lot to the standing of those who fought the general trend to levy accusations in court.

In the end, convictions for rape were even more rare than appeals and indictments. (Trevor Dean famously found 0 convictions for 258 cases in early 15C England, but that's not quite representative.) Accusers had to meet an enormous burden of proof to demonstrate they resisted; a resulting pregnancy would even be seen as evidence for consent. Delineating rape as a capital crime is on one hand evidence of how seriously people took sexual violation, but on the other, made obtaining convictions less likely since the stakes were so high. And, of course, even after the Statute of Pardons, J.B. Post has observed that enough money for a cash-strapped king would buy one's life and freedom.

So the legal evidence presents a picture of people technically, probably morally, opposed to rape--a capital crime, the worst crime--but with legal remedies depressingly rare in practice. Rich men frequently had the ability to buy their way out of punishment, and men at all levels of society knew they could use "she was paid off" as a defense if they picked a plausible target.

[cont'd]

I have a question to add to the topic.

What sort of punishment, if any, would a high lord receive for abusing one of his serfs, someone else's serf, or a free peasant. In addition how would the punishment vary between him and lets say a merchant's son who abused a stranger.

I suppose this is going more into the realm of medieval legal practices and punishments.

Not to deter further discussion, but here are some previous threads that might shed light on this topic:

• Could a medieval King go and a rape random peasant girl?
• The prevalence of rape and other sexual violence in medieval Europe.
• How common were rape and the threat of rape in the Medieval period?
• Rape in the medieval world. How was it received/treated?

Also A medieval nun is raped. Would church or secular authorities handle it? Theologically, did it disrupt vows of chastity/virginity? has some really good responses, though I'm not sure they are particularly helpful in answering this specific question.