This month I'll be having a bit of a Tudor-fest - late Tudor fiction with Hilary Mantel's Bring up the Bodies, and early Tudor non-fiction with Thomas Penn's Winter King: The Dawn of Tudor England, which looks at the difficult reign of Henry VII:
'He were a dark prince, and infinitely suspicious, and his times full of secret conspiracies and troubles' - Sir Francis Bacon
It
was 1501. England had been ravaged for decades by conspiracy, violence,
murders, coups and counter-coups. Henry VII had clambered to the top of
the heap - a fugitive with a flimsy claim to England's crown who
through luck, guile and ruthlessness had managed to win the throne and
stay on it for sixteen years. Although he built palaces, hosted jousts,
gave out lavish presents and sent ambassadors across Europe, for many he
remained a usurper, a false king.
But Henry had a
crucial asset: his queen and their children, the living embodiment of
his hoped-for dynasty. Now, in what would be the crowning glory of his
reign, his elder son would marry a great Spanish princess. On a cold
November day this girl, the sixteen-year-old Catherine of Aragon,
arrived in London for a wedding upon which the fate of England would
hinge...
In his remarkable debut, historian Thomas Penn
recreates an England which is both familiar and very strange - a country
that seems medieval yet modern, in which honour and chivalry mingle
with espionage, realpolitik, high finance and corruption. It is the
story of the transformation of a young, vulnerable boy, Prince Henry,
into the aggressive teenager who would become Henry VIII, and of
Catherine of Aragon, his future queen. And at its heart is the tragic,
magnetic figure of Henry VII - controlling, paranoid, avaricious, with a
Machiavellian charm and will to power.