Winter King: The Dawn of Tudor England [Kindle Edition]

Penn does a good job here of re-telling the foundation of the Tudor dynasty and the reign of Henry VII (1485-1509). Strictly speaking, nothing here is new but if your knowledge of the Tudors is based around Henry VIII and Elizabeth then this is likely to be an interesting and informative read.

Penn excels at re-imagining the pageantry and rituals of the court, and his descriptions of the triumphs, state entrances, coronations etc. are superb. He doesn't just quote from the sources but succeeds in placing himself there, giving us a front-row seat alongside him. He's also very good at replacing Henry within his European context: not just the marriage negotiations but also his trade alliances (e.g. the manoeuvrings to circumvent the papal alum monopoly) and his desire to establish European humanism (e.g. Erasmus, More) in his England, itself a legitimising strategy for the Tudor monarchy.

The book does a fine job of confirming why this is known as the `early modern' period with the growth of the international banking system and commodities trading. Less successful, however, for me, are some of the anti-Tudor political conspiracies: these are sometimes complicated and, inevitably, spread across time and there are points at which Penn doesn't quite succeed in making reading about them less than tortuous.

So this is thorough, detailed and precise with full sourcing and proper referencing. Penn writes elegantly and with a novelist's eye for detail at times - if you're interested in early Tudor history, the personality and reign of Henry VII, or the early life of Henry VIII then this is an excellent choice.

Henry VII's reign has been a black hole in the history of the Wars of the Roses and the Tudors. At least it has been for me, along with the short reign of Edward VI. Thomas Penn's Winter King has filled in a quarter century of history, and in a readable and well-documented way.

I suppose I had thought that the period following The Wars of the Roses and preceding the drama that was Henry VIII's reign would be dull. Winter King does away with that notion. Consolidating his power and fending off pretenders made Henry VII a very busy monarch.

Penn's Henry Tudor is the sullen, skulking character we might have expected, but he is also three-dimensional, showing real grief when his wife died in childbirth, and when his son Arthur, Prince of Wales, died unexpectedly.

Winter King shows the importance of Henry's reign in establishing the validity of the Tudor line and how hard Henry had to fight to maintain its legitimacy. By the time his son, Henry VIII, took the throne, there was little question of his right to succeed.

But as interesting and important as the big picture is, I found the little details most intriguing. For instance, Henry VII's mother, Margaret Beaufort, wore reading glasses much of the time. I didn't know eyeglasses existed in 1500. But apparently only for reading, because Penn tells how Henry VII's eyesight was deteriorating and made him a menace when he indulged in his favorite pastime of hunting.

The image of Henry VII sitting in his castle counting his money like some Midas is also not far from the truth, according to Penn. Henry was deeply involved in the details of the royal finances, finding every possible way to wring more taxes from his subjects. He was also something of a commodities broker, dealing in potassium alum, a valuable mineral used to make dyes color-fast, very important to the textile trade across Europe and beyond.

Winter King also reveals again what many modern historians have shown - that the women of the age were as much a part of the political action as were the men. Henry's mother, Margaret Beaufort was a real power behind the throne. So was Henry's wife, Elizabeth of York. Catherine of Aragon came to England as a bit of an innocent, but over her years as Arthur's widow, learned a fair bit of wheeling and dealing, and when she became Henry VIII's queen, was able to give him the benefit of her experience.

For all the popular history of the Tudors that are available, here is a book that doesn't rehash the same old stories and adds some new and original scholarship.

Henry VII displaced Richard III as king of England, brought an end to the Wars of the Roses, founded the Tudor dynasty, managed for the most part to avoid war, put the country (that is to say, his own treasury) on a sound financial footing, and was a contemporary of many other historically significant and interesting personalities, including William Caxton, Erasmus, and Thomas More, not to mention his son Henry VIII and Henry VIII's first wife, Catherine of Aragon, whom Henry VII himself at one stage considered marrying. And during Henry's reign two of the best-remembered pretenders, Perkin Warbeck and Lambert Simnel, were manoeuvred to challenge his throne. So I expected to enjoy reading this book, and to learn much from it. I was disappointed.

Firstly, Henry's boyhood, youth, exile, return to England, the Battle of Bosworth Field, and the first six of Henry's 24 years as king are scarcely more than summarised. Granted, there is much about these events and years that seems not to have been recorded, or the records lost, but there is no sign in Thomas Penn's book that he has engaged in any original research, and there is much that is known that he does not include. In later sections of his book, Penn writes so much about Prince Henry, his formative years, and even about the early years of his reign as Henry VIII, that we begin to suspect he finds Henry VIII considerably more interesting than Henry VII. At times, we feel we are reading Henry VIII Part I.

Penn does write interestingly on matters such as Henry successfully bypassing the Pope's attempted monopoly of the Alum trade, the rise and downfall of Richard Empson and Edmund Dudley, and on the Duke of Burgundy's unintended 1506 visit to England, following shipwreck. But the text throughout is marred by grating clichés, some of which, such as James IV of Scotland's military campaign against Henry "hit the buffers." are distractingly anachronistic too. Adopting a term much overused by sports' commentators, Penn then writes, "In the end, it was no contest." This with reference to Perkin Warbeck's march on London, backed by James and in alliance with disaffected Cornish rebels, which - quite to the contrary - did indeed pose a very serious challenge to Henry, albeit that Henry's superior arms and forces eventually triumphed.

We are also told that "The general gist.... was crashingly obvious"; that "north of the River Trent, England was crawling with royal officials"; that "In the recent past, chamberlains had a habit of being executed for their disloyalty"; and so on, and on, and on. Penn also has a problem with the terms downstream and upriver, as in Westminster being "downstream" of St Paul's and a servant being dispatched "upriver" from Richmond to London for a barrel of Muscadel, though Penn is not consistent in his error and sometimes hits on the right term.

I carp. The book was intended as a readily digestible re-telling of the Henry story for the general reader, not a new academic study, and clearly some of the very many reviewers here have enjoyed the book. Nevertheless, it is hard not to draw parallels with Penn's own judgment on the poetry of Stephen Hawes: "his ploddingly conventional verse dealt with the formulaic topics....in an entirely predictable way. It was, in short, the kind of middle-of-the-road, crowd-pleasing stuff that people lapped up." That description may have some relationship with Penn's own objective. For me, though, he wasn't entirely successful even in that modest ambition.