Winter King: The Dawn of Tudor England

“He was, of course, the founder of the dynasty, but he was also one of the most unlikely kings England has had. He was a usurper and a chancer with a highly dubious claim to the throne. He also knew very little at firsthand about the country he ended up ruling, as he had spent much of his early life as a refugee in Brittany and France. He was very charming but inscrutable, controlling and ruthless – the Machiavelli of English kings…It’s a world in which England is still part of Christendom, owing allegiance to the Pope. England is still a feudal kingdom, one that’s recognisably medieval – but at the same time you have the emergence of what we think of as the early modern world – the discovery of America, new Renaissance ideas about politics and government, and the widespread appearance of print culture…So this is a volatile world, a world in flux. In a sense, Henry VII is typical of this age. He’s somebody who seems to come out of nowhere, seizes power and makes the throne his own…One of the things my book does is to show Henry’s reign as a 25-year-long state of emergency. He’s never able to shake off the spectre of civil war.” Read more...

The best books on Henry VII

Thomas Penn, Historian