480
pages, Simon & Schuster, ISBN-13: 978-1439191569
Like
many people, I have always had an interest in perhaps the most famous of English
Kings, Henry VIII. However, prior to reading this book, I really knew nothing
about the reign of his father, Henry VII, or indeed of Henry VIII’s early
years. This book has helped fill much of that gap in my knowledge. However, if
the reader knows anything about the War of the Roses, or anything about the
Yorkists in particular, they will be driven to fits of frustration as the
author knows the period only from the post-Tudor perspective, and that is
unfortunate. A retelling of self-serving propaganda is never very enticing. Penn,
however, seems to want to rid himself of this albatross, but he seems torn
between telling history the way it was in the well-maintained academic and popular
perception of the Tudors, and what his own fine intellect and sense of fair
play otherwise tells him. Sooner or later we will get to a post-Tudor period
and it may be that we look back at Penn’s effort here as a good start.
Penn
does a good job relating just how bizarre a victory the Tudors pulled off, and
if Henry VII can be said to fascinate at all it is due to his very
improbability. He usurped the throne through the agency of others (not his own
military prowess like Edward IV, or by popular acclaim like Edward III. The
real interest in Henry VII, then, centers on examining how this Lancastrian
offshoot found himself an anointed king. It begins with a simple answer: persistent
infertility of the House of Lancaster and the exceptionally improbable careers
of four illegitimate children, the Beauforts. Penn does not skimp on how
acutely sensitive Tudor was about the meagerness of his claim, coming as it was
through a female line, and Beaufort at that, as well as deeply resentful of the
superiority firstly of Edward of Warwick’s claim and secondly that of his own
wife. This led to a poisonous inability to coexist with any member of his wife’s
Yorkist family, not just one-time Richardian servants and retainers. Tudor
always cast himself as their victim in his own lifetime and certainly what he
wanted his biographers to perpetuate. This in itself is so unappealing, and
emasculating, that is hardly surprising that he is ignored by historians.
Whatever else he was, Henry VIII, the son, was no victim; he did the
victimizing, with malicious, narcissistic zeal.
The
author’s study of how Henry VII used bonds and fines as a method of exerting
control over the aristocracy and of curtailing the power of any potential
rivals was fascinating, although, for my personal taste, a little over-detailed
at times. Penn painted a picture of a monarch who spent his early years
fighting first to gain and then to hold the throne and who in his later years
became obsessed with the need to consolidate his position and ensure an
undisputed dynastic inheritance for his son. I found it both interesting and
unexpected that Henry VII chose to do this by financial control rather than by
the axe later so beloved of Henry VIII. Some of the most interesting parts of
the book to me were those that dealt with the young Princes Arthur and Henry
and with poor Catherine of Aragon, used for years as a pawn in a game of
diplomatic chess. The author paints a sympathetic picture of how powerless
Catherine was in influencing and determining her own fate (not unusual, of
course, but often left undescribed). Penn also gives some great descriptions of
state occasions: the marriage of Catherine to Arthur and later to Henry VIII,
coronations, funerals, and the socially important jousting tournaments. We also
learn who were the influences on Henry VIII’s education, both intellectual and
chivalrous, and learn about the early careers of some of those who would be so
significant in his later reign: Thomas More, Thomas Wolsey, et al.
This book is very much a biography rather than a
social history and as such concentrates almost exclusively on royalty,
aristocracy and the rich; furthermore, this is a study of Henry Tudor’s life after
winning the crown at Bosworth, and his life before this momentous event is dealt
with in a brief introduction. Personally, I would have liked the author to shed
a bit more light on how Henry VII’s reign impacted on the commoners. Everywhere
Henry Tudor looked he thought he saw a Yorkist’s better claim lurking and the
people only too happy to put one of them back on the throne, such was his
delusion. Far from delivering the Yorkists and the English people from an
alleged parricidal, Henry Tudor’s own inadequacies drove him to becoming that
which he claimed to have prevented. And his son was even worse.
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