Winter King

In a "Dear Bookseller" epistle introducing his 2012 edition of WINTER KING: HENRY VII AND THE DAWN OF TUDOR ENGLAND, author Thomas Penn writes the following: "Henry VII was the first Tudor king. He is also the one Tudor monarch that we don't know, and his is the story that has until now remained untold." He held power for nearly 25 years. In many respects Henry VII "remains ... the most fascinating Tudor of them all." He proved that royal power could grow "through surveillance, commodity trading and the manipulation of money markets" in an age "in which everything was up for grabs." Secondarily, WINTER KING also dissects the not notably affectionate relationship between Henry VII and his second son and successor, Prince Henry, later King Henry VIII. *** Two men could not have been temperamentally more different. And Henry VIII ostensibly quickly tore down almost all of his father's centralizing ad hoc institutions which placed terrifying power over subjects in the the hands of the King. And yet a quarter century after coming to power as a strapping teenager, Henry VIII had destroyed the power of the Pope in England and Ireland, using revived elements of his father's system of control of his subjects and a string of villainous ministers worthy of those chosen by the first Tudor. ***If there is any thoroughly off-putting element in this well researched biography, it is the author's distinctly personal "non-timeless" at times smart Alec English. Thomas Penn's text abounds in slang and anachronistic terminology. Characters "parachute in" to events. When fearing death, Henry VII lets a little "glasnost" slip into his rule. People are "framed" for crimes they did not commit. I have found paragraphs with two or three such howlers in the space of very few words. Serious history as comic strip? -OOO-