Tudor England: A History
Lucy Wooding
(Yale, £30)
RECENT conversations with family and friends have confirmed my suspicions of a widely held view, namely, that everything we need to know about the Tudors has surely already been written, serialised (in television documentaries and dramas), rendered into novels or splashed across cinema screens. Then, along comes this extraordinary book—of the kind that can only really be written by someone who has spent decades immersed in their subject area—to show us exactly how naive we can be.
‘Tudor England was nothing like it appears on the screen; it was far more interesting’
Tudor England was nothing like it appears on the screen, Lucy Wooding is quick to point out in her introduction. Indeed, many modern depictions of the era tend to distort the historical record and are often a travesty of the real thing, which was at once more complicated, more intractable and far more interesting.
Astonishingly, the founder of the dynasty, Henry of Richmond (not Tudor, which is a later invention), ‘had no good claim to the throne at all’. Nevertheless, with a combination of sheer nerve and extraordinary courage, he landed with a small invasion fleet at a remote bay in south-west Wales. Within two months, he had defeated the anointed king in battle, taken London and been crowned in Westminster Abbey. Thereafter, Henry’s reign (1485− 1509), followed by those of
