Winter King
The Dawn of Tudor England
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Winter King
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Narrated by:
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Simon Vance
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By:
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Thomas Penn
About this listen
A fresh look at the endlessly fascinating Tudors - the dramatic and overlooked story of Henry VII and his founding of the Tudor Dynasty - filled with spies, plots, counter-plots, and an uneasy royal succession to Henry VIII.
Near the turn of the sixteenth century, England had been ravaged for decades by conspiracy and civil war. Henry Tudor clambered to the top of the heap, a fugitive with a flimsy claim to England’s crown who managed to win the throne and stay on it for 24 years. Although he built palaces, hosted magnificent jousts, and sent ambassadors across Europe, for many Henry VII remained a false king. But he had a crucial asset: his family - the queen and their children, the living embodiment of his hoped-for dynasty. Now, in what would be the crowning glory of his reign, his elder son would marry a great Spanish princess.
Thomas Penn re-creates an England that is both familiar and very strange - a country medieval yet modern, in which honor and chivalry mingle with espionage, realpolitik, high finance, and corruption. It is the story of the transformation of a young, vulnerable boy, Prince Henry, into the aggressive teenager who would become Henry VIII, and of Catherine of Aragon, his future queen, as well as of Henry VII - controlling, avaricious, paranoid, with Machiavellian charm and will to power.
Rich with incident and drama, filled with wonderfully drawn characters, Winter King is an unforgettable account of pageantry, intrigue, the thirst for glory, and the fraught, unstable birth of Tudor England.
Thomas Penn has a PhD in early Tudor history from Clare College, Cambridge. Winter King is his first book.
©2011 Thomas Penn (P)2012 Blackstone Audio, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...
Critic reviews
This seems to be regarded as one of the better books on Henry VII and his reign, and I can see why. It does a great job of bringing to life the broader geopolitical context - putting England firmly within the wider European sphere, with lots of machinations around alliances with the Habsburgs and/or France in pursuit of creating combined kingdoms that would have radically altered European and world history - as well as domestic courtly intrigued and resentments.
As a prequel to the much better-knowm reign of Henry VIII, this is particularly useful, as Penn frequently has an eye on what's to come, with the young Prince Henry a constant presence, along with others - like More and Wolsey - who would later come to dominate the country.
But if I'm honest, Henry VII himself remains a bit of an enigma - a kind of shadowy, slightly menacing background presence whose motivations are unclear, and whose actions often make little sense. Why, for instance, as a man who'd won the throne by conquest - based on a split-second battlefield decision by someone else, rather than his own actions - did he act so seemingly unfairly to so many of his subjects, appropriating land and forcing people into debt? Did he feel force and threats were the only way to rule? Did he want to be feared rather than loved? If so, why?
I guess asking for more on the psychology of a man who apparently wrote little and seems to have kept his thoughts close is unfair of me, but this is what I was hoping for, and I was left somewhat disappointed. Not the author's fault - it's the fault of the sources.
Still, despite the gaps - and more on Henry's early life and initial motivation to pursue the crown is another big gap, for me - this was interesting. Makes me wonder why this reign so often seems to be skipped over - there's a lot here that lays the foundations for what was to come far more than simply in the seizing of the crown for the Tudors.
interesting and well done
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Very Good
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Enjoyable, informative, interesting
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Fascinating but selective. A very enjoyable history of Henry VII and how he managed to size the English throne, and keep it, in very unsure times. The Battle of Bosworth is skated over very quickly, as is how Henry secured the throne. But longer passages are devoted to more obscure persons such as the poet Skelton who became Henry VIII tutor. It gives a good back ground to the early lives of Henry VIII and Catherine, and all the machinations around their eventually marriage. The final passages on the the death of Henry VII are some of the best, in showing what it was like to be around a dying king. In the end Henry VII still remains an elusive character. A knowledge of the ins and outs of the period is useful, Wikipedia was very helpful.
Classy reconstruction of the period
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Winter King
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