Winter King: The Dawn of Tudor England. By Thomas Penn. Allen Lane; 448 pages; £20. To be published in America by Simon & Schuster in March 2012. Buy from Amazon.co.uk
MYSTERIOUS, suspicious, avaricious, cold, the figure of Henry VII has long been skipped over or ignored. From 1485 to 1509 he ruled England, a usurper-king steadily tightening his grip and casting his net for money, intent on establishing his Tudor dynasty firmly on the throne. From his portraits he stares out warily, his eyes hooded and his thin lips trying, but failing, to smile.
Long before the Tudors became television celebrities, historians sought gleams of sunshine in his reign by tracing the emergence of his second son, the future Henry VIII; and so it is again here. Thomas Penn covers the first 16 years of Henry’s rule at a swift, perfunctory clip, deepening and slowing only in 1501—when, at the doomed wedding of Catherine of Aragon to Prince Arthur, a certain irrepressible “carrot-haired” lad, foreshadowing the modern Harry, appears in public to escort her. From then on the reader, too, is alert for him, doffing his robe to dance, dominating the tiltyard, until in 1509 he throws the windows open and sweeps his father’s miserly dreariness away.
This imbalance is a shame. It consigns Henry VII to the Scroogeish, lonely twilight of his last years; but if anyone could have brought him out of the shadows, Mr Penn could. He is a superb teller of a tale, a reveller in dodgy deeds, a keen observer of the febrile, dissimulating characters of court and embassy, and a splendid limner of the great jousts and entertainments of the age. It is not hard, perhaps, to make the late Middle Ages colourful. But Mr Penn, with a sharp eye for detail and adroit use of a gifted historical imagination, lets readers relive them. He is especially good at noting the weather, the press and noise of crowds, the claustrophobic closeness of over-upholstered rooms and the foul state of the roads. He lets us hear the creak of oars and the scratch of pens, as well as the tubercular king fighting for every breath.
He also draws a compelling picture of ever-increasing fear. As the king’s cupidity and nervousness increased in his last years, he found new ways to squeeze money from his subjects: to keep them, in Henry’s own words, “in danger at his pleasure”. They were made to sign bonds for their loyalty, fined for trumped-up infractions, or hauled before his “council learned” for no reason, except to pay money to be freed again. Low-born king’s intimates, Reynold Bray, Richard Empson and Edmund Dudley, devoted themselves to extortion, while the king’s spies and “promoters” roamed and listened everywhere. This was, in effect, a reign of terror. As Henry lay dying, leaving a vast treasure (much of it, interestingly, from trading alum, essential for dyeing cloth), he said he was sorry for what his officers had done. But only partly sorry.
Mr Penn is much better at narrative than analysis. This is not a book for new insights into the rebellions of Henry’s early years, or the tortuous diplomacy of the Spanish marriage, or the contents of the king’s private account-books. From those carefully monogrammed pages in the 1490s another man emerges: a music-lover, a delighted (though short-sighted) ogler of dancing maidens, an inveterate loser of tennis balls, and an amorous husband whose marriage to Elizabeth of York, cut short by her death in 1503, is depicted by Mr Penn mostly in sketchy flashbacks. The gap between father and son, darkness and light, winter and spring, did not always yawn so wide. If Mr Penn had properly charted the whole course of Henry VII’s struggle to assert himself, this vigorous and thoroughly enjoyable book would have been even better.
