Description:

The Tudors are England’s most notorious royal family. But, as Leanda de Lisle’s gripping new history reveals, they are a family still more extraordinary than the one we thought we knew.

The Tudor canon typically starts with the Battle of Bosworth in 1485, before speeding on to Henry VIII and the Reformation. But this leaves out the family’s obscure Welsh origins, the ordinary man known as Owen Tudor who would fall (literally) into a Queen’s lap—and later her bed. It passes by the courage of Margaret Beaufort, the pregnant thirteen-year-old girl who would help found the Tudor dynasty, and the childhood and painful exile of her son, the future Henry VII. It ignores the fact that the Tudors were shaped by their past—those parts they wished to remember and those they wished to forget.

By creating a full family portrait set against the background of this past, de Lisle enables us to see the Tudor dynasty in its own terms, and presents new perspectives and revelations on key figures and events. De Lisle discovers a family dominated by remarkable women doing everything possible to secure its future; shows why the princes in the Tower had to vanish; and reexamines the bloodiness of Mary’s reign, Elizabeth’s fraught relationships with her cousins, and the true significance of previously overlooked figures. Throughout the Tudor story, Leanda de Lisle emphasizes the supreme importance of achieving peace and stability in a violent and uncertain world, and of protecting and securing the bloodline.

Tudor is bristling with religious and political intrigue but at heart is a thrilling story of one family’s determined and flamboyant ambition.

From Booklist

From the peccadilloes of Henry VIII, to the judicial murders of Anne Boleyn and Thomas More, to the Golden Age of Elizabeth, the Tudor epoch in English history lends itself to the soap-opera treatment as well as serious historical study. This enjoyable, well-written account is a bit of both. De Lisle, who has written extensively on Tudor history, begins the saga with the Welsh commoner, Owen Tudor, who lucked into a marriage with the widow of Henry V, thus providing Tudor descendants with noble lineage. Bouncing between hard historical facts and sometimes-debatable speculations, De Lisle examines the key events and characters that make the Tudor story interesting. She offers a surprisingly sympathetic portrait of Margaret Beaufort, the mother of the first Tudor monarch, Henry VII. She describes an unfairly maligned “Bloody Mary” and an Elizabeth not quite deserving of “Gloriana.” This is a very well-done popular history ideal for general readers. --Jay Freeman

Review

"A wonderfully fluent portrait of five generations... de Lisle brings an entirely fresh feel to the Tudor story, reminding us of the one thing the monarchs themselves wanted us to forget: the sheer improbability of their royal rule" -- Dan Jones, author of The Plantagenets The Times (Saturday Review) "Violent, heady, glamorous stuff, this is popular history of a very superior sort" -- Lucy Worsley Country Life "While many Tudor fans have been crying out for an accessible narrative history of the entire periodm few historians have felt able to rise to the challenge... [de Lisle] manages to achieve that very feat... should now be the go-to book" -- Chris Skidmore History Today (Books of the Year 2013) "In de Lisle's hands, this is a deeply human tale, a family tree come to vivid life, rather than a narrative of politics and power structures (Book of the Week)" -- Helen Castor Sunday Telegraph "One of the most interesting of today's historians, with her easy scholarship, fresh interpretation and presentation, Leanda De Lisle succeeds in casting a revealing light on what one had thought familiar. The pace never flags. Time and again she says something new in one of the most exciting and enjoyable books I have read for a long time." -- Desmond Seward History Today