The Tudors: The Complete Story of England's Most Notorious Dynasty [Deckle Edge] [Hardcover]

G.J. Meyer (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 23, 2010

For the first time in decades, here, in a single volume, is a fresh look at the fabled Tudor dynasty, comprising some of the most enigmatic figures ever to rule a country. Acclaimed historian G. J. Meyer reveals the flesh-and-bone reality in all its wild excess.

In 1485, young Henry Tudor, whose claim to the throne was so weak as to be almost laughable, crossed the English Channel from France at the head of a ragtag little army and took the crown from the family that had ruled England for almost four hundred years. Half a century later his son, Henry VIII, desperate to rid himself of his first wife in order to marry a second, launched a reign of terror aimed at taking powers no previous monarch had even dreamed of possessing. In the process he plunged his kingdom into generations of division and disorder, creating a legacy of blood and betrayal that would blight the lives of his children and the destiny of his country.

The boy king Edward VI, a fervent believer in reforming the English church, died before bringing to fruition his dream of a second English Reformation. Mary I, the disgraced daughter of Catherine of Aragon, tried and failed to reestablish the Catholic Church and produce an heir. And finally came Elizabeth I, who devoted her life to creating an image of herself as Gloriana the Virgin Queen but, behind that mask, sacrificed all chance of personal happiness in order to survive. 
 
The Tudors weaves together all the sinners and saints, the tragedies and triumphs, the high dreams and dark crimes, that reveal the Tudor era to be, in its enthralling, notorious truth, as momentous and as fascinating as the fictions audiences have come to love.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Amazon Exclusive: G.J. Meyer on The Tudors

Why?

That question is likely to be--and probably should be--sparked by the appearance of almost any new book about the Tudors. Does the world really need more words about the dynasty that produced King Henry VIII and Queen Elizabeth I? Those two are already the most written-about monarchs in English history, after all. They’re the subjects of so many movies, novels and TV dramas that sometimes they seem to be not figures out of the past but living showbiz celebrities. Why should anyone want to read about them yet again?

I offer two answers.

First, though the number of books about the most famous Tudors is practically infinite, single volumes dealing with the entire dynasty and aimed at a general readership have always been rare. This is unfortunate, because it deprives a great story of its proper context. The legendary career of Henry VIII would have been impossible if not for the exploits--in some ways far more astonishing--of his father Henry VII, a penniless fugitive who came almost out of nowhere to seize the crown. And Elizabeth was only the third of Henry VIII’s children to inherit his throne and struggle to deal with his blood-soaked legacy. She had a brother and sister, both of whom ruled before her and tried without success (in radically different ways) to undo what Henry had done. Her story comes fully to life only when illuminated by theirs. The Tudors ruled England for three generations--118 years in all--and not nearly enough has been done to deal with their five reigns as a continuum, a chain of causes and effects that cumulatively changed the course of English, European, and even world history, often in tragic ways.

Second, more than four centuries after the death of the last Tudor, there continues to be an immense gap between who the various members of the family actually were and what most people--including most people with some knowledge of English history--think they know about them. The real Henry VIII was both a greater and lesser man than the lusty Bluff King Hal of legend, the man who famously had six wives. Elizabeth was vastly more complicated, more pathetic and less noble than the glorious façade behind which she concealed herself. The now-obscure Henry VII, Edward VI, and Mary I were both more important as rulers and far more fascinating as human beings than is commonly understood.

The true shape of the Tudor story has been long obscured, even for leading historians, by religious controversy and differences of political ideology. It is only in the past couple of generations, as ancient passions have cooled, that the story has come into clear focus, and too often it has done so only for the historians themselves. For the public at large, the truth has continued to be overwhelmed by old legends with too little basis in fact. My hope for The Tudors, as it goes to press, is that it will help to bring popular understanding of one of history’s most deservedly famous dynasties into closer alignment with reality. --G.J. Meyer

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From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Arguably the most famous rulers in world history, Tudor monarchs Henry VIII and his daughter Elizabeth I were, according to journalist and author Meyer (A World Undone), cold and ruthless egotis[ts] whose self-created myths have prevailed over reality in our historical memory of them. Henry VII, the first Tudor, was a competent ruler who filled the royal treasury with gold, avoided war, and shrewdly consolidated his power by stripping away the nobility's autonomy. By contrast, Henry VIII's determination to enforce his religious change on his people led to a reign of terror, and his squandering of his riches contributed to the monarchy's later collapse under Charles I. His children fared little better, from the fervently evangelical boy-king Edward VI to the fanatically Catholic Mary, England's first woman ruler, who burned 300 of her subjects for heresy. Elizabeth is portrayed as selfish to the point of childishness, aspiring only to preserve her life and her rule. History buffs will savor Meyer's cheeky, nuanced, and authoritative perspective on an entire dynasty, and his study brims with enriching background discussions, ranging from class structure and the medieval Catholic Church to the Tudor connection to Spanish royalty. 4-color inserts, 1 map. (Mar.)
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Product Details

• Hardcover: 640 pages
• Publisher: Delacorte Press; First Edition, First Printing edition (February 23, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385340761
• ISBN-13: 978-0385340762
• Product Dimensions: 6.6 x 1.5 x 9.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (72 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #160,725 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #100 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > Historical > British

More About the Author

G. J. Meyer is a former Woodrow Wilson Fellow with an M.A. in English literature from the University of Minnesota, a onetime journalist, and holder of Harvard University's Neiman Fellowship in Journalism. He has taught at colleges and universities in Des Moines, St. Louis, and New York. His books include A World Undone: The Story of the Great War, Executive Blues, and The Memphis Murders, winner of an Edgar Award for nonfiction from the Mystery Writers of America. He lives in Goring-on-Thames, England.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

124 of 129 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I must be the target audience., February 17, 2010

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J. Hoelscher "debater7" (Texas) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Tudors: The Complete Story of England's Most Notorious Dynasty (Hardcover)

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I loved this book, but I think I may be dead center in the target audience: educated, interested in history but not a historian, and reading this book for leisure, not enlightenment. It reminds me very much of Thomas Carlyle's "History of the French Revolution." Meyer gets away from the dry facts and detailed historical analysis and tells us the history as a detailed story. That's exactly what I was looking for and Meyer does a great job. While much was left out in order to get down to a single volume, I certainly didn't miss any of it. After all, I was learning new info with nearly every page and the story flowed quite well. This a perfect book for someone who wants an accurate historical novel without any fiction mixed in to confuse the history.

I think it's a mistake to expect much more from a book the author clearly meant for a general audience. He sticks to the big themes and neceassarily leaves out stuff that really isn't important unless you are a serious student of history. For example, I don't care about the details of Henry VII's various victories while he consolidated power. The important plotline is that he got lucky, became king almost by accident, and turned out to be a great man. Twenty-five pages was enough to get a feel for the events of the day and set up the rest of the story.

I can understand why some readers found the digression chapters a little off-putting. They broke up the story line and were, as you might expect, not always directly relevant to the story. I enjoyed them. They were like nice little breaks where Meyer got to inject more of his personal opinion about something in the general historical period. I read the book in sections and found the digressions amusing. If you wanted to read straight through the Tudor storyline, then they were easy enough to skip and come back to later, but I think they provided some color and were worthwhile.

All in all, "The Tudors" was entertaining and educational for me as a layperson and I highly recommend it to anyone who enjoys history as a story.

93 of 103 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Much much better than being there, February 11, 2010

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Personne (Rocky Mountain West) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Tudors: The Complete Story of England's Most Notorious Dynasty (Hardcover)

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For generations, the century of England's Tudors has presented a complicated picture. According to this picture, Henry VIII and his daughter Elizabeth I rid the nation of a corrupt church and founded an age of enlightenment. Of course, Henry had a few marital issues, but the picture was largely positive. In recent decades that portrait has begun to crumble. G.J. Meyer puts in the final dagger and kicks it over the edge.

The age of the Tudors begins when the short but bloody reign of Richard III meets its end on the battlefield. Henry Tudor, a man with a questionable claim (as if any claim could be legitimate) becomes Henry VII. His time on the throne is dedicated to amassing gold, and he turns out to be pretty good at it. When the crown passes to his son, England is forced down a path of change that lasted for centuries.

Henry VIII was obsessed with his own succession. When he became convinced that his wife could give him no male heirs, he began a battle with the Catholic church to have the marriage annulled. This escalated until he broke completely with the church, founding his own religion and asserted his claim of supreme rulership. He created legalisms which allowed him to pillage the churches, kill his enemies, and steal their lands. He extracted money from a population already teetering on the edge of abject poverty. He lavishly rewarded his friends and embarked on foolish military adventures. It would take the nation many generations to recover from the debt, and animosities born then have lingered to the present day.

While most historical accounts elide the time between Henry and Elizabeth, there was significant turmoil in those dozen years. There was a period of regency as the boy king Edward gradually took the reigns of a bloody period of intolerance. Jane Grey became queen for a little over a week. Mary began with great hope and ended having initiated a terrible period of counter-persecution, as ruthless toward Protestants as her father and brother had been toward the Catholics. Finally we reach Elizabeth, with the tide turning against the Catholics once again. Meyer argues convincingly that the primary focus of her reign was self-preservation. This is convincing when one considers her lack of interest in the succession. Her enemies--real or perceived--perished on trumped-up and transparent charges. She continued the wholesale style of execution begun by her family: I will not describe it here but it is cruel beyond measure.

One of the real strength of Meyer's book is context. Interleaved with the chapters on the primary characters are chapters giving us a sense of the world as it was. There are sections on English monasticism, the Council of Trent, English theater and public education. We learn about the Protestant upheavals begun by Luther, then Calvin, leading to the age of the Puritans. There were hundreds of wars and skirmishes waged by foolish rulers across Europe, for no reasons other than vanity and paranoia. While one can never really know the mind of another age, one can at least know some of the details. This amounts to a book within a book and it's quite valuable on its own.

It has become fashionable for some historians to provide an armchair psychoanalysis of their subjects. To his great credit, Meyer avoids this. It is up to the reader to think about the characters and their motivations. I could not help thinking of more modern monsters, whether Saddam or Kim Il Sung, Stalin or Khamenei. There are attributes they all share: rewarding friends and punishing enemies, making sure no one quite knows where they stand. They have all had the ability to make some of their worst deeds appear to come from other sources. It is distressing to see how many of the Tudors' techniques foreshadow more recent times.

This is a big book and requires some commitment to read. It's not hard to be confused by all the Marys, Philips, Henrys, dukes, earls and popes. Some characters like Wolsey and Cromwell may be known to readers, but others will only make brief appearances. A rereading will be in order at some point, but for now a little sunlight will be welcome respite.

69 of 78 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars It's important to have good "PR"..., February 2, 2010

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Jill Meyer (United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Tudors: The Complete Story of England's Most Notorious Dynasty (Hardcover)

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...if you're a despot on the throne. G E Meyer's biography of the Tudor dynasty - all five rulers - shows why William Shakespeare got paid the big bucks to rewrite British history as he did with his plays about their immediate predecessors. The five Tudors - beginning with Henry VII and ending with Elizabeth - were an interesting group. Their slightly more than 100 year occupation of the British throne is examined closely by Meyer (no relation to me). He writes "popular" history - accessible to the average non-academic reader. And he does a good job at it, too. Following every chapter in this large book is a few-page section called "Background", where Meyer goes into detail on something he's covered in the previous chapter. He may write a small section about "John Calvin", for instance, when discussing the Reformation as developing on the Continent as opposed to how the Church of England evolved at the same time. I've never seen another historian do this in a book, and I heartily approve.

One thing that he writes about in one of his "Background" sections is the English alphabet in the 16th century. Evidently, it had only 24 letters and one of them, the letter, "y", was actually pronounced as a "th" sound. SO, we have "ye olde tea shoppe" which should be pronounced "the" olde tea shop. Interesting fact, I think.

If a writer of history is going to pursue a dynasty, he's best concentrating on one or two particular issues to link the generations. I'd say Meyer uses "religion" as his major theme here. And maybe the various personalities - spouses and advisers - who served each of the five Tudors, as his minor theme. The same families pop up time and again as they serve the Tudors in "supporting roles" during their reigns.

And regarding Shakespeare, who wrote during the last years of Elizabeth's reign. Her 45 or so years on the throne were not the "golden era" we have come to believe. As Meyer points out, the poor and unfortunate members of society greatly increased during her reign. She was not a particularly successful ruler but she had very good "PR", both then and after.

Meyer writes very readable history here. The book is long but never boring. The only disturbing thing is that the book's subtitle is "The Complete Story of England's Most Notorious Dynasty". By using the word "notorious" in the title, I think the publisher is cheapening the contents of the book.