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The Tudors: The Complete Story of England's Most Notorious Dynasty

5 star:		(25)
4 star:		(29)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

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.

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.

...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.

I've read a few books about the Tudors, and they tend to get repetitive. Let's face it, there's only so much information on that era that survives, so a new perspective can be hard to come by. So much to my surprise, I did actually learn new things by reading this. The author portrays the Tudors in a more negative light than other books I've read, and that lends an interesting perspective. Many authors come across as thinking the subjects of their books are the greatest people ever and downplay any negatives they may have. Meyer does the opposite. I'm not even sure he finds the Tudors admirable in the least. He isn't shy about expressing his opinion on the people who appear in the book. If you're strict about history, that could be off-putting, on the other hand, his biases are out there for everyone to see and evaluate accordingly.

One thing this book is NOT is the complete story. The bulk of the book is about Henry VIII. Henry VII is mentioned only in passing and only as the father of Henry VIII. I can understand why the sections on Edward VI and Mary I are shorter--their reigns were shorter, but Elizabeth I, who ruled longer than any other Tudor, barely figures into the story until the last 200 or so pages. And even then, she doesn't seem very present--the author focuses more on the men around her than the Queen herself. I got the impression the author got bored with the book about halfway through and started rushing. Large clumps of time are covered in a few pages (this happens throughout the book, not just the latter parts), while some events are covered in excruciating detail (this happens almost entirely in the Henry VIII parts).

Each chapter is broken up by a brief "background" chapter. These will be a like 'em or hate 'em thing. I liked them--they provided good information about life in England beyond the Tudors and broke up some heavy reading. I can see why people would hate them, though, as they don't flow into the text naturally and often bear little relation to the chapter before or after their location in the book.

Overall, I did enjoy reading it. Meyer has a nice writing style* provide some much-needed balance on the subject. If you've read other books about the Tudors, this would be a nice contrast to those and chances are good you'll learn something new. But it's probably not for someone who knows little about them--you'll wind up hating them and not read another thing about them, which would be a shame. The Tudors, warts and all, are a fascinating subject.

*My copy was an unproofed review copy, so I'll refrain from dwelling on the typos, bad sentences, etc. that plagued almost every page in hopes his editor was a darn good proof-reader.

This book is wonderfully readable, and races along with the page-turning quality of a thriller. Unfortunately it is very poorly documented. There are no citations, though there are end notes, in which important statements are repeated and a source stated. But there is not even one per page, so that most statements are left undocumented. For instance, on p. 92-93 Meyer writes, "Were the parish priests, especially those in the poorest and remotest districts, an ill-educated and brutish lot? ... More recent scholarship, the kind that became possible only when sectarian passions cooled, has shown the reality to have been considerably less horrifying."

What recent scholarship? When historians make such statements, they should cite at least one example. There is no note for either page 92 or 93, but in a note for p. 91 Meyer writes, "Good introductions to the religious life of pre-Reformation England are Penry Williams, Life; Maurice Keen, English Society in the Later Middle Ages; Francis Aiden Gasquet, England Under the Old Religion and Other Essays; and most important, Duffy, Stripping of Altars." Are these the books to which he refers? The reader has no way of knowing, and can only guess they are. Not good enough.

As other reviewers have stated, this book certainly is opinionated, but somehow that didn't bother me. Who doesn't have an opinion about Henry VIII? Bloody Mary? Elizabeth I? And I've read enough history to know that historians state completely contradictory things as "fact", to the point where I now read "fact" as "this particular historian's probably-completely-biased opinion". What bothers me is the lack of documentation. Even opinionated history is drawn from sources, and when a historian makes an opinionated statement I want to know on what sources the opinion is based. After every quote there should be a citation, which shows the author, the book, the edition and the page number, so that if I want to read more I can go straight to the source and pick up where the quote left off. After every statement of fact, unless it's a very well-known one, there should also be a citation that provides the source - a chronicler? an ambassador? an act of Parliament? Some historians really do stoop to wilful misrepresentation, as I discovered when I re-read Joanna Denny's awful biography of Anne Boleyn, and found that she had passed off a passage of Thomas More's History of Richard III as a description of Henry VIII's court (failing to provide a citation, so we couldn't turn to the end notes and see what she was up to).

As mentioned in the title, this book has factual errors. It's not enough to say so - people are entitled to ask what they are - so here are the ones I think there are. On p. 59 Meyer writes, "Ferdinand and Isabella both belonged to the ancient house of Trastamara (and were also, incidentally, desdended from King Edward III of England through his son John of Gaunt)." Isabel was definitely descended from John of Gaunt twice, through his daughter Philippa (the paternal grandmother of her mother, Isabel of Portugal), and his daughter Catalina (the mother of her father, John II of Castile). But Ferdinand was descended from Ferdinand I of Aragon, a younger brother of Catalina's husband, who does not appear to have been related to John of Gaunt (nor does his wife, Eleanor of Alburquerque). And Ferdinand's mother, Juana Enriquez, was Spanish, and not even royal. So far as I know, Ferdinand was not related to John of Gaunt. Nonetheless, I have to give credit to Meyer for knowing the name of Catherine of Aragon's dynasty - some historians refer to her a Habsburg, just because her sister Juana's son the Emperor Chares V was a Habsburg.

There's a mistake on p. 102 about the Emperor Charles: "Throughout his life the long-faced, lantern-jawed emperor showed little inclination to be sentimental about his relatives on either side. When another of his aunts was cast aside by her husband the King of Denmark, he did nothing for her and took little interest in her case." This "aunt" was actually his sister Isabel. And from what I've gathered, Isabel and her husband, Christian II, left Denmark with their children after Christian was overthrown, and took refuge in the Netherlands. I've haven't read anything to suggest that her husband divorced her or formally separated from her, and she died only three years later, in 1526. Maybe he did - but since there's not a single end note for p. 102, I have no way of checking Meyer's source. For all I know he made a blunder, and his failure to document his book means there's no proof he didn't.

Another odd statement about Charles V is made on p. 395: "Charles was a widower (not for the first time)". Charles married Isabel of Portugal in 1526, and she died in 1539. Though he fathered at least one illegitimate child after this, he never remarried. So what does this statement mean? Did Meyer think he remarried, and was widowed a second time?

On p. 369 Meyer writes that when Henry VIII's sister Mary died in 1533, "she was survived only by the girls Frances and Eleanor". Actually her son Henry was still alive, and didn't die until 1534. On the next page he writes, "All, as it happened, were female: Frances's daughters Jane, Catherine, and Mary Grey, and Eleanor's daughter, Margaret Clifford. (The Grey sisters, incidentally, were granddaughters of one of the sons that Elizabeth Woodville had before her marriage to Edward IV.)" A lazy mistake: looking at the family tree in Arlene Okerlund's recent biography of Elizabeth Woodville would have shown that they were great-granddaughters of Elizabeth's son Thomas Grey, Marquess of Dorset - their father's paternal grandfather.

There's a dubious statement on p. 374: "Dudley himself was a charmless, graceless figure, resented at court for his rough style and for having risen so high after beginning as the son of an attainted traitor. (In all of England there were currently only three dukes, one of whom had been languishing in prison since before the death of Henry VIII, and Dudley was the first in history without even a trace of blood connection to the royal family.)". Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, married Henry VIII's sister Mary as her second husband in 1515. But he was created Duke of Suffolk in 1514. He had no blood connection whatsoever to the royal family, and Henry VIII had no way of knowing that Brandon was going to become his brother-in-law. If Meyer is suggesting that Dudley was the first person with no royal blood raised to a dukedom in England, that's a mistake.

Also, on p. 368 Meyer writes that Edward VI "makes a melancholy picture: this solitary boy, his father and mother and stepmothers all long dead". Even though Anne of Cleves was only briefly Edward's stepmother, and, so far as I am aware, was never close to him, she was nonetheless a one-time stepmother, and still alive at this time. I assumed Meyer didn't know this. Yet on p. 378 he writes, "Two weeks later, accompanied by her sister Elizabeth and Anne of Cleves, Queen Mary I entered London." If Anne of Cleves was so briefly a stepmother that Meyer thought she didn't count, perhaps he should have specified this.

One other statement worth commenting on is on p. 386: "It is ironic, in light of what history held in store, that the descendants of Henry's elder sister Margaret were excluded altogether. It is only through Margaret that today's royal family is related to the Tudors at all." I won't be so unreasonable as to term this a mistake, since the matter is so obscure that I only came across it by accident. But according to The Princess of the [H.M.S.] Mary Rose, a short book about Henry VIII's sister Mary and the ship that was named after her, the current Queen is a descendant of Mary Tudor, through Mary's granddaughter Lady Catherine Grey. A family tree at the back states that Catherine Grey's grandson William Seymour, who got in trouble for secretly marrying Arbella Stuart, remarried after her death, to Lady Frances Devereaux. The next family tree shows that their daughter Lady Jane Seymour was an ancestress of the late Queen Mother, through her mother. A third family tree shows that Princess Diana was also descended from Mary Tudor through another of William Seymour's daughters, Lady Mary Seymour, one of whose descendants married a Spencer in the early 18th Century. If all this is correct, then the queen is descended from Mary Tudor once, and Princess Diana's sons are descended from her twice.

There's a blunder on p. 491, when Meyer writes that Philip II of Spain was "more the idealist than Marie de' Medici". Marie de' Medici didn't become Queen of France until 1600, and regent until her husband Henry IV was assassinated in 1610. He meant Catherine de' Medici. Given that Catherine had previously been mentioned, how did the editor or proofreader not pick up on this? Particularly given that she is mentioned later on the same page.

In the bibliography Meyer writes, "Nothing could be easier, in connection with the Tudors, than the assembly of an impressively weighty bibliography. The available literature, even the fairly recent literature, is so vast as to bring the concept of infinity to mind. And few exercises could be of less real value to the general reader for whom this book is intended."

If I hadn't found any factual errors, I might be willing to consider that, in a mega-popular work of popular history, he was entitled to do this. But the factual errors suggest that he didn't do his research quite adequately. He didn't find a source for every statement of fact, then withhold those sources from the reader, but rather, didn't find a source for every statement of fact. He adds, "What may have some value - at least in a book that is an attempt at synthesis, without any claim to plowing new ground in original source materials - is an indication of which works the author has found to be particularly useful." But even syntheses should be diligently researched and factually correct.

Normally I'd give this book four stars, since there's a place for easy-to-read but non-groundbreaking popular history, and The Tudors fits perfectly into this category. But I'm knocking off a star for the factual errors. By all means, read this book - but if you're a student or would-be historian, don't trust anything it says unless it's corroborated elsewhere.

I have a pretty good knowledge of Tudor history, especially Queen Elizabeth's period. I am currently also reading Ives's book on Lady Jane Grey as well as Hilary Mantel's "Wolfs Hall" and Alison Weir's book about the last days of Anne Boleyn.

If you are familiar with the Tudor era and are looking for one book that sort of pulls it all together or are not familiar and are looking for an introduction, this book is for you. It is not a detailed scholarly book. That is not to say that it is not based on good research, it obviously is, but there are no footnotes. And, a lot of the detail of the period is left out.

For example, there were many more people than just Aske involved in the Pilgrimage of Grace, but the author never mentions them by name. Sometimes I got the feeling that he intentionally left out detail because he didn't want to overwhelm his reader, but some people want the detail.

The book is also good at putting the era in historical context vis a vis the rest of Europe, but I am not sure we needed a whole chapter on Suleiman the Magnificent. Not really relevant to Tudor history.

It is also interesting to read the author's take on the socio-economic changes which England was undergoing at the time. He goes into great detail about the average person's diet, the impact of the enclosures, etc. Lots of authors just concentrate on the royals.

I detect a bit of a pro-Catholic bias, but maybe I am wrong. The persecution of the Catholics and dissolution of the monasteries is handled in great detail (which I liked), but there is no mention of Thomas More's persecution unto death of William Tyndale (who had to flee to the continent and hide while he was translating the bible into English). There is evidence that More personally tortured "heretics" but you won't find mention of this fact in this book.

The chapters dealing with Mary (who is not called "Bloody" for nothing) are relatively short. I was disappointed in what I saw as a lack of fairness in the treatment of the protestants.

Overall, I would unhesitatingly recommend this book to anyone interested in the period. I do have to say I was put off by the cover and the title "England's Most Notorious Dynasty"-!! Well, maybe not. There were some medieval Plantagenets who were pretty awful. Perhaps the publisher is trying to hitch onto the popularity of the dreadful Tudor TV series.

While an interesting review of facts, this book skips about in time so much that a true chronological history is impossible to gain from the reading of it. Very annoyed to find that we jump from Henry Tudor nearly losing hope at ever making something of himself almost directly into Anne Boleyn and then back to a young Margaret Beaufort again. Not the informative and insightful book that was advertised! Author seems incapable of sticking to a topic for more than five minutes. Sorry I bought the book. Author states that this book is not for true Tudor scholars but I do not see how an average non historian would be able to understand the story in a coherent manner as it is so poorly organized. I am quite familiar with the histories of all five monarchs and hold a degree in British history but fail to see much value in such a jumbled landfill of facts. Not a coherent nor cohesive book at all. Who edited this thing anyway? I think the loose pages of the manuscript must have been dropped and scattered, hastily reassembled without regard to chronology, and then published without further thought. I will avoid this author's work in the future.

I really like the writing style of this author. His ease of writing makes an intense history lesson a breeze to comprehend, without writing in a dumbed-down manner. If you have an interest in the Tudors and their inside scoop, this would be a great book for you to pick up.

There are timelines, descriptions of the characters we know (and may not know), and a review of their return to power.

The book is broken down into the following parts:

An Excess of Good Fortune 1485-1532

Monster 1533-1547

A King Too Soon and a Queen Too Late 1547-1558

Survivor 1558-1603

A must read for anyone interested in this "colorful" family!

This book worked on many levels, but failed in one respect. As an overview of the Tudor Dynasty, it offers a comprehensive portrait of these notorious monarchs and all key players and events. One very useful feature was the inclusion of alternating "background" chapters that illustrated customs, practices, religion, history, and even diet. These demonstrated the many different factors of life in England during the 16th Century, adding a nice supplement to the sequential narrative of the Dynasty.

The one shortcoming of this book is its sheer size and the tedium of several topics. This may make it inaccessible to casual readers looking to learn more about the Tudors. So much of it is devoted to religious policy and reform, political mechanizations, and foreign policy, though it seems the most salacious details were glossed over. Hundreds of pages were devoted to Henry VIII's conflict with Rome, while Anne Boleyn's beheading only garnered a few scant pages. People reading about the Tudors are expecting to learn the (often gruesome) fates of Henry's six wives, but the downfall of Sir Thomas More takes more precedence than Jane Seymour's death.

Overall, as a devoted Tudor aficionado, I found this book to be a complete and thorough look at England's most legendary monarchs. It effectively champions Henry VII's rise to power, illustrates Henry VIII's ruthlessness and conceit, portrays Edward as an intelligent but sympathetic youth, justifies Mary's ardent faith which lead to her tarnished character, and portrays Elizabeth as indecisive and vain. But there is more to each Tudor's reign than their reputation. There is the vast change they brought to an often obscured island nation, their role in foreign politics, the Reformation, and dozens of other topics addressed in this all encompassing narrative which successfully captured the dynamics of Tudor England.

Although I mostly enjoyed this book, I have to take issue with the tagline of the title -- this is not the complete story of the Tudors; in fact, the book assumes you know the basics. As just one example, Elizabeth's execution of Mary Queen of Scots is only mentioned after the fact, in passing.

Meyer doesn't much like the Tudors, particularly Elizabeth, and in the introduction he states that part of what he wants to do is to deflate to some extent the glamorous image that this dynasty has built up over the centuries, and to show how they were responsible in part for the positive image of themselves that has come down to us over the centuries. But mostly what Meyer wants to do is examine religion during the Tuodor era and how it relates to matters of state and the creation of Renaissance England.

Meyer is at his best when discussing Henry VIII. There is a chapter early on in which Meyer tries to sum up the events giving rise to the reign of Henry VII and to how Henry VII changed the government of the medieval English state, but it is entirely confusing, even if you already know much about the history of the Tudors. If you don't know anything about the era, the names will be impossible to follow. Once Meyer really gets cooking, however, about Henry VIII, the book starts to become very interesting. He goes in depth into the workings of Henry VIII's government and finances and explores in great detail how Henry's position on religion changed over time under the influences of Cardinal Woolsey, Thomas Cromwell and others, and conversely, how politics shaped the state's religion.

Meyer challenges some of the characterizations of Henry, pointing out what a truly awful man he became and what the cost was for much of England's nobility and for its religious leaders and institutions. He continues to examine the motivations of the nobility, in particular, during the brief reign of Edward VI and the even briefer reign of Lady Jane Grey.

Meyer presents a much more sympathetic view of Queen Mary than is generally held, examining the conflicting pressures that were exerted upon her during a reign in which the Catholics and Protestants were very much at odds. It is when Meyer gets to Elizabeth, however, that the book really begins to break down.

Doubtless, Elizabeth was not a very nice person, but Meyer clearly loathes her. It also seems like the author may have had deadline pressure when he got to the section on Elizabeth as his tendency in later parts of the book is to make very broad conclusions that seem personal in nature. He is of the opinion that Elizabeth's primary interest as Queen was her personal survival and that this led to her inability to make decisions. He presents a fairly compelling case, but it would have been much better work were it more balanced and were his personal dislike of her less on display. As it was, my reading pace in the latter half of the book slowed tremendously and while the first half of the book, which is devoted to the reign of Henry VIII merits five stars, the coverage of Edward VI and Queen Mary slips to four stars and by the end of the book, the writing barely merits three stars, despite the wealth of useful information.

All in all, there is much to like about this book as it does present an alternative and probably more accurate view of the Tudor monarchs, particularly the intersection between government and in religion during their reigns. The complete story of the Tudors, however, can not be told in one book, and if you're looking for much of a personal glimpse into the lives of people during this era, you'd do better to look elsewhere. But if you are interested in church and state in late medieval/early Renaissance Europe, this book is quite worth a read.