This book should really be entitled The Court of Henry VIII.īut that didn’t bother me too much. They complain that it’s hard to find the king, buried as he is under the detailed descriptions of the world he inhabited. There are plenty of reviews out there which complain that this book isn’t actually about Henry VIII at all. It sat well with my reading of Mantel’s Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies.

Because this was immaculate and a tenth of the price it was supposed to be, I snapped it up though. I used to read books like this all the time but the 1001 list has my heart set on novels. She’s written about pretty much every Tudor monarch or individual connected with Tudor monarchy you can think of. I’ve not read any of Weir’s books before. There, in a charity shop, completely unblemished as in a proper bookshop, lay Weir’s encylopaedic description of one of the most magnificent courts of English royalty. We have certainly come a long way from the portrait created by Charles Laughton. Other Tudor writers like Hutchinson or Starkey do disagree with Weir on various points, but in the main that does not detract from my enjoyment of this fascinating book.

Therefore this book is filled with a myriad of detail of court life from the Privy Chamber to the culinary creations of the royal kitchens down to the names of the pet dogs.

Instead the olde worn caricature of Henry VIII is dusted off and given a more realistic treatment illuminated with the light of modern research. The reader of Tudor history may well have to go elsewhere for greater depth and detail of Henry's six wives, or of the many monumental events that effected the cultural, social or political climate of the age. A vast and fully comprehensive work, covering over five hundred pages, along with the obligatory sixty pages of notes.Īs the author states in her introduction, this is not a political history of the reign, her brief here is to record the events that help to build up a picture of the life and ethos of the King and the court. I have to rate Alison Weir's 'Henry VIII-King and Court' a five star read.

Henry VIII by Alison Weir