The House Of Tudor

The Tudors were phenomenal by any standards. They ruled England for little more than a century yet no other royal dynasty has so impressed itself on our consciousness. Bluff King Hal and Good Queen Bess are part of our folklore and remain to this day among the very few English monarchs immediately recognizable to most people. In this personal rather than political history of the Tudors, Alison Plowden examines the origins of this astonishing family which appeared out of nowhere in 1485, blazed briefly in the heavens and then vanished, leaving a slowly fading trail of glory behind it. The lives of the five Tudor monarchs are interwoven with the lesser-known branches of the tree in a rich tapestry which begins with the romance of an obscure Welsh squire and a French princess and ends in peace and in glory with the death in 1603 of the last English sovereign of the English nation. The Tudors have a special fascination. The astute statesmanship of the first Henry Tudor, the enterprising marital career of the second and the tragedy of the son he laboured so murderously to get, the unhappy reign of Mary and finally the flowering of Elizabeth in whom the family genius reached its apotheosis, all find their place in this chronicle of five turbulent, passionate, tragic and prodigious generations of Tudors.