Winter King: Henry VII and the Dawn of Tudor England

A fresh look at the endlessly fascinating Tudorsthe dramatic and overlooked story of Henry VII and his founding of the Tudor Dynastyfilled with spies, plots, counter-plots, and an uneasy royal succession to Henry VIII.

It was 1501. England had been ravaged for decades by conspiracy, violence, murders, coups and countercoups. Through luck, guile and ruthlessness, Henry VII, the first of the Tudor kings, had clambered to the top of the heapa fugitive with a flimsy claim to Englands throne. For many he remained a usurper, a false king.

But Henry had a crucial asset: his queen and their children, the living embodiment of his hoped-for dynasty. Queen Elizabeth was a member of the House of York. Henry himself was from the House of Lancaster, so between them they united the warring parties that had fought the bloody century-long Wars of the Roses. Now their older son, Arthur, was about to marry a Spanish princess. On a cold November day sixteen-year-old Catherine of Aragon arrived in London for a wedding that would mark a triumphal moment in Henrys reign.

In this remarkable book, Thomas Penn re-creates the story of the tragic, magnetic Henry VIIa controlling, paranoid, avaricious monarch who was entering the most perilous years of his long reign.

Rich with drama and insight, Winter King is an astonishing story of pageantry, treachery, intrigue and incidentand the fraught, dangerous birth of Tudor England.