House of Tudor, by Alison Plowden.
Paperback 256 pages (23 June, 2003)
Publisher: Sutton Publishing;
ISBN: 0750932406
To my surprise and immense delight, especially after my disappointment with Alison's Plowden's "Tudor Women," Plowden's "The House of Tudor" bestowed a lot of reading pleasure, allowing me to briefly re-visit most of my favourite people from history.
Despite being only a very short book (under 300 pages), for the most part Plowden successfully captures the essence of the members of the Tudor royal family - her vivid and sensitive portraits making them live and breathe from the very page.
I really enjoyed Plowden's sympathetic portrait of Henry VII. Often portrayed in history books as cold and calculating - here we see Henry Tudor etched boldly as the centre of a close and stable family group: a hardworking King who still had time to write to his mother and comfort his wife at the loss of their first born.
Plowden shows him as a man who loved music, the supposed "miser" of other history accounts willing to pay good coin simply to watch a young maid dance. Henry VII could laugh too, possessing enough sense of humour to punish a pretender to his throne by placing him in the palace kitchens.
One section I did take much issue with. Plowden clearly does not like Anne Boleyn, not at all. The more I moved deeper into this part of "The House of Tudor," the more I detected her bias against Anne Boleyn, Plowden writing how Anne Boleyn's attraction to Henry is hard to "define."
I guessed Alison Plowden didn't like Anne Boleyn when reading her "Tudor Women." But Anne Boleyn is person from history many people either love or hate, and regular readers of my column will not be surprised to hear me admit I'm biased the other way!
Plowden does exhibit some lack of understanding concerning the cadence of people from Tudor times. In "The house of Tudor," when discussing Anne Boleyn, she brings up Anne's famous wit, but writes "no examples of it have survived." Goodness! I think she forgot here to place her sources against the context of the time, something all good history writers strive to do, but sometimes fail to do properly when possessing an obvious prejudice.
That might explain why Plowden isn't hearing Anne's wit, rather "tasteless remarks" - Plowden's description of Anne's pre-execution joke:
"I have heard that the executioner is very good. And I have a little neck."
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