2021 BOOK OF THE YEAR

Tracy Borman

Just when we think we know everything about the Tudors, along comes a book that turns that all on its head. Reading Sarah Gristwood’s The Tudors in Love: The Courtly Code Behind the Last Medieval Dynasty (Oneworld) feels like being given the cypher to decode the letters between Mary, Queen of Scots and her Catholic conspirators. For the first time, there are satisfying answers to such conundrums as why Henry VIII took six wives and why the male favourites of Elizabeth I worshipped her as a goddess, even in her old age. The prose is as seductive as the subject matter. Be prepared to fall in love.

Staying in the Tudor age, the celebrated painter Hans Holbein brought Henry VIII and his courtiers to life, and his startlingly realistic portrayals still give us insights into their character as well as their appearance. Yet the man himself has, for the most part, remained a shadowy figure.

Franny Moyle puts this right in her stunning biography, The King’s Painter: The Life and Times of Hans Holbein (Apollo), which evokes the painter and his world as vividly as a Holbein masterpiece. As well as propounding theories about his best-known works, she presents him as a true polymath. Finally, The Dissolution of the Monasteries: A New History (Yale University Press) by James Clark is an impressively detailed study that yields a rich harvest. Clark has unearthed a wealth of overlooked details to challenge centuries of controversy and misconception, and provides a welcome new perspective on Henry VIII, his “henchman” Thomas Cromwell and other powerful members of the court, as well as the people whose lives were forever blighted by the destruction they wrought.

Tracy Borman is a historian and author, whose books include Crown & Sceptre: A New History of the British Monarchy (Hodder & Stoughton, 2021)

Simon Sebag Montefiore

(Yale) by