Terracotta bust of Henry VII, by Pietro Torrigiano

Winter King: The Dawn of Tudor England
By Thomas Penn,
Allen Lane, Rs 899

Henry VII, the king who made England a powerful state in the turbulent times of late medieval Europe, had a very dubious, if not a non-existent, claim to the English crown. He found it, as the story goes, in the battlefield of Bosworth in 1485 where he defeated Richard III.

Henry VII was born Henry Tudor, a descendant of John of Gaunt, the third son of Edward III who had been made the Duke of Lancaster. John of Gaunt dominated English politics from around 1377 to his death in 1399. The Tudors were descended from Gaunt through his mistress and they were, therefore, bastards. In the 1450s, Edmund Tudor, Henry VII’s father, was half-brother to Henry VI, his mother being Henry V’s young wife, Catherine of Valois, the daughter of the French king, Charles VI. Edmund’s father, Owen, a Welshman, was a groom of Catherine’s and married her secretly after Henry V’s death. Henry VII had royal blood but as Thomas Penn says in this biography, “it was irretrievably tainted’’.

Henry seized the crown of England but his kingdom had been torn apart by a bloody civil war that had lasted for much of the 15th century. When he died in 1509, the succession of his son was undisputed and England was a stable and a hugely rich state. But Henry’s achievements and the way he achieved them have always been somewhat eclipsed by the figure of his son, Henry VIII. “A dark prince’’ was the epithet that Francis Bacon, his first biographer, had used for Henry VII.

Penn’s masterly biography successfully removes the darkness but Henry VII’s career as a king makes it difficult to see him in full and delightful sunlight. He is forever a pale and shadowy figure — “the winter king’’.

Henry’s methods of building up his absolute power and unprecedented wealth were ruthless and without scruples. He was a pious man but this did not stop him from grasping his subjects’ estates without reason and from torturing them when required. In the first half of his reign he lived in the fear of pretenders to the throne. He was thus prone to intrigue and suspicion. His reign was a “sustained state of emergency’’. The second half, when his reign appeared to be stable, was marred by the death of his first-born son.

Penn’s narrative conveys the drama and the terror of Henry VII’s reign as the story spreads from England into the courts and chancelleries of Europe. Without quite suggesting it, Penn leads readers to recognize that what his king established approximated to modern regimes of power, complete with spies, torture chambers and the ubiquitous presence of fear. Josef Stalin, if he had read about Henry VII, would have found in him a kindred soul.