Tudors: The History of England from Henry VIII to Elizabeth I

by Peter Ackroyd

Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin's Press, 2013 

That the central challenge of writing popular narrative history is damn near unanswerable is amply demonstrated in Peter Ackroyd's new book, Tudors. This is the second volume in Ackroyd's projected multi-volume history of England; it covers the reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I, and Elizabeth I, and even the least-conversant reader in the world will immediately think, what, again? Popular narrative histories of these marquee monarchs (the thin bat-squeal of outrage you hear is the ghost of Henry VII, the founder of the family firm, whose reign was tacked onto the end of Ackroyd's previous volume so that this current volume could open with the bang of Henry 8 instead of the dreary penny-pinching of his father's dotage) haven't exactly been thin on the ground in recent years. The popularity of the Tudors is evergreen, which presents a writer like Ackroyd with something of a problem: these books sell, but there's almost no way to prevent them from feeling derivative.

Almost no way. In fact, there are only two: either you can write it all more engagingly than any of your immediate competitors and thus justify yourself on simple grounds of entertainment, or you can attack your too-familiar subject from a new or interesting angle and thus justify yourself on the trickier grounds of rhetorical argument. Since these kinds of popular narrative histories are usually based only on secondary sources, actual historical spadework is out of the question; what's left comes down to the fine art of pouring old wine into new bottles.

Ackroyd is our reigning genius at this kind of thing. In a long and very prolific career (writing both fiction and history), he's never written a boring book. And this latest one, Tudors, very much continues that inhuman winning streak: it's fantastically fun, engrossing reading. It's hundreds of old, familiar vignettes re-told by a master storyteller who's been eating and breathing these matters for longer than most of his readers have been alive. He controls the pacing of his narrative here far more expertly than he could possibly have done in his previous volume, which galloped over thousands of years of history in only a few hundred pages. Here, he's on much firmer ground, with much better-known material: beheaded wives, burnt heretics, the Spanish Armada - the typical Tudor pageant. He's able to slow down and shine a spotlight on individual people who attract his attention, like poor doomed Thomas More:

Thomas More followed John Fisher to the scaffold. Four days after Fisher's death a special commission was established to consider his case. Ever since his imprisonment in the Tower he had been cajoled and bullied by Cromwell, in the hope that he might relent. Cromwell even insinuated that More's obstinacy, by providing a bad example, had helped to bring the Carthusians to destruction. This proved too much even for his patience to bear. 'I do nobody harm,' he replied. 'I say none harm, I think none harm, but wish everybody good. And if this be not enough to keep a man alive, in good faith I long not to live.'

But Ackroyd's not content with just the one way of escaping triviality. Yes, he writes it all so entertainingly we don't require a second justification from him, but he provides one anyway: he has a theme, you see, a central preoccupation that animates his volume this time around - the reformation of the English Church, begun by Henry VIII, continued by his son Edward VI, nearly reversed by "Bloody" Mary, and finally hammered into place by the long reign of Elizabeth I. He very modishly asserts that this reformation "was, from the beginning, a political and dynastic matter; it had no roots in popular protest or the principles of humanist reform."

This is a bit of a stretch, of course - the English Reformation had at least one root in the Erasmian zeal of humanist reform: the root that ran right down through Henry VIII himself. At various points in the track of Tudor historiography, it's been fashionable to make the kind of assertion Ackroyd does here, that the auditing of the churches and the stripping of the altars was done entirely out of secular greed for melted plate. It's perhaps a sign of our times that historians who would never themselves sacrifice their principles for ready money are perfectly willing to tell their readers that the great men and women of the past did so without hesitation, and there's more than a hint of 20th-century brownshirted fascism in Ackroyd's depiction of the Tudor state apparatus. After a very satisfyingly detailed account of the so-called Pilgrimage of Grace in 1536 (in which half of Yorkshire rose in rebellion over the shuttering of their churches), for instance, Ackroyd sums up the villainy of Henry and his chief henchman Thomas Cromwell with melodramatic relish:

If the rebels had held together more tightly, and seized the initiative, they might have reached London and the court. They had failed to do that, but in the process, they had revealed a strong current of popular protest against the religious policies of the king and Cromwell. The majority of the people wished to maintain their parish churches in good order and were opposed to any innovation. They argued, for example, that the cura animarum, or 'care of souls' should be returned to the pope. They denounced Luther and other whom they called heretics. Yet Henry had faced them down; by duplicity and cunning he had defeated their leaders. He had broken the promises made on his behalf by the duke of Norfolk. But he might have said with some justification - what other way to deal with traitors? And he had won. Cranmer wrote that the enemies of reform 'now look humbled to the ground and oppose us less.' Henry could move forward with impunity.

When the dying boy-king Edward VI looked on the increasingly stern Reformation changes he championed, he saw the whole of his work threatened by the fact that Princess Mary, daughter of that most Catholic Queen Catherine of Aragon, would certainly try to revert the country to the old religion if she came to the throne. Mary was barred briefly from her accession when a legal device was produced by the Earl of Northumberland pronouncing Jane Grey queen in Mary's place, and on this point as on so many others, Ackroyd has strong opinions on the available evidence - and has found just the right quote to shade in the human dimension of that evidence:

It has been suggested that the plot [to alter the line of succession after Edward VI in order to bypass Mary] was devised by the duke alone, but there is no reason to suppose that the 'godly imp' would have calmly anticipated the reversal of religious reform. The salvation of the country depended on its survival. Northumberland himself seems to have grown tired and weary of governance. 'I have,' he wrote, 'entered into the bottom of my care.'

The picture he paints - of an England largely phlegmatic about religious change - stays unchanged throughout the length of the book, a static background against which he can more sharply contrast the doings of the high and mighty:

It would be unwise, however, to exaggerate the fervency of the Catholic cause. The Venetian ambassador, some eighteen months even before the accession of Elizabeth, had suspected that very few of those under the age of thirty five were truly Catholic. They did not espouse the new faith but they had not lost interest in the old. They had become what one Benedictine called 'neutrals in religion'. We must suspect, therefore, a very high level of indifference. A man or woman of that age would hardly remember a time when the monarch was not head of the Church, yet such a fact was not likely to inspire devotion.

Some readers may find this kind of thing more convincing than I did; it fails to take into account the massively widespread hatred of "Popery" and "the intrigues of Rome" that had filled the country's schools, churches, and taverns by the time of Elizabeth, and it lacks the informed nuances that would be present in a work actually concentrating on the Tudor era to the exclusion of all else. Tudors is, by its own sub-titular admission, very much concerned with other things than its own theme. It's a powerfully entertaining volume, but it foregoes scholarly depth (by way of critical apparatus, it has a half-hearted 'Further Reading' section at the back and no notes) in favor of giving Ackroyd the world to bustle in. Its predecessor in this series covered thousands of years and so could only ever be a vault of aphorisms; this present volume deals with the most-covered ground in English history and so must strike poses in order to avoid simply fading into the chorus. Both books give the distinct impression of haste, as though there's an era of English history Ackroyd particularly wants to examine afresh and these aren't it. Considering its inimitable combination of erudition and showmanship, the Stuart era seems a likely bet, and if that's so, readers are in luck: it's up next.