Winter King: The Dawn of Tudor England

London: Penguin, 2012 9780141040530. Soft cover: Penguin. First edition. Number 001. Like new. No creasing to spine or elsewhere. No annotations or inscriptions. 448 pages including index. plus many pages of other books advertised by this publisher.. 'History book of the year.' "In a "Dear Bookseller" epistle introducing his 2012 edition of WINTER KING: author Thomas Penn writes the following: "Henry VII was the first Tudor king. He is also the one Tudor monarch that we don't know, and his is the story that has until now remained untold." He held power for nearly 25 years. In many respects Henry VII "remains ... the most fascinating Tudor of them all." He proved that royal power could grow "through surveillance, commodity trading and the manipulation of money markets" in an age "in which everything was up for grabs." Secondarily, WINTER KING also dissects the not notably affectionate relationship between Henry VII and his second son and successor, Prince Henry, later King Henry VIII. Two men could not have been temperamentally more different. And Henry VIII ostensibly quickly tore down almost all of his father's centralizing ad hoc institutions which placed terrifying power over subjects in the the hands of the King. And yet a quarter century after coming to power as a strapping teenager, Henry VIII had destroyed the power of the Pope in England and Ireland, using revived elements of his father's system of control of his subjects and a string of villainous ministers worthy of those chosen by the first Tudor.. "In his remarkable debut, Penn vividly recreates the dark and turbulent reign of Henry VII. He traces the transformation of a young, vulnerable boy, Prince Henry, into the aggressive teenager who would become Henry VIII, and of Catherine of Aragon, his future queen. And at the book's heart is the tragic, magnetic figure of Henry VII - controlling, paranoid, avaricious, with a Machiavellian charm and will to power." .