The Tudors

For one hundred and eighteen years, a single family held the throne of England and remade the nation in its own image. From the muddy field at Bosworth where an obscure Welshman seized a fallen king's crown, through the thunderous reign of Henry VIII and his six wives, the boy-king's Protestant revolution, the fires of Bloody Mary, and the golden age of Gloriana, the House of Tudor stands at the center of the English story. E.
B Cohen tells the whole of it as a single, sweeping narrative - the break with Rome and the dissolution of the monasteries, the defeat of the Spanish Armada, the flowering of Shakespeare's stage, and the endless, dynasty-defining question of who would wear the crown next. Here are the schemers and the saints: the ruthless Thomas Cromwell and the martyred Thomas More; the doomed Anne Boleyn and the imprisoned Mary, Queen of Scots; the sea dogs Drake and Hawkins; the spymaster Walsingham; and the Virgin Queen who married her kingdom. From the counting-house of a miserly first king to the deathbed of the last, this is the complete story of how five monarchs of one restless family dragged medieval England into the modern world - and of the blood, faith, and ambition it cost.