Tudor Victims of the Reformation

 

Tudor Victims of the Reformation by Lynda Telford

The detailed story of the Tudor dynasty is not an easy one to assimilate.  There are an awful lot of kings, queens, countries, emperors, popes, arranged marriages, dukes, peace treaties, broken treaties, bishops, prelates, cardinals, legitimate children, illegitimate children, and an awful lot of roman numerals.  For the most part, author Lynda Telford manages to keep all this confusion at bay and tell a reasonably good account of a good portion of the Tudor story.  This book isn’t perfect.  In fact, in can be frustrating at times, but overall, she succeeds in telling her intended tale.

Here is where some clarification needs to be unveiled.  This book is essentially the story of Henry VIII and his desire to divorce Catherine of Aragon to marry Anne Boleyn.  Once that marriage happens, thinks are never as rosy as Henry VIII imagined, and tragedy ensues for Anne Boleyn, as most readers probably already know.  This is essentially where this book stops.  So there really is much more to the story after Anne’s demise that isn’t told here.  I mention this because the title of this book is a bit vague, and one might wish to know this before beginning to read.   So even though I enjoyed the book, I think a different title might have better sufficed the subject matter.  One should also know that even though the word “Reformation” is in the book title, there really isn’t too much detail about the actual Protestant Reformation which (I’m assuming) is the “Reformation” that the title is referring.   Those who know their history know that you can easily connect the dots between the Protestant Reformation and the actions of the psychopathic King of England, but the author doesn’t really expand too much on those connections within the pages. 

There are other minor gripes that I had as well.  Initially, it seems like too much of this tale is told through the eyes of the scheming Cardinal Thomas Wolsey.  There were times when I felt that I was reading a biography of the Cardinal as opposed to who I thought the key players should be.  After Wolsey dies during the narrative, I was somewhat relieved since I didn’t have to keep reading about him and could instead focus on the royals.  Another issue I had was that I felt the author tried to give too much background on irrelevant places, people, and topics.  If we come across, say, a magnificent landmark, the author feels compelled to tell us all the important people responsible for such landmark, including titles, relations, nationalities, etc.   With a book that has your head already spinning with too many specifics of the many key players, such additions hinder the experience as opposed to helping.

The real strength of this book is the straightforward story of Henry VIII and two of his six wives.  It was particularly scary to read in detail just how warped King Henry VIII really was.  Had this man been alive 500 years later with tools such as an atomic bomb at his disposal, he could have very well gone down in history as a worse figure than, say, an Adolph Hitler.   No one in his kingdom is really safe from his megalomaniac tendencies, and here is where the real tragedy lies in this tale.  Specifically, the focus is mainly on Anne Boleyn.  We read that the constituents don’t really like her (although no one would dare say so) because they disapprove of Henry’s behavior, in addition to loving their generous Queen Catherine, who is obviously getting the shaft. As the tale progresses, though, one begins to sympathize with Anne as she is constantly subjugated by her sadistic husband.  You get the feeling that the majority of the subjects who didn’t care for her because of how she became intertwined in this story, now sympathize as she becomes an even more tragic victim than her predecessor.

Again, there’s so much more tale to be told here.  Yes, there are other “victims” than the two queens, yet due to page limitations, the author doesn’t dwell too much on other people that we read about such as Bishop Fisher and Thomas More.  Overall, this was a very good book, but one needs to know where the focus of the story is in order to not be overly disappointed since the title can be a tad misleading.