A review by writerbeverly
Tudors: The History of England from Henry VIII to Elizabeth I by Peter Ackroyd

3.0

I love Tudor history, I was so excited to get this book... and it put me to sleep. Over and over again.

It's not really about the Tudors, or the people of England, but painstaking minutiae about every bobble and wobble in England's religious transformation from a papal country to an Anglican one. If that's what you are interested in, this is the book for you. Includes excruciating details on how people were burned at the stake or beheaded.

It's not really about the Tudors, or the people of England, but painstaking minutiae about every bobble and wobble in England's religious transformation from a papal country to an Anglican one. If that's what you are interested in, this is the book for you. Includes excruciating details on how people were burned at the stake or beheaded.

Mind you, I was already struggling to hook into this book when he said of Anne Boleyn that she was probably guilty of adultery because so many charges were brought against her. This struck me as an incredibly lazy argument for a historian, but I kept plugging on. It felt to me like the entire book was a dry, unemotional arm's length from both the Tudor family and the English people, though the writing itself was unoffensive. YMMV.