Penn shows us Henry’s furious maneuvering to ensure that the next generation of Tudors wouldn’t have his legitimacy problems. So, even though Shakespeare has the character Henry declare peace after Bosworth, the real Henry faced a long string of pretenders (like Perkin Warbeck and Lambert Simnel) and genuine claimants (like the Duke of Buckingham and the Earl of Warwick) that kept the realm in permanent turmoil. His marriage to Edward IV’s daughter Elizabeth helped improve his legitimacy, but others claimed stronger (i.e. Why? His claim to the throne was a thin one, coming through his mother’s family. “The hidden hand of the king” was everywhere, Penn explains, “testing, probing, controlling, and undermining the authority of his greatest subjects.” Henry courted a kind of instability because his reign depended on it. Henry was a monarch who controlled by fear and force and used a vast network of spies and informers. After finishing Penn’s book, you may decide 7,209 Masses weren’t enough. When illness threatened to kill him in 1507, two years before his actual death, Henry ordered that 7,209 Masses be sung for his soul. What Penn shows us is that what hides behind this cloak of mystery is a 24-year reign from 1485 to 1509 which “degenerated into oppression, extortion and a kind of terror” that would have impressed Joseph Stalin. “Henry VII remains mysterious…’a dark prince,’” writes Penn, an editor at a London publisher.
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