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Henry VIII: King and Court by: Alison Weir

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Rating: - An Informative Account of the great Rennasiance Tyrant

Alison Weir's Henry VIII: King and Court is a very informative biography and tastes of the most glamourus tyrant in English history. A man who built the great palaces of Greenwich, Richmond, Whitehall, and Hampton Court. The man who strived for glory in war and pleasure. And the man who fell in love with his mistress. How could such a man not be a great lover of luxury and glamour.

Weir's descriptions of Henry's expenditure on cloths, palaces, politics, and relics was shocking. The man obiviously had no problem frolicking around outrageous sums of money just to look like a glorius prince on the scale of Francis I and Charles V. Weir also shows the way that Henry got his money back. One example is when he fined his sister, Mary, and his best friend, the Duke of Suffolk, 24,000 pounds for marrying each other!

And after all this glamour and glitz, we have Henry's political aims contained within great celebrations such as the Field of Cloth of Gold in 1520. Henry's aims was to be a new Henry V, and he also wanted to show that he was capable of lavish displays of magnifience. In his military aims, he failed. In his lavish lifestyle, he succeeded with grear success.

Weir's biography of Henry VIII through his court was a cool experiment. Although some parts of it were tedious, such as the too long discriptions of the arrangments of Henry's privy chmaber, it was a really succesful experiment. Alison Weir has done it again

Rating: - How the old monster really lived

Alison Weir has done a terrific job of bringing the life of Henry VIII and his court to the page. Where academic historians would quickly gloss over the chronicles of hunting, jousting and feasting in Chapter One, she leaves it in, while still telling the tale in chronological order. This is consequently the best book around for a real insight into both aspects of an eventful and blood-soaked reign.

Some old canards are very ably disposed of. Henry did not have more wives than mistresses as we are so often told; he was just discreet about his affairs. He probably had dozens of mistresses. In every respect, he was a princely man of his times. There is also plenty of interesting anecdotal detail, from Henry's love of fruit to his favourite horses and dogs, his obsessive palace-building.

Weir does a pretty good job in opening up the paradoxes of Henry's character: a man who would never openly tell a lie but who perpetrated the most outrageous untruths through his actions; an intelligent, scholarly man who hated writing; a man with a tender conscience that always told him exactly what we wanted to hear; and, above all, a serial killer by proxy who was fundamentally a coward and distanced himself physically and emotionally from the bloodshed he wrought on wives, courtiers and ministers.

Weir's - openly stated - liking for Henry does, perhaps, blind her at times. Her one genuine new finding in the documentary evidence, presumably discussed in more depth in the more recent 'The Lady in the Tower', leads her to conclude that Henry genuinely believed Anne Boleyn to be guilty of adultery and that he got rid of her because the child she was carrying might not be his. This casts poor old Thomas Cromwell as the villain yet again.

I don't buy it. Henry's geunine devastastion at the very real adultery of Catherine Howard, the one thing in his entire adult life he was forced to believe when it did not suit him to, gives the lie to any notion that he really believed in Anne's guilt. He was a monster, Alison. There may have been many circumstances that helped make him a monster but that was what he was. End of.

That said, I recommend the book wholeheartedly as an intro to the serious reader. And it came in very useful when I did the subject on Mastermind!

Rating: - brilliant read

fantastically written historical book. Alison Weir writes factual books that read like the best fictional ones! If history was presented to me like this at school I never would have forgotten a fact!

Rating: - Avid History buff

This is an interesting account of life in Henry V111's Court but I should have liked to know more about the man.
Somehow I couldn't get as immersed in this as in the other Weir's books that I have read. Nevertheless anyone who is interested in court life of this period will find it engrossing and as informative as this author's books always are.

Rating: - Henry VIII

A must for anyone who wants to know more about King Henry VIII. You learn so much more from this than you do from watching TV programmes. The only problem is you cannot read too much at once and I have to keep going back to what I have read before to clarify things.

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