Reign Of Henry VIII: The Personalities and Politics - Tapa blanda

"Starkey has the mind of an historian but the eye of a court painter" (Peter Ackroyd The Times)

"To anyone who can savour the atmosphere of high politics, this book will make exciting reading" (Conrad Russell)

"Starkey's great innovation as a constitutional historian has been his readiness to take a closer look at the organisation of the early modern royal household" (Times Literary Supplement)

"To anyone who savours the atmosphere of high politics, this book will make exciting reading" (Conrad Russell)

"David Starkey brings to the task not only a mastery of institutional framework...but also skills in graphic delineation of character and an exuberant narrative panache" (R. A. Houlbrooke)

Henry VIII was almost never alone. He was surrounded, twenty-four hours a day, by the small group of intimates and personal attendants who made up the staff of his Privy Chamber. They organised his daily life, kept him amused and acted as the landline between the King and the formal machinery of government. These men, intermarried, interbred and close-knit even in their mutual feuding, were supremely well placed to rig politics and patronage for their own benefit. Their influence was important and sometimes decisive: factions in the Privy Chamber destroyed Anne Boleyn, they frustrated the 'Catholic' reaction of the 1540s, and, by doctoring Henry's will, prepared the way for the full-blooded Protestantism of his son's reign.

The Reign of Henry the VIII is not so much a book about Henry VIII. It is about the great game of politics over which he presided.