The Tudors

For one hundred and eighteen years, a single family held the throne of England and remade the nation in its own image. From the muddy field at Bosworth where an obscure Welshman seized a fallen king's crown, through the thunderous reign of Henry VIII and his six wives, the boy-king's Protestant revolution, the fires of Bloody Mary, and the golden age of Gloriana, the House of Tudor stands at the center of the English story.

E.B Cohen tells the whole of it as a single, sweeping narrative — the break with Rome and the dissolution of the monasteries, the defeat of the Spanish Armada, the flowering of Shakespeare's stage, and the endless, dynasty-defining question of who would wear the crown next. Here are the schemers and the saints: the ruthless Thomas Cromwell and the martyred Thomas More; the doomed Anne Boleyn and the imprisoned Mary, Queen of Scots; the sea dogs Drake and Hawkins; the spymaster Walsingham; and the Virgin Queen who married her kingdom.

From the counting-house of a miserly first king to the deathbed of the last, this is the complete story of how five monarchs of one restless family dragged medieval England into the modern world — and of the blood, faith, and ambition it cost.