In his turn, the king came to doubt the whole of the nobility, who would usually be the king's councillors, and instead took advice from men whose careers he could make and whose fortunes utterly depended on him. One after another, his comrades in arms at Bosworth turned against him to support rival claimants. The king who came to the throne by last-minute support at the battle of Bosworth would be bitterly disappointed by the unreliability of his court. The Henry that Penn shows us is unattractive, suspicious to the edge of paranoia, profit-seeking to the point of miserliness, using children and friends as pawns in a constant game of survival. The king's own mother, the formidable Lady Margaret Beaufort, lost her house at Woking to her son under the forced exchange she received a less handsome property, and was recorded in his accounts paying 700 marks for an abbey and a benefice. Penn tells of London citizens harried to death over false charges that could only be set aside by a payment to the king. The king's money-raising efforts had a modicum of legality, but this wore very thin. His point is to show that this is not the 'merrie England' of the Tudor myth, but a country forced under the rule of a new king, spied on and policed for any sign of disloyalty, and tyrannised by the use of ancient half-forgotten fines and taxes: '… fines and payments for every conceivable offence and opportunity: the sale of export licences, wards, marriages, lucrative crown lands and 'temporalities', the sinecures that accompanied religious office the king's favour in everything from royal appointments to court cases and throughout, the sale of justice, fees for royal pardons for offences from illegal wool-trading and customs to infringements to murder.'

These pages pulsate with the names of courtiers and councillors, and general readers may get a little overwhelmed by the detail, but Penn has a sure grasp of the many players and hangers-on at the royal court. The battle of Bosworth and the killing of Richard III are dealt with briskly in the prologue and the first chapters tell the story of Henry's desperate defence of his newly founded throne against other claimants: Lambert Simnel, Perkin Warbeck and the surviving members of the former royal family, the Plantagenets. The book starts not with childhood or youth, nor with the long exile of Henry Tudor, a distant kinsman to the House of Lancaster and so an unlikely claimant to the throne of England.

Henry vii winter king