So Great A Prince

Download or read book So Great a Prince: The Accession of Henry VIII: 1509 written by Lauren Johnson and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-10-03 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A vivid and original portrait of the year the young Henry VIII assumes the throne, revealing a kingdom at a crossroads between two dynamic monarchs and two ages of history. England, 1509. Henry VII, the first Tudor monarch, is dead; his successor, the seventeen-year-old Henry VIII, offers hope of renewal and reconciliation after the corruption and repression of the last years of his father's reign. The kingdom Henry inherits is not the familiar Tudor England of Protestantism and playwrights. It is still more than two decades away from the English Reformation, and ancient traditions persist: boy bishops, pilgrimages, Corpus Christi pageants, the jewel-decked shrine at Canterbury. So Great a Prince offers a fascinating portrait of a country at a crossroads between two powerful monarchs and between the worlds of the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Historian Lauren Johnson tells the story of 1509 not just from the perspective of the young king and his court, but from the point of view of merchants, ploughmen, apprentices, laundresses, and foreign workers. She looks at these early Tudor lives through the rhythms of annual rituals, juxtaposing political events in Westminster and the palaces of southeast England with the religious, agrarian, and social events that punctuated the lives of the people of young Henry VIII's England.