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.
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