Henry VIII.

A.F. Pollard brought formidable scholarly rigor to his 1930 portrait of England's most notorious monarch, drawing on decades of archival research into Tudor state papers and ecclesiastical records. Pollard does not exonerate Henry VIII, the six wives, the executed ministers, the blood on the Reformation's hands, but he insists on understanding the king within the brutal logic of Tudor politics. What emerges is a figure of extraordinary energy and cunning: a ruler who shattered the medieval church to build royal supremacy, who manipulated Parliament and precedent with equal skill, who could be dazzlingly charming and then sign a death warrant without flinching. Pollard traces Henry's reign from the glittering youth at the Field of the Cloth of Gold through the catastrophic first marriage to Catherine of Aragon, the break with Rome, the dissolution of the monasteries, and the twilight years of ever-expanding tyranny. This remains essential reading for anyone who wants more than the caricature: a historian's attempt to grapple with a king who transformed England and paid for every transformation in human lives.