Power pervades Peter Ackroyd’s Tudors. With a focus on sedition, peril, war and plot, Tudors focuses heavily on a high political narrative.
This is a legitimate route to take, but anyone who has read Ackroyd’s novels – which bring figures like Milton, John Dee and Karl Marx (and a bevy of historical Londoners) to life – will be disappointed if they expect a book which brings the past back to life.
The focus is on the power play of princes, bishops and whispering advisers, rather than on the pain of reformation, or bustle and stench of London.
Tudors is engaging: Ackroyd’s style is highly readable. But he has created a narrative of the 16th century that is too standard.
One of Ackroyd’s greatest works is London: The Biography, a work that combines real life testimonies with his own curious insights into psycho-geography, connecting the prehistoric stone, fossils and murky druidical practices to the city we all know today.
That is what he does best. Ackroyd’s novels and non-fictional works bring the past to life, and make it relevant. He is aware that history lives and breathes in the world we inhabit, and that ghosts tend to wander our subconscious.
Therefore, it is unfortunate to read such a staid and two-dimensional work as Tudors, especially in the fortnight where Hillary Mantel’s Man Booker Prize-winning Bring Up The Bodies – the explosive account of the life of Thomas Cromwell – has achieved such a high profile.
There is no radical viewpoint on show here. Tudors is a fairly conventional retelling of a familiar tale, a good general survey of 16th century British political history.
Ackroyd’s Catholicism results in a melancholy take on the dissolution of the monasteries and stripping of churches in the Reformation, but it is combined with recognition of the genius of the court in selling the property to the middle and upper orders of society, which invested them irrevocably in the Reformation process.
Ackroyd, who I do believe stands as one of the greatest living writers, also recognises the superb literary legacy that resulted from Protestantism’s emphasis on the written word over visual tradition: “this refashioned culture was to find its fruits in Milton and in Bunyan, in Blake and in Tennyson”, these idols of a literary world of which Ackroyd is a firm part.
It’s difficult to find anything particularly contentious in Tudors. Anyone who hasn’t read much on the period will find this a useful introduction. Indeed, Tudors’ fate may be to become a perfectly decent text to set as vacation reading for undergraduates.
Next up is the turbulent 17th century, which I expect Ackroyd is about to cover in his third volume: we can only wait and see if Ackroyd will continue his attempt to resist the partisan in his account of a world turned upside down.
Three Stars
