Margaret George The Autobiography of Henry VIII

I am wondering if I enjoyed it so much because I had previously read Phllipa Gregory's books of the period. I found myself looking to the next wife and the other side of the story. Since Gregory's books are told from the perspective of the woman involved, this book was a refreshing look at Henry's side of things. He told himself no less or no more lies than the average person but add to that the power he had and we end with a person that on the surface looks like a mad man. I was thrilled that this book took me a week to read and I looked forward to my reading time each day.

Margaret George The Autobiography of Henry V111 is strictly speaking a work of fiction, although you would be hard-pressed to find a better or more interesting documentation of the whole of Henry's reign, seen through the eyes of the king himself. The bloodthirsty tyrant of our school history lessons becomes human and fallible, weighed down by self-doubt. Some passages are almost unbearably moving such as when Henry learns of Catherine Howard's (his 'rose without a thorn) adultery or when Katherine of Aragon dies after many years' estrangement, and he realises she was one of the few remaining people who could remember him as a young man. Henry progresses from the golden youth to the sick old man, gradually outliving all his compatriots (Thomas More, Wolsey, Cromwell - those other giants of the Tudor age) and it is left to his fool Will Somers, who perhaps knew him better than anyone, to pass the final comments on a man who was both larger than life, and sometimes almost pathetically human. The book is a masterpiece-totally un-putdownable, and one you will want to read again and again.