Search results for ""author john matusiak""

Cardinal Wolsey is a controversial figure: a butcher’s son, a man of letters and the Church, a divisive political expert, a man of principle – yet, to some, an arrogant upstart. As Lord Chancellor to the incorrigible Henry VIII he achieved much both at home and abroad, but his failure to achieve the mighty monarch’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon saw him brought to his knees. John Matusiak explores the pragmatic cardinal’s life and career to uncover a man of contradictions and extremes whose meteoric rise was marked by an equally inexorable descent into desperation, as he attempted in vain to satisfy the tempestuous master whose ambition ultimately broke him. Far from being another familiar portrait of an overweight and overweening spider or cautionary tale of pride preceding a fall, this is the gripping story of how consummate talent, noble intentions and an eagle eye for the main chance can contrive with the vagaries of power politics to raise an individual to unheard of heights before finally consuming him.

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When Henry VIII passed through Canterbury in 1532, a young woman in her mid-twenties named Elizabeth Barton, widely revered as a visionary and prophetess, burst into his presence and warned him that he was ‘so abominable in the sight of God that he was not worthy to tread on hallowed ground’. Two years later, the self-same ‘Holy Maid of Kent’ would suffer a grisly fate at Tyburn and trigger a wave of bloody repression that consumed not only Sir Thomas More, but two other less widely-known individuals, whose exceptional sacrifices were, arguably, even more compelling. One was a combative cleric as renowned for his integrity as his intellect, prepared to sacrifice both life and country in defence of Queen Catherine of Aragon and the old religion; the other a courtier-turned-ascetic, plucked from the shelter of the cloister by a religious and political revolution, in which he had little stake beyond the dictates of his own conscience. For these three unique individuals of widely contrasting backgrounds, temperaments and motives, drawn together at a critical watershed in English history by a common cause and destiny, the path to Tyburn was a long and painful one, paved with fear, hardships, vilification and intrigue.

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‘War,’ wrote Cardinal Richelieu, ‘is one of the scourges with which it has pleased God to afflict men’. Yet the prelate’s mournful observation scarcely begins to encapsulate the full complexity and unspeakable horror of the greatest man-made calamity to befall Europe before the twentieth century. Claiming far more lives proportionately than either the First or Second World Wars, it was a contest involving all the major powers of Europe, in which vast mercenary armies extracted an incalculable toll upon helpless civilian populations as their commanders and the men who equipped them frequently grew rich on the profits. Swedish troops alone are said to have destroyed some 2,000 German castles, 18,000 villages and 1,500 towns, while other vast armies in the pay of Spain, France, the Holy Roman Emperor and a host of pettier princelings brought death to as many as 8 million souls. Rarely has such a perplexing tale been more in need of a new account that is both compelling and informed, and no less comprehensible than comprehensive.

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This compelling account of Henry VIII is by no means yet another history of the ‘old monster’ and his reign. The ‘monster’ displayed here is, at the very least, a newer type, more beset by anxieties and insecurities, and more tightly surrounded by those who equated loyalty with fear, self-interest and blind obedience. This ground-breaking book also demonstrates that Henry VIII’s priorities were always primarily martial rather than marital, and accepts neither the necessity of his all-consuming quest for a male heir nor his need ultimately to sever ties with Rome. As the story unfolds, Henry’s predicaments prove largely of his own making, the paths he chooses neither the only nor the best available. For Henry VIII was not only a bad man, but also a bad ruler who failed to achieve his aims and blighted the reigns of his two immediate successors. Five hundred years after he ascended the throne, the reputation of England’s best known king is being rehabilitated and subtly sanitized. Yet Tudor historian John Matusiak paints a colourful and absorbingly intimate portrait of a man wholly unfit for power.

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In 1517, a certain Dr Beale, rector of St Mary Spitall in London, had roused the capital’s mob by laying the blame for an increase in poverty squarely upon the shoulders of grasping foreigners. ‘God has given England to Englishmen,’ he fumed, and ‘as birds would defend their nest, so ought Englishmen to cherish and defend themselves and to hurt and grieve aliens for the common weal.’ But migration was not the only factor influencing Tudor attitudes to Europe. War, religion, commerce and dynastic security were all critical in linking England to developments abroad, and in ways that remain strikingly relevant today. What were the forces that shaped the shifting perspectives of Tudor men and women and their rulers towards a continent at the crossroads? And what, in turn, were the responses of sixteenth-century Europeans to their counterparts across the Channel? The Tudors and Europe looks at a time when the very survival of England hung critically in the balance and asks if it has lessons for the present.

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Few kings have been more savagely caricatured or grossly misunderstood than England’s first Stuart. Yet, as this biography demonstrates, the modern tendency to downplay his defects and minimise the long-term consequences of his reign has gone too far. In spite of genuine idealism and flashes of considerable resourcefulness, James I remains a perplexing figure – a uniquely curious ruler, shot through with glaring inconsistencies. His vices and foibles not only undermined his high hopes for healing and renewal after Elizabeth I’s troubled last years, but also entrenched political and religious tensions that eventually consumed his successor. A flawed, if well-meaning, foreigner in a rapidly changing and divided kingdom, his passionate commitment to time-honoured principles of government would, ironically, prove his undoing, as England edged unconsciously towards a crossroads and the shadow of the Thirty Years War descended upon Europe.

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Cardinal Wolsey is a controversial figure: a butcher’s son, a man of letters and the Church, a divisive political expert, a man of principle – yet, to some, an arrogant upstart. As Lord Chancellor to the incorrigible Henry VIII he achieved much both at home and abroad, but his failure to achieve the mighty monarch’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon saw him brought to his knees. John Matusiak explores the pragmatic cardinal’s life and career to uncover a man of contradictions and extremes whose meteoric rise was marked by an equally inexorable descent into desperation, as he attempted in vain to satisfy the tempestuous master whose ambition ultimately broke him. Far from being another familiar portrait of an overweight and overweening spider or cautionary tale of pride preceding a fall, this is the gripping story of how consummate talent, noble intentions and an eagle eye for the main chance can contrive with the vagaries of power politics to raise an individual to unheard of heights before finally consuming him.

Read more less

‘War,’ wrote Cardinal Richelieu, ‘is one of the scourges with which it has pleased God to afflict men’. Yet the prelate’s mournful observation scarcely begins to encapsulate the full complexity and unspeakable horror of the greatest man-made calamity to befall Europe before the twentieth century. Claiming far more lives proportionately than either the First or Second World Wars, it was a contest involving all the major powers of Europe, in which vast mercenary armies extracted an incalculable toll upon helpless civilian populations as their commanders and the men who equipped them frequently grew rich on the profits. Swedish troops alone are said to have destroyed some 2,000 German castles, 18,000 villages and 1,500 towns, while other vast armies in the pay of Spain, France, the Holy Roman Emperor and a host of pettier princelings brought death to as many as 8 million souls. Rarely has such a perplexing tale been more in need of a new account that is both compelling and informed, and no less comprehensible than comprehensive.

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Much has been written about Charles I’s reign, about the brutal civil war into which his pursuit of unfettered power plunged the realm, and about the Commonwealth regime that followed his defeat and execution. His reign is one that shaped the future of the British monarch, and his legacy still remains with us today. After more than half a century of comparative neglect, The Prisoner King provides a new and much needed re-examination of the crucial period encompassing Charles I’s captivity after his surrender to the Scots at Newark in May 1646. Not only were the subsequent months before his trial a time when the human dimension of the king’s predicament assumed unparalleled intensity, they were also a critical watershed when the entire nation stood at the most fateful of crossroads. For Charles himself, as subterfuge, espionage and assassination rumours escalated on all fronts, escape attempts foundered, and tensions with his absent wife mounted agonisingly, the test was supreme. Yet, in a painful passage involving both stubborn impenitence and uncommon fortitude in the face of ‘barbarous usage’ by his captors, the ‘Man of Blood’ would ultimately come to merit his unique place in history as England’s ‘martyr king’.

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