Henry VIII: A History of his Most Important Places and Events

This book explores the life and legacy of Britain's most famous monarch through theplaces he built, lived in and travelled to.

No English sovereign ever owned as many palaces or houses as Henry VIII.

Includes Henry VIII’s time spent in Belgium and Northern France, as well as HamptonCourt, Greenwich Palace, and his former hunting lodges and palaces set amidst theforests of Surrey, Kent, Essex and Berkshire.

The story of Henry VIII is well known: he is famed throughout the world as the charismaticking of England who married six wives (and executed two of them), who broke with Romeand dissolved England’s monasteries, and who grew from a Renaissance prince into alustful, egotistical and callous tyrant. He is the subject of scholarly and popularbiographies and of numerous fictional works, from John Fletcher and William Shakespeare’s jointly authored play Henry VIII to contemporary novels, films and TV series.But this book tells the story of Henry VIII in a very different way to any of these: through the places where the events of his life unfolded.

From Westminster Abbey and the Tower of London to the site of the Field of the Cloth of Gold near Calais where Henry met the French King Francis I for a week of pageantry in 1520, and from his lavish palaces in London to quieter manor houses in the English countryside which he visited during his annual summer “progress”, a whole new light is thrown on this most compelling of historical figures.

Whilst some sites associated with Henry are now very ruinous – such as Woking Palace inSurrey, which Henry remodelled into a lavish royal residence but which is now little morethan a few tumbledown walls, or Greenwich Palace, where he was born, of which only afew remnants from his era remain – others, most famously Hampton Court, are muchmore substantial; the book looks at Henry’s connections with each site in turn, along withthe conditions that today’s visitors to the site can expect, beginning with the Thames-side palaces from Greenwich upstream to Hampton Court, before broadening its scope toinclude properties and sites outside London, in the West and North of England and in Northern France.