The New Release tables at your nearest evil chain bookstore are piled high with Tudor histories, Tudor biographies, and most of all Tudor fiction Netflix and Hulu have countless Tudor offerings, whether you incline toward the bee-sting lips of Jonathan Rhys-Meyers or the wasp-sting wit of David Starkey the general populace is so passingly familiar with those key showboating five figures that hardly any room is left on stage for anybody else (unless it’s the well-meaning Windsors, whenever one of them cavorts with James Bond, or insults an entire nationality, or impregnates his wife).And yet, as historians have pointed out fairly regularly for a fairly long time, the tempestuous Tudors and the spaniel-eyed Stuarts and the hefty Hanoverians and all the rest wouldn’t have had a stage to hog if it hadn’t been built by the Plantagenets, the longest-ruling British dynasty, who held power for more than two centuries in an extravagantly violent age. The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England By Dan JonesViking, 2013It seems almost impertinent these days to mention English monarchs who aren’t Tudors.
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