Book Review: Selling the Tudor Monarchy: Authority and Image in Sixteenth-Century England by Kevin Sharpe. Yale University Press, 2009

• Published in: Literature & History Vol. 19; no. 2; p. 90
• Main Author: Hoak, Dale
• Format: Book Review
• Language: English
• Published: London Sage Publications Ltd 01.10.2010
• ISSN: 0306-1973; 2050-4594

[...]Sharpe does not discuss Cecil's central administrative role in all of this; nor does he mention that under Edward VI Cecil helped formulate (with Sir Thomas Smith) the new, royalist discourse of godly, Protestant kingship so effectively articulated by Elizabeth I. Despite a masterful grasp of the contours of his subject, Sharpe sometimes commits needless errors of fact or relies on insufficient or obsolete secondary sources to buttress his conclusions. According to French and Italian eye-witnesses, court dress and tapestries were the chief means by which Henry VIII projected the magnificence of his person and court. Henry VIII intended Holbein's mural of the Tudor dynasty in the privy chamber at Whitehall to stand as the supreme artistic statement of his reign - Remigius van Leemput's 1667 copy of it is one of 66 poorly-reproduced black and white illustrations in this book - yet Sharpe fails to explain the political context of the genesis of the painting in 1536-37.