HOUSE OF TUDOR, by Alison Plowden.

Despite being only a very short book (under 300 pages), for the most part Plowden successfully captures the essence of the members of the Tudor royal family - her vivid and sensitive portraits making them live and breathe from the very page.

I really enjoyed Plowden's sympathetic portrait of Henry VII. Often portrayed in history books as cold and calculating – here we see Henry Tudor etched boldly as the centre of a close and stable family group: a hardworking King who still had time to write to his mother and comfort his wife at the loss of their first born.

Plowden shows him as a man who loved music, the supposed "miser" of other history accounts willing to pay good coin simply to watch a young maid dance. Henry VII could laugh too, possessing enough sense of humour to punish a pretender to his throne by placing him in the palace kitchens.

One section I did take much issue with. Plowden clearly does not like Anne Boleyn, not at all. The more I moved deeper into this part of "The House of Tudor," the more I detected her bias against Anne Boleyn, Plowden writing how Anne Boleyn's attraction to Henry is hard to "define."

I guessed Alison Plowden didn’t like Anne Boleyn when reading her "Tudor Women." But Anne Boleyn is person from history many people either love or hate, and regular readers of my column will not be surprised to hear me admit I’m biased the other way!

Plowden does exhibit some lack of understanding concerning the cadence of people from Tudor times. In "The house of Tudor," when discussing Anne Boleyn, she brings up Anne’s famous wit, but writes "no examples of it have survived." Goodness! I think she forgot here to place her sources against the context of the time, something all good history writers strive to do, but sometimes fail to do properly when possessing an obvious prejudice.

That might explain why Plowden isn't hearing Anne's wit, rather "tasteless remarks” - Plowden's description of Anne's pre-execution joke:

"I have heard that the executioner is very good. And I have a little neck."

A remark like this would have perceived as a remark of woman with a “stout heart,” and part of the whole equation of making “a good death.” Obvious fear just days before her execution would show her as some one guilty of the crimes held against her and fearing to meet her God. In these times, death was a defining moment - the précis of your entire life. Knowing she went to God, there was nothing wrong in Anne taking pleasure in the knowledge of her impending death. By her innocence, she knew she died a martyr.

Anne Boleyn also may have said of herself that history would remember her as "La Reine Sans Tete.' Although this could have also come from another source, it really does sound like Anne to me! When I read Anne's speech on the scaffold, I always hear the undercurrent of her wit and see the sparkle of her dark eyes.

Although there are many more examples I can think of, we can forgive Plowden's one flaw in an otherwise very fine introduction to the Tudor family. All writers of history make mistakes - we can only try our best to avoid them.