Henry VIII and His Court

Henry VIII in his last years, married to his sixth queen, Catharine Parr: Anne Askew burnt for heresy, Cranmer, Gardiner, and a court where every faction is one word from the block. Mühlbach was Klara Mundt, who wrote nearly three hundred volumes and poured the courts of Europe into them; she is a gossip working from state papers, and her Henry — vain, dying, and terrifying to be near — is the one the nineteenth century read. Thirty-five plates, from Cranach to Munch, trace the courts and coasts of Renaissance Europe, the world of pageantry and peril that Mühlbach's Henry ruled.