Best books about the Tudors, from the side the famous ones leave out
Start with The Man on a Donkey for the northern rising of 1536, told from the losing side, The Voices of Morebath for the Reformation arriving in one Devon village, and The Fifth Queen for a Thomas Cromwell who is the villain. Two of the six can’t be bought new in the UK, and the table below says which. Last verified 2 October 2026.
What you have already been handed
Ask for a book about the Tudors and you get Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy, C.J. Sansom’s Shardlake novels, Alison Weir’s The Six Wives of Henry VIII, G.J. Meyer’s The Tudors and Leanda de Lisle’s The Sisters Who Would Be Queen. Across the 22 Tudor lists we counted on 2 October 2026, Wolf Hall is on six, Shardlake on five and the other three on four each, and Philippa Gregory’s The Other Boleyn Girl tops the Goodreads vote. They are well known for good reasons, so they don’t take a numbered place here.
Three of the five main picks below see the Reformation from the side that lost it: the monasteries closed, the rising put down, the parish church stripped. That is on purpose. It is the side the popular books leave out, and it is where the under-read books are. The counterweight is the shelf you already have. Mantel’s Cromwell is the sympathetic one, and Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Thomas Cromwell: A Life (2018) is the same man from the archive.
The lists were Five Books’ eight Tudor interviews and its suggestions for readers of Wolf Hall, Goodreads’ 643-book vote on Tudor England and Mantel’s own list there, and twelve bookseller, publisher and blog lists.
What Highstreett returned for “the best books about the Tudors”
- The Tudors: The Complete Story of England's Most Notorious Dynasty, G. J. Meyer (2010)
- The Life of Elizabeth I, Alison Weir (1998)
- The Six Wives of Henry VIII, Antonia Fraser (1992)
- The Tudor Revolution in Government: Administrative Changes in the Reign of Henry VIII, Geoffrey Elton (1953)
- The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400-1580, Eamon Duffy (1992)
- Tudor England, John Guy (1988)
See this result · run 2 October 2026
Editor’s verdict: Half of it is the standard shelf, Meyer, Weir on Elizabeth and Fraser on the wives, and half is historians' history: Elton, John Guy and Duffy's The Stripping of the Altars. It found the right historian and chose his long book over his short one. It returned no fiction at all, on a subject most readers meet through novels, and none of its six overlaps with the six below.
If you have read Wolf Hall and want the other side of it
Hilary Mantel made Thomas Cromwell the hero of the 1530s. These two novels are older than hers and stand on the other side of the same events.
1. The Man on a Donkey, H.F.M. Prescott (1952)
historical novel · the Pilgrimage of Grace, 1536 · 756 pages, slow on purpose
In 1536 the north of England rose against the closing of the monasteries and against Cromwell, and lost. Prescott, who trained as a historian and wrote a prize-winning life of Mary Tudor, tells it as a chronicle of five people: an ambitious prioress, a northern lord, a gentlewoman, the lawyer Robert Aske who led the rising, and an embittered reforming priest. There is also Malle, a serving woman who sees Christ ride a donkey over a Yorkshire bridge. Hilary Mantel put it first of her five favourite books about the Tudors in 2012. It is 251st of 643 on Goodreads' Tudor list and on none of the twelve bookseller, publisher and blog lists we read. Differs: it is long and it does not hurry. This is a book to live in for a month, and readers who want Mantel's speed and wit will not find them here.
2. The Fifth Queen, Ford Madox Ford (1906 to 1908)
historical novel, three volumes · Katharine Howard against Cromwell · mannered and pictorial
Katharine Howard, Henry VIII's fifth wife, as Ford imagined her: learned, devout and too honest to scheme, set against a Thomas Cromwell who is the villain of the piece. It is Mantel's picture turned inside out, a century before she painted it. Graham Greene called it a magnificent bravura piece. It is not on Goodreads' 643-book list at all, and the one place we found it is Five Books, which makes it the first suggestion for readers of Wolf Hall. Differs: Ford wrote it in his own approximation of Tudor English, in long, still scenes, and his Katharine is not the one historians describe. Read it as a novel about conscience, not as a life of the queen.
If you want the Reformation as it reached one village
3. The Voices of Morebath, Eamon Duffy (2001)
history · one Devon parish, 1520 to 1574 · about 250 pages, readable
Sir Christopher Trychay was vicar of Morebath, a sheep-farming village of thirty-three households on the edge of Exmoor, from 1520 to 1574, and he wrote up the parish accounts in his own voice. Through them Duffy follows the Reformation arriving in one place: the lights before the saints put out, the parish's funds diverted, and in 1549 five young men armed at the parish's expense and sent to join the Prayer Book rebels outside Exeter. None of the five appears in the records again. It won the Hawthornden Prize in 2002. The historian Peter Marshall chooses it on Five Books and Mantel put it third of her five; it is not on Goodreads' list or on any of the twelve popular lists. Differs: it is a lament for the old religion, written by a historian whose sympathy is with the villagers who wanted to keep it. The reformers' case is not made here.
If you want Elizabeth, and the summer of 1588
Two books from the 1950s, by a novelist and by a historian of diplomacy, that the modern lists have stopped mentioning.
4. Elizabeth the Great, Elizabeth Jenkins (1958)
biography · the private Elizabeth · 336 pages, second-hand only
A life of Elizabeth I by a novelist, built from what political biographies pass over: the daily life of her household, her dress, her health and the people she was attached to. Kirkus, reviewing it in 1958, said it was the detail that made the picture. It is 277th of 643 on Goodreads' Tudor list and on no other list we read. Differs: it is a portrait of the woman more than of her government. Garrett Mattingly, whose own book is next on this page, is quoted in her New York Times obituary as saying she was not much interested in war and diplomacy, politics and finance. Read it beside a modern life such as Helen Castor's short Elizabeth I (2018), not instead of one.
5. The Defeat of the Spanish Armada (US title: The Armada), Garrett Mattingly (1959)
narrative history · 1588, from Spain as well as England · 384 pages, brisk
The invasion attempt of 1588 told from Spain, France and the Low Countries as well as from the English coast, by a Columbia historian whose subject was diplomacy. Much of the book is the manoeuvring and preparation before the fleet sailed. The Pulitzer board gave it a special citation in 1960, calling it a first class history and a literary work of high order. It is 126th of 643 on Goodreads' list, under its American title, and on no other list we read. Differs: it is a book of 1959, and if the sea fight is all you want, it takes its time getting there.
If you want the Tudors in their own words
The odd one out. It is not a history or a novel, it is a family's post.
6. The Lisle Letters: An Abridgement, edited by Muriel St Clare Byrne (1983)
letters, 1533 to 1540 · one household under Henry VIII · out of print
Arthur Plantagenet, Viscount Lisle, was Henry VIII's Lord Deputy at Calais. When he was arrested on suspicion of treason in 1540 the household's letters were seized, and because they were seized they survived: seven years of marriages arranged, children schooled, clothes and food ordered, and a London agent reporting every change in the King's mood. Byrne worked on the six-volume edition for some fifty years. This one-volume selection, made by the playwright Bridget Boland with a foreword by Hugh Trevor-Roper, is the one for readers. It is 584th of 643 on Goodreads' list. Differs: it is a book to dip into, with no story but the family's, and you will have to buy it second-hand.
The honest bit
This page leans one way. The Man on a Donkey, The Voices of Morebath and The Fifth Queen all take the part of the people the Reformation was done to. If they are the only Tudor books you read, you will come away with half the argument. Mantel and MacCulloch are the other half.
It also leans old and slow. The newest book here is from 2001 and three are from the 1950s. The Man on a Donkey is 756 pages and The Fifth Queen is written in imitation Tudor English. If you want pace, start with The Defeat of the Spanish Armada or The Voices of Morebath. And none of the six is a court romance: if The Other Boleyn Girl is what you loved, these are a different kind of book.
Which edition you can buy in the UK
Two of the six cannot be bought new in the UK, a third is printed on demand, and the best-known edition of a fourth has gone. This is what the publisher or the bookseller named showed on 2 October 2026.
| Book | Edition | ISBN | Published | Publisher | Worth knowing |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Man on a Donkey | Paperback | 9781789545111 | 3 October 2019 | Head of Zeus (Bloomsbury) | £16.99; available from Waterstones, Foyles and Wordery. The 2016 paperback is no longer sold |
| The Fifth Queen | Paperback, all three volumes | 9781513290799 | 22 July 2021 | Mint Editions | £16.99; about two weeks from Waterstones and Foyles. The Penguin edition with A.S. Byatt's introduction (9780141181301) is unavailable new. The three volumes are free ebooks at Standard Ebooks |
| The Voices of Morebath | Paperback | 9780300098259 | 2003 | Yale University Press | £15.99; in stock at Waterstones, Foyles and Wordery |
| Elizabeth the Great | Paperback | 9781842121627 | 20 July 2000 | Phoenix (Orion) | Out of print, and no UK publisher lists it. Second-hand only |
| The Defeat of the Spanish Armada | Paperback | 9780712666275 | 6 July 2000 | Pimlico (Penguin) | £15.99 on Penguin's own page; no stock at Waterstones or Foyles, printed on demand by Wordery. Ebook 9781446467688. Sold in the US as The Armada |
| The Lisle Letters: An Abridgement | Paperback | 9780140069419 | 1985 | Penguin | Out of print in every edition. Second-hand only, and usually cheap |
Questions
What should I read after Wolf Hall?
Two older novels cover the same years from the other side. H.F.M. Prescott's The Man on a Donkey (1952) follows the northern rising of 1536, and it is the first of the five favourite Tudor books Hilary Mantel gave Goodreads in April 2012. Ford Madox Ford's The Fifth Queen (1906 to 1908) makes Thomas Cromwell the villain, and Five Books lists it first for readers of Wolf Hall.
Which books about the Tudors did Hilary Mantel recommend?
In a list Goodreads published on 30 April 2012 she chose five: The Man on a Donkey by H.F.M. Prescott, Religion and the Decline of Magic by Keith Thomas, The Voices of Morebath by Eamon Duffy, The Perfect Prince by Ann Wroe, which is published in Britain as Perkin, and A Handbook on Good Manners for Children by Erasmus.
Is The Armada the same book as The Defeat of the Spanish Armada?
Yes. Garrett Mattingly's book came out in 1959 as The Armada in the United States and as The Defeat of the Spanish Armada in Britain, and the 1960 Pulitzer special citation uses the longer title. The British paperback is Pimlico's, ISBN 9780712666275.
What is the best single book about the Tudors?
The one-volume history that the lists we read recommend most often is G.J. Meyer's The Tudors (2010), on four of them. Peter Ackroyd's Tudors (2012), which runs from Henry VIII to Elizabeth I, is on two. This page names them once and spends its six picks elsewhere.
Tell the book search which Tudor England you mean, the court, the cloister or the village, and it will look for that instead of the dynasty.
Search for a book on one corner of Tudor England
For another history page that says whose side each book is written from, see Best books about the East India Company. And Muriel St Clare Byrne, who edited the Lisle letters, also wrote the play Busman’s Honeymoon with Dorothy L. Sayers, whose Gaudy Night is on our Books like Beach Read page.