One of the most heartening developments in recent historical writing about early modern England has been an increased attention to developments in the regions and at the grassroots, history from below. Such more diffused developments can be a challenge when writing a narrative for the general reader, but the book's focus on the royal court can at times seem claustrophobically old-fashioned. One might have expected Ackroyd to home in on such social transformations, at least in his beloved London, and to have something enlightening to say about the flowering of  English culture in the age of Shakespeare: Shakespeare, however, rates just three meagre mentions.

Sticklers for accuracy will find much to irritate. For example, the notorious remark of the fanatical Cardinal Caraffa, later Pope Paul IV, that if his own father was a heretic he would fetch the wood to burn him, is attributed instead to the genial and worldly Paul III. The Norfolk rebellion of 1549, whose leaders claimed to be good Protestants, is treated by Ackroyd as a traditionalist Catholic protest, like the Prayerbook rebellion in Devon and Cornwall that same year. 

The central drama of the Tudor age was of course the break with Rome and the transformation of England over three generations into a Protestant stronghold.  On this Ackroyd is refreshingly immune to some ingrained national myths. He has scant sympathy for the more destructive aspects of Reformation change, and a positive aversion to its royal promoters, especially Elizabeth, to whose indecisiveness, vanity and general bloody-mindedness he does full justice. Though he writes movingly about the sufferings of the Protestant martyrs under Queen Mary, he has absorbed recent revisionist accounts of Tudor religious change, and agrees that the Reformation made slow headway against popular reluctance. Somewhat inconsistently, however, he thinks that Queen Mary's restoration of Catholicism was an attempt to return religion to the state in which her father left it. But Henry's central achievement was his repudiation of the Pope and seizure of control of the Church through the doctrine of the Royal Supremacy. Mary formally abolished that supremacy, returned the country to papal jurisdiction (at considerable political risk), restored the clerical taxes Henry had appropriated to the Crown, and set about reviving monastic life, all pointed rejections of her father's legacy. 

Nothing Peter Ackroyd writes is entirely without rewards for the reader, and anyone looking for an accessible one-volume survey of Tudor England could do worse. But this is just not the kind of book which allows him scope for his distinctive talents, and it's not obvious that it adds much to the existing literature: his admirers may well not think it essential reading.