The machinations of the Dudleys make Game of Thrones look tame

This is the gripping story of the ever-fluctuating fortunes of three generations of the Dudley dynasty, servants to — and at times rivals for — the Crown in the 16th century. As Joanne Paul observes in her engrossing biography of an extraordinary family, ‘had fate, Fortuna, Nemesis or God made only the slightest adjustment to their orchestration of events’, the Dudleys, not the Tudors, might have ruled England for generations.

The narrative begins in the 1490s with Edmund Dudley, an Oxford-educated barrister who rose to a position of power, influence and wealth at the early Tudor court, only to be arrested and imprisoned in the Tower within days of Henry VII’s death in 1509. Conspired against by a cabal that included William Warham, Archbishop of Canterbury, and the teenaged Henry VIII, Edmund was convicted of treason and beheaded on Tower Hill.

His son John, a boy of five or six at the time of his father’s execution, was neither bowed nor broken by these events.