Steven Gunn has made a career out of studying the history of the early Tudors, and Henry VII's New Men and the Making of Tudor England is a worthy addition to his body of work. In this meticulously and exhaustively researched book, Gunn brings to life the intricate relationships the “new men” of Henry VII's reign who served their king and commonweal. These men developed networks of personal influence and wealth, both at the centers of power at court and in the shires where they created and provided new conduits for exercising royal power in the localities. The accession of Henry VII in 1485 was like the election of Donald Trump as US president in 2016 in that no one saw it coming. Both brought a businessman's eye to their respective offices; if Trump were at all a student of history, Henry VII would easily be his favorite English king for his imaginative if not coercive efforts to revive the fortunes of the English crown. Like Trump the businessman, Henry VII relied on litigation and a system of bonds and recognizances rather than shows of arms to pursue his fiscal goals. But Henry VII is but a shadowy presence in this book; the spotlight is squarely on the men who made these goals reality for him.

These new men, drawn from the ranks of the gentry and the municipal oligarchies, and frequently educated at the universities, were a standard feature in the rise of Renaissance monarchies in early modern Europe, but England, much more than France or the Iberian kingdoms experienced the sharpest rise in their prominence in royal government. The most famous were Sir Edward Poynings, sent to Ireland to pass the law that bears his name, and Richard Empson and Edmund Dudley, efficient taskmasters for Henry VII who were sacrificed at the beginning of Henry VIII's reign for their rapaciousness. But equally important were Sir Andrew Windsor, Sir Thomas Lovell, Sir Thomas Brandon (whose nephew Charles later became Henry VIII's boon companion), and Sir Henry Wyatt, whose son Thomas was a noted poet, and whose grandson, also named Thomas, led a rebellion against Mary Tudor in 1554.

What tied all these men together was the fortunate outcome of Bosworth, which ushered in the Tudor regime, and a fierce sense of loyalty to Henry VII. He trusted these men as much as he trusted anybody, which is to say that even these men were still required to enter into bonds and recognizances for their good behavior, just like members of the nobility, the principle means by which Henry VII kept potentially over-mighty subjects on a tight leash. Whether 1485 signaled a substantive change in English governance, as sixteenth century commentators like Edward Hall would have you believe, remains a venerable old point of debate. Gunn's work illustrates the lines of continuity with the previous Yorkist regimes. Henry VII's approach to providing an ample fiscal base for his monarchy was essentially feudal; he researched and vigorously prosecuted all viable forms of crown income, and in the process, he enlarged the boundaries and categories of crown income and modernized the means of enforcement, a process that reached its apotheosis with Charles I's ship money tax in the 1620s.

Henry VII's new men helped him achieve these goals. They were all truly Renaissance men, performing military service, legal duties, serving as justices of the peace in the shires, and creating myriads of affinities that had the result of importing crown power and influence into the localities on a scale that Henry VII's Yorkist father-in-law Edward IV could only have dreamed of. Their efficiency, and their recognition of their places in the social hierarchy, allowed them to work well with both the nobility and its clerical corollary, the high-ranking members of the church, classes that had traditionally supplied kings with counselors and administrators. In his book's final chapters, however, in his descriptions of the landed and financial holdings of these men, Gunn does not sugarcoat the fact that they were often rapacious jackals; even the bones of relatives were picked clean, as Gunn's description of the dismemberment of the estate of the Earl of Kent amply illustrates. Or consider the fact that Wyatt, whose image grimaces on the book's dust jacket, was wealthy and influential enough to get Henry VIII's court painter Hans Holbein to paint him, the Tudor equivalent of getting renowned photographer Annie Leibovitz to come to one's home to take the family portrait.

Nevertheless, Gunn's analysis finds balance in his descriptions of their collective roles as servants of the state and masters of their own destinies. Gunn's singular achievement with Henry VII's New Men and the Making of Tudor England is the way he takers a wide body of manuscript sources and deploys them to bring alive these men who seem so modern in their approach to business, service, leisure, and legacy building.