I now understand historical and political reasons for the English Reformation. That's always something nice to take away from a great story.

This book sucked me in more and more as I read it, at least half of that was because I had to be sucked in to be able to keep track of all the Henry's and Mary's. I was constantly flicking back to the character list at the start to know who was who.

Written in a style I'm not sure what it is but it took a while to wrap my head around, it's all from the point of view of Cromwell but still in third person, it leaps around in time very casually and sometimes doesn't bother with dialogue but just keeps it in a "then they talked about this and then that" style of writing. I'm not sure why this is the style but hey, once I'd figured out that 'he' was almost always relating to Cromwell I was able to keep up.

Looking forward to the rest of the series.