Early Tudor government was controversial among contemporaries and remains so among historians. This book analyses the historical debates over the 'new monarchy' and the 'Tudor revolution in government', but seeks to go beyond them by setting the growing strength of the crown under Henry VII and Henry VIII in the context of our developing understanding of later medieval English government and politics.

It focuses on the interaction of political and administrative developments in the implementation of various aspects of state power, rather than on institutional change.

The king's control of the localities, the judicial system, crown finances and the growing claims of the state are reviewed in the context of trends such as the development of the crown estate, the changing relationship between royal and noble power, the growth of the court, the increasing centrality of the king's council, external warfare, the break with Rome, the development of parliament and the government's use of the printing press.

The formulation of royal policy is seen less as the product of individual ministers than as the interaction of a number of sets of ideas represented amongst those advising the monarchs: the common law, the civil law, chivalry and humanism.

The achievements of early Tudor regimes are tested against the challenges of the mid-Tudor years and reassessed in the light of the contemporary European monarchies with which the Tudors competed, to produce a new picture of the aims and legacies of early Tudor kings and ministers.