The Welsh Dragon by K. M. Butler

Overall Rating: ***** (5 stars)

The Welsh Dragon is a historical novel with a dash of romance, telling the tale of one of England’s most remarkable monarchs in the days before he came to rule.

When our tale begins, Henry Tudor is a very young man, still in his teens, in the midst of that English civil conflict that we call the Wars of the Roses. His uncle – King Henry VI of England – has just been deposed and imprisoned by the House of York. The Lancastrian cause seems all but lost, and Henry is forced to flee England or face arrest and possible execution. He sails with his protector, his uncle Jasper Tudor, hoping to reach France. Unfortunately, an untimely storm washes the Tudors up in independent Brittany, where Henry is forced to live in exile.

At first, Henry has little ambition for his own sake. He has lost lands and title in England, but he is safe under the protection of the powerful Duke of Brittany, and he finds happiness in the arms of a wealthy widow. His tenuous claim to the English throne seems almost irrelevant. The House of York is firmly in command back home, and there are several other men with better claims. Yet Henry’s mother, Margaret Beaufort, is striving to regain a position in England for her son. Meanwhile, the Yorkists refuse to let him live quietly in exile, constantly scheming to seize him or have him killed.

In the end, Henry is forced to give up the woman and the peaceful life he has come to love, and contend for the English throne in his own right.

Unlike Mr. Butler’s previous novel, The Raven and the Dove, this one is set in a much better-documented period. It’s a foregone conclusion that Henry Tudor will return to England, establish one of the most brilliant royal dynasties that country ever knew, and begin leading his kingdom into the modern era.

Mr. Butler’s gift is bringing historical figures to vivid life while he tells the well-known story. Henry himself is a conflicted man, torn between his happy life in Brittany and the ambition he feels compelled to pursue. He matures considerably in the course of the story, growing from an awkward youth to an admirable contender for the crown. Some of Mr. Butler’s more speculative elements – especially Henry’s fictional love interest, the Breton merchant Jehana de Rousson – offer an interesting perspective into how one of England’s more unusual kings might have been shaped.

Mr. Butler has a very clean prose style, and the editing here is very good; I saw only a few copy- or line-editing issues, and these never pulled me out of the story. Action scenes are easy to follow and very exciting. The story alternates among several viewpoint characters, but each section is labeled, and the story is strict in its close third-person perspective.

Mr. Butler is deft in the art of dropping needed exposition into character dialogue or internal reflection, and that’s very useful here. The reader gets to watch characters as they engage in very sophisticated political intrigue, but it’s always clear why they act as they do. The mindset of late-medieval English aristocracy is often alien to us, but the author makes it very compelling.

I thoroughly enjoyed The Welsh Dragon, and I’m definitely looking forward to Mr. Butler’s next venture into historical fiction. Very highly recommended.