Ditto. I’m in 100% agreement, including the comment on Alison Weir. She’s very popular, but I tried her volume on the War of the Roses and was unimpressed. From time to time I’ll give a well-reviewed a popular history a try and I’m more often disappointed than not.
Missed these two, I’ve actually been looking for a volume on Henry III ( and not incidentally English language works on Louis VIII and IX ). Have to check them out.
Agreed - quite good and even-handedly deflates some of the traditional tendency to cast him as a military genius, which he wasn’t ( quite competent, yes - brilliant, no ).
I’ve read Ralph Turner’s earlier 1994 volume on John. Do you know if Church is in significant disagreement with him on any particulars?
For the OP re: English kings, most of the Yale University series on English monarchs are good places to start ( the Prestwich book above is one of them ).
ETA: Ah, hell - I just looked it up and the Carpenter volume is going for $120.00 :eek:. Guess that one is going on the back burner.
I’m up to Richard II, John of Gaunt, Henry Bolingbroke, the Peasants’ Revolt, and the Lords Appellant.
It’s fascinating to me how the creation of Parliament was something forced upon the Kings over time, and how the Magna Carta was a declaration of the rights of barons against the king’s absolute rule. Parliament had from the beginning an adversarial relationship with the Kings of England, sort of like the peoples’ veto. Parliament more or less evolved from a small council of supervisors into a regulatory body in its own right.
Amazing stuff! Wish me luck, I’m drawing close to the Wars of the Roses…
Scorecard! Scorecard! Get ‘cher scorecard here. Can’t tell the players without a scorecard.
What just drives me to distraction in the need to fight through all those convoluted genealogical tables at the back of the book. You start off with a nice clean House of This and House of That, but before you reel through two generations things are a tangled as a snarl of fishing line in a cheap spin-caster.
If you are looking for a modern equivalent try looking at the Sicilian Mafia. A similar mind-set and ethos. It is true the old saw that the Royals got their’s the old fashion way – they stole it fair and square.
Unfortunately, there’s a derth of English-language books on the Capetians. You might check out Capetian Women by Kathleen Nolan, 2003, which has some interesting essays on early Capetian queens.
Update: I’m up through Catherine of Aragon, Henry VIII and his flirtations with Anne Boleyn, and Charles V. Fascinating stuff. No wonder so much has been made of Henry VIII and his many mistresses.
Schama’s book skips over the Wars of the Roses almost in their entirety, giving them only a passing mention. I know that Henry VIII’s divorce/annulment was the major factor in the disintegration of relations between the crown and the church, so it merits the coverage, but were the Wars of the Roses really that … pointless? Could one really skip over them?
Well, if one is interested in results rather than processes one could just say that the Wars of the Roses resulted in Henry Tudor getting the throne and pick up the story from there. It may have been an editorial decision to leave out a truly confusing tale.
But Henry had a huge motive- if he was legit, then they were, and they had a better claim. And, the odd thing is that Henry Tudor waited for a looong time to announce the Princes were dead- when you’d think one of the 1st things a man with a tenuous grip on the throne would do is announce that the King you just killed was a child-murderer.
*Motive: Henry’s Act of Parliament that repealed the Titulus Regius (and, therefore, the bastardy charges) made the boys’ deaths necessary; otherwise Prince Edward was the lawful king of England. *
Edit: Replying to Hypno-Toad: That’s my understanding of the situation, yeah. The Wars didn’t seem to have any lasting effect on the law, the church, the economy, the peasantry, the rights of the nobles, or anything else.
That’s my take on the matter as well. It isn’t as if Henry Tudor didn’t take every opportunity to slander Richard III in the history books as it is — if there had been any legitimate evidence that Richard III had been responsible for the murders of princes, that’d be the first thing to come out.
Just out of curiousity: ISTR that a few years ago two small skeletons were found interred in the stairs of the Bloody Tower. I believe most people have assumed them to be the remains of the two princes, but has there been any confirmation of that? DNA, carbon dating, or clothing/fiber analysis - that sort of thing?
If I remember correctly, the bones weren’t even human. Wikipedia suggests that the bones were first found in 1675 during a renovation and were interred in Westminster Abbey; they were later reexamined but not all the bones were even human. Age and sex could not be determined.
Therefore it’s obvious that Richard III used black sorcery to transform the two princes into a little girl and a dog before having them murdered.
So I was searching for an old post, where I could have sworn that I had argued in the opposite of this - that Richard III had very good and pressing reasons for taking them out. I’m pretty sure I based this on Charles Ross’ biography of Richard III - Ross being in the “rather more likely than not” category.
Instead I found this thread from 2006 where Mississippienne and I were discussing death rates of extinction among nobility. Which tickled me, because I remember the cite I couldn’t recall then :p.
You’re right - it was more like a quarter ( ~24-30% ) of the English peerage per 25 year generation in the 14th century :D. Per K.B. MacFarlane, The Nobility of Later Medieval England ( 1973 Clarendon Press, Oxford ). Poking around apparently the numbers were much the same for the 15th and 16th century and E. Perroy ( for France ) and A. Grant ( for Scotland ) have turned up roughly similar numbers. So noble houses in western Europe seemed to have gone extinct ( or were very occasionally dispossed ) in the male line, on average, after four generations, at least in the High Middle Ages/Renaissance.
Err…sorry for the hijack, but it IS rather mundane and pointless ;).
After pondering Henry VIII and his six wives, why the hell did #6 (Catherine Parr) agree to marry him? By the time Cathy #3 got there, Henry VIII had already had two wives annulled (Cathy #1 and Anne #2) and two wives beheaded (Anne #1 and Cathy #2). The remaining wife (Jane Seymour) died in childbirth. Was Catherine Parr a gambler, or what?