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Tautly structured, elegantly written, and finely attuned to the values and sensibilities of the age, The Wars of the Roses is probably the best introduction to the conflict currently in print. The toddler tantrum that the one year-old king threw on his way to his first parliament in 1423 (only curbed by a sojourn in Staines) was a rare expression of royal will.
The crown of England changed hands violently seven times as the great families of England fought to the death for power, majesty and the right to rule. I’ll find friends to wear my bleeding roses,” cries Edmund Beaufort, Duke of Somerset, in Harey the vjth. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. There is fine scholarly intuition on display here and a mastery of the grand narrative; it is a supremely skillful piece of storytelling.Richard of York argued that his great aristocratic lineage and proximity to the king in blood (as third cousin, once removed, on his mother’s side) gave him the right to steer government during the king’s incapacity. Henry VI’s vengeful Queen, Margaret of Anjou, is standing behind the royal lines and ‘she was in terrible danger’, but ‘the grand wife of the vanquished duke walked through the streets of the ransacked town, her sons by her side. But, I still struggle to endorse the theory that it has come down to us as a dynastic struggle solely because that’s the way the Tudors wanted to spin it. One of Henry VI’s earliest advisers, William de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk, was blamed for the loss of Normandy and ended his days on Dover beach, his head stuck on a pole next to its truncated corpse. The writing is excellent as you'd expect from Dan Jones but as others have said, it is complicated to follow at times as so many of the men had the same names in those days.
I was feeding information back to my family members on the opposite side of the war, one in which was highly accurate for the time period—William Neville went from supporting the House of Lancaster to supporting the House of York in the later end of the war.
He has appeared on Broadway in Journeys End, The Sound of Music, and The King and I and off-Broadway in Passion Play, Comic Potential, and The Entertainer. While Edward was accustomed to fighting on foot, Warwick was said by one chronicler to prefer to run with his men into battle before mounting on horseback, “and if he found victory inclined to his side, he charged boldly among them; if otherwise he took care of himself in time and provided for his escape. By using the Web site, you confirm that you have read, understood, and agreed to be bound by the Terms and Conditions. In this follow up to his book, The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England, I felt the author, Dan Jones, has done an admirable job of explaining the whys and wherefores of the struggle that became known as the Wars of the Roses. Characters like Margaret of Anjou, Richard of York and a succession of Somerset Dukes become real to us.
There is a “Parliament of Devils”, a “Bloody Meadow”, a “Red Gutter” and even a “Love Day”: Henry’s bizarre attempt to reconcile Beauforts and Percys with York and the Nevilles by having them process, arm in arm, through the streets of London. Committed to the Tudor perspective that the conflicts have their origins in the downfall of Richard II?Is there in the front piece of books in the royal library, it’s there at Elizabeth I’s coronation where she turns to Penchant Street during her procession from the Tower to Westminster Abbey. The author of Powers and Thrones and presenter of Netflixs Secrets of Great British Castles offers a vivid account of the events that inspired Game of Thrones and Shakespeares Henry IV and Richard IIIDiscover the real history behind The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses, the PBS Great Performance series of Shakespeare's plays, starring Judi Dench, Benedict Cumberbatch, Sofie Okenedo and Hugh Bonneville.