The Yorkists - Anne Crawford

For all the attention lavished on Richard III since the discovery of his body in Leicester, he remains the only well-known Yorkist. Edward IV, who brought England to the threshold of the modern era, remains a shadowy figure and even less is known about his father, Richard of York. Virtually nothing at all is known about the original dukes of York, descending from the fourth son of Edward III, and even less about Richard of Cambridge, grandfather of Edward and Richard, whose marriage of Anne Mortimer, granddaughter of the second son, bumped them up the pedigree.

Crawford's idea, then, is an excellent one - as the subtitle says, "The History of a Dynasty". The trouble is, the lack of information persists. Albeit the Yorkists were the first thoroughly English kings since 1066, they still tended to operate in medieval French. It remains next to impossible to keep track of all the subsets of Nevilles and Woodvilles and Beauforts. I can just about manage the first two, having done a lot of research myself, but the Beauforts... Crawford, so far as I can tell, has a total grasp of all three, and she provides several family trees to help the fuddled reader get back on track.

Another problem is that these are the last royals without contemporary portraiture. It is hard to empathise with a king or queen you can't really picture. There are contemporary descriptions, and Crawford quotes from most of the best sources. But she gives herself a problem, unnecessary in my view, by avoiding the deformity question with Richard III. When you reach the end without a mention, you feel cheated. Of course Crawford was writing in 2007, before the body was found, so she couldn't see the wickedly curved spine which had be agonising and embarrassing for the king; it had, basically, to be a major factor in his personality and mindset; it is a sign of true character that none of the people who met him, and were not subject to him in any way (I'm thinking of Commines), even noticed a problem.

Crawford's target audience, before the discovery of the body, would have been the Ricardians, those who believe their hero was the innocent victim of Tudor propagandists. The problem is, the Ricardians were wrong about everything. He really was, literally, a hunchback, and every commentator writing during his lifetime and shortly thereafter, none of whom were writing for publication, expressly said he was responsible for murdering his nephews, the Princes in the Tower.

Nevertheless, a great read. Crawford handles the complexities of the period very well indeed and has added a lot of new information about the women who played a key, often behind-the-scenes role in sorting out the royal succession. It is a good idea to end her account with the death of Elizabeth of York, Henry VII's queen, because her son united the warring houses.

Richard III and the Bosworth Campaign - Peter Hammond

Written in 2010, that is to say before the discovery of the body in the car park, Hammond writes in the belief that nothing the likes of Thomas More, the Croyland Chronicler, and indeed every single contemporary chronicler said about Richard III was true.  Of course the undoubted body demonstrates that everything they said about his appearance and death was absolutely true, which logically suggests that everything they said about his usurpation was true too.  Hammond is a dyed in the wool Ricardian, a former research officer of the Richard III Society.  As such he seems reluctant to accept that Richard's seizing of the throne was a usurpation, and no mention is made here of the fact that he had his nephews murdered.  Instead we have a long and unnecessary passage about how he didn't really want to marry his niece, Elizabeth of York, albeit, according to Hammond, Elizabeth was mad keen on marrying Richard.  This is piffle and our author is wearing blinkers.

We know where he starts from by his use of the works of Ashdown Hill, who has won awards for his genealogical research but who labours under the belief that everybody in the 15th century was either illegitimate, responsible for whole tribes of illegitimate offspring, or preferably both.  Here we are given two Ricardian bastards, John and Katherine, both of whom seem to have been teenagers, albeit their putative father was only 32 when he died.  It is of course perfectly possible for Richard to have fathered children when he was himself an early teen but let us not forget (what Hammond and Ashdown Hill didn't know in 2010) that Richard's puberty was much worse than most with his spine curving by the day.  It had to hurt and it had to have had psychological impact.  Still, perhaps his response to the trauma was to go out and get bastards.

The main problem with this book, though, is that it doesn't tell me anything I didn't already know about the battle.  Surely A L Rowse did a better job back in 1966?  Funnily enough, Hammond doesn't cite Rowse in his bibliography.  He does, however, make extensive use of the Mancini text, and the second continuation of Croyland, which both have the merit of being contemporary.  I'm sure everything Hammond says about the battle is true so far as it can be, but in a book of only 116 pages, specifically about a battle and written for a specialist military publisher (Pen & Sword), less than ten pages of actual battle is not enough.

The Third Plantagenet - John Ashdown-Hill

John Ashdown-Hill was the genealogist-historian who tracked down people descended from Richard III's female relatives though not, of course, from Richard himself.  This meant the DNA in the skeleton dug up in the car park of Leicester Social Services could be matched, confirming the remains of the crooked-back man killed in battle, always said in the historical records to have been buried where he was found, was indeed the missing king.

The dig was funded by the Ricardians, of whom Ashdown-Hill is one, who were appalled when the 'Tudor propaganda' deformity was there before their very eyes.  The implication, of course, is that everything else Thomas More said about Richard might also be true, in particular that he murdered his nephews, the Princes in the Tower - just like every contemporary chronicler, including those who wrote before 1485, said he did.

The Ricardians, quite openly, have an agenda - to restore the king's reputation.  This can lead them into odd yet fascinating digressions, which is what interested me about Ashdown-Hill's latest book.  His thesis is that the Duke of Clarence, the surviving brother between Edward IV and Richard, was not the scheming, self-promoting, untrustworthy blot on the landscape who screams out at us from the pages of history (and I'm talking here to real history; that recorded at the time).  Thus, for Ashdown-Hill every Plantagenet male other than Clarence and Richard was illegitimate and excluded from the crown.  I'm no fan of the British royal family and their endless progeny but I know for a fact some of them were married - I've seen them marry on the telly.

His other problem is that Clarence has left very few traces behind him (though, to be fair, he has an awful lot of actual direct descendants thanks to his daughter Margaret Countess of Salisbury).  Even his bones seem to have vanished from his tomb.  Thus everything has to be reconstructed or hypothesized.  The result is great fun in every sense.  Ashdown-Hill provokes argument, which is what books should do from time to time.  I don't agree with some of his theories (frankly, I don't agree with any of them) but I am confident that what he identifies as facts are indeed reliable.  I enjoyed it, and there are plenty of other modern histories of the period I can't say the same about.