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.

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.

Fatal Colours - George Goodwin

The subtitle says it all - Towton 1461: England's Most Brutal Battle.  Towton was the deciding factor of the first half of the Wars of the Roses, Edward of York's revenge for the deaths of his father and brother at Wakefield.  It was fought at Easter but, this being Yorkshire, it was fought in a snowstorm.  The Lancastrians were massacred and Edward became king.  In the long run it resolved nothing.  Ten years later Edward was hoofed off the throne by Warwick the Kingmaker and had to do it all again at Barnet and Tewkesbury.

Goodwin is an enthusiast rather than a professional historian - he's a member of the Towton Battlefield Society.  He is scrupulous, however, in his references, if a little free-form in the way he pads out his narrative.  For example, a long time is spent debating the various theories of what was wrong with Henry VI.  That's OK, and handled well enough, but at the end of the day he didn't fight at Towton and was, by that stage of his reign certainly, a spectator at his own fate.

I enjoyed the book.  To be fair, I'm much more interested in the personalities of the participants rather than the battle itself.  Goodwin certainly showed me things I didn't already know (and which bore up to further research on my part).  It's a decent book.

Blood Sisters - Sarah Gristwood

This is something of an odds-and-sods adjunct to the Tudor women genre revived recently by Philippa Gregory and Gristwood herself.  It purports to show that women were powerful players in the Wars of the Roses (or Cousins War, as Gristwood prefers) but ends up, by and large, proving that they weren't. 

Elizabeth Woodville was certainly the epicentre of a powerful clique, mostly her relations, but was either a nonentity or a completely heartless bitch.  Because Gristwood wants to play the feminist card, she opts for the nonentity option.  Margaret Beaufort, on the other hand, was certainly a woman of brains and ambition - but had to exercise her talents through the single son she gave birth to at the age of thirteen or younger, the future Henry VII.  Elizabeth of York looked like a plumper version of her mother and was certainly a nonentity.  Margaret of Burgundy was the dowager duchess of a small but wealthy and influential duchy.  She brought up people of significance, like Philip the Fair, but threw her backing behind anyone who could pass as one of the murdered Princes in the Tower.  She was, therefore, a rotten judge of character.  Cecily Neville, Duchess of York, suffered more bereavement than anyone should and outlived more or less everybody involved in the Cousins War, but she let her reputation be trampled in the mud at the whim of her ruthless sons.  Margaret of Anjou, queen of the hopeless Henry VI, was another who had a rotten time and lost everything when she lost her son, the Prince of Wales.  The poor old Neville sisters, wives of dukes, princes and kings, seem to have existed only to give birth and die.  They were absolutely pawns in the games of sleazy men and completely undermine Gristwood's argument.  One woman who does seem to have had skills as a courtier and who is only mentioned in passing here - Katherine Gordon, wife of the pretender Warbeck, who seems to have flourished after his execution - is the one I would like to learn more about.

Sarah Gristwood is a cracking writer and this book is a pleasure to read.  Whilst I criticise her thesis, I have only two criticisms of her technique.  Firstly, she really overdoes the Fortune's Wheel device.  Secondly, after properly branding as unreliable the writings of Tudor propagandists like More, who weren't there and didn't know the people concerned, why then rely so heavily on Shakespeare, who didn't even know Thomas More?  There is no conspiracy behind the fact that Shakespeare overlooks Margaret Beaufort - he just didn't have an actor who fancied playing a midget in drag.  I really appreciated the extensive notes where she makes many of her more scholarly arguments.