Book Review: The Wars of the Roses

The Wars of the Roses:The Fall of the Plantagenets and the Rise of the Tudorsby Dan JonesViking, 2014The Wars of the Roses, young historian Dan Jones's follow-up to his remarkably good popular history of the Plantagenet dynasty, is, mirabile dictu, even more enjoyable than its predecessor. Of course, part of this is almost inevitable: the rampaging dynastic struggle between the houses of York and Lancaster known as the Wars of the Roses is so inherently dramatic that it would take a fairly doltish writer to screw it up completely. But a much bigger part of the success of this particular The Wars of the Roses derives from Jones's rich complement of talents: he's a shrewd researcher, a very gamesome writer, and, perhaps most importantly, a resolutely objective historian. He steadily cautions his readers against the primary-color reductions this subject has so often elicited from writers:

All the evil of the fifteenth century was not embodied in a villainous Richard III, any more than the marriage of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York provided instant salvation. Rather, this was a vicious and at times barely comprehensible period of deep political instability, which stemmed ultimately from a collapse in royal authority and English rule in France under Henry VI.

Jones's new book follows the violent and twisting series of events that stretched from Agincourt to Bosworth and saw the venerable – and venal – old Plantagenet dynasty serially self-destruct, leaving a waiting and watchful young Lancaster heir, Henry Tudor, squaring off against the last Yorkist king, the treacherous Richard III. And all through the events, Jones intersperses historical reconstruction with neatly-chosen quotes and moments that serve to illustrate his larger societal backdrop:

There is nothing new about grumbling against authority. Even the greatest kings in history have known that somewhere in their kingdom, a drunkard is probably railing against them. But England in the 1440s was especially rich in public disaffection, as it was beset by increasingly serious political problems. In 1448, a man from Canterbury was recorded complaining that Queen Margaret “was none able to be Queen of England.” The complainant boasted that if he were a peer of the realm he would strike the queen down “for because that she beareth no child, and because that we have no prince in this land.”

As readers of The Plantagenets will know, Jones specializes in novelistic flourishes. More conservative historians (and their devotees) will doubtless consider this something of a weakness, an affected grab for the front display tables of bookstores, but there's no denying how effective it can be in the hands of so skillful a practitioner as Jones is. He sets the stages of his various set-pieces with confident flair, as in the case of the pivotal 1471 battle of Barnet:

Dawn broke around four o'clock on Easter Sunday. A great mist hung over the ground, clouding the short distance between the two armies, and obscured “the sight of either other.” But almost all present – not least the veterans of Towton – had fought in worse. No sooner had the sun's thin light come up than Edward “committed his cause and quarrel to Almighty God,” raised his banners, ordered his trumpeters to blow and charged his men forward against the blaze of the enemy artillery. The reckoning had begun.

Naturally, the book's dramatic high points tend to happen with increased frequency as the narrative arc moves toward Richard's final crisis, his usurpation of the throne from his young nephew and king, Edward V (one of the celebrated “Princes in the Tower”). Jones is certainly right to strip young Edward of some of the complete innocence fabulists typically give him. “Edward V was twelve and he had been well educated,” Jones writes. “He presumably knew enough either of English history or of human nature = or both – to anticipate his fate. Deposed kings did not live.” As for the much-vexed question of the ultimate fate of the Princes in the Tower, Jones can hardly be expected to avoid tackling it – and he does so with the same objective reserve he displays throughout the book:

We still do not know for certain how the boys died. In later years rumors would hold that they had been smothered with a feather bed, or drowned in a butt of Malmsey or poisoned – but these were no more than rumors. It is possible that bones and teeth discovered roughly buried in a wooden box beneath the chapel stairs in the White Tower at the Tower of London are those of the princes, but these have not been tested adequately enough to say for certain. All we can be sure of is that the boys were first disinherited, then deprived of their liberty and servants, and that they then disappeared, presumed dead by contemporaries across Europe. And the person who benefited most from their disappearance was Richard III.

The main plot lines of The Wars of the Roses eventually dwindle to the pathetic and tortured tail-ends that usually characterize changes of dynasties in both fact and fiction. Once Henry Tudor took the throne and became Henry VII, he faced an entire reign of potential usurpers, and his son Henry VIII as almost maniacally worried about Plantagenet claimants to his title. That aspect of the story has the saddest and most revolting of all possible conclusions, when 67-year-old Plantagenet Margaret Pole was dragged to the block in 1541 and gruesomely hacked to death by an inept (or sadistic) executioner. It was with such gaudy displays that the Wars of the Roses finally reached their end, and Jones tells the whole story with consummate skill. We'll all be quite lucky if he decides to keep moving chronologically and devote his next book (or two) to the Tudors themselves.