He steadily cautions his readers against the primary-color reductions this subject has so often elicited from writers:Īll 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. 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. 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. Among the beautiful people revelling on deck was William Aetheling, grandson of William the Conqueror and sole legitimate son of Henry I.The Wars of the Roses: The Fall of the Plantagenets and the Rise of the Tudorsby Dan JonesViking, 2014 The 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. The narrative opens in 1120 with a drunken party aboard a white ship – the White Ship. As I sometimes stop mid-paragraph to daydream around a subject, I was grateful to be kept on track by a text that is simple and direct, without leaving me feeling patronised.
Jones avoids this with a combination of gripping storytelling and pin-sharp clarity. The risk with a long dynastic history is that it becomes just one damn thing after another, and the reader gets lost in a snowstorm of names and events. Jones covers an enormous amount of ground: eight generations of kings and queens from 1120 to 1399.
We both read into the night, but I was the one reading passages out loud. Bed time, back to back: him reading George R R Martin’s hugely popular Game of Thrones fantasy fiction me reading Dan Jones’s The Plantagenets. It has been a week of competitive reading in the de Lisle household.
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