Queens at War

I had been eagerly anticipating this final installment of the England's Medieval Queens series for some time. The Wars of the Roses are a huge knot of complex politics and murders and allegiances, and I had hoped a book tracking it through the queens would help with understanding, much like the second book did for Eleanor of Aquitaine and Henry II's progeny.

Unfortunately, I just didn't find Queens at War to live up to the previous books. It suffers from two things primarily: overly detailed reporting about people and events who weren't the queen or future queen, and referring to people almost exclusively by their title, even when the title transfers in the same sentence.

The second first. With all the allegiance-shifting, murders, and show more creation of titles, it got confusing for me who exactly was Warwick or Lancaster or whomever. It's convention when writing about English history, I suppose, and there's probably some tradition about the individual becoming the title. Still, when Edward IV deposes Henry IV in battle, the narrative says something like "the King fell and the King declared victory". Yes, very clever, but really! It made me stumble when reading, the most egregious example.

As for the too-detailed problem. In the first book and even the second, Weir heavily relies on what extant records we have to recreate the travels of the queens and make inferrences about her household or lifestyle, such as from wardrobe books or charters she signed. There is a lot more available about the 15th century women, including letters from and about them, and Weir seems to not know what to do with the bounty.

Particularly regarding Margaret of Anjou, Weir makes statements about her without really explaining where the assessment comes from, while reporting large amounts of political maneouvring or items from wardrobe rolls without similar summaries. She asserts that after a decade as queen, Margaret was still unaware of English customs and old feuds, thus her ceding a town on the border to the Scots queen in exchange for safe harbor. But there's nothing to indicate she didn't know about the two countries' longtime tussle over the town, or any other things she did that Weir attributes to her Foreigness.

This problem of the wrong details and summaries really came to a head for me in the afterward, which discusses Margaret, Elizabeth Woodville, and Anne Neville after Henry VII's succession to the throne, and very briefly of his marriage to Elizabeth of York and her coronation. This chapter tells of their lives much more fluidly and with the ongoing analysis lacking in the bulk of the book.

While I did get a better understanding of the Wars of the Roses, I don't really feel the same about the women. I guess no matter who the king marries, unless she completely avoids anything political, the English people will find reasons to hate her and her family.

It's kind of a shame the series gets bogged down in the end. (Also the editing of the US edition seems slapdash.) show less