Even when men came to blows, as Beaufort and Humphrey did in 1424, the violence was quickly stopped and the protagonists reprimanded.

Some of the greatest heroes and villains of history were thrown together in these turbulent times, from Joan of Arc and Henry V, whose victory at Agincourt marked the high point of the medieval monarchy, to Richard III, who murdered his own nephews in a desperate bid to secure his stolen crown. And it is worth noting that, though the white rose was one of a number of badges used by York and his family, the ‘Lancastrian’ royal family never used the red rose as a symbol during the conflict. So, if you’ve read about the Wars oRather than fighting one another, the English nobles showed a remarkable unity of purpose at the moment of greatest royal weakness. The baby king was watched over by two charismatic and extremely ‘royal’ uncles, John, Duke of Bedford, and Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester.

Against the backdrop of weak kingship and disastrous military defeat in France, two rival branches of the Plantagenet dynasty – Lancaster and York – had gone to war for the throne, using red and white roses as emblems of their causes. No matter that the red rose of Lancaster was pretty much a Tudor device: it could be scribbled, retrospectively, into the old scrolls. A third phase began in 1483 after Edward IV’s death when Richard III usurped the throne, reopening the old wounds of 1460–71. In 1541, the 67-year-old Margaret Pole, one of the last living nieces of Edward IV, was hacked to death in the Tower by a novice axeman, a spectacle that shocked Europe. The usurper Henry IV endured a troubled reign, but his son, Henry V, achieved stunning successes in the wars with France – notably the battle of Agincourt in 1415 and the treaty of Troyes in 1420, by which Henry V laid claim to the French crown for his descendants.

And it is hard not to say the same for this very readable installment that he has produced on the madness that was the Wars of The Roses. It was the rivals between the powerful men and women behind the crown, like Richard, Duke of York and Margaret of Anjou, which led to the thirty years of civil wars. Or perhaps of her father, who had many of his ex-wives beheaded for treason, or English colonialism, the beginnings of expanding into the new worlds and territories opening up on the opposite side of the world.

The Wars of the Roses is something I, an American with an American education, never actually learned about in school. Henry VI’s mental problems have left England in a state of instability, which, of course, led to civil war. Additionally make sure your User-Agent is not empty and is something unique and descriptive and try again. It is not recorded’ wrote one admiring chronicler, ‘that any king of England ever accomplished so much in so short a time’.The double rose created a number of false assumptions: that Henry Tudor was on a par, in terms of royal blood, with the white-rose Yorkists; that his marriage to Elizabeth of York put an end to the violence that had engulfed England in the second half of the h century; and that the Wars of the Roses (a h-century term) was simply a blood feud between two branches of the Plantagenet dynasty. It is also a period of headstrong and resilient women-Margaret of Anjou, Elizabeth Woodville, Margaret Beaufort-who were not afraid to seize power and bend men to their will. Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published. Chronicling the heraldic rise of the houses of Lancaster and York to the house of Tudor, the Hollow Crown is a tale of glory, betrayal, triumph, sadness, and lastly rewriting history.