Post by Deleted on Dec 6, 2013 22:22:28 GMT
I have just this moment began to read 'Fatal Colours' by George Goodwin, centred around the Battle of Towton in 1461. Having visited Towton a few times I am looking forward to this book and will let you know my thoughts when I've finished.
Helen Castor reviewed it as stated;
Helen Castor reviewed it as stated;
On Palm Sunday 1461, in a blizzard of sleet and snow, two of the largest armies ever mustered on English soil met near the Yorkshire village of Towton.
They fought for eight horrifying hours, with no quarter given on either side. By the time dusk fell, England’s biggest battle had also become its bloodiest. Perhaps 28,000 men died that day – cut down in the fighting, drowned as they fled into a freezing river, or butchered, as unarmed prisoners, once the field had finally been won.
Five hundred and fifty years later, George Goodwin’s account of the battle combines elegiac commemoration with telling historical insight. The Wars of the Roses have attracted many historians: some deal in the technicalities of military strategy; some analyse structures of political power; some chronicle the lives of the chief protagonists. Much rarer is the ability to combine all three – but Goodwin has pulled it off in this page-turning read.
Towton itself, of course, cannot be explained without an understanding of how England had come to be divided between Lancaster and York, the red rose and the white – a rupture so profound, by the spring of 1461, that the two armies on the field each fought for a different king. And so Goodwin’s story winds back to 1422, when one of those kings, Henry VI, came to the throne as a nine-month-old baby.
Shakespeare delved back further still, to the deposition of Richard II by his cousin Henry Bolingbroke in 1399, in order to play the wars as an epic cycle of dynastic hubris and nemesis. But Goodwin rightly points out that by 1422 the triumphs of the warrior king Henry V had laid to rest any demons that still shadowed the house of Lancaster. Thirty years on, what ailed English politics was not any lingering stain of usurpation but – simply and catastrophically – the failings of Henry’s son, Henry VI, who had inherited a mental illness from his maternal grandfather, the French king Charles VI.
The best recent scholarship has demonstrated that Henry was consistently incapable of giving any command or direction to the government that was carried out in his name. That important conclusion raises the question of how Henry’s “normal” functioning could be distinguished from the catatonic state into which he lapsed dramatically in 1453.
Here Goodwin brings to bear a revealing perspective from the world of modern psychiatry, arguing persuasively that the symptoms of developing schizophrenia, as they are now understood, explain the various manifestations of Henry’s incapacity, from a burst of aggression in adolescence to his extraordinary passivity in adulthood, his horror of conflict, his incoherence of thought and his extreme religiosity – the one element of this pathology for which he was praised by contemporaries, since, as Goodwin suggests, “a unique relationship with God was exactly what a medieval king was expected to have”.
This new portrait of Henry underpins a pithily energetic narrative of the unfolding conflict. As political structures that depended on royal leadership tottered under the strain of the King’s vacuity, a deeper problem revealed itself: Henry’s disastrous non-rule could not easily be challenged because he had done nothing wrong, even if it was by dint of doing nothing at all.
The Duke of York, who emerged as the champion of political reform (and of his own sense of honour, Goodwin argues), found himself tainted by his resistance. It was not until after York’s death – killed in battle outside his own castle near Wakefield in December 1460 – that his 18-year-old son, the commandingly charismatic Edward of March, had a viable chance of ending an increasingly bloody war by claiming the throne for himself. And it was as the self-proclaimed Edward IV that he led his troops onto the field at Towton.
Here, suddenly, the hectic pace of Goodwin’s story becomes agonising slow-motion. As we learn how soldiers armed themselves, how the weapons they carried did their sickening work, how the commanders disposed their forces, and how the men sustained themselves on their punishing march, the knowledge of the slaughter to come weighs heavier and heavier.
But Towton is not etched into our historical consciousness, because Edward of York’s cataclysmic victory was eventually undone by Richard III’s defeat at the hands of Henry Tudor: Bosworth, not Towton, is the end of Shakespeare’s story. Political myth makes great theatre; but Fatal Colours is a compelling reminder that behind that elegant arc lies a more complex, more significant and even more savage drama.
They fought for eight horrifying hours, with no quarter given on either side. By the time dusk fell, England’s biggest battle had also become its bloodiest. Perhaps 28,000 men died that day – cut down in the fighting, drowned as they fled into a freezing river, or butchered, as unarmed prisoners, once the field had finally been won.
Five hundred and fifty years later, George Goodwin’s account of the battle combines elegiac commemoration with telling historical insight. The Wars of the Roses have attracted many historians: some deal in the technicalities of military strategy; some analyse structures of political power; some chronicle the lives of the chief protagonists. Much rarer is the ability to combine all three – but Goodwin has pulled it off in this page-turning read.
Towton itself, of course, cannot be explained without an understanding of how England had come to be divided between Lancaster and York, the red rose and the white – a rupture so profound, by the spring of 1461, that the two armies on the field each fought for a different king. And so Goodwin’s story winds back to 1422, when one of those kings, Henry VI, came to the throne as a nine-month-old baby.
Shakespeare delved back further still, to the deposition of Richard II by his cousin Henry Bolingbroke in 1399, in order to play the wars as an epic cycle of dynastic hubris and nemesis. But Goodwin rightly points out that by 1422 the triumphs of the warrior king Henry V had laid to rest any demons that still shadowed the house of Lancaster. Thirty years on, what ailed English politics was not any lingering stain of usurpation but – simply and catastrophically – the failings of Henry’s son, Henry VI, who had inherited a mental illness from his maternal grandfather, the French king Charles VI.
The best recent scholarship has demonstrated that Henry was consistently incapable of giving any command or direction to the government that was carried out in his name. That important conclusion raises the question of how Henry’s “normal” functioning could be distinguished from the catatonic state into which he lapsed dramatically in 1453.
Here Goodwin brings to bear a revealing perspective from the world of modern psychiatry, arguing persuasively that the symptoms of developing schizophrenia, as they are now understood, explain the various manifestations of Henry’s incapacity, from a burst of aggression in adolescence to his extraordinary passivity in adulthood, his horror of conflict, his incoherence of thought and his extreme religiosity – the one element of this pathology for which he was praised by contemporaries, since, as Goodwin suggests, “a unique relationship with God was exactly what a medieval king was expected to have”.
This new portrait of Henry underpins a pithily energetic narrative of the unfolding conflict. As political structures that depended on royal leadership tottered under the strain of the King’s vacuity, a deeper problem revealed itself: Henry’s disastrous non-rule could not easily be challenged because he had done nothing wrong, even if it was by dint of doing nothing at all.
The Duke of York, who emerged as the champion of political reform (and of his own sense of honour, Goodwin argues), found himself tainted by his resistance. It was not until after York’s death – killed in battle outside his own castle near Wakefield in December 1460 – that his 18-year-old son, the commandingly charismatic Edward of March, had a viable chance of ending an increasingly bloody war by claiming the throne for himself. And it was as the self-proclaimed Edward IV that he led his troops onto the field at Towton.
Here, suddenly, the hectic pace of Goodwin’s story becomes agonising slow-motion. As we learn how soldiers armed themselves, how the weapons they carried did their sickening work, how the commanders disposed their forces, and how the men sustained themselves on their punishing march, the knowledge of the slaughter to come weighs heavier and heavier.
But Towton is not etched into our historical consciousness, because Edward of York’s cataclysmic victory was eventually undone by Richard III’s defeat at the hands of Henry Tudor: Bosworth, not Towton, is the end of Shakespeare’s story. Political myth makes great theatre; but Fatal Colours is a compelling reminder that behind that elegant arc lies a more complex, more significant and even more savage drama.