Thomas Penn’s weighty new volume takes as its titular subject the lives of these three brothers. But The Brothers York is primarily a biography of the charismatic Edward — and a superb biography at that ... The tragedy and brutality of the Wars of the Roses jumps out from every page of Penn’s book ... Against all this barbarism, the chivalric obsessions of Edward’s court may seem contradictory. But Penn’s achievement is to place at the heart of his narrative the stories that Edward’s followers wanted to tell themselves. This is a world of young men whose insistence on seeing themselves as a new Camelot was an essential veneer to the brutality waiting to burst out at any moment ... an impressive and engaging read.
... this vast, sprawling book offers an epic orgy of colour and character: there are soldiers and townsmen, poets and pirates, battlefield massacres and hidden murders. But the figure of Edward IV stands out ... One of the great strengths of Brothers York is the attention paid to the European stage, and Penn is good at bringing its protagonists to life.
... rip-roaring ... Penn has interwoven the multiple strands of this story with great aplomb, ignoring the dead-ends of conspiracy theory in favour of sensible, balanced judgements ... This does not feel like a 650-page book. Pacy, engrossing and evocative in its details (of feasts and jousts as well as battles and diplomatic skulduggery), it engages the reader’s emotions as well as intellect. For the plight of noblewomen of the time – commodified as either diplomatic bait or marriageable value, forced to witness the beheadings of husbands and sons, inveigled, threatened or even tortured out of their inheritances – it is impossible not to feel a kind of desolation.
Mr. Penn’s narrative is rich in detail, and he leads the reader through a dense and dark forest with masterly skill ... Our picture of Richard was indelibly painted by Shakespeare—as a cruel, manipulative hunchback. Shakepeare’s authority was a biography composed by the chancellor of Henry Tudor (now Henry VII), thus a work of propaganda. The fate of the Princes in the Tower is still a matter for argument. Most hold Richard responsible. This seems to be Mr. Penn’s view, though as a scrupulous historian he stops short of declaring as fact what can only be supposition. In any case, Mr. Penn has written a gripping account of the brothers York and of the England they briefly governed. The best one can say for them is that their Tudor successors were every bit as callous and brutal.
Penn’s first book, a biography of Henry VII – arguably the Tudor monarch with the lowest public profile – showed that he could craft pacy and convincing accounts out of 15th-century source materials. In The Brothers York, he succeeds again, smoothing the period’s interlocking alliances and multigenerational feuds into a narrative that is always readable and even thrilling ... it’s a measure of Penn’s skill as a narrator that he offers memorable sketches of even peripheral characters and brings a novelist’s verve to his telling of events. This doesn’t quite happen as convincingly with some of the book’s women ... There are no simple analogies to be made between then and now, but Penn’s history of betrayal, backstabbing and paranoia strikes notes that still resonate today. On the brink of a new dispensation, England found itself desperately divided, its future far from certain.
The horror of fratricide is merely the price of admission to the family drama Penn here relates. By the time Edward has George murdered, readers have already watched these two and Richard plot against and brood about each other for hundreds of pages, and Penn’s superb gifts as a storyteller make those pages as enjoyable an account of this chaotic period in English history as anything since Thomas Costain’s The Last Plantagenets nearly 60 years ago ... despite George’s sociopathic cowardice and Edward’s fratricidal callousness, the villain of any volume like The Brothers York will always be Richard. In the book’s first half, he’s an undoubtedly brave but somewhat slippery figure, and like most biographers, Penn can scarcely disguise his fascination with this most infamous of Shakespeare’s villains. But as the narrative moves forward, as Richard steadily accumulates wealth and influence under his brother’s watchful tutelage, the intensity of the drama increases ... Penn has told that story with such sweep and enthusiasm that his book easily takes its place alongside similar volumes by Dan Jones and Desmond Seward. The central hypothetical – how might history have changed if these three brothers had been at all fraternal – remains unanswerable, but Penn’s book makes it enormously enjoyable to ponder.
The amount of research that has gone into this account is thoroughly impressive, captured most brilliantly in a concise manner, with salient explanations achieved by referring to the accounts and publications from the time ... an engaging and absorbing read ... This book reads as easy as fiction itself ... Given the size of the book and the hours’ worth of reading involved, it was never a chore and always a pleasure. Such an engaging account is a credit in itself and if you have any interest in this time period but maybe wouldn’t usually read non-fiction, I would urge you to give it a go, as I think you will be pleasantly surprised.
[Penn] he combines a keen sense of time, place, circumstance and anecdote with a firm grasp of human psychology, of the macabre, the comic and the tragic, and – perhaps as important as any of these – an instinct for the rhythm of a sentence ... One of the great strengths of Penn’s narrative is that it constantly factors in the distorting effects of European rivalries on English domestic stability ... Penn’s is a very masculine book: women of the calibre of Margaret of Anjou and Elizabeth Woodville surely deserved more space. Jane Shore, reputedly Edward IV’s favourite mistress, doesn’t make an entrance until the king is dead.
... gripping ... while professing to offer a triptych analysis of the three enigmatic brothers at the heart of this dynasty — Edward IV, George, Duke of Clarence and Richard III — Penn has largely written a richly contextualised and meticulously researched biography of just the first of these figures: Edward IV is the focus of 450 pages of the book’s narrative ... In calling this biographical study tragedy, Penn argues that there is ‘a tragic flaw in the Yorkist dynasty’ and that ‘the tragedy of the brothers York was that they destroyed themselves’. This is a useful corrective to those triumphalist accounts which see the Tudors as masters of historical destiny, with Lancastrians quashing Yorkists in the march towards modernity ... While Penn’s book is only passingly about Richard III, it is a vital corrective to the ongoing, polarising battle over his legacy that has raged since 2012, after his remains were unearthed in Leicester ... This book refuses to airbrush Richard’s violent reputation but, in its careful excavation of the court and politics of Edward IV, it does show that the seeds of the destruction of the House of York were sown well before he took to the throne.
Sufficient documentation, aided by Penn’s entertaining, easy to follow narrative, makes their lives and times real ... Telling of those 24 years takes Penn 688 pages of scholarly, in-depth, but well-written text. A Royal Tragedy has annotations, bibliography, and color illustrations. It also has useful family charts and maps.
... presented as a triptych portrait of Edward and his younger brothers, George, duke of Clarence and Richard III. But it is for the most part a straight biography of Edward. His reign occupies the first 453 pages of a 688-page text. He is the central, real sun in the parhelion, his siblings wan imitations by his side. They rise with him, but soon disappear ... Penn’s last book was Winter King, a well-received biography of the first Tudor monarch, Henry VII. That book was rightly praised for its fresh and lively narrative swagger, and Penn has brought all the same qualities to this new work on Edward. It is a long book, but is peppered with delightful, telling anecdotes and details. Some are comical and others grisly, but all breathe life into their subject, whose reign has proven too much for many less capable narrators to handle ... As Penn unpacks his doomed tale of Edward’s reign, and the subsequent, abysmal two-year ascendancy of his youngest brother Richard, which provides the book’s coda, it is salutary to remember the extent to which medieval English rulers were bound by Continental considerations. By the same token, it is grimly amusing to see how perplexed foreigners were left by England’s vicious and unpredictable politics.
A dramatic portrait of 15th-century England, which was besieged by political upheaval, betrayals, and ruthless violence.
Penn...brings keen understanding and a sharp eye for detail to his prodigiously researched, engrossing history of the decadeslong conflict between the houses of Lancaster and York that ended, in 1485, with the advent of Henry VII ... Besides chronicling intrigues, conspiracies, and shifting alliances among a large cast of characters, Penn details the 'messy reality of life' among the nobles and their subjects: births and deaths, festivals and weddings, feasts and tournaments, famines and illness, and, not least, the unstoppable gossip that circulated constantly ... Rebellious decades come to life vividly in a taut, spirited history.
Penn recreates the jousting tournaments, battlefield clashes, and ever-shifting political alliances of the era, adding texture and color to the historical record ... Though a bit baggy, this rigorous and richly detailed account breathes new life into the Wars of the Roses. Medieval history buffs and fans of Shakespeare’s Richard III will be rewarded.
