The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses and the Rise of the Tudors by Dan Jones Read Free Book Online Page A

translated into modern currencies with the assistance of the conversion tool at http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/currency/ , which gives modern values for ancient, and also has a ‘purchasing power’ function. Readers should be aware, however, that the conversion of monetary values across the centuries is a perilously inexact science, and that the figures given are for rough guidance only. As an approximation, £100 in 1450 would be worth £55,000 (or $90,000) today. The same sum would represent ten years’ salary for an ordinary English labourer in the mid-fifteenth century.
    Where a distance between two places is given, it has usually been calculated using Google Maps Walking Directions, and thus tends to be calculated according to the fastest route via modern roads.
    The family trees presented at the start of this book are designed to clarify the complex dynastic links described later in the text. For reasons of space and sense, these have been simplified. In some places, siblings have been placed out of order of age.

 
     
    Who wot nowe that ys here
    Where he schall be anoder yere?
    ANON. (1445)
     
    For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground
    And tell sad stories of the death of kings;
    How some have been deposed; some slain in war,
    Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed;
    Some poison’d by their wives: some sleeping kill’d;
    All murder’d: for within the hollow crown
    That rounds the mortal temples of a king
    Keeps Death his court …
    WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE,
Richard II
(
c
.1595)

I
BEGINNINGS
1420–1437
    ‘We were in perfect health.’
    KING HENRY VI (aged seventeen months)

II

What Is a King?
1437–1455
    Thus began sorrow upon sorrow, and death for death …
    THE BRUT CHRONICLE 1

III

The Hollow Crown
1455–1471
    I spoke quietly to his Majesty about English affairs …
    He remarked with a sigh that it is impossible to fight against Fortune.
    SFORZA DE BETTINI OF FLORENCE,
    Milanese ambassador to the court of Louis XI 1

IV

The Rise of the Tudors
1471–1525
    But who will insane lust for power spare …?
    DOMINIC MANCINI

Epilogue: How Many Men, in the Name of God Immortal, Have You Killed?
    The death of the last White Rose in 1525 was really the final rattle of opposition to the Crown to have its origins in the wars that had shaken the realm since the first outbreak of violence during Henry VI’s reign in the 1450s. By the 1520s the generation that ruled and moved England were, by and large, not veterans of Bosworth or Stoke. Anyone who had participated in either of those battles would be in his fifties – approaching old age, by the standards of the time. Few could now remember the horrors of Towton. Henry VIII’s generation were children of (relative) peace, and though the elderly would have spoken of the violence of civil war, and shared their memories of the ferocious battles that had taken place in the midlands, the marches of Wales, the outskirts of London and the far north, the truth was that most of the protagonists and the participants of the wars were long dead. The wounds were passing into the realm of history and folklore.
    One very important reason for this was that the central issue that had lain at the root of the wars appeared to have been resolved. This was not a case of an overmighty nobility having been blunted, of a system we now call ‘bastard feudalism’ having been destroyed, or of a radical shift having occurred in the power structures of England, as has sometimes been argued. Rather, it was the result of a final restoration of determined and legitimate kingship that would have been recognisable to men who had lived a century earlier, during the heyday of the Plantagenets. Henry VIII was not merely a king who had inherited his crown by right of birth rather than conquest: he was a majestic, assertive, warlike prince who combined the swagger and grit of Edward IV withthe appetite for all the trappings of Renaissance princeliness that was common to the other great