****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
This is an excellent biography. First, Amy Licence's style is extremely readable. Second, she clearly delineates what is fact and what is conjecture on her part or the part of other historians, and she clearly strives to be unbiased in her opinions, offering multiple viewpoints. A good example of this is found in her analysis of Anne and Richard's marriage:"The thorny question remains. Did Richard love Anne? If so, why do the rumorssuggest that he treated her cruelly in her last months of life? Setting aside thescurrilous stream of gossip that dogged Richard during and after his life, whathappened between husband and wife during what must have been, for Anne, a`winter of discontent'? If she loved him, the disintegration of their family unit andher health must have been the tragic cost of the crown she now wore. While fifteenth-century definitions of marriage render these responses anachronistic, a modern analysisof his behaviour of 1484-85 cannot avoid such a question. If Richard had loved her, atany point, was this overridden by political imperatives and the need to protect himselfand the fragile dynasty from increasing attack? Had his affection been graduallyeroded over the course of their years together? Had he married her purely for herinheritance? It would be wrong to assess Richard through a romantic filter when itcomes to his marriage; kings did tire of wives they had once loved and seek to replacethem with younger models in order to father sons. Elizabeth of York's own son,Henry VIII, provides enough evidence for this. There is no doubt that he wasromantically in love with Catherine of Aragon as a young man, yet their failure toproduce a living son undermined his emotion. The desire to qualify the Gloucesters'relationship as a love match is strong, but there is little evidence to support ordisprove such a theory. It is also natural to seek positive interpretations, in theinterests of balance, when rejecting the centuries of defamation that had done somuch damage to assessments of Richard as a man and a king. It may have beenAnne's tragedy that their previously harmonious marriage did not fit the requirementsof a royal match. Richard may have loved her as a wife, but considered that shefailed in her primary function as a queen. If any turning point can be identified,the loss of Edward must be it. If they had remained as duke and duchess, the boy'sdeath would have had predominantly personal ramifications. As king and queen, itopened the kingdom to invasion and conflict. Sadly for them as individuals, theGloucesters' marriage was undone by their lack of fecundity. If Anne was Richard'stragic queen, he was, no less, her tragic husband."Additionally, Licence provides a wealth of information about life in medieval England. Finally, two other pluses are the large number of color photographs and the information in the Epilogue about the discovery of Richard's skeleton under the famous, or infamous, social services car park. The last three pages of photos are of the dig and Richard's skeleton. Anyone interested in late medieval England in general and Richard III and Anne Neville in particular would be interested in this biography.ANNE NEVILLE
