One-sided.

A lot of history books get tarred with that brush, but it is more than usually relevant to Desmond Seward's book about the Wars of the Roses. Covering a civil war almost always brings the danger of tilting toward one side or the other, but Seward's approach makes balance even harder to find.

Seward doesn't really give a history of England from 1455 to 1487; he gives biographies of five characters, trying to use these to tell the story of the Wars.

The problem is, five characters is an odd number. That means he will inherently lean more toward one side than the other.

And Seward makes it worse. Three of his characters are Margaret Beaufort, the mother of the future King Henry VII; Cardinal Morton, later Henry's Archbishop of Canterbury; and the Earl of Oxford, who is believed to have been the chief general at the Battle of Bosworth that put Henry on the throne. Not only does that give us three Lancastrians, it gives us three fanatical Lancastrians. Or, rather, one fanatical Lancastrian (Oxford) and two fanatical Tudors.

To represent the other side, the Yorkists, we have William, Lord Hastings, who was King Edward IV's drinking buddy (more or less) and Jane Shore, Edward's mistress. One of whom (Hastings) was executed by King Richard III and the other degraded. So, while Yorkists, they were both enemies of the last Yorkist king.

And Shore was, at most, an infant when the wars began, and several of the others still quite young. It is an inherently biased portrait; we get very little direct information about Richard Duke of York, the father of Edward IV the first Yorkist king. This is made worse by the fact that Seward, as his book on Richard III shows, has a very strong axe to grind. There were plenty of neutrals in the Wars, or characters who changed sides, or characters who were Yorkist and survived. You wouldn't know it from Seward.

All this might be forgivable if the result were easier to follow. But all the bouncing around between characters is very confusing. This history is neither fair nor very interesting.

Desmond Seward has written very good popular histories; I very much enjoyed his book on the Hundred Years' War. But his books on the Wars of the Roses are simply not a good place to learn about perhaps the most complicated political period in English history. ( )

Found this overview readable and enjoyable. Got me very interested in reading more about Margaret Beaufort ( )

2970 The Wars of the Roses Through the Lives of Five Men and Women of the Fifteenth Century, by Desmond Seward (read 6 Apr 1997) I think Seward is a better historian than Alison Weir, whose book titled the same as this one I read Jan. 7,1997, but a lot of the detail able to be extracted from records isn't frightfully interesting. Seward's device is to pay special attention to five people: William Hastings, a strong supporter of Edward IV; Margaret Beaufort, mother of Henry VII; John de Vere, a strong supporter of the Lancaster cause; Dr. John Morton, who became a Cardinal in 1495; and Jane Shore, a mistress of Edward IV. This book was too diffused to be as good as I expected. ( )