Tudor Queens of England

Tudor Queens of England by David Loades
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

From what I see, the book is targeted at people with a beginner-to-intermediate level of history. From time to time it skips over important events that didn't directly involve the book's characters (if I can call them such) but influenced their lives one way or the other by saying "it's well known how [a particular event] played out"...

That's all good and well but then the author does some errors that jump out of the page in a book that should require at least minimal knowledge to read. Example number one appears in Elizabeth Woodville's chapter. The John Woodville that was executed by the Earl of Warwick was Elizabeth's brother, not her uncle (as the author calls him not once, but twice), the same brother that had married, in his 20s, a 65 year-old widow - fact that had actually been mentioned a few pages before that. It is relevant that it was that particular brother that was killed, as the author himself mentions how the 65 year-old widow was a Neville - a relation of the Earl of Warwick.

Example number 2 appears in the Elizabeth of York chapter. The Viscount Welles is mentioned as uncle of king Henry VII (correct), because he is half-brother of Jasper Tudor...! (incorrect). Viscount Welles was a half-brother of Margaret Beaufort - also relevant, because it shows Margaret's influence with Henry. Cecily, the sister of Elizabeth of York, was the daughter of a king and she married Viscount Welles, who was a virtual nobody (albeit with noble blood) who was lucky enough to share a mother with Margaret Beaufort.

The third one I noticed was the worst of all. In the Mary Queen of Scots chapter, the mother of Henry Darnley was described as the daughter of Eleanor Brandon (herself a daughter of Mary Tudor). The fact that Eleanor Brandon was born 1519 and Lord Darnley was born 1545 should have already rung some bells. Lord Darnley's claim to the English throne did not come via Mary Tudor, but via her elder sister Margaret, who, through her second marriage to Archibald Douglas, was the mother of Lord Darnley's mother, Margaret Douglas, who had married the Earl of Lennox. That is VERY relevant because his claim was in no way "distant", as the author claims. Margaret, not Mary, was the older sister, and when Mary Stuart, her granddaughter via her first marriage married Henry Darnley, grandson via her second, she basically united the two top legitimate claims to the English throne (considering that Elizabeth, queen at the time, had a claim that was tainted by illegitimacy and had no children and no other children of Henry VIII survived after her, since Margaret was the older sister of Henry VIII, her main heir was Mary followed by Henry Darnley). Therefore, the child born of this union had a double claim and quite unlikely to have a rival.

In the final chapter (queens after 1603), there's a river of mistakes. For an author that keeps insisting of mentioning the number of children each queen produces, he gets them wrong in an astonishing manner. Queen Anne did not have 18 pregnancies, but 17. Queen Victoria did not have 10 children, she had 9 and not "most of them" got married, all of them got married - just that not all of them produced children and not all of them have descendants alive today(which is a completely different matter). I will give him the benefit of a doubt and say that maybe he meant that "most of them" married into other royal families, spreading Victoria's bloodline pretty much in every European country.

You may think I am a bit obsessive compulsive with these things, but I fail to see how a book that obviously expects is readers to at least know the basic events of the days can end up making mistakes that can be corrected by Wikipedia and are known even by people that do not have advanced historical knowledge. I think that a person that reads actual history and not historical fiction, will expect at least the Wikipedia facts named right (and none of the mistakes above is really that hard to spot). These things make you wonder if the author did any research at all.

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