The Stolen Crown - Susan Higginbotham

*** 1/2 - An intriguing look at the very complicated subject of The Wars of the Roses. My main complaint? It would have been nice to have a family tree showing how everyone fit together. Since everyone seems to be named the same things (Henry, Edward, Richard, Elizabeth), some way to distinguish who is related to whom would have helped.

I received a free review copy from the publisher Sourcebooks. Thanks!

Kate Woodville was only a young girl when the Yorkist King Edward IV married her sister Elizabeth in secret. But that marriage, and her own to the Lancastrian Harry Stafford, Duke of Buckingham will eventually plunge Kate into the middle of the struggles of the Wars of the Roses, especially given Harry's close friendship with Richard, Duke of Gloucester.

Susan Higginbotham does an excellent job at portraying the conflicting loyalties of the Wars of the Roses, and despite my relative unfamiliarity with the conflict, I was never completely lost. That said, I did often find it difficult to keep all the Margarets, Edwards, and Henrys apart, not to mention to remember whom they were related to and why it all mattered. This is, to an extent, inevitable given the complicated history involved, and Higginbotham generally included explanations in dialogue or inner monologue to help the reader figure things out. Especially the main strands of the story surrounding Harry and Kate are quite clear - but if you feel the need to understand the reason behind the various executions and battles, you should make sure you have some background material to hand.

While I'm generally not a huge fan of first-person narratives outside of a diary/epistolary format, I didn't find the POV distracting in The Stolen Crown. Higginbotham also made sure that the perspective wasn't as limited by including two point of view characters - Kate and Harry. Given how much of the history of the Wars of the Roses takes place on battlefields, I thought this was a strong move. For those that remember, the solely female point of view was what left me feeling somewhat lost for context in Margaret Campbell Barnes The Tudor Rose (which is about Edward IV's daughter Elizabeth of York & Henry Tudor). Higginbotham adroitly side-steps that problem by having a male character who is involved in the more martial side of things.

To be honest, I wasn't terribly fond of Harry. I thought he was a largely realistic character complete with flaws, frustrations and divided loyalties, and I enjoyed the blossoming love between Kate and Harry in the early days of their marriage. But once Harry has grown into a man, he still seems naive and too easily led. There are a few moments in Harry's story that suggest a strong love for Richard - which could explain his wilful blindness regarding the Princes in the Tower and make his subsequent decisions more heart-wrenching, but I'm not sure that I believed in the depth of his emotion. One of the hazards of first-person narratives is that it's much more difficult to pull off subtle/suppressed emotions. If I was to believe that Harry was in love with Richard, I needed more evidence since we were given so much insight into his head. I see the argument that Harry was in denial and was repressing his feelings and confused - given his deep affection for Kate. But again, I think to play with such subtlety, a third-person narration would have been more effective.

This, of course, leads us to the ever-fascinating (and ever-controversial) character of Richard of Gloucester. Higginbotham's Richard is unceasingly political - he's always manipulating people and twisting facts to shape events to his liking. He's ruthless towards his political opponents and thinks nothing of ruining a reputation or taking a life if he deems it necessary for the succession. Partially this can be ascribed to his learning from his brother's ill-fated attempts at mercy and compassion, but Richard comes across as inhumanly unemotional. Perhaps Higginbotham's Richard suffers coming relatively close behind what I thought was a masterful portrayal of the man in all his complexities in The Tudor Rose, but I couldn't see the Richard that inspired such devotion in Harry Stafford, nor the man who was so beloved of his subjects in York, nor the man so passionate about his wife Anne. So Richard didn't steal the show in Higginbotham's The Stolen Crown, but perhaps the novel would have been better for it if he had.

Susan Higginbotham's The Stolen Crown is a very readable and comprehensible look at the muddle that was The Wars of the Roses. I learned a great deal about the conflict and Edward IV and his family that I had never heard of. Particularly interesting, to my mind, were the attempts to prove Edward's marriage invalid - I saw portents of the future there! I enjoyed reading about Edward IV (who was shown as a charmingly larger than life character) and the Woodvilles. I'd recommend The Stolen Crown to someone interested in seeing what came before the Tudors.

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