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The Kings and Queens of England

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If you have any interest in a fascinating look at some very dysfunctional, rulers, I highly recommend this compendium. Mainly it focuses on dates, conflicts (because English royalty lol), marriages, births, along side some very intriguing bits of palace gossip. This book doesn’t focus on those specific aspects at all, giving only a fun and fascinating run down of each monarch. Nevertheless, the Beauforts remained closely allied with Gaunt's other descendants, the Royal House of Lancaster.

I was pleasantly surprised at how much I learned; never did I find the material dry or boring - definitely recommended! Historian Simon Keynes states, for example, that "Offa was driven by a lust for power, not a vision of English unity; and what he left was a reputation, not a legacy.The chapters are presented with a brief character analysis, a timeline of events, illustrations of people places and events, reflective observations from contemporaries and sections devoted to highlights of the ruler’s life. This was a little more in depth than The Tudor Treasury, which was good but sometimes it was a bit dense, but maybe that's just me! He hurried to Westminster and got himself crowned, then had one of the most unsuccessful reigns in English history, entirely dominated by a savage civil war. She has written five highly praised books which focus on women in history, The Weaker Vessel: Women's Lot in Seventeenth Century Britain (Wolfson Award for History, 1984), The Warrior Queens: Boadecia's Chariot, The Six Wives of Henry VIII, Marie Antoinette: The Journey (Franco-British Literary Prize 2001), which was made into a film by Sofia Coppola in 2006 and most recently Love and Louis XIV: The Women in the Life of the Sun King. There are lots of funny anecdotes like how William I (The Conqueror) was so fat he couldn't fit in his coffin.

The club of royal families of Europe that continually intermarried obviously made for some thorough genetic mixing. This is a great book for the key information on each monarch and gave me a really clear mind map for how this country was formed. Not only have I learnt a lot about the monarchy, I have also really enjoyed these intriguing, often larger than life and stranger than fiction, stories! He was spectacularly unsuccessful, inheriting England, Ireland and most of France but then losing control of almost all of it within two decades. Following the decisive Battle of Assandun on 18 October 1016, King Edmund signed a treaty with Cnut (Canute) under which all of England except for Wessex would be controlled by Cnut.

The subsequent dynastic struggles of the Angevins and Plantagenets heralded the great age of English kingship under the Tudors and Stuarts, who united the crowns of Scotland and England, before the Hanoverians combined personal rule with parliamentary government, ushering in the modern age and the royalty of today. Unfortunately when it comes to the current queen she refuses to identify any weaknesses other than that of her children.

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