Exclusive interview with author Dan Jones and a review of his book about the fall of the Plantagenets and the rise of the Tudors
Rating: 4 Stars
by Gabrielle Pantera
“I open the new book with a dramatic sequence describing the execution of Margaret Pole, cousin of king Henry VIII, in 1541,” says Wars of the Roses author Dan Jones. “Margaret was 67 when she was beheaded, but the foreign ambassadors at the English court took her to be 80 or 90. She was beheaded by an incompetent deputy axeman. He took eight blows to kill her. Eight blows! Can you even begin to imagine?”
In the fifteenth century there were five different kings in England. However, unlike Game of Thrones, there were no dragons. In the book we see the Lancasters and the Yorks, two different branches of the Plantagenet dynasty, fight to wear the crown. Many die in the civil war. Various Plantagenets ruled England for over three hundred years until greed and power corrupted them. They had a spectacular fall.
Jones descriptions of the battles and his narrative take you back to the 15th century. He demystifies the fall of the Plantagents as a family and their conflict and the rise of the Tudors. Jones’ writing style will make you forget you’re reading history, but in reality you’ll be soaking up a lot of facts. Alive during that time were Joan of Arc, Henry V, whose military victories gained England much land in France and Richard III, who took possession of the crown over his young nephews, who disappeared into the Tower. A great gift for the history lover in your family.
“We are accustomed to thinking that the wars of the roses ended at Bosworth with the victory of Henry VII over Richard III in 1485,” says Jones. “Far from it. They rumbled on, diminished and diluted but still significant, for decades afterward. Decades.”
The prequel to The Wars of the Roses, The Plantagenets has been made into a four-part documentary miniseries, with Jones as host. Premiering on Channel 5 in the UK November 26th.
“It’s very cool and very different to most history documentaries,” says Jones. “We’re also working at the moment on developing The Plantagenets and The Wars of the Roses for drama series. That’s the logical next step for me. You’ve had The Tudors, The White Queen, The Borgias, Rome, and so on. Game of Thrones is obviously huge, too, in the sort of alternative medieval sphere where you have barons and kings but also scary skeletons and dragons and whatnot. Anyway, all this I think suggests that there’s a massive, massive appetite for good quality, epic historical drama. So it makes sense to me to start taking these incredible stories from the Plantagenet era in that direction.”
Jones says he takes delight in finding and including in his books what he calls weird stuff. “The best of all is from The Plantagenets,” says Jones. “During a particularly turbulent period in the mid-thirteenth century a rebellious royal agent based in Essex was planning to firebomb London by tying incendiary devices to cockerels’ feet and flying them over the city. Medieval drone warfare.”
Jones has been studying Plantagenet history ever since he was a student at Cambridge 15 years ago. Besides writing several books, Jones is a journalist who writes regularly for the Sunday Times, the Mail on Sunday, the Daily Telegraph, and The Spectator. For five years he’s written a column about sports for The Evening Standard in London.
Next year is the 800th anniversary of the granting of Magna Carta. Jones will be doing a lot of public speaking for that event and has written a short book about the origins and legacy of the charter.
Jones, lives in Battersea, London, which he finds conveniently close to The British Library and the National Archives in Kew. He was born in Reading.
The Wars of the Roses The Fall of the Plantagenets and the Rise of the Tudors by Dan Jones • Hardcover, 416 pages, Publisher: Viking Adult (October 14, 2014), Language: English, ISBN: 9780670026678 $ 36.00
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