Reviews

Introduction

On this page we will include occasional reviews of books that are likely to be of significant interest to anyone investigating royal genealogy. If you have a suggestion for a book to be reviewed, or if you would like to submit a review for publication on this page, please contact us via the Feedback page.

England's Boy King: The Diary of Edward VI, 1547-1553

Published 2005 by Ravenhall Books

ISBN 190504304X

Very few monarchs kept personal diaries. Fragments remain here and there, and musings culled from letters or reported conversations, but eyewitness accounts of a reign by the ruling monarch are very rare indeed.

Which makes Edward VI's diary a very remarkable book. It is a frank and open account of key events by a very young monarch and comes from an age when little by way of personal reflection has survived. Edward was only ten when he began his journal and it ends six months before his untimely death. It is full of detailed observations, British and European news and a fair bit of court gossip and intrigue. It is fuller after 1550 when the king is more mature, and this is reflected in his writings.

We learn a great deal about Edward, about his kingdom and about how the monarchy functioned. It was an incredibly difficult period with reform and revolt in the air and we get a real sense of the vulnerability of the throne during peasant revolts and intrigue by factions at court.

Nicely produced, this is an excellent book and a welcome addition to the library of anyone interested in English history. It is a must-have for Tudor fans.

(Reviewed by Jonathan North)

Click to order from Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk.

Plantagenet Ancestry : A Study in Colonial and Medieval Families

by Douglas Richardson

(Royal Ancestry Series, editor Kimball G. Everingham)

Published 2004 by Genealogical Publishing Company, Inc.

ISBN 0806317507

If you are descended from early North American colonists, you may belong to one of the most famous families in history. With the publication of Douglas Richardson's "Plantagenet Ancestry", there is now an excellent single-volume source for researching your links to the family that produced a line of English kings.

David Faris's "Plantagenet Ancestry of Seventeenth-Century Colonists", published in 1996, traced the legitimate descendants of King Henry III of England, a great-grandchild of Geoffrey Plantagenet. The new "Plantagenet Ancestry" is an expansion and revision of that work, tracing the descendants of 16 of Geoffrey's great-grandchildren, and is the first in a planned series on the ancestry of American colonial immigrants. Future volumes will cover descents from the Magna Carta signatories, early feudal English barons, and the Emperor Charlemagne.

The new book documents lines of descent for approximately 190 17th-century North American colonists from the Plantagenet dynasty that ruled England between 1154 and 1485. It addresses three distinct audiences:

1. Those desiring a reliable reference for events and individuals in the colonial and medieval time periods.
2. Those family researchers seeking information about their more remote ancestry.
3. Those wishing to understand English history from a family viewpoint.

The lines of descent are organised alphabetically by family name, but with the primary Plantagenet line (down to Richard II) filling the first 32 pages of the main section. The other lines occupy 774 pages, the bulk of the main section, and are followed by a comprehensive 78-page bibliography and an index of names.

The wealth of detail in the book is astonishing, and will provide weeks of fascinating reading to anyone with an interest in English history. Each person featuring in a line of descent, and each of his/her spouses, is described in a mini-biography containing whatever salient details are known. Typically, an entry contains dates and places of birth, marriage, death, burial, and other major events including battles; names of children; titles and offices; and legal records such as trials, wills and grants. Each entry is followed by a list of sources, and an attempt has been made to provide documentation for each generation. Footnotes list the names of colonial immigrants who descend from the couples in the main entries.

This hefty volume, with 1000-odd pages and weighing in at more than 5 pounds, will perhaps seem expensive at $85, but you may soon start to feel embarrassed at acquiring the fruits of such scholarship so cheaply.

Click here for further information, or to order direct from the publisher.