other pieces of parchment

Queens at War is the last of Alison Weir's medieval English queens series, and a c-c-c-combo breaker after Conquest, Crusade and Chivalry. Surprisingly her book also covers five queens: Joan of Navarre, Katherine of Valois, Margaret of Anjou, Elizabeth Widville and Anne Neville; when I thought she'd end with Elizabeth of York, but maybe this last book was getting long enough as it is, plus she'd already written a book about that Elizabeth.

Anyway, I had a good time! Which is surprising because I'm super familiar with the Cousins War and a lot of this book was a rehash, though funnily enough it's because of Weir that I started calling it that over the War of the Roses, but Weir took pains within this book to make clear that Cousins War is also modern fashionable terminology and War of the Roses is also fine as a term, actually. There's also some new opinions on Weir's side, I feel, compared to her much-earlier book about the York vs. Lancaster feud, and I feel she's much kinder to Margaret of Anjou even while detailing the many, many things she did wrong. The tragedy of Margaret, IMO, is that if she had a strong husband she would've been such a successful and widely respected queen, but Henry VI being weak is what forced Margaret to step up, plus her unfamiliarity with English politics and prejudices just made it so much worse.

I think because having the book prologue with the tail end of Edward III's reign really sets the stage for everything that happens with Henry Bolingbroke and Richard II, and then the fallout with the next generations once the glory of Henry V's era fades. Once again I marvel that Henry V is regarded so highly when none of his successes stuck, and it was because of all of that that his son Henry VI inherited huge debts and a fractious government. I also enjoyed keeping track of where Katherine of Valois was after her first husband died as she's the connection between the Tudor and the Beaufort line, and poor Joan of Navarre, marrying in but having no impact on the family line, while Mary de Bohun does have impact but doesn't get to be queen at all.

Two general observations in wrapping up, one is that Weir does give Elizabeth Widville (Weir's choice of spelling in this book) her due, and although Weir does spell out how much the aggrandizement of the Widville clan is what caused them to be hated, I had the thought, "at least she's not Eleanor of Provence", since Eleanor and her fam should have known better than the parvenu Widvilles, and then I laughed when Weir went and namedropped Eleanor of Provence as a specific example of that kind of past behaviour being hated on by the English commons (yay!).

Second observation which is somewhat related to the first, is that Weir reports on the usual of how Edward IV's marriage to Elizabeth Widville is a major cause for falling out with the Earl of Warwick and the next round of fighting, but I feel like that that's such easy scapegoating because Edward IV was not inclined to be as much influenced by Warwick as Warwick would have liked, plus Warwick wanted Edward to marry a French princess, when the commons still loathed Margaret of Anjou and remembered freshly Henry V's successes against France. Elizabeth was not a great choice, but neither was Warwick's, and fighting would have erupted anyway, IMO.