Thomas Penn (historian)

Thomas Penn (born 1974) is an English historian, author and editor.

Quotes

The Brothers York: A Royal Tragedy (2019)

All page numbers are from the hardcover first American edition published by Simon & Schuster in June 2020, ISBN 978-1-4516-9417-8, first printing

The British edition is subtitled "An English Tragedy"

All unlinked mentions of Edward refer to Edward IV, of George or Clarence to George Plantagenet, and of Richard to Richard III

• It reassesses the brothers themselves: Edward IV, whose slow transformation from virile teenage war-leader to bloated, avaricious tyrant – traits that, skipping a generation, found a new form in his grandson Henry VIII – remains obscure in the public imagination; the simmering stew of self-entitlement and personal inadequacy that was George duke of Clarence; and Richard III. Richard’s notorious reign, of course, needs no introduction.
  • Introduction (p. xxii)

• Their ways of thinking are traced, too, through the books and political tracts that people read or absorbed second hand as the site paths through these crisis-ridden years, clutching hold of ideas and ideals that, all too often, evaporated on their first contact with reality.
  • Introduction (pp. xxii-xxiii)

• Making for the king’s throne, empty under its cloth of estate, York laid a hand on it ‘like a man taking possession’ and stated flat leave that he had come to challenge his right”: to claim the crown of England. He was met, not with a ringing acclamation, but with a sea of faces frozen with shock.
  • Part One, “Blood Royal”, Chapter 1, “Three Suns” (p. 29)

• With England in the grip of a deflationary spiral, and desperate to avoid antagonizing public opinion further, Edward had to explore more creative solutions to fundraising. As ever, when Edward brought his massive energies to bear on a task, he proved rather good at it. And while he had a habit of ignoring advice when it suited him to do so, he tended to prick up his ears when his financial advisors spoke to him about money-making opportunities.
  • Chapter 4, “Two Kings of England” (p. 94)

• For kings and princes, of course, marriage and extra-marital sex were hardly mutually exclusive. Still, there were contemporary medical concerns about promiscuity. As far as physicians were concerned, sex, like most things, was good in moderation: part of a lifestyle that kept the four humours in balance. But ‘immoderate frequency of the work of Venus’, in the words of the distinguished Oxford physician Gilbert Kymer (an associate of Edward’s own doctor William Hatteclyffe), came with a catalogue of health warnings, including corruption of the humours, increased risk of illness, ‘forgetfulness, fatness, neglectfulness and foolishness’. It also, Kymer concluded, ‘shortens the life’. And, as his close servants and advisers were all too aware, Edward did nothing in moderation.
  • Chapter 4, “Two Kings of England” (pp. 98-99)

• Arriving at Reading in mid-September, braced for the days of tactful persuasion that later ahead, they were unprepared for the bombshell Edward now dropped. He was in fact already married.
  • Chapter 4, “Two Kings of England” (p. 106)

• For decades the Medicis had followed a general rule of thumb: that offering financial services to princes was very risky indeed. Such loans were difficult to secure and to amortize; besides which, banks often found it impossible to extract themselves from such agreements, being forced to extend further loans to their princely debtors in order to stand a chance of recovering the initial credit they had lent….But there was a flip side. Supplying credit to princes brought with it access and influence. Doors magically swung open to new markets and business opportunities, from the importing of luxury goods to the exporting of wool.
  • Part Two, “Blind Affection”, Chapter 6, “They Are Not to be Trusted” (p. 148; ellipsis represents the elision of a list of examples)

• Spread by people who knew perfectly well that, once in circulation, such false news was almost impossible to counter, it was immediately effective.
  • Part Three, “A Season of Punishment”, Chapter 8, “Robin Mend-All” (p. 198)

• It hardly mattered if the allegations themselves didn’t stand up. As Warwick knew perfectly well, the truth of the matter was irrelevant: it was the story that counted.
  • Chapter 9, “The Matter Quickeneth” (p. 219)

• Adversity seemed to bring out the best in Edward, and his natural instinct for breaking through barriers of social rank to form intense bonds with the men around him. The crisis he faced seemed to absorb those obsessive drives that in quieter, more aimless times found released in his bingeing and womanizing.
  • Chapter 10, “They Think He Will Leave His Skin There” (p. 254)

• Not for the first time, Edward’s view of his own irresistible appeal was dented by contact with reality.
  • Chapter 11, “The Knot is Knit Again” (p. 282)

• The king’s brothers had, naturally, given their consent. A formality it may have been, but it was a significant one: Prince Edward was now the king’s heir presumptive. Which meant that Clarence, and by extension Richard, were not. Nonetheless, both brothers could console themselves with the fact that, as Edward carved up the political map of England, they were at the head of the queue.
  • Part Four, “Brother Against Brother”, Chapter 12, “A New Foundation” (p. 300)

• From the outset of his reign, Edward also displayed an obsession about his health that was entirely in keeping with his compulsive tendencies, consuming sweetened powders and potions with the same gigantic appetite that fueled his bingeing and womanizing. In what were years of almost constant plague and ‘great pestilence’, Edward and his doctors were preoccupied with warding off infection: anybody who could afford to do so – and most couldn’t – did much the same. After all, people had a little choice, even though they knew much medicine wasn’t just overpriced and largely useless, but actively dangerous.
  • Chapter 12, “Brother Against Brother” (pp. 321-322)

• If such behavior on the part of the Yorkist establishment was shocking, it wasn’t unexpected. It was a twisted manifestation of Edward’s philosophy of ‘family first’, which maintained that power should be concentrated in the hands of the ‘king’s blood’.
  • Chapter 13, “Master of the Game” (p. 339)

• Rather than clarifying the diplomatic situation, the new treaties simply added to the haze of mutual suspicion between the three rulers.
  • Chapter 16, “Diamond Cuts Diamond” (p. 424)

• Here was the king in his element: a nod and smile here, a ‘good word’ there, his intimacy edged with calculation. This was the corporate environment in which Edward had always thrived, and which had come to encapsulate the character of his reign. Content to get, spend and consume, luxuriating in his own charismatic majesty, Edward’s rule combined bonhomie, greed, rapacity and – through the haze of his excesses – a narrow-eyed watchfulness, alert to financial irregularities and wandering loyalties alike. Not that anybody contemplated disloyalty – at least, not in public. Under the practiced charm, the threat of a terrifying, indiscriminate violence lay ready to erupt against anybody who crossed the interests of the king or his family. This was what Edward’s rule had come to – and, for some, especially its beneficiaries, these blurred, limited horizons were enough.
  • Chapter 17, “They Have Taken Away the Rose of the World” (pp. 441-442)

• Richard’s insistence on the death penalty for his opponents was the kind of move made all too often in the last few decades: seeking legal endorsement for what was essentially a political settling of scores.
  • Part Five, “The Gaze of Our Inward Eye”, Chapter 18, “Old Royal Blood” (p. 475)

• When it came to ridding himself of knotty problems, Richard was making a habit of putting necessity first and law a distant second.
  • Chapter 18, “Old Royal Blood” (p. 488)

• In the absence of concrete information, stories proliferated.
  • Chapter 19, “No Long Time in Rest” (p. 503)

• Whatever the details, one dominant narrative soon established itself. The boys had been killed, and on Richard’s watch: ‘the people’, wrote one chronicler, ‘laid the blame only on him’.
  As commentators acknowledged, whatever Richard had – or had not – actually done soon came to be irrelevant. It was the story, ‘common report’, which mattered; ‘hard it is to alter the natural disposition of one’s mind’, the same chronicler reflected, ‘and suddenly to extirp the thing therein settled by daily conversation’. Once people had made up their mind to believe something, in other words, it was all but impossible to make them change it. Unable to offer any positive proof of the princes’ continued survival, Richard lost control of the narrative.
  • Chapter 19, “No Long Time in Rest” (pp. 503-504)

• Von Poppelau was the ideal ambassador. Equally at home in the tiltyard, court and library, he possessed sensational strength – he carried with him a lance so heavy that only he could lift it – and could turn a well-worked oration. As he travelled up from London, however, he concluded he didn’t like the English very much. In his league of national stereotypes, they more or less came bottom, outdoing the Poles in pretension, the Hungarians in violence and the Lombards in duplicity. Their women, though stunning, were rather too independent-minded for his liking. And their cooking was atrocious.
  • Chapter 20, “The Castle of Care” (p. 526)

• In Elizabeth’s reign, a time when the civil wars had finally passed from living memory, the story of York finally ceased to be a live issue for the Tudors. Moralizing histories of the conflict became simply a way of throwing the Tudor achievement into starker relief while entertaining the public with the ghastliness of the Yorkist fratricidal relationships. In decades to come, accounts of Edward’s self-indulgence, Clarence’s vaulting ambition and Richard’s tyranny were offered to monarchs as examples of how not to do it, their authors often more concerned with flattering or pointing out the foibles of their dedicatees then with the accuracy of their history.
  • Epilogue (pp. 571-572)