Most Influential Monarchs in British History (up to 1603)

Please welcome Robin, of Lady Gwyn's Kingdom, who submits the following guest post:

Most Influential Monarchs in British History (up to 1603)

While awaiting the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton in April, many have wondered what kind of King and Queen these two will become and how their reign will impact Britain. I have thought the same thing but I have also thought back on the many monarchs who have already left their mark on the kingdom. Thus the idea for this post was born and below are the monarchs (up to 1603) who I feel made the biggest impact on England - for good or bad.


1. William the Conqueror

Obviously we need to start at the beginning (or close to it anyway!) and that means the Norman Conquest of 1066. One of the most well known of William's contributions is the Tower of London. He originally built it to show the native English that he was now in charge and he was there to stay. Another of William's contributions to history, and one that may be more important historically, is the Doomsday Book, which was a very complete survey of England at the time (names of towns, who lived there, what they owned, etc, etc). Many customs, especially in the royal court, were formed during William's reign. The Anglo-Saxon ways were slowly erased. The coming of the Normans changed much in England and many of those changes remained through the years.


2. John

This youngest son of Eleanor of Aquitaine and Henry II is usually seen as one of the worst kings in English history but there is one legacy from his reign that made a huge impact on the country and its future - Magna Carta. Because of the lack of trust between John and his barons, Magna Carta was eventually forced on John as a way of controlling some of the monarch's powers. While bits and pieces of this were whittled away over the years, some of the laws set down in the 13th century remain to this day. Some view Magna Carta as a "great constitutional document," the beginnings of the freedoms so many enjoy today.

3. Edward I

This warrior king changed the boundaries of England as no king before him had done. He accomplished what no king before him had managed - the conquest of Wales and Scotland. Granted, England's control of Scotland turned out to be temporary, but Edward did manage to expand England's boundaries and much of that remains in "English" hands to this day. In order to hang on to England's new territory and fill the local populaces with awe, Edward went on a building spree of massive proportions, building many castles along the Welsh border, most of which can be visited today (Caernarfon Castle for example).


4. Henry V

Another of England's warrior kings set quite a bit in motion for England's future, though at the time most of it could not have been imagined. His victory in France gave Englishmen a strong sense of pride, not to mention the desire continue the country's military successes for several generations. After his victory over France and claiming of the French crown (which many English monarchs tried to actually wear), he married the French King's daughter, who in turn gave birth to the future Henry VI, whose reign would be the main battle ground of the Wars of the Roses.


5. Henry VII

While I am not overly fond of the man, I add Henry VII to this list mainly for the fact that had he not been victorious on Bosworth Field, the next two powerful monarchs on my list would not have existed. It is hard to image British history without the presence of this king's son and granddaughter, not to mention the huge changes that occurred during their reigns.


6. Henry VIII

When talking about changes in England we can't overlook Henry's break from the Catholic Church in his quest for a divorce. One could say that, aside from the Norman Conquest in 1066, the break with the Church during Henry's reign is the most significant change in England's history. It certainly was momentous and fueled tension in the country for many years to come. Henry VIII also began the building up of England's Navy, seeing it as a way to help build and secure the empire he so desperately wanted to create.


7. Elizabeth I

Henry VIII's daughter had an equally important impact on England and its future - politically and culturally. The big triumph of Elizabeth's reign is the triumph of the English over the Spanish Armada. There is no way of knowing what England would be like today if Elizabeth and her small navy had not over come the much more powerful Spanish forces. However, Elizabeth's reign is particularly known for the achievements of artists, poets, and playwrights (does the name William Shakespeare ring any bells?); so many achievements and advancements were made during her reign that this literary time period is called the Elizabethan era.

I am well aware that these are not the only monarchs who have made an impact on England throughout its long history. I am also aware that these are just short little bits of information and many of these monarchs did much more than I have mentioned above. I simply wanted to highlight some of the kings (and queen) whose influence can still be seen through the country to this day.

What are your thoughts on these monarchs? Who do you think is one of the most influential monarchs, and who's contributions do you most value?

What's on my iPod?- Henry VIII

The following is a bit of humor submitted by Robin of Lady Gwyn's Kingdom. What would you add for iPods of your favorite historical figure?

What's on My iPod? - Henry VIII

If some of our favorite historical figures could show us their Ipods, what would be on them?

First up is Henry VIII! What would this infamous English King have on his Ipod?
1. Ain't No Mountain High Enough - Diana Ross (could fit any wife he's after)
2. It's My Life - Jon Bon Jovi
3. I Got You Babe - Sonny and Cher (again...all wives fit)
4. I'll Make Love to You - Boys II Men (and again, except Anne of Cleves lol!)
5. Anymore - Travis Tritt (yet again, all of them)
6. Don't Take the Girl - Tim McGraw (fits with Jane Seymour)
7. You Can't Always Get What You Want - Rolling Stones
8. I'm Too Sexy - Right Said Fred (too obvious I think, hehe)
9. Heartbreak Hotel - Elvis Presley
10. The Bad Touch - Bloodhound Gang
11. You Give Love a Bad Name - Jon Bon Jovi
12. Greensleeves
13. You're the One that I Want - John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John
14. Bad - Michael Jackson
15. (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction - Rolling Stones (understatement...)
16. Another One Bites the Dust - Queen
17. Henry the Eight - Herman's Hermits

~~
Something along the same lines hit the internet/blogwaves recently and I found it so clever I wanted to share. A Mixed Tape from a Bookseller. Jarek Steele laments over poor sales, the fact that his favorite customer hasn't come in the store recently.. and he has put together an interesting piece on what would be on his iPod, yet.. he's old fashioned so we'll still call it the mixed tape, just for his sanity. Read his article here.

Colin Falconer Guest Review of Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

Please welcome back author Colin Falconer to Historical Fiction Connection.  He is the author of the upcoming novel Silk Road.

REVIEW OF WOLF HALL by HILARY MANTEL

COLIN FALCONER

It’s rare these days to find an historical novelist who hasn’t written about the Tudors. The story of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I is rich with intrigue, heaving bosoms, treachery, huge codpieces, starched ruffs, and pale, ambitious, doomed women. Desperate Housewives meets the Rack. You would think that with the number of words - and furlongs of celluloid - dedicated to their story, even just over the last two decades, that the harvest was in, the cellar empty, the bottle dry.

So it was with no little reserve that I approached Hilary Mantels’ WOLF HALL. What else was there to say about the Tudors? Well, quite a lot, apparently.

The novel’s back drop is a defining moment in British history, when Henry wrested power away from the Catholic Church and allowed Britain to worship - and think – for itself. But Bluff King Hal was not motivated by great religious purpose; he was simply in love with a younger woman and wanted a son and heir. He was, as Mantel paints him, a man terrified for his immortal soul but not so concerned that he was going to let anyone – even God - stand in his way.

WOLF HALL follows the contest between Henry and his first wife, Catherine of Aragon; between the Pope and the King; between Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell. But this isn’t the story; this is just the plot. The world to which we are allowed entry is not that of Henry VIII, or the Boleyns, but the much maligned Thomas Cromwell.

We follow his rise from a Putney blacksmith’s son to the second most powerful man in England and if that was all the narrative, it would have made an adequate Jeffrey Archer novel. In Mantel’s hands it becomes something else.

I was prepared for a long and tedious beginning. After all, didn’t this win the Man Booker Prize in 2009? The cast list of the characters at the beginning reads like the telephone listing of a small town. When I picked it up, my heart sank.

I expected the opening paragraph to be a long description of a vase. Instead, on the first page, we meet Thomas Cromwell as a teenager, being kicked unconscious on the cobblestones by his father. Hard not to cheer for him; stay down, son, stay down. If you try and get up again, the next boot will kill you.

His married sister dresses his injuries and he escapes on a boat to France. The next time we encounter him he is chief counsel to the king’s chief counsellor, Cardinal Wolsey. It's a long way from the mud and blood of the Putney yard, but Cromwell isn’t done yet. He is the ultimate fixer, the man who gets things done. “He can draft a contract, train a falcon, draw a map, stop a street fight, furnish a house and fix a jury." He also knows the New Testament by heart. While Wolsey and More crumble under the press of the king’s tantrums and whimsies, Cromwell endures and prevails. When Cromwell falls gets sick the king pays a personal visit to his home to see him well again. Even his bitterest enemies come to rely on him.

Much of Cromwell's history is told in quicksilver flashbacks. They beg more questions than they answer and add to his allure, allowing the reader to recreate the man in their own mind. We expect a monster with a heart like an abacus; instead Mantel shows us an enforcer who champions tolerance, a free-thinker who still ensures that the king has his way. His affection for his family, his ward - even his enemies - disarms. In finding charity in one of history’s villains, she has found the unseen aspect of Henry’s story and rendered it utterly fresh.

In fact she relegates the king and all those wives as well as the religious future of England to an afterword; it’s Cromwell’s fate that captivates. We never do go to Wolf Hall though we sense that is where his fortunes will finally turn.

This is a beautiful and surprisingly tender book. The assumption is that there will be a sequel but I hope she will leave this work to stand alone. We all know that Cromwell came to a nasty end and this lends poignancy to the book’s enigmatic ending.

This is not so much a novel as a portrait, the artist capturing a great man in his moment of pre-eminent glory just before tragedy overtakes him. “Lock Cromwell in a deep dungeon, says Thomas More, and when you come back that night he’ll be sitting on a plush cushion eating larks’ tongues, and all the gaolers will owe him money.” It is the sense of doom unforeseen that lends brilliance to the artist’s precise brushwork.

If you are looking for a bodice ripper or a Ken Follett saga, this is not for you. Mantel’s overuse of the personal pronoun may also drive you to distraction. Who said what? But this time the Booker judges got it exactly right. Cromwell may well charm you in the same way he seduced Henry’s court. When the book ends it is like saying goodbye to an old friend.

Colin Falconer's When We Were Gods - the story of Cleopatra, has just been re-released on Kindle for $5.99. His new novel Silk Road, will be published by Corvus Atlantic on October 1. To find out more, see http://www.colinfalconer.net  and his blog: http://www.colinfalconer.net/the-man-with-the-past.html

Guest Post: Colin Falconer, author of the upcoming novel Silk Road

Please welcome author Colin Falconer to Historical Fiction Connection. He is the author of the upcoming novel Silk Road.

CLEOPATRA: A MIRROR TO THE PRESENT

Colin Falconer

Cleopatra has been an object of fascination for writers, artists and film directors down the centuries.

But in her book, ‘Cleopatra, Queen Lover Legend’ Lucy Hughes-Hallet contends that every story written about her, and every picture painted of her, said more about the artist and the times they lived in than they did about the woman herself.

Cleopatra has been variously portrayed as virtuous suicide, inefficient housewife, exuberant lover, professional courtesan, scheming manipulator, and femme fatale. Was she Shakespeare’s cruel and lazy siren, Shaw’s man-eater or Taylor’s alluring beauty? Or does she rather, as Hughes suggests, only represent those aspects of the female that has most challenged each era since her death?

Cleopatra’s fiction was first formulated in her own lifetime by her enemies' propaganda. Its primary purpose was to discredit her lover Mark Antony. Antony’s rival, Augustus, claimed he had become so besotted with the Queen of Egypt that she had virtually emasculated him. He profited by denigrating Antony to his fellow Romans as a hedonist and a traitor, for in Rome - unlike in Egypt - women were considered inferior, lacking in virtue and intelligence.

And so Cleopatra became the dangerous feminine that can lure a helpless man from his duty to pursue the forbidden; and over the next two millennia she came to be the mirror in which each age saw its women.

In the fourteenth century, for example, Chaucer painted her as the very paragon of feminine virtue; the proof of her goodness being that she didn't wish to outlive her man. In an age when love-matches were rare and widowhood the only condition in which a woman could be truly independent, her great virtue, it seemed, was that she didn’t want to live longer than Anthony did.

But by the time of the Renaissance, with art and society dominated by themes of the sacred and the profane, Cleopatra’s bare breasts and the phallic asp became a dominant motif for many artists. The significance of her ritual suicide was overwhelmed by the imagined manner of it.
Later, as the American and French revolutions gripped eighteenth century Europe and North America, her story evolved into the clash between rival systems of government. Cleopatra and Antony represented the feudal nobility opposed to Octavius's centralising and modernising regime.

By colonial times she had transformed yet again, was depicted in gauzy harem pants and sparkly bra, like a dusky Lady Gaga, lolling indolently on a divan, representing a terminally decadent culture ripe for annexation by a benignly virgin western power.

In the Victorian era Cleopatra was reborn yet again as femme fatale, flouter of every convention, breacher of every taboo. To an increasingly rigid and regulated society, she was at once both evil and delightful, a powerful antidote to male sexual guilt.

The image persisted into 1930’s Hollywood. Cecil B de Mille offered the leading role in his movie about her to Claudette Colbert with the words: "How would you like to play the wickedest woman in history?" By this time "wicked" had become a term of approbation - sexy, edgy, titillating. The wickedest woman in history? The real Cleopatra was politically astute, a genius at diplomacy and an brilliant administrator – but how can that ever stack up against a sparkly bra?

By the time of the notorious 1963 movie with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton the tragedy of her reign had devolved to history's best-ever holiday romance.

Hughes has made a very good point; Cleopatra is not as much a woman as an idea. Historians know what she did and what happened to her, but the interpretation of her history depends largely on the writer or artist and the times they live in.

But what was she really like?

Perhaps only Liz Taylor will ever know.

Colin Falconer's When We Were Gods - the story of Cleopatra, has just been re-released on Kindle for $5.99. His new novel Silk Road, will be published by Corvus Atlantic on October 1. To find out more, see http://www.colinfalconer.net  and his blog: http://www.colinfalconer.net/the-man-with-the-past.html

The RAVEN and the WOLF: Chronicle II - Land of Ire By Christopher Spellman

The RAVEN and the WOLF: Chronicle II - Land of Ire By Christopher Spellman
ISBN-13: 9781614342555
Publisher: Booklocker.com
Date: May 2011
Page Count: 306




Available at
http://booklocker.com/books/5477.html
http://www.amazon.com/RAVEN-WOLF-Chronicle-Land-Ire/dp/1614342555/
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-raven-the-wolf-christopher-spellman/1031308549

There is currently a giveaway contest for June. Two winners will receive a free copy of Land of Ire. Details on my blog: http://christopher-spellman.tumblr.com/


Chris Spellman
Author of The Raven & the Wolf Series
Blood Oath: http://booklocker.com/books/4631.html
Land of Ire: http://booklocker.com/books/5477.html

The sequel to The Raven  the Wolf trilogy's 2010 debut novel Blood Oath, Land of Ire continues the dramatic saga of two Anglo-Danish brothers on the isle of Britain embroiled in a bitter, dark age blood feud.


Synopsis:
940 AD. Having departed alive and triumphant from the blood-washed fields of England's greatest battle, Wulfric, the ill-starred brother and rival of a Viking Jarl, makes way homeward in hopes of finding the peace of a simple life. But his fate-threads are intricately and sinisterly woven toward a less forgiving destiny.

The Norse King of Ireland, though vanquished, has yet to abandon his aspirations to the throne of Jórvík, the seat of power in Northumbria. The walls of the old city surrounded and the shadow of misfortune falling, Wulfric must rally his brotherhood of warriors in hopes of safeguarding their homes and families.

In this second and equally foreboding tale of The Raven & the Wolf, the sworn brethren forged by Wulfric must follow a noble calling, journeying toward an unfriendly land across a sea that is both lonely and rife with menace. But what lies in between is a path sown with peril, injustice and a menagerie of wayward foes and unlikely allies.

The gods are restless and the seas reddening with the blood of the damned. Just who will survive the upheaval the Norns are left to decide.


See Christopher Spellman's previous visit to HF-Connection here.