Conn Iggulden - Wars of the Roses. Stormbird

The Wars of the Roses is a difficult period in the history of England. Conn Iggulden starts his series about the period with the death of Edward III in 1377. After that event, there was a messy fight for power among his sons that split the family into many different branches. York and Lancaster are the most important ones to understand the Wars of the Roses.

The power struggle after Edward's death led to Henry IV (part of the Lancaster branch) took the throne from his cousin Richard II. Henry was the father of Philippa who married the Nordic union king Erik of Pomerania in 1406 (I will return to her in later blog posts.). His oldest son Henry V inherited the English throne after him.

Henry V is seen as a hero by the English for beating the French in the battle of Agincourt in 1415. He, however, died young in 1422 leaving the throne to his very young son Henry VI. The latter is the king of England when Stormbird starts off in 1443.

Henry VI is nothing like his father. He is  young and sickly and wants peace. His spymaster Derry Brewer therefore gets the idea to marry him off to the French princess Margaret of Anjou in exchange for a truce and parts of France that had been counquered by the English during the 100 years war that Edward III started. This because he understands that Henry never will be able to keep them. Derry is one of a few fictional characters in Stormbird and Iggulden explains why he chose to follow this part at the end of the book in an appendix called  Historical notes (The main reason he gives is that Henry would have needed a person who knew the ways of the French court.)

Henry and Margaret marries and a fragile truce is initiated. The Frenchmen are, however pretty violent in their ways to take back controll over the parts Henry has returned to them and they meets some serious resistance in the English settlers (eg Thomas Woodchurch and his son Rowan). Henry's father's second cousin (if I have correctly understood the family tree), Richard, Duke of York gets upset over the whole affair and starts gathering support for claiming his right to the throne.

Henry is depicted as a credulous and mild man who does not quite grasp the life outside of the castle walls. This leads to courtiers surrounding him, taking liberties and titles and his subjects suffer. This is where the character Jack Cade walks into the story. He is the leader of a revolt in Kent and manages to get to London. Iggulden depicts him as if he could be a very good leader, but his abuse of alcohol makes him volatile. If he had managed in making the Londoners part of his revolt, he might have succeded better, but instead, he loots the city, turning them against him.

Iggulden tells the story from many different characters. This gets confusing from time to time and I think it would have been better if he used one character's perspective for an entire chapter (kind of like in the A Song of Ice and Fire books). At the same time the story also benefits from this changing perspective, giving the reader a chance to see the different types of power that comes into conflict.

The character I personally likes most to follow is queen Margaret. She has got a bad reputation in history because of Yorkish propaganda and I like that Iggulden has chosen to get away from the picture of her as "The she-wolf of France". Instead he portrays her as a product of the power vaccum in England at the time. She develops from a 14 year old princess to a strong queen prepared to fight for her position, her marriage and her son. Unfortunately, she is the only female among the main characters in a very male oriented plot (Richard of York's wife Cecily do appear from time to time, but seems less important to the plot.). This might have historical reasons, but I still think there most have been some other women present at the time.

The portrayal of violence is pretty good, but I mostly enjoyed how Iggulden takes a more humanistic approach to the events of the time. The scenes between Margaret and Henry and between Thomas Woodchurch and Rowan is depicted with tenderness and love and is a nice interruption to the otherwise pretty raw power struggles the book depicts.