Henry Iv Penguin Monarchs

Author : Catherine Nall
Publisher : Penguin UK
ISBN 13 : 0241188652
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.51/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Henry IV (Penguin Monarchs) written by Catherine Nall and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2026-01-08 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Henry IV seized the throne from his cousin Richard II, people saw it as a hopeful new beginning for England. The first monarch to have English as his mother tongue since the Norman conquest, Henry seemed to embody the ideals of chivalric kingship: mercy, piety, military prowess and learning. Yet deposing a crowned monarch was not a stable foundation on which to build a reign. Henry IV found himself challenged from all sides, plagued by conspiracies, rebellions, assassination attempts and crippling debts, while his tense relationships with Parliament and with his own son, Shakespeare's Prince Hal, saw his grip on power falter. Nevertheless, he was the first king and founder of a Lancastrian dynasty which would go on to shape England for centuries to come. In this lively study, Catherine Nall reappraises a monarch who weathered upheaval and uncertainty and held on to the throne through sheer force of will.

Author : Edmund King
Publisher : Penguin UK
ISBN 13 : 0141978996
Total Pages : 144 pages
Book Rating : 4.94/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Henry I (Penguin Monarchs) written by Edmund King and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2018-07-26 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'To be a medieval king was a job of work ... This was a man who knew how to run a complex organization. He was England's CEO' The youngest of William the Conqueror's sons, Henry I came to unchallenged power only after two of his brothers died in strange hunting accidents and he had imprisoned the other. He was destined to become one of the greatest of all medieval monarchs, both through his own ruthlessness, and through his dynastic legacy. Edmund King's engrossing portrait shows a strikingly charismatic, intelligent and fortunate man, whose rule was looked back on as the real post-conquest founding of England as a new realm: wealthy, stable, bureaucratised and self-confident.

Author : Anne Curry
Publisher : Penguin UK
ISBN 13 : 0141978724
Total Pages : 128 pages
Book Rating : 4.27/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Henry V (Penguin Monarchs) written by Anne Curry and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2015-08-27 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Foremost medieval historian Anne Curry offers a new reinterpretation of Henry V and the battle that defined his kingship: Agincourt Henry V's invasion of France, in August 1415, represented a huge gamble. As heir to the throne, he had been a failure, cast into the political wilderness amid rumours that he planned to depose his father. Despite a complete change of character as king - founding monasteries, persecuting heretics, and enforcing the law to its extremes - little had gone right since. He was insecure in his kingdom, his reputation low. On the eve of his departure for France, he uncovered a plot by some of his closest associates to remove him from power. Agincourt was a battle that Henry should not have won - but he did, and the rest is history. Within five years, he was heir to the throne of France. In this vivid new interpretation, Anne Curry explores how Henry's hyperactive efforts to expunge his past failures, and his experience of crisis - which threatened to ruin everything he had struggled to achieve - defined his kingship, and how his astonishing success at Agincourt transformed his standing in the eyes of his contemporaries, and of all generations to come.

Author : A J Pollard
Publisher : Penguin UK
ISBN 13 : 0141978708
Total Pages : 138 pages
Book Rating : 4.03/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Edward IV (Penguin Monarchs) written by A J Pollard and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2016-07-28 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1461 Edward earl of March, an able, handsome, and charming eighteen-year old, usurped the English throne from his feeble Lancastrian predecessor Henry VI. Ten years on, following outbreaks of civil conflict that culminated in him losing, then regaining the crown, he had finally secured his kingdom. The years that followed witnessed a period of rule that has been described as a golden age: a time of peace and economic and industrial expansion, which saw the establishment of a style of monarchy that the Tudors would later develop. Yet, argues A. J. Pollard, Edward, who was drawn to a life of sexual and epicurean excess, was a man of limited vision, his reign remaining to the very end the narrow rule of a victorious faction in civil war. Ultimately, his failure was dynastic: barely two months after his death in April 1483, the throne was usurped by Edward's youngest brother, Richard III.

Author : Rosemary Horrox
Publisher : Penguin UK
ISBN 13 : 0141978945
Total Pages : 106 pages
Book Rating : 4.49/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Richard III (Penguin Monarchs) written by Rosemary Horrox and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2020-09-24 with total page 106 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No English king has so divided opinion, both during his reign and in the centuries since, more than Richard III. He was loathed in his own time for the never-confirmed murder of his young nephews, the Princes in the Tower, and died fighting his own subjects on the battlefield. This is the vision of Richard we have inherited from Shakespeare. Equally, he inspired great loyalty in his followers. In this enlightening, even-handed study, Rosemary Horrox builds a complex picture of a king who by any standard failed as a monarch. He was killed after only two years on the throne, without an heir, and brought such a decisive end to the House of York that Henry Tudor was able to seize the throne, despite his extremely tenuous claim. Whether Richard was undone by his own fierce ambitions, or by the legacy of a Yorkist dynasty which was already profoundly dysfunctional, the end result was the same: Richard III destroyed the very dynasty that he had spent his life so passionately defending.

Author : Roger Knight
Publisher : Penguin UK
ISBN 13 : 0141977213
Total Pages : 160 pages
Book Rating : 4.18/5 ( download)

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Download or read book William IV (Penguin Monarchs) written by Roger Knight and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2015-08-27 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: William IV, the 'Sailor King', reigned for just seven years. Rash and impetuous as a young man, he was sent to join the navy by his father, George III, to bring him to order, but he was overpromoted at an early age and saw his years of active service marked by a series of calamities. He was also notorious for his mounting debts and his long relationship with the actress Mrs Jordan, with whom he had ten children. Yet, as Roger Knight, one of Britain's foremost naval historians, shows in this concise and perceptive biography, William's bluff, unpolished sailor's manner made him popular with the people. Inheriting the throne amid strikes, riots and the push for parliamentary reform, he helped see the country through the great constitutional crisis of the era. Despite his many flaws, he was perhaps a better king than sailor, leaving the monarchy in a healthier state than when he found it, and enabling the smooth succession of his niece, Victoria.

Author : Stella Tillyard
Publisher : Penguin UK
ISBN 13 : 0141978864
Total Pages : 160 pages
Book Rating : 4.64/5 ( download)

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Download or read book George IV (Penguin Monarchs) written by Stella Tillyard and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2019-07-04 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: George IV spent most of his life waiting to become king: as a pleasure-loving and rebellious Prince of Wales during the sixty-year reign of his father, George III, and for ten years as Prince Regent, when his father went mad. 'The days are very long when you have nothing to do' he once wrote plaintively, but he did his best to fill them with pleasure - women, art, food, wine, fashion, architecture. He presided over the creation of the Regency style, which came to epitomise the era, and he was, with Charles I, the most artistically literate of all our kings. Yet despite his life of luxury and indulgence, George died alone and unmourned. Stella Tillyard has not written a judgemental book, but a very human and enjoyable one, about this most colourful of all British kings.

Author : James Ross
Publisher : Penguin UK
ISBN 13 : 0141979356
Total Pages : 128 pages
Book Rating : 4.59/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Henry VI (Penguin Monarchs) written by James Ross and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2016-12-29 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Henry VI, son of the all-conquering Henry V, was one of the least able and least successful of English kings. His long reign, which started when he was only nine months old, ended in catastrophe, with the loss of England's territories in France and a bankrupt England's long decline into civil war: the wars of the Roses. Yet, failure though Henry undoubtedly was, he remains an enigma. Was he always, as he became in the last disastrous years of his rule, a holy fool, simple-minded to the point of insanity and prey to the ambitions of others? Or was he more active and, as some have suggested, actively malign? In this groundbreaking new portrait, James Ross shows a king whose priorities diverged sharply from what England expected of its monarchs, and whose fitful engagement with government was directly, though not solely, responsible for the disasters that engulfed the kingdom during his reign.

Author : Anne Curry
Publisher : Penguin UK
ISBN 13 : 9780141978710
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.16/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Henry V written by Anne Curry and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2015 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Henry V is probably medieval England's most well-known and admired king, famed for victory at Agincourt. Yet Henry's invasion of France in August 1415 represented a huge gamble. As heir to the throne he had been a failure, cast into the political wilderness amid rumours that he planned to depose his father. Despite a complete change of character as king - founding monasteries and enforcing the law - little had gone right since. He was insecure in his kingdom, his reputation low. Agincourt was a battle that Henry should not have won - but he did. Within five years, he was regent of France. In this vivid new interpretation, Anne Curry explores how Henry's hyperactive efforts to expunge his past failures defined his kingship, and how his astonishing success at Agincourt transformed his standing in the eyes of his contemporaries, and of all generations to come.

Author : Piers Brendon
Publisher : Penguin UK
ISBN 13 : 0241196426
Total Pages : 160 pages
Book Rating : 4.27/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Edward VIII (Penguin Monarchs) written by Piers Brendon and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2016-04-28 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'After my death,' George V said of his eldest son and heir, 'the boy will ruin himself within twelve months.' The forecast proved uncannily accurate. Edward VIII came to the throne in January 1936, provoked a constitutional crisis by his determination to marry the American divorcée Wallis Simpson, and abdicated in December. He was never crowned king. In choosing the woman he loved over his royal birthright, Edward shook the monarchy to its foundations. Given the new title 'Duke of Windsor' and essentially sent into exile, he remained a visible skeleton in the royal cupboard until his death in 1972 and he haunts the house of Windsor to this day. Drawing on unpublished material, notably correspondence with his most loyal (though much tried) supporter Winston Churchill, Piers Brendon's superb biography traces Edward's tumultuous public and private life from bright young prince to troubled sovereign, from wartime colonial governor to sad but glittering expatriate. With pace and panache, it cuts through the myths that still surround this most controversial of modern British monarchs.