![]() ![]() Or they can go the opposite tack and leave you desperate for a year, a town, a battle, (dear god anything!) you can use as a frame of reference. ![]() They often overload you with information for no clear reason, maybe to validate their amount of research. ![]() Historians often sacrifice the human aspect their subject to detail dates, times, economics, etc. NERD ALERT: This is the yardstick by which I measure all nonfiction. How, then, could a woman be king, how could royal power lie in female hands? Man was the head of woman and the king was the head of all. The stories of these women - told here in all their vivid humanity - illustrate the paradox which the female heirs to the Tudor throne had no choice but to negotiate. And between the 12th and the 15th centuries three more exceptional women - Eleanor of Aquitaine, Isabella of France, and Margaret of Anjou - discovered, as queens consort and dowager, how much was possible if the presumptions of male rule were not confronted so explicitly. Four hundred years before Edward’s death, Matilda, daughter of Henry I and granddaughter of William the Conquerer, came tantalisingly close to securing her hold on the power of the crown. But female rule in England also had a past. ![]() In 1553, England was about to experience the ‘monstrous regiment’ - the unnatural rule - of a woman. For the first time, all the contenders for the crown were female. When Edward VI - Henry VIII’s longed-for son - died in 1553, extraordinarily, there was no one left to claim the title King of England. ![]()
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