Oh dear. There are times when Amazon recommends books to me that are actually anathema to a loyal Ricardian. This time it’s…I can hardly type it….that awful Terry Breverton book Henry VII: The Maligned King. Porkies from beginning to end.
Well, if the Weasel has been maligned I’ll eat my Yorkist hat. Maligned suggests innocent and hard done by. The Weasel?
So I won’t be acquiring this awful junk, and if I’m given it by some wag, it’ll be in the loo for obvious purposes!
😂😂😂😂
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Look at it this way, the gargantuan effort to make withered Harry palatable and sympathetic to more than a few sozzeled execs at the Beeb has been going on for several years now (I noticed it first around 2012 with the Winter King business, altho if you google the title you will likely get the Arthurian flick based on Bernard Cornwell’s work, who, clearly, is lightyears more in touch with reality than anything Penn ever wrote).
It’s no easy thing to take a massively unlikeable, insecure, inadequate fraud who was best known for his informers, incessant taxes, and holding virtually everyone under bonds, and repackaging that mess into a victim of … Yorkist propaganda and lord help me, academic bias!
To give you some idea of what a misery it is to rehab the man consider what I found perusing the old documents from 1883, in a charming collection of a devoted Tudor devotee like Rev. William Campbell, earnestly compiling “original documents” from the Public Records Office. I was interested to find out how soon after Bosworth Henry began dispensing the spoils to his henchmen, what I found was Campbell, p.xiii of the introduction, at pains to explain one of Henry’s little quirks – “and we shall see that the name of the late king is never mentioned by him without the favorite iteration of king “in dede, but not in “right.” The state scriveners seem to have received a standing order to introduce this hateful formula into every paper connected with Richard’s name, however insignificant.”
For the curious the document is easily available online (see link) and the first 120 pages are al grants made to Harry’s faithful (note all southern gentry, allied with the Wydvilles, and for the most part quite young; I looked in vain for a contingent of Welshmen to be among this rewarded group, I found at best one); the litany of ‘in dede, but not in “right” begins on pg.121 and announces the long, great unwinding of Richard’s own policies, offices and grants issued. It is sobering reading, made worse by the pettiness of that dirge like “in dede, not by…”
Another thing that cropped up was Henry’s just as frequent, maybe obsessive, use of “Henry by right…” list of his magnificent title and claims before every blessed pronouncement, even the most trivial. It made me look back among those documents from Edward IV and Richard III to see if they did likewise – answer, nope.
Not sure what the heck Breverton thought he could accomplish with this so small, and immature and wanting man but benign he was not!
Breverton also wrote a book about Owain Glyndwr. It was equally awful. I conceived it an insult to the great man, although it was certainly not intended as such. I believe Breverton admires Henry VII for being ‘Welsh’, and if Hitler had been Welsh he would no doubt have found his good points too.
OMG Breverton did what???? what an atrocity! Owain is near and dear to me! I pinched my pennies to get the Livingston/ Bollard Casebook on Owain (the Revolt of Owain by R.R.Davies is also excellent), what a travesty!
Makes me wonder what on earth Breverton actually finds to admire in the fraud, it’s not like he could “paint an entire apartment in one afternoon! Two coats!” like the Fuhrer!
(apologies to Mel Brooks)
I owe my knowledge of Cymric nomenclature to Rhys Bowen’s Constable Evans mysteries. Her hero, Evans-the-Law, shares his surname with Evanses-the-milk, meat, and post. There is also a Hughes-the-bucket (heavy equipment operator.)
If ‘Breverton’ were that common, what would be a good sobriquet for Terry B.?
Breverton the Deluded? Breverton the Gull? The street in Wales where I grew up had a surfeit of Lewises, so they were referred to by the number of their house. My grandmother was Lewis number 12. There was a Lewis number 1, Lewis number 9 and one other which I can’t remember now. And that was just the lower portion of the street. It went on up the hill, where there were no doubt even more Lewises! 😄 My grandmother’s maiden name was Evans, and they abounded in the village too.
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