Book Review: Demon's Brood
/The Demon's Brood: A History of the Plantagenet Dynasty
met and married on the spot a lady of unearthly beauty but mysterious origin, called Melusine, who bore him four children. She shocked her husband and his court by rarely attending church – if she did, she left Mass after the reading of the Gospel, deliberately missing the most sacred moment, the Consecration. Finally, her husband ordered his knights to intervene: next time she tried to leave they seized hold of her cloak. Melusine reacted by slipping out of the cloak to fly up into the air, vanishing through a church window, with two sons under her arm. Neither the demon countess nor the boys was ever seen again. But she left behind the other sons.
It is this demon and her brood who take center stage in The Demon's Brood: the first great dynasty to sit upon the English throne.This sensational choice of an organizing trope could mislead a reader into thinking that what is unique about the book is its sensationalism. But in fact, as Seward points out, the niche he seeks to fill is larger. He aims to contribute to the resurgence of interest – scholarly, artistic, and popular – in the Plantagenets, most recently occasioned by the discovery of Richard III's skeleton. He hopes that "the Plantagenet kings can recapture popular imagination, now that the Tudors have been almost – if not quite – worked to death."Seward goes about capturing his reader's imagination with a judicious mixture of understated scholarship and anecdotal portraiture. The book is divided into capsule biographies of each Plantagenet king. Each biography follows a formula which, despite increasingly giving the impression that the author's scaffolding is showing, gets the job done. Chapters open with a very short epigraph pithily summarizing another historian's judgment of the relevant king, such as "a more complex Macbeth," by Bruce McFarlane of Henry IV, or "a thriftless, shiftless king," by Frederick Maitland of Henry III. The epigraph is followed by an anecdote showing the monarch at a characteristic or climactic moment. Then Seward proceeds systematically to discuss the king's appearance, accession, major accomplishments, character, and manner of death. This formula could go stale quickly, but Seward manages to keep it fresh by means of his vigorous prose and the attention he pays to the grotesque. Whether going on crusade, murdering their own relatives, scheming or fighting to extend their hegemony to France, or indulging in civil wars, the Plantagenets escape the clutches of a bore at every turn: and Seward is no bore.Seward's accomplishment is a history trustworthy both to entertain and to instruct. The most impressive aspect of the book is the way it wears its scholarship openly without thereby encumbering its popular style. For example, the text is sprinkled with historiographical observations like this one:
Edward [III] was lucky to find a chronicler, Jean Froissart (c.1337-1410), who immortalized him. Born in Hainault, a French-speaking cleric, Froissart recorded with unflagging enthusiasm the battles of the Hundred Years. Sometimes called the first war correspondent, no other fourteenth-century writer possessed such gifts for describing combat, analysing personality and using dialogue. Stubbs may argue that any admiration for the king derives from Froissart, but Froissart knew what he was writing about – he first visited Edward's court in 1361, when the king was still vigorous, and for earlier events used Jean le Bel's chronicle.
In such passages, the history of the chroniclers of the Plantagenets forms a secondary narrative, providing even the most casual reader with a parallax view of the past that does not occlude history's underlying complexity or the difficulties that attend its transmission to the present.
