No comments about Disraeli.

No comments about Japan and Back and Places Elsewhere: A Memoir.

No comments about Anna & the King of Siam.

No comments about Thomas Denton: A Perambulation of Cumberland, 1687-8, including descriptions of Westmorland, the Isle of Man and Ireland: (Cumbria Record Office MS D/Lons/L12/4/2/2) ... (Publications of the Surtees Society).

No comments about Introducing William Wallace.

5 comments about King John (Yale English Monarchs Series).

1. W.L. Warren begins this biography with an explanation of how and why King John ended up with the dastardly reputation we all know from Robin Hood stories and other popular fiction. John, Warren says, suffered from a confluence of factors that have rendered a slanted and warped portrait of him. Historiography methods of the past concentrated almost entirely on contemporary chronicles, practically ignoring administrative records and other types of extraneous material. John especially suffers under this kind of examination, since the chroniclers who wrote about his reign were all either poorly informed, outrageously prejudiced, or both.
   
   John is mocked with the name "Softsword" for having lost his hold on the French domains his father, Henry II, and his brother, Richard I, worked so hard to keep. Warren points out, however, that such far-flung territories could never have been maintained, and, even had Richard lived, the French outcome would probably have been the same. Far from being a military do-nothing, John is the founder of the Royal Navy. Warren marvels that a nation that came to treasure its naval superiority as England did could so completely vilify the founder of its navy.
   
   But this book is no whitewash, either. John was duplicitous and grasping and didn't trust anyone who wasn't beholden to him. He surrounded himself with baseborn hangers-on, excluding and alienating the barons of his realm. He took money for dispensing justice and then still ruled against the side that paid him. He was cunning and conniving, and was known to issue decrees that said one thing while secretly issuing instructions that ran exactly counter to what he wrote.
   
   Yet this same king instituted something that, to historians, is even more important than the Royal Navy: the systematic keeping of government and court records. Before John ascended the throne in 1199, English government recordkeeping is spotty and haphazard - a frustratingly obscure and incomplete source for the study of history. But from 1199 on, these same records emerge as a rich and authoritative resource. Hmm, almost as if John knew the chroniclers weren't going to treat him fairly...
   
   Another myth that gets busted in this book is the one about King John's being forced to sign the Magna Carta. While Warren concedes that John had backed himself into a corner by running roughshod over his barons, he explains that the Magna Carta was simply a compromise brokered between him and his opponents. Nobody was holding a gun to his head - and wouldn't have been even had guns been invented. And John had the last laugh when, days later, he made England a fief of the Pope, who reciprocated by declaring the Magna Carta null and void.
   
   When I started reading this book, I had a fairly negative attitude about King John. By the time I finished, I still didn't like him much, but I had a new appreciation for him as a brilliant, complex, and probably tortured soul who tried to do great things and occasionally succeeded.



2. I was a little hesitant about ordering this book at first for fear it would be dry and complicated. I was very happy to discover it was neither. It is well researched and well written. Warren gives you a good feel about the period and the challenges John faced. I even found myself asking "what would I have done in his place?" This book busted a few of the "Bad King John" myths as well as some of the "Good King Richard" ones. This is a very readable book provided you have an interest and a little knowledge about the period. If you are looking for a "Robin Hood" type story this isn't it. It's not a page turner but nor should it be. This is the story of a complex man during a complex time and Warren did a great job of bringing it to life without making it dull.



3. This book shows the "dastardly" King John of Robin Hood fame in a more realistic light. He is seen to be an enlightened ruler who reviewed the law courts and other English institutions and who truly, of all the previous Plantagenet kings, preferred England as his inheritance. He is not the cowed king who is seen to have signed the Magna Carta, but a king who was faced with the accumulatiom of misrule by previous Plantagnet rulers including his brother Richard the Lion Heart. This book does not hide the King's less likeable attributes, avarice, lustfullness, a bad temper, a vengeful nature, but then Richard Coeur de Leon had that too. This book shows that John was no worse than his predecessors. Read also "Eleanor of Aquitaine" by Alison Weir, which corroborates this book very well..



4. King John has the reputation as being the absolutely worse King England has ever had. Accused of lechery, murder, treason and much more, John is looked on as an absolute failure, and is warped out of all recognition as the bad Prince John of Robin Hood. The only bright spot in his reign is John's grant of the Magna Charta, which is looked on by many as the ultimate foundation stone upon which English and American freedoms rest.
   W.L. Warren, in this exhaustively researched book, paints a full picture of the life of this least successful of English kings. Dr. Warren points out that much of John's bad reputation results from writer's contrasting him with his brother, Richard the Lionheart.
   This book gives us the reality of King John. It doesn't excuse him. It does explain him.



5. An excellent history book, factual as a text book but reads like a novel. Hollywood could never dream up a life or character so complex.

No comments about Lord Broghill and the Cromwellian Union with Ireland and Scotland (Irish Historical Monographs).

No comments about History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat of the Spanish Armada: Volume 6. Mary. Elizabeth.

No comments about The Gladstone Diaries: Volumes I & II: 1825-1832 & 1833-1839.

No comments about Gladstone (British History in Perspective).