In Margaret Plantagenet, niece of Edward IV and granddaughter of Warwick the Kingmaker, these issues came together, and cost the old lady her life.

Now, celebrated historian Dan Jones describes how the longest reigning British royal family tore itself apart until it was finally replaced by the Tudors. The early stages were about the Duke of York trying to replace the ministers of the Lancastrian King; he probably was genuinely loyal to the monarch himself at the start.It is also a period of headstrong and resilient women-Margaret of Anjou, Elizabeth Woodville, Margaret Beaufort-who were not afraid to seize power and bend men to their will. Like most accounts of the era, it focuses on his unpopular marriage to Elizabeth Wydeville, which in turn leads to a rebellion by Warwick and the second phases of the wars. Then a far more grotesque and insulting marriage was arranged between the twenty-year-old John Woodville and Katherine Neville, Warwick’s aunt and the dowager duchess of Norfolk.

Then there are figures who stand on their own who worked behind the scenes, like Warwick “The Kingmaker”, Margaret Beaufort, Owen and Jasper Tudor, the Princes in the Tower, and the ultimate victor, Henry VII.All in all, I found this to be a fascinating and riveting book and would recommend it to anyone interested in the topic. The Lancastrian cause seems hopeless, until in 1470 Edward’s cousin and closest ally, Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, ‘the Kingmaker’ makes an alliance with Margaret of Anjou that sees Henry VI re-adapted as King – briefly. Margaret of Anjou, though, jealously defended her own rights and those of her infant son, Edward, Prince of Wales, by allying with the Beaufort family and others. It appeared that the Hundred Years’ War had been settled and England had regained much of the continental land that it had lost in the thirteenth century.

the gloriously resonant title title of Dan Jones's brilliant account of the Wars of the Roses - The Hollow Crown - conjures up Shakespeare's influence not just on our language but on the ways in which we think about our past . No matter that the red rose of Lancaster was pretty much a Tudor device: it could be scribbled, retrospectively, into the old scrolls.The crown of England changed hands violently five times as the great families of England fought to the death for the right to rule. York has selected a white rose – “with this maiden blossom in my hand/I scorn thee,” he spits – and the noblemen standing by have followed suit, choosing the colour of their rose to advertise their allegiance. This marked an end to this truly ‘dynastic’ phase of the Wars of the Roses: one side was comprehensively defeated, and the other had comprehensively won. Her descent from an illegitimate line of the House of Lancaster, would give her son, Henry Tudor, his only – and corrupted - claim to English royal blood. It began around 1429 with the arrival of Joan of Arc before the walls of Orléans, continued with the gradual loss of Normandy to the forces of Charles VII of France, and ended on 17 July 1453 with humiliation and defeat at the battle of Castillon, when the renowned captain John Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, was killed.