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In the Shadow of the Tower
Harry the King
In the Shadow of the Tower...
Hero of Agincourt, Henry V is one of England's best known warrior kings with an amazing victory snatched from almost certain defeat.
Henry's reign was never free from unrest or resentment, however - from the great Lollard uprising to the attempted coup, the "Southampton Plot".
In tracing these eventful years, Brenda Honeyman includes some of the vibrant characters of that era - the violent Percys, the power-hungry Beauforts and above all Henry of Monmouth himself.
Republished as The Warrior King by Brenda Clarke.
Hero of Agincourt, Henry V is one of England's best known warrior kings with an amazing victory snatched from almost certain defeat.
Henry's reign was never free from unrest or resentment, however - from the great Lollard uprising to the attempted coup, the "Southampton Plot".
In tracing these eventful years, Brenda Honeyman includes some of the vibrant characters of that era - the violent Percys, the power-hungry Beauforts and above all Henry of Monmouth himself.
Republished as The Warrior King by Brenda Clarke.
- GenresHistorical
192 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published January 1, 1967
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
May 18, 2022
Harry the King is a retelling of Henry V’s life and reign by Brenda Honeyman (the book was also known as The Warrior King by Brenda Clarke; both are out of print). Beginning in 1399 in the aftermath of John of Gaunt’s death, it traverses the deposition of Richard II, the reigns of Henry IV and Henry V before ending in 1422 with the death of Henry V. For all this, Harry the King is decidedly uninterested in Henry V.
I knew going in that I wasn’t likely to enjoy Harry the King. I hadn’t overly enjoyed the three Honeyman novels I’d read previously and her interpretation of Henry V in Brother Bedford was a warning that I wouldn’t like it. But there are only about five novels that retell Henry V’s life and I’d read four of them so I figured I may as well read all of them. At least this was easier to track down than some of the others.
On a sentence-by-sentence level, the writing is fine. I quite liked some paragraphs. But when you move to evaluate a scene, you move into trouble. Everything is expositional. Everything is told, not shown. Honeyman doesn’t write a scene as such as she writes precis of what is happening and what her characters are feeling. Dialogue is functional, seldom revelatory. The narrative is also limited by Honeyman’s decision to write in omniscient third person, meaning that we rarely get in the heads of anyone: we catch fleeting glimpses that again, more functional than revelatory.
The back of the book proclaims that Honeyman’s narrative features “some of the vibrant characters” of Henry V’s era. Yet that vibrancy is lacking. It’s superficial, the characters feel more like an assembled list of character descriptors than actual characters. The book description promises the “violent Percys” – but if you blink, you’ll miss them. The “power-hungry Beauforts” are more present but their presence feels more unnecessary than necessary – a lot of their narrative time was focused on Joanna (Joan) Beaufort, Countess of Westmorland arranging marriages for her children, which felt pointless in a novel about Henry V but was apparently deemed essential to go with the gratuitous references to Richard, Duke of York (how else will we know that he and Cecily Neville will marry and birth the Yorkist kings decades from now?!). Figures like Richard II, Henry IV, Henry V’s own brothers, Henry Scrope, etc. are left lurking in the ether.
And “above all Henry of Monmouth himself”? Henry V gets more page time but at times he disappears from the narrative. The choice to use omniscient third person means that we only sometimes get insight into Henry V as he seems himself – or how others see him. This might have been an interesting experiment to explore Henry’s character: who is he to others? Is he man, monster, hero, angel? Can we reconcile disparate views of him into the one person? Is he knowable? But Honeyman’s narrative isn’t doing that. When we do get insight into Henry’s character, it’s largely along the lines of his being an arrogant prig, with a simple-minded sense of right and wrong that he sometimes rejects or compromises out of self-interest, a zealot firmly believing he is chosen by God and can do no wrong with a streak of cruelty in him.
It’s not an interpretation I believe or can really get behind and it’s hampered by Honeyman’s narrative choices. How can we “know” Henry of Monmouth in all his complexity when the glimpses we get of him are superficial? It hits a bum note within the first pages: Henry is told the absurd lie that his Lancastrian ancestor, Edmund Crouchback, was the rightful heir of Henry III, meaning that Henry IV is the rightful king after all. Yes, the Crouchback legend – lie – was bunted around at the time of Richard II’s deposition but it was never seriously pursued because it was so absurd and no one believed it. But Honeyman has Henry V wholeheartedly and absurdly believing it while his cousin, Humphrey of Gloucester, rips the notion apart – right in front of him. Nor does Honeyman – or historians who echo her view of Henry – really come to grips with the idea that Henry V was liked by his contemporaries. For her and them, it was fear and success that earned him adulation yet the contemporary evidence suggests a far more complex view of Henry that cannot be explained away by “propaganda”. If not, his legacy would not have been so admired, nor so poisonous to his own son’s reign, or so untouched by the civil wars that shortly followed and rested on the idea that his dynasty had ruled illegitimately.
It's these civil wars – the Wars of the Roses, the Wars of Lancaster, York and Tudor – that hold the most interest for Honeyman. I’ve never read a novel that’s ostensibly about Henry V with so little interest in him and so much interest in the Yorkist family!
The narrative takes us from 1399 to 1413 at break-neck speed but makes diversions to tell us about Richard, Duke of York being a strong, vibrant baby or to detail Edward, Duke of York’s relationships with his sister and brother, Richard, Earl of Cambridge. When Honeyman turns her attention to 1415, what gains the most page time is the Southampton Plot. Not the Battle of Agincourt, not the Siege of Harfleur. But the ill-considered plot wherein Cambridge and others sought to depose Henry V and place Edmund Mortimer, Earl of March on the throne just before Henry was due to sail to France. Honeyman’s version of events plays little attention to Henry V, Edmund Mortimer or another of the conspirators, Henry Scrope, but centres it on Cambridge and his brother York. At the very last moment, there’s a throwaway line about how Scrope, who we’ve never met before, had been one of Henry’s closest friends. What? Seriously, WHAT? You’re writing a novel about Henry V and rather than spending time on how he might be affected by one of his closest friends betrayed him or why that friend betrayed him, you threw it at the last moment because you’re so obsessed with the Yorkist family?
It's not that I’d object to a novel that centred on the early York dynasty so much as I feel utterly confused as to why they get so much attention and focus in a novel supposed to be about Henry V. Everything is exposited to us and the novels reeks of foreshadowing. If Honeyman’s real interest was in tracing the origins of the York family, I don’t understand why she didn’t just write a novel about them. If she thought herself writing a volume that chronicles the decline and fall of the Plantagenet dynasty, then she utterly fails in writing in a way where the multiple strands of the story come together. You can say what you will about Shakespeare’s History plays (though please no more “Tudor propaganda!”) but his plays were focused on more than relentlessly setting the scene for the next chapter.
Philippa Gregory once remarked that historical fiction can feel burdened with foreknowledge – the author knows what will happen to everyone, what comes next, the big events that are still in the future and lets the reader know. While I’m no fan of Gregory’s novels either, it also strikes me as an apt criticism of the genre and one that is particularly relevant to Honeyman’s novels. She’s so focused on the Wars of the Roses that she wants to start sowing the seeds well before they’re needed and pays them more attention that the contemporary events. Again, it's not that it’s necessarily bad or wrong to focus on Edward, Duke of York or his siblings but that Harry the King reeks of an author who didn’t want to write about her subject and instead focused on how The Yorkists Are Coming.
In terms of accuracy, the book was published in 1971 and shows it age. It seems as though in the 1990s, the extent and seriousness of the wound Henry V suffered at the Battle of Shrewsbury was rediscovered. Here, it’s a glancing blow that gives him no trouble and is never mentioned again but in reality, an bodkin point was lodged in his skull to the depth of six inches and required a risky surgery that may have left him with neurological damage and was no doubt a traumatising experience for him and the body politic. There are other incidents where things seemed to jar or are out of date but this was the most major one.
In short, I don’t even know where to begin with this novel. Expositional, telling over showing, not all that interest in its proclaimed subject. Pass.
I knew going in that I wasn’t likely to enjoy Harry the King. I hadn’t overly enjoyed the three Honeyman novels I’d read previously and her interpretation of Henry V in Brother Bedford was a warning that I wouldn’t like it. But there are only about five novels that retell Henry V’s life and I’d read four of them so I figured I may as well read all of them. At least this was easier to track down than some of the others.
On a sentence-by-sentence level, the writing is fine. I quite liked some paragraphs. But when you move to evaluate a scene, you move into trouble. Everything is expositional. Everything is told, not shown. Honeyman doesn’t write a scene as such as she writes precis of what is happening and what her characters are feeling. Dialogue is functional, seldom revelatory. The narrative is also limited by Honeyman’s decision to write in omniscient third person, meaning that we rarely get in the heads of anyone: we catch fleeting glimpses that again, more functional than revelatory.
The back of the book proclaims that Honeyman’s narrative features “some of the vibrant characters” of Henry V’s era. Yet that vibrancy is lacking. It’s superficial, the characters feel more like an assembled list of character descriptors than actual characters. The book description promises the “violent Percys” – but if you blink, you’ll miss them. The “power-hungry Beauforts” are more present but their presence feels more unnecessary than necessary – a lot of their narrative time was focused on Joanna (Joan) Beaufort, Countess of Westmorland arranging marriages for her children, which felt pointless in a novel about Henry V but was apparently deemed essential to go with the gratuitous references to Richard, Duke of York (how else will we know that he and Cecily Neville will marry and birth the Yorkist kings decades from now?!). Figures like Richard II, Henry IV, Henry V’s own brothers, Henry Scrope, etc. are left lurking in the ether.
And “above all Henry of Monmouth himself”? Henry V gets more page time but at times he disappears from the narrative. The choice to use omniscient third person means that we only sometimes get insight into Henry V as he seems himself – or how others see him. This might have been an interesting experiment to explore Henry’s character: who is he to others? Is he man, monster, hero, angel? Can we reconcile disparate views of him into the one person? Is he knowable? But Honeyman’s narrative isn’t doing that. When we do get insight into Henry’s character, it’s largely along the lines of his being an arrogant prig, with a simple-minded sense of right and wrong that he sometimes rejects or compromises out of self-interest, a zealot firmly believing he is chosen by God and can do no wrong with a streak of cruelty in him.
It’s not an interpretation I believe or can really get behind and it’s hampered by Honeyman’s narrative choices. How can we “know” Henry of Monmouth in all his complexity when the glimpses we get of him are superficial? It hits a bum note within the first pages: Henry is told the absurd lie that his Lancastrian ancestor, Edmund Crouchback, was the rightful heir of Henry III, meaning that Henry IV is the rightful king after all. Yes, the Crouchback legend – lie – was bunted around at the time of Richard II’s deposition but it was never seriously pursued because it was so absurd and no one believed it. But Honeyman has Henry V wholeheartedly and absurdly believing it while his cousin, Humphrey of Gloucester, rips the notion apart – right in front of him. Nor does Honeyman – or historians who echo her view of Henry – really come to grips with the idea that Henry V was liked by his contemporaries. For her and them, it was fear and success that earned him adulation yet the contemporary evidence suggests a far more complex view of Henry that cannot be explained away by “propaganda”. If not, his legacy would not have been so admired, nor so poisonous to his own son’s reign, or so untouched by the civil wars that shortly followed and rested on the idea that his dynasty had ruled illegitimately.
It's these civil wars – the Wars of the Roses, the Wars of Lancaster, York and Tudor – that hold the most interest for Honeyman. I’ve never read a novel that’s ostensibly about Henry V with so little interest in him and so much interest in the Yorkist family!
The narrative takes us from 1399 to 1413 at break-neck speed but makes diversions to tell us about Richard, Duke of York being a strong, vibrant baby or to detail Edward, Duke of York’s relationships with his sister and brother, Richard, Earl of Cambridge. When Honeyman turns her attention to 1415, what gains the most page time is the Southampton Plot. Not the Battle of Agincourt, not the Siege of Harfleur. But the ill-considered plot wherein Cambridge and others sought to depose Henry V and place Edmund Mortimer, Earl of March on the throne just before Henry was due to sail to France. Honeyman’s version of events plays little attention to Henry V, Edmund Mortimer or another of the conspirators, Henry Scrope, but centres it on Cambridge and his brother York. At the very last moment, there’s a throwaway line about how Scrope, who we’ve never met before, had been one of Henry’s closest friends. What? Seriously, WHAT? You’re writing a novel about Henry V and rather than spending time on how he might be affected by one of his closest friends betrayed him or why that friend betrayed him, you threw it at the last moment because you’re so obsessed with the Yorkist family?
It's not that I’d object to a novel that centred on the early York dynasty so much as I feel utterly confused as to why they get so much attention and focus in a novel supposed to be about Henry V. Everything is exposited to us and the novels reeks of foreshadowing. If Honeyman’s real interest was in tracing the origins of the York family, I don’t understand why she didn’t just write a novel about them. If she thought herself writing a volume that chronicles the decline and fall of the Plantagenet dynasty, then she utterly fails in writing in a way where the multiple strands of the story come together. You can say what you will about Shakespeare’s History plays (though please no more “Tudor propaganda!”) but his plays were focused on more than relentlessly setting the scene for the next chapter.
Philippa Gregory once remarked that historical fiction can feel burdened with foreknowledge – the author knows what will happen to everyone, what comes next, the big events that are still in the future and lets the reader know. While I’m no fan of Gregory’s novels either, it also strikes me as an apt criticism of the genre and one that is particularly relevant to Honeyman’s novels. She’s so focused on the Wars of the Roses that she wants to start sowing the seeds well before they’re needed and pays them more attention that the contemporary events. Again, it's not that it’s necessarily bad or wrong to focus on Edward, Duke of York or his siblings but that Harry the King reeks of an author who didn’t want to write about her subject and instead focused on how The Yorkists Are Coming.
In terms of accuracy, the book was published in 1971 and shows it age. It seems as though in the 1990s, the extent and seriousness of the wound Henry V suffered at the Battle of Shrewsbury was rediscovered. Here, it’s a glancing blow that gives him no trouble and is never mentioned again but in reality, an bodkin point was lodged in his skull to the depth of six inches and required a risky surgery that may have left him with neurological damage and was no doubt a traumatising experience for him and the body politic. There are other incidents where things seemed to jar or are out of date but this was the most major one.
In short, I don’t even know where to begin with this novel. Expositional, telling over showing, not all that interest in its proclaimed subject. Pass.
July 21, 2011
This novel presented an overview of the life of King Henry VI of England beginning with his father's taking of the English crown from Richard II. All in all, the story could be an interesting one, but in this case, it is presented in rather dry prose with much more telling than showing. Granted it would be difficult to present the political intrigues and nuances of the many alliances of the period in a mere 218 pages, but there was no subtlety to the writing.
All too often, the foreshadowing of future events was presented to the reader as this character will die at this time in the future of this book, get ready for it now. A more subtle hint of things to come and being shown the circumstances of these type of events at the time they occur makes for a much more interesting story. Foreshadowing, particularly in historical fiction novels where many events that occur in the plot may already be known to readers, is tricky, but in the hands of a master writer is subtle and woven into the fabric of the story that the reader hardly notices it until the foreshadowed event takes place. At that time, the reader has a light bulb moment connecting the hints with the event and in many cases feel that they are a part of the story rather than an observer of the action. While the research and facts seem to be historically accurate, the story is not woven in such a way that the I never actually became part of the story. Nor, did I develop any strong attachment to any of the characters, in particular Henry V, even though I had developed some empathy with him while reading other historical novels.
If you are interested in this period of history or just want to read something about Henry V, then this book might well be worth your time. It's not bad for a quick read to get a feel for the reign of Henry V, but if you want a great, meaty, consuming, I was there type of historical novel about Henry V then this one is not it.
All too often, the foreshadowing of future events was presented to the reader as this character will die at this time in the future of this book, get ready for it now. A more subtle hint of things to come and being shown the circumstances of these type of events at the time they occur makes for a much more interesting story. Foreshadowing, particularly in historical fiction novels where many events that occur in the plot may already be known to readers, is tricky, but in the hands of a master writer is subtle and woven into the fabric of the story that the reader hardly notices it until the foreshadowed event takes place. At that time, the reader has a light bulb moment connecting the hints with the event and in many cases feel that they are a part of the story rather than an observer of the action. While the research and facts seem to be historically accurate, the story is not woven in such a way that the I never actually became part of the story. Nor, did I develop any strong attachment to any of the characters, in particular Henry V, even though I had developed some empathy with him while reading other historical novels.
If you are interested in this period of history or just want to read something about Henry V, then this book might well be worth your time. It's not bad for a quick read to get a feel for the reign of Henry V, but if you want a great, meaty, consuming, I was there type of historical novel about Henry V then this one is not it.
July 6, 2012
I wanted to read this, I really did - but first lines should grab the reader's attention by the scruff of the neck and not let go. So when I saw this as the first line: The two young men were closely related, the father of the younger boy being first-cousin to the elder, and their mothers having been sisters I juddered to a halt, and haven't been able to face ploughing on through the chapter or indeed the book.
Skimming it, I've seen a lot of exposition, and a startling description of Henry's injury at Shrewsbury as making the blood run down his face. Surely the author knew that the arrow lodged in the base of his brain and took days to extract? It doesn't augur well for the rest of the book.
Certainly historical Henry is a difficult character to write about sympathetically, and the times were hard, but the author didn't seem to want to engage with either her subject or her readers. Perhaps it gets better later on? If so, I'm prepared to admit that I made an over-hasty judgement.
Skimming it, I've seen a lot of exposition, and a startling description of Henry's injury at Shrewsbury as making the blood run down his face. Surely the author knew that the arrow lodged in the base of his brain and took days to extract? It doesn't augur well for the rest of the book.
Certainly historical Henry is a difficult character to write about sympathetically, and the times were hard, but the author didn't seem to want to engage with either her subject or her readers. Perhaps it gets better later on? If so, I'm prepared to admit that I made an over-hasty judgement.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews