Welsh Journals

Search over 450 titles and 1.2 million pages

old-fashioned look. If the English lords really were (as he thinks) 'turbulent and excessively prone to take to arms to settle their own quarrels' (p. 30), it is difficult to explain how public order was preserved between the death of Henry V and the first battle of St. Albans in 1455. As a class the English baronage was on the side of law and order, and that needs to be emphasized. According to Mr. Lander, English kingship emerged from the Wars of the Roses 'a ramshackle structure' and under Edward IV and Henry VII England financially was 'hardly a state at all' (p. 33), while the wealth and power of the nobility were not significantly impaired (p. 28). Mr. Lander shows no awareness that Henry VII's government was a great deal stronger than that of Henry IV or that the English nobles were politically much weaker at the close of the fifteenth century than they had been under the Lancastrian kings. It was a considerable achievement to begin this book in Ghana and finish it in Canada. Remoteness from his sources probably compelled the author to write from memory and that must explain some mistakes. Owain Tudor was executed (p. 119) at Hereford (not Haverfordwest) and Charles the Bold vainly besieged (p. 206) the Rhenish town of Neuss (not the non-existent 'Swiss town of Nuz'). Tattershall castle, co. Lincoln, was not 'begun by Thomas, Lord Cromwell' (as the illustration facing p. 289 misinforms us) and William Nevill, Lord Fauconberg, was uncle (not brother) to Richard Nevill, earl of Warwick (pp. 99, 105, 127). Louis XI did not push 'his puppet Lancastrian government into an invasion of Burgundy' (p. 25) in 1471. Cardinal Bourchier (c. 1411-86) (p. 239) cannot have been eighty in June 1483 (as he was not born before the marriage of his parents), and the abbot of Abingdon who plotted against Henry VII in 1489 (p. 275) was not executed. The Chronological Table at the end of the book may mislead the unwary; Richard, duke of York's rising in 1452 did not (p. 324) take place at Dartmouth (that escapade fizzled out at Dartford, co. Kent), and it was Henry (not Humphrey), duke of Buckingham, who was executed in 1483 (p. 327). Readers will be astonished to learn (p. 327) that Edward V and his younger brother were murdered on 26 June 1483. T. B. PUGH Southampton Howel HARRIS 1714-1773. THE LAST ENTHUSIAST. By Geoffrey F. Nuttall. University of Wales Press, Cardiff, 1965. Pp. 84. 12s. 6d. In choosing Howel Harris as his subject for a course of lectures given at the University College of North Wales and subsequently prepared for publication in book form, Mr. Nuttall gives as one reason for his choice the fact that 'to English students of the history of the Church in these islands Harris is virtually unknown'. His second is to put 'Harris in a