Welsh Journals

excellent final chapter) how to impress the importance of his exalted royal position upon his subjects. It may be pertinent to ask whether the Valois or the Lancastrians were more skilled at this game: Henry V had been a master of the art, and the duke of Bedford was no novice either. Was this something about which the English could teach the French- or vice versa ? To criticize Dr. Vale's emphasis upon personality is to criticize the form of his book, for this is not, as the author admits, a conventional biography, but a reassessment of the man (both as a private and public figure) using chiefly the available printed sources. As a person, Charles is eminently worth probing, but one may ask whether a book of this length can afford to concentrate so heavily upon the man, however interesting he may be. The English reader may regret that the reign as a whole has still not found its historian; from this point of view, a golden opportunity has not been taken. More important, can one write the biography of a king as a public figure without writing the history of the country over which he not only presided but, in a very real sense as Dr. Vale successfully makes out, also ruled? The better the king, the more important it is to incorporate his own story into that of his country. A series of observations, some of them of a purely clinical nature, however well made and relevant to the development of the individual's personality, will only take one a certain way. It should not have been necessary to establish a chronology by means of a 'table of events' at the end of the book. A king, especially one who witnessed and was, in part, responsible for a series of events of great importance in the history and development of France, cannot be divorced from his country's history. These are serious regrets. But it would be unjust to deny that, within the limits he has chosen for himself, Dr. Vale has provided us with a valuable study of a king who, as the evidence drawn up in the first chapter shows, has been both maligned and misunderstood in the past. The man, at any rate, has now been well served by a sympathetic biographer of the nation whose expulsion from his country is one of his chief claims to fame. C. T. ALLMAND Liverpool. EDWARD IV. By Charles Ross. Eyre Methuen, 1974. Pp. xvi, 479. £ 9.50. Edward IV has elicited very varied reactions from historians: to the Victorians a bloodthirsty tyrant, to some more recent writers he has seemed rather the astute statesman, whose ability rescued England from the horrors of civil war, re-established order and prosperity and laid the foundations on which the Tudor Henry VII built. There is no doubt that he is a difficult ruler to assess. Dr. Ross's impressive biography takes account of much important research work, by Lander, Wolffe and others, and of new interpretations of the period such as those of McFarlane and Storey-all of which have appeared since the last attempt at a full scale biography, that of Miss Schofield. The author is himself a scholar whose