A Brief History of British Kings and Queens: British Royal History from Alfred the Great to the Present (The Brief History) [Paperback]

Mike Ashley (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 23, 2002 | Series: The Brief History

In one portable volume, A Brief History of British Kings and Queens offers a royal biographical A–Z, its pages lavish in details on all the rulers of the kingdoms within the British Isles, together with their wives or consorts, pretenders, usurpers, and regents, from Queen Boadicea of the early Britons to today's Elizabeth II. This complete record of Britain's kings and queens contains more than 1,000 monarchs and 2,000 years of fascinating history. "Everything its title promises. The pages are filled with ... everything anyone might ever want to know about the royals."—Publishers Weekly "Highly recommended."—Choice

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Mike Ashley is the author and editor of over sixty books including the bestselling Mammoths Comic Fantasy, Seriously Comic Fantasy and Fantasy, and the crime-fiction collections The Mammoth Book of Locked Room Mysteries, The Mammoth Book of Roman Whodunnits and The Mammoth Book of Historical Whodunnits. He lives in Chatham, Kent. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 464 pages
• Publisher: Running Press (December 23, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0786711043
• ISBN-13: 978-0786711048
• Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 5.1 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #173,507 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Hefty tome covering all Brit royals, November 17, 2003

By 

Anonymous (London) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Brief History of British Kings and Queens: British Royal History from Alfred the Great to the Present (The Brief History) (Paperback)

With individual portraits of all the kings of Britain, no one could accuse this of incompleteness, but the solemn tone and lengthy paragraphs make for a rather dry read.

Billed as from "Alfred the Great to the Present" it begins long before Alfred, with overviews of the Celts, the Roman Occupation, and the Dark Ages. Ashley's organising principle, unity versus disunity within Britain, results in some confusing arrangement of material. For example, in the first Section, Kingdom Against Kingdom: Early Britain: after "The House of Normandy 1066-1154" he backtracks several hundred years to the Kingdoms of Wales (500-1240) and Scotland (850-1165). Then the narrative resumes in 1154 with The House of Anjou.

This mine of information, though daunting at first glance, covers monarchs' appearance, character, consorts, political, social, religious and cultural history. Among 100 pages of appendices are lists of Roman emperors and governors, kings of British provinces, royal consorts, family trees. The massive bibliography, handy for historic royal watchers, precedes the index.

You would probably want something more snappy and anecdotal on your shelf as well as this. However it's worth investing in as a reference source.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars British kings and queens, May 15, 2010

By 

vic-tor - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Brief History of British Kings and Queens: British Royal History from Alfred the Great to the Present (The Brief History) (Paperback)

This book was great. I really learned a lot about kings and queens i was not very familar with. Also, when I read something in passing about a monarch, I went back to this book to get more information. I am really glad I bought this, however I do not recomend reading the whole thing through, unless that is your thing. I did, and my head sort of hurt afterwards because of all the information. One thing that sort of bothered me about the book was I would read some information that I had not read in any other sources that I have read about a certain king or queen. It made me a little uneasy about the accuracy of some parts, but it did add something interesting.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Land of a thousand kings, June 13, 2011

By 

Peter Durward Harris "Pete the music fan" (Leicester England) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: A Brief History of British Kings and Queens: British Royal History from Alfred the Great to the Present (The Brief History) (Paperback)

I previously reviewed a book that gave a basic overview of the kings and queens of England, and while it is good for what it is, I eventually realized that I wanted a more detailed history that also covered Scotland. If it covered Wales and Ireland too, even better. This book covers Wales but not Ireland (though Ireland gets mentioned a few times), while having the additional merit of attempting to go right back to the earliest British kings, way before the Romans arrived. Very little is known about the really early kings, but it is good to find some information about them here.

Because of the book's starting point, it covers the Roman period, but if you really want to read about the Roman Empire, you'll need a different book. This being a history of royalty, it covers the basics, including the walls built by Hadrian and Antonius. Well, not built by them personally, but built in their names. Of course, one could say the same about any given period. This book is an excellent history of British royalty, but while it mentions some of the major changes that took place in society, it cannot dwell on them.

Actually, this book is titled a brief history because it is a carefully edited version of a much larger tome The Mammoth Book of British Kings and Queens (Mammoth Books) in which the same author provided a very comprehensive study of the subject. Apparently realizing that it would be too much for most people, he set about producing a book that was more readable while preserving the essence of the story. Not having read the mammoth book, I don't know for sure what he left out, though I can guess in some cases, where I've come across other pieces of information elsewhere. I'm not complaining anyway; there is more than enough information here for my needs just now. If I ever need to know more about a particular period, I'll look for another book.

This book shows that up to around the middle of the last millennium, kings were mostly warriors who tended to spend a lot of their time as fighting soldiers, and plenty were killed in battle or murdered. In the early years, these battles were often between rival kingdoms within what we now know as England, Scotland and Wales, but eventually those three nations emerged (of a fashion) and battles between these three became the norm, while battles within any one of them were classed as civil wars. Meanwhile, there were other enemies in Normandy, France, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands and Ireland to contend with.

Plenty of myths and legends have been handed down, among them being King Arthur, King Canute and Lady Godiva. The author gives his own thoughts on these, maintaining that while Arthur may have been a real person, he doesn't think that Arthur was ever a king. The episode involving King Canute is probably based on a real event but the legend as told is probably somewhat different from the truth of what really happened. The Lady Godiva story is probably very close to what really happened. The author thinks that history is very kind to Richard the Lion-heart, who apparently was anything but brave. While he may be flattered by history, other kings have been less fortunate. In particular, Shakespeare's Macbeth is much worse than the real Macbeth had been.

Some of the minor details are quite amusing. The author suggests that Elephant and Castle (in central London) is actually a corruption of Eleanor of Castile. I always thought Elephant and Castle was an odd name, but if the author is correct, it's odder than I thought.

One way or another, I knew the basic outline of the history presented here, but I found a lot of the detail fascinating. Also, by having to focus on the story, it brought home how easily things could have been so different. The story of Lady Jane Grey is tragic and well-known, but had she been spared execution, or had people not tried to make her queen in the first place, she or one of her descendants would have eventually inherited the throne following the death of Queen Elizabeth. I suspect that the crowns of England and Scotland would have been united through marriage eventually anyway. One thing that is clear from this book is that a lot of marriages between different European royal families were for political reasons rather than anything else. I was surprised to read that the marriages were not merely arranged for royal children to marry each other, but that in some instances, the marriages actually took place while they were still children.

Another thing that becomes clear is that while a lot of people believe the weakening role of the monarchy began with the replacement of Charles I with Oliver Cromwell (and that no doubt played some part), the process was accelerated during the Hanoverian era, because the British didn't like being ruled by a foreign king, especially (in the case of George I) one whose command of English was poor at best.

For me, the greatest interest lay in the early years about which I knew least and had most to learn. Even here, I dispute the author's assertion that Alfred the Great could not really be called the first king of England. It seems that will he was not king of all England as we now know it, he was king of a large part of it, mach larger than any predecessor, so I think it fair that history records him as the first king of England. George Washington, the first American president, had power over a territory that is only a small portion of what we now know as the United States, with the last state joining as recently as 1960. So the argument that Alfred did not rule over all of England is a weak one, but does not spoil the book overall.

I love this book, despite some disagreements with the author where he strays into opinion. Mostly, there are so many facts to squeeze in that there isn't much room for opinion beyond pointing out which kings and queens were good and which were bad. The author conspicuously avoids getting involved in the debate about the monarchy's future, content with noting that it has to remain relevant to the British people in a changing world. Of course, the big test will come when the next king is crowned, whether that be my eighth cousin Prince Charles or one of his sons.

There are about 400 pages of text and a further 100 or so pages of lists and family trees. The lists cover all the kings, queens, Roman emperors and Roman governors of Britain that the author has identified, but the family trees are limited to England. There are more comprehensive family trees on the internet.

For a thorough look at the history of British royalty, this book is likely to be hard to beat, though if you want something far more comprehensive, the author has written that book too.