The secret history of Eleanor Talbot examines the woman at the heart of the controversy surrounding Richard III. The author proves that Eleanor was married to Edward IV and therefore the marriage to Elizabeth Woodville was bigamous, and that the princes in the Tower were illegitimate.
Eleanor the Secret Queen
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Editorial Reviews
About the Author
John Ashdown-Hill is an historian and a member of the Royal Historical Society, the Society of Genealogists, the Richard III Society, and the Centre Européen d’Etudes Bourguignonnes. He is the author of Richard III’s 'Beloved Cousyn.'
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
21 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Scholarly summary of the evidence,
By
This review is from: Eleanor, The Secret Queen: The Woman Who Put Richard III on the Throne (Hardcover)
This is the book that 'Riccardians' will seize on and brandish in the face of Tudor fanatics, hollering, "see? here's the proof that Richard was a good guy!"
Well, yes and no. What Ashdown-Hill does pull off in this slim volume is to present (albeit in an overly stilted manner) Eleanor Talbot, the 'other woman' in Edward IV's life, as a real character. What he doesn't do is probably what it is impossible to do -- prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that Edward married her, legally, before marrying the woman who became his queen, Elizabeth Woodville. The discovery of a --real or fictional-- marriage between Eleanor and Edward was what succeeded in bastardizing the two young "princes in the Tower", raising their uncle to the throne as Richard III and leading to the overthrow of the Plantagenet Yorkists by the Tudors. The real strength of this book is the genealogical evidence for Eleanor's existence, parentage and relationships to the great and the good of 15th century England, evidence that many have overlooked or denied until recently. That's where the author really makes his mark. When it comes to the crucial issue of the marriage, however, Ashdown-Hill's will to believe takes over from his scholarly instincts. No one can deny that it could have happened the way he lays out, but there's no evidence of it. (In one case, where he postulates that Edward could have married Eleanor at Norwich on his way south after winning the battle of Towton, I think he let his eagerness get in the way of the evidence that I'm familiar with -- his progress to London led him via the West of the country, not the east and Norwich. So either Eleanor was in the West, or they married later or not at all.) On the flip side, he does lay out a compelling series of events, bolstered by canon law, that show why the second marriage might have been illegal. (Had it been public, and had Eleanor not objected and asserted her rights at that time, the whole issue, he suggests, would have been moot.) Don't read this if you're looking for a lively non-fiction biography; there are no love-letters disclosed, breakthtaking revelations, imagined encounters, etc. In other words, this isn't an Alison Weir book of popular history. In the case of afficionados, if you've already read the author's articles in the Riccardian, I'm informed by reliable sources that it largely repeats and expands on those, rather than presenting fresh material. Do read it if you're intrigued by all the twists and turns of the era's politics, and are looking for insight into one of its biggest mysteries. The book also does a particularly good job of showing just how interrelated the magnates of the time were, and how they were 'divided by the sword', as was said of another English civil war two centuries later. Perhaps my own biggest beef with the book is the rather sweeping claims Ashdown-Hill makes at the outset, that without Eleanor, England might never have succumbed to the Tudors or become a Protestant nation. A marriage between Eleanor and Edward (if true) simply gave Richard III one reason to seize the crown -- he had strong motives to do so anyway. (Protectors didn't traditionally fare well when their charges grew to maturity -- see those who ruled over Richard II or Henry VI; the country wasn't fond of the idea of a child ruler after decades of instability; either or both of the two boys could have died childless.) And even without Henry VIII's lust for Anne Boleyn, England could have become a Protestant country, just in a different way & time frame. Ashdown-Hill's conclusions are far too deterministic. For Wars of the Roses/Richard III fans only; anyone else is likely to snooze off due to dry writing by the end of chapter 2.
8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
reconsidered my evaluation,
By
This review is from: Eleanor the Secret Queen: The Woman Who Put Richard III on the Throne (Paperback)
For alot of reasons I was only able to get this book about 3 weeks ago. My comment to the other Reviewer in February was based on their summary and I had little idea what a remarkable effort this was. Along with the historian Annette Carson's bravura research and analysis (Richard III, the Maligned King, 2008) what Ashdown Hill has done is nothing short of saying we ought to just wipe that blackboard clean and start again. As in START again. What a mess Ricardian/Tudor scholarship and/popular novelization has become.
The reason I think the earlier reviewer had such a hard time feeling the thrill is that REAL research is not exactly the same thing as a bodice ripper. We can't always go the Alison Weir route. Sometimes it is worthwhile doing it right. And that means it may well get tedious, tangled, profusely complicated - none of which is helped by a distance of 500 years and with no lack of a heavy hand with ignorance and/or duplicity among the chroniclers of the day and frantic recourse to propaganda from August 22, 1485 onward. To give you some idea of just HOW well this Eleanor Talbot has been effectively buried or lost or misplaced by "history" I've been an intermittent Ricardian for some decades now, intermittent because the ability to unravel this mess is so overwhelming that one just has to take a break. But, you always find yourself going back, picking up another thread, and hoping that this time it will take you all the way back to the whole cloth! Ashdown Hill's book is the first time I can honestly say that not only do I think it is credible that eleanor Talbot found herself compromised by EIV but the author may have just scratched the surface of this whole matter, right through to the crisis of 1483! I am really shocked that this woman has been so summarily dismissed - and for that reason I assumed if she even existed she was just one more of the many women EIV had pursued, that she was of the "lower" social stations, someone conveniently powerless. As Ashdown Hill has shown, I could not have been more wrong. In some ways, however, Eleanor may have been as powerless to be vindicated as any tavern maid, she was nobility and much the worse, directly related to EIV and their common kinsman, the (overmighty?) Earl of Warwick, the infamous "Kingmaker" who felt he had "made" EIV and was just as happy to "unmake" him. But whatever plans the Earl had for his young protege they would not likely include marriage with his widowed kinswoman; for his nephew he had his eyes on a European royal bride, one with the "right" blood to permanently tie the Yorkist cause (ie. EIV) to the elite ruling families of their world. (It is also, by the way, the same reason Napoleon, that one time darling of French liberty and equality, would in time take a royal bride from the vast empire ruled by the Austrian Bourbons). Legitimacy would go a long way to keeping EIV on the throne, and it would have provided untold benefits with whatever country they allied with in marriage. The sheer stupidity of the Woodville liason can scarcely be comprehended today. However, I can't imagine the young Eleanor finding the nerve to confront the Earl with a halting revelation that those European princesses are just so unnecessary, "oh, by the way, young Ned and I are very happily married, well sort of happy, he tends to drift, but we can work on that, right?" So, for those willing to pick up this particular thread that Ashdown Hill has so patiently, perhaps even obsessively, tugged at, I suggest you have a measured and thorough guide in this mangled story of seduction, betrayal, abandonment and finally invisibility, perhaps a willful invisibility; it could not have felt comforting to have been treated with such vulgar opportunism - or perhaps she was acutely embarrassed that she fell for such a charming predator. I am bewildered that so much information has been lying around ignored or mishandled - and what we make of the documents, the geneaology (which I thought I knew!), and its repercussions is where I think he has opened a Pandora's box. If you can, read this one along with Annette Carson's book, one that I mean to review, and I will. For now, she too has provided SO much "new" or properly fleshed out information that all I can say is how did so many "scholars" miss so much? How could they ignore so much? Although their writing styles are different you have two serious scholars for whom that string is worth all the work.
4.0 out of 5 stars
Dry writing, but excellent research,
By sbv17 (Boston, MA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Eleanor the Secret Queen: The Woman Who Put Richard III on the Throne (Paperback)
While the writing style of this book is, frankly, incredibly dry, the research in this book is simply excellent. This is a solid contribution to the research and historiography of the War of the Roses period and should not be overlooked by any serious researcher.Ashdown-Hill should be congratulated on this study. Given the obscurity of Ashdown-Hill's findings, I suspect that it took enormous amounts of research to unearth them. Like I imagine other reviews say, the book makes a very strong case for Edward's marriage to Eleanor as being valid. Ashdown-Hill brings out several smoking guns, including the destruction of Titulus Regis. Fascinatingly, this book shows that Edward may have had a pattern of behavior of marrying or precontracting with women and then having then walking away from the marriages. While the actual evidence is relatively meager, Ashdown-Hill actually finds some, which is remarkable given the relative insignificance of Talbot's family. Given the significance of what it could mean if Ashdown-Hill's arguments are true, I think it is important for any serious of historian of the period to read this book and judge for him or herself. If the author is correct, it means things like... -Edward IV's children were illegimate -Richard III was still a usurper,but his claims in Titulus Regis were correct -Henry VII did burn Titulus Regis because he had something to hide (his wife's claim to the throne was weak). It also, arguably, casts light on the legitimacy of Henry VII's ursurpation. I don't think this book necessarily provides definitive proof, but I still recommend reading it for historians and buffs of the period.
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