Review: the Rise and Fall of a Medieval Family: The Despensers by Kathryn Warner

Synopsis: The Despensers were a baronial English family who rose to great prominence in the reign of Edward II (1307-27) when Hugh Despenser the Younger became the king's chamberlain, favourite and perhaps lover. He and his father Hugh the Elder wielded great influence, and Hugh the Younger's greed and tyranny brought down a king for the first time in English history and almost destroyed his own family. 

Rise and Fall tells the story of the ups and downs of this fascinating family from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries, when three Despenser lords were beheaded and two fell in battle. We begin with Hugh the Justiciar, who died rebelling against King Henry III and his son in 1265, and end with Thomas Despenser, summarily beheaded in 1400 after attempting to free a deposed Richard II, and Thomas's posthumous daughter Isabella, a countess twice over and the grandmother of Richard III's queen.

From the medieval version of Prime Ministers to the (possible) lovers of monarchs, the aristocratic Despenser family wielded great power in medieval England. Drawing on the popular intrigue and infamy of the Despenser clan, Kathryn Warner's book traces the lives of the most notorious, powerful and influential members of this patrician family over a 200 year span.

This for me is a hard review to write and I have literally left it unwritten for sometime after reading this book.

On the one hand, writing about one of England's most despised medieval families, in a favourable light, but still warts and all, is no simple task. Documenting the families' politically activities over a mere 200 years again is no walk in the park.

What I took away from this book was that the Despencers were always closely connected with the reigning royal family of the day - and they maintained their support of the royal line through thick and thin. They did not shy away from political or military service, and gladly served their monarch. The Despencers were also, I think a rather closely knit familial group - for the most part, barring a few renegade members from lesser branches. They supported each other - they had each others' backs. And they accumulated wealth - great wealth, some of it centralised in the hands of a few, but from my understanding, even the lesser branches were doing much better than some of the more powerful nobles of the day.

This is obviously a very well researched and documented book - Warner is noted for her focus on the reign of Edward II and all that which is associated with it. And she is at ease her with her subject matter. Which brings up my next point.

For me, this felt like a genealogical dump. So much was focused on who married who, who inherited what, who took what from whom, that the narrative of the "rise and fall" was somewhat lost - its thin threads are in there but they are quite fragile. In fact, after looking at some of the reviews, I was worried I was the only one who felt the story was lost amid the overwhelming amount of genealogical data. 

When composing this review, what I did, in essence, was put myself in the shoes of someone who was maybe just starting out their own journey of discovery of the era. I imagine them looking at the spine of the book on the shelf, picking up the book, admiring the cover, reading the blurb, maybe reading the intro. What worries me is if they skip the intro and dive right in to be confronted by page after page of whom begat whom (which I can get chapter and verse from Genesis). Then, the book is quietly returned to the shelf and passed by for something more user-friendly.

Writing a two hundred year history of an important family and binding it all together with the contemporaneous events is no slight feat. It is hard to know what to include but more importantly, what to exclude. Just because you have all of this information to hand, doesn't mean it has to be included. Whilst the book does include family trees and a list of who's who for each chapter, I think the focus should have been more concentrated on those (few) who were responsible for the rise and the ultimate fall of this great family.  Afterall, in the great scheme of things, political power and influence was only held by a few. I just wanted a bit more meat on the bone - a bit more of an analysis of events and the impact of the actions undertaken by certain members.  

Alternately, it could have be written in two parts - maybe the first part concentrating on the political history, and then the second part on the more detailed genealogical discussion (for the purist). Anyone is is avidly interested in this period and has done their due diligence will certainly pick this up for their own collection. 

CUP bags 'thrilling' Bartlett book on medieval Europe

From The Bookseller: 

Cambridge University Press has bagged a “thrilling” book on dynastic political intrigue in medieval Europe by historian and presenter Robert Bartlett.

Liz Friend-Smith, senior commissioning editor in history, bought world print and digital rights to Blood Royal: Dynastic Politics in Medieval Europe direct from the author. It will be published in July 2020.

The book explores the role played by family dynamics and family consciousness in the politics of the royal and imperial dynasties of Europe, “from royal marriages and the birth of sons, to female sovereigns, mistresses and wicked uncles”.

The synopsis explains: “Throughout medieval Europe, for hundreds of years, monarchy was the way that politics worked in most countries. This meant power was in the hands of a family—a dynasty; that politics was family politics; and political life was shaped by the births, marriages and deaths of the ruling family. Bartlett looks at how the dynastic system coped with female rule and pretenders to the throne. It expplores how the dynasties used names, the numbering of rulers and the visual display of heraldry to express their identity. And it asks why some royal families survived and thrived, while others did not.”

Bartlett is writer and presenter of several BBC documentary series including “Inside the Medieval Mind”, “The Normans”, and “The Plantagenets”. Professor Emeritus at the University of St Andrews, his books include The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change (Penguin), which won the Wolfson History Prize.

Friend-Smith said: “Robert is a master historian and a fabulous storyteller. He makes enthralling sense of the complex web of internal rivalries and loyalties of the ruling dynasties and casts fresh light on an essential feature of the medieval world. We’re very excited to be publishing his next book, it’s a tour de force.”

Family Secrets: The Scandalous History of an Extraordinary Family by Derek Malcolm

‘Some people’s secrets should never be told. The secret, though, that surrounded my parents’ unhappy life together, was divulged to me by accident . . .’

Hidden under some papers in his father’s bureau, the sixteen-year-old Derek Malcolm finds a book by the famous criminologist Edgar Lustgarten called The Judges and the Damned. Browsing through the Contents pages Derek reads, ‘Mr Justice McCardie tries Lieutenant Malcolm – page 33.’ But there is no page 33. The whole chapter has been ripped out of the book. 

Slowly but surely, the shocking truth emerges: that Derek’s father, shot his wife’s lover and was acquitted at a famous trial at the Old Bailey.  The victim was the self-titled Count de Borch, Count de Borch, aka Anton Baumberg, a dubious character, womaniser and possibly a white slaver and spy for the Germans, who had seduced the lieutenant's wife, Dorothy.

The trial was unique in British legal history as the first case of a crime passione, where a guilty man is set free, on the grounds of self-defence. Husband and wife lived together unhappily ever after, raising Derek in their wake. 

Then, in a dramatic twist, following his father’s death, Derek receives an open postcard from his Aunt Phyllis, informing him that his real father is the Italian Ambassador to London . . . 

By turns laconic and affectionate, Derek Malcolm has written a richly evocative memoir of a family sinking into hopeless disrepair.

From The Church Times 15th September 1917

[The trial that followed the shooting in his Paddington lodgings of the self-styled Count de Borch, Anton Baumberg, by an army officer home from the Front, had provided a distraction from the war news. Was it, some were asking, a case of a husband’s right to avenge his wife’s honour?]

THE trial of Lieutenant [Douglas] Malcolm on the charge of murder let loose a flood of talk about what is known in some other countries as the “unwritten law”. Counsel for the prosecution emphatically affirmed that no such thing is known in the English Courts. If a person’s death is compassed with intention to kill, the slayer is a murderer, and counsel for the defence abstained from resting his case on the plea of the “unwritten law”. He argued that the prisoner, when he shot Baumberg, was acting in self-defence, and the jury accepted this theory, with the result that Lieut. Malcolm was acquitted. It was certainly better so: the law was not strained. This deplorable case raises the question why such people as Baumberg are allowed to be at large. He was known to the police as an undesirable alien, preying on weak women, keeping company with spies, and supporting himself by other infamous practices. He ought long ago to have been placed out of mischief, either by deportation or by internment. His removal through death rids us only of one among many of his sort. Possibly the fact that public attention has been drawn to the existence of this type of persons in our midst may induce the authorities to deal with them effectively.

see also:

A Murderer  in the Family
British Pathe
Like Lover, Like Son
The Sydney Morning Herald Archive
The Daily News, Perth, Archive