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Henry Tudor is a familiar name to students of English history, especially the military side of it. Henry VII is actually a less familiar figure, despite being the same person.

So, a book on Henry VII’s reign seemed like a good way to fill in the ‘hole’ between the Wars of the Roses and the ever-popular Henry VIII. And Penn’s Winter King does a very good job at that.

I would not call this a biography. Henry VII was fairly remote as a king, watching from afar, and generally letting others be the primary face of government. Similarly, you don’t get an up-close and personal view of him here. You do see a lot of him, and his drives. The book starts with a fairly brief overview of the time leading to Bosworth, and gives an idea of how that shaped him. More importantly, it spends a fair amount of time and attention on just how unstable England was after Bosworth. No one yet knew that the trading of the throne from one faction to another had come to an end, and there were still plenty of people that the next rebellion could center around (even if some of them had to be made up for the purpose).

Much of the book therefore focuses on Henry VII’s efforts at control. This turned more and more to economic means, which people fined and held to that debt as a promise of good behavior. The truly disturbing part of this is that it was all extra-judicial, operating outside all the traditional forms of accusations and trials of Common Law. It also shows a deep concern for money matters, and Henry VII was throwing around some vast sums on the continent effectively trying to bribe/finance his way to international deals, particularly ones involving pretenders to the English throne.

One thing I do wish the book had gone into more was the flow of money. It gets touched on a lot, and there’s much that would be hard to say with certainty, but just enough is said to bring up the topic for further interest. One thread in the middle of things deals with the illegal alum trade, which Henry VII made a fair amount of money on, and was part of the shape of international diplomacy.

So, there’s a few dropped threads in what is, after all, a layman’s history. And it does a good job of covering a lot of aspects of the subject, going into the stable transition of power to his son, and perhaps leaving you wanting that little bit more. Definitely a great book to round out understanding of the end of the Fifteenth Century.

The French and Indian War gets enough attention that I wasn’t sure I was in need of a book just on that part of the Seven Years War.

Boy, was I wrong.

Narratively, the focus is around events over several hundreds of miles of indifferently-settled tracts of North America, and the personalities surrounding that. Just as a history of the main campaigns of the French and Indian War, this book has a lot to recommend it. Anderson also goes deep into the forces that shaped all of this. For example, he spends a fair amount of time looking at the differences between British regulars, and provincial (largely New England) soldiers. Commanding officers generally distrusted the provincials, finding them to be horribly insubordinate. Americans tended towards a world view of contracts, and saw military service as such (including a term of service, after which the contract was void), instead of pure subordination to authority. Moreover, the poor, underemployed, class that British soldiers generally came from did not really exist in the North America; there wasn’t enough population to have spare workforce lying around.

In addition, there is a very welcome focus on Indian relations. One of the overall focuses is how the Iroquois Confederacy managed to undermine its own position (largely while trying to strengthen it), and the shift of circumstances broke their ability to hold the Ohio watershed free of Europeans. There’s some very good looks at the internal politics of the major colonial states, and just how dysfunctional they could be (to the point that I’m wondering where to find good books on Colonial Pennsylvania and Virginia).

And, it’s largely aimed at showing how all the effort put into winning a war in North America caused the dissolution of the empire that existed before the war. The war tested the United Kingdom’s abilities to the utmost, and brought a lot of attention to a part of the world that had been somewhat allowed to drift along. The pressures of the war got the various colonies working together for the first time, and also came with a greater realization of how much there was to administer. The book continues on directly with Pontiac’s War, and the economic downturn that came after the peace. It effectively finishes up with the Declaratory Act, and shows how the Sugar Act was a finely-crafted bill meant to stimulate the New England economy at the same time it raised revenue.

There’s a lot of things going on in this book, and they’re all handled well, and at reasonable length. I don’t know that he entirely succeeds in his prime goal of showing just how the act of gaining a large chunk of North America from France led Great Britain to lose that part it had started with, but the through lines are there, and it is all well handled.

This has been on my to-read/to-get list long enough that I don’t remember just how it got there. Certainly in the period when I was looking a lot more at early Europe.

It isn’t quite the book I’d been expecting, which would more be a history of the ancient Celts. This is instead a treatise trying to get at what was (is?) an ancient Celt. To that end, he spends a fair amount of time going over what the ancient authors said about Celts, and the history of the idea of the idea of the Celts from the Seventeenth Century on.

For someone studying the Iron Age in Western and Central Europe, this book may well be a must-get simply because he has a very good catalog of Ancient and Classical authors in historical order, to show what Greeks and Romans thought/knew about the Celts and how that changed over time. He also has a good summary of the history of Modern thought on the Ancient Celts.

That last doesn’t quite say ‘and here’s where it all went wrong’, but that is some of the intent. Collis dates to the wave of scholarship that discounted the ‘fall’ of Late Antiquity, and those sentiments do lead him to have some very pertinent questions about pre-Roman Europe, and the traditional maps showing La Tene ‘Celts’ invading and conquering large portions of Europe. He doesn’t, naturally, have any hard and fast answers on what the proper reconstruction should be, but he does also provide a summary of the types of finds in various regions, and has some things to say about chronology. It was a bit dense for me, with my minimal background, but its yet another good catalog of data in one place in this book.

And really, despite his discussions of certain topics throughout the book, that’s what the primary purpose is: reference. Ancient authors on the Celts, modern authors on the Celts, archaeological finds of the… possibly not Celt, but identified with them La Tene and Halstatt cultures, are all nicely cataloged in here, and that’s why someone studying the subject should have this book. It will save a lot of hunting.

And La Tene and Halstatt are the core of the trouble. Archaeologists see the same types of goods in two places and start assuming they must share the same ‘culture’ (and the drift in the use of that word in archaeology is where things start to go wrong), despite differences in other goods, and differences in the evolution of patterns (types of burials, etc). The pre-WWII habit of equating culture -> people -> ethnicity was roundly dropped in the 40s to 50s in ancient Germanic studies, and Collis sees a need to do the same thing for the contemporary Celtic studies.

So, it’s a well-constructed book, and important in many ways, but it was hitting a little above my specialty level. Other people with casual interest will find it rough going, but anyone diving at all deeper should have it just for the compendiums even if they disagree with the arguments.