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“... These two paperbacks, of Geoffroi de Charny’s A Knight’s Own Book of Chivalry and Edward, Duke of York’s The Master of Game, make accessible two texts that are of exceptional interest for the light they shed on the ethos, style and tastes of the secular aristocracy of the later Middle Ages ...”

“... is ‘impulsive, changeable, irascible … unwilling to listen to advice’. John the Fearless, duke of Burgundy is ‘graceless, awkward and taciturn’, ‘brutal, cunning and duplicitous’, while his son, Philip the Good, is a playboy prince, given to ‘dancing, feasting, jousting, hunting and fornication’. Philip is admitted to be a subtler ...”

“... some 687 foxes in one session.’ But hunters were also early systematic observers. Edward, second Duke of York, in his Master of the Game noticed what David Macdonald’s research has confirmed: foxes eat worms. As it became a more respectable quarry the fox was pampered: its habitat was protected, its enemy, the farmer ...”

“... was a strong one if you ignored the deposition of Richard II in 1399. In the mid-1450s, Richard, Duke of York, Edward’s father and England’s pushiest peer, had twice attempted to sideline Henry VI, who suffered from lengthy spells of mental illness and was repelled by the idea of warfare. He was a pious, compassionate ...”

“... and Cartier, standing beside him through the long years of what became, in effect, their exile as Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Then, at last, inside Buckingham Palace, after her husband’s funeral: the much tightened face glimpsed at the window, only the eyes expressive of some incalculable regret. In the many retellings, of which Deborah Cadbury’s is the ...”

“... When Richard, Duke of York, laid claim to the English throne in 1460, he presented himself as a physician, sent to heal the ills of the kingdom. In partnership with his apothecaries, the faithful Commons, he would probe ‘the root and bottom of this long-festered canker’ and separate ‘the clean and pure stuff from the old, corrupt and putrefied dregs ...”

“... other high-ranking lay and ecclesiastical magnates, most notably William Melton, Archbishop of York, came to believe that Edward II was alive, or said they believed it, or were alleged to believe it. This doesn’t mean it was any more true than the belief that Richard II was still alive in the 1400s or Richard Duke of ...”

“... it was a relief – or would have been if there had not been serious doubt whether his brother the Duke of York was up to the job either. His health was poor, he suffered from a severe stammer and he lacked even Edward’s vapid charm. For some months – while the American press speculated that the new king was ‘of poorer ...”

“... prospect of later rediscovery. Who, today, knows anything about such defunct dynasts as the Duke of Cambridge, the Marquess of Carisbrooke or the Earl of Athlone? The subject of Noble Frankland’s well-intentioned but unconvincing effort at rehabilitation, His Royal Highness Prince Arthur William Patrick Albert, ...”

“... either to fade out of the public eye or be a nuisance.’ It has generally been assumed that the Duke came in the second of these categories and, since it is even easier to hit a man when he is dead than when he is down, tilting at Windsor has recently become a popular sport. Some of the jousting has been in dubious taste, with lances forged in malice, aimed ...”

“... Returning unbidden from exile in July 1399 to claim his confiscated inheritance as Duke of Lancaster while Richard II was in Ireland, Henry Bolingbroke was greeted tumultuously as the prospective saviour of the realm. Richard, hurrying home, found himself deserted in mid-Wales and faced with no alternative to putting himself in his cousin’s power ...”

“... must have been Edwina H. Wilson’s Her name was Wallis Warfield, for it was published, in New York, in December 1936, before the issue was decided. (‘Suppose – just suppose – an American girl should become Queen of England!’) The volume is worth looking at, for it sets the style of much that has been written since, and the tone is of an ...”

“... Instead, he cites other people who shared these views – as many did and do. Take the Duke and Duchess of Windsor: King George VI and Queen Elizabeth knew, Harris writes, that the Duke ‘was irresponsible, insensitive, feckless. He never paused to consider the implications of what he said and did. They put ...”

“... English, although born and brought up abroad. Jones’s father served in the household of the Duke of Cumberland, Ernst Augustus, later King of Hanover, and he spent his youth near Hamburg and went to school in Lüneburg. In short he was, like Will, an exotic, and played to the fact. More important, he had been educated, to the limit of his father’s ...”

“... or at least violence and sentimentality. The roses most relevant to the story are in fact those of York and Lancaster, whose surges of hostility wrecked almost every one of the Paston family’s schemes for advancement just as they were coming to fruition. The Pastons managed to avoid most of the bloodshed directly associated with the civil war, but there was ...”