Book Review: Sceptred Isle – A New History of the Fourteenth Century by Helen Carr

A vividly-told, immersive story...a Crécy-esque triumph

“My God this is a strange and fickle land…which has destroyed and ruined so many kings, so many rulers, so many great men”

So said an introspective Richard II towards the end of his reign, according to Adam of Usk at least, perhaps unwittingly encapsulating the fourteenth century within one sharp outburst.

In just a few short years, Helen Carr has developed a deserved scholarly reputation as one of the brightest historians in the game, achieving success after success in whatever she turns her hand to, from her exceptional Times bestselling debut The Red Prince: John of Gaunt Duke of Lancaster in 2021 to her insightful broadcast and literary contributions since. It is little surprise to encounter another resounding triumph in Carr’s latest work, Sceptred Isle.

Subtitled ‘a new history of the fourteenth century’, Carr sets out to present a fresh narrative telling of what must rank the most eventful century in British history, certainly one that surpasses most others in terms of its import and impact.

The book opens with the rise to the throne of Edward II, covering his complex relationship with Piers Gaveston, who manoeuvred his way into position as a ‘second king’. This intimate bond between subject and king has attracted much gossip across the last seven hundred years, and indeed did so during the lifetimes of those involved, and Carr does not shy away from exploring the matter. She wonders, delicately, if their relationship was one more akin to a ritual brotherhood rather than anything more, but personal aspect aside, Gaveston’s remarkable rise, one which served to ‘enrage and ostracise’ the ‘red-faced lords’ on account of his ‘whiplash elevation’, could only to a bloody end for the enigmatic figure once thought untouchable through the protection of his smitten king.

This gripping introduction to the world of the fourteenth century Plantagenet soap opera covers only the first thirty pages, but serves as a compelling appetiser for what is to come. Sceptred Isle is, at its heart, a suspenseful and profound sweep through this most turbulent period that shaped a nation, skilfully recounted through an immersive narrative.

From the ‘corruption, deceit and avarice’ that plagued Edward II’s reign, the story shifts to his son Edward III, who Carr judiciously views a ‘natural political leader’ who sought to become a ‘beacon of kingship’. With flowing prose built upon a foundation of contemporary sources, the reader is treated in turn to a front-row seat to the fall of Mortimer, the beginning of the French wars, the devastating outbreak of the Black Death and the formation of the Order of Garter.

The final years of Edward III’s remarkable fifty-year reign finds the once impressive chivalric figure transformed into a lecherous old man, infatuated with his mistress. On this point, Carr is admirable and correctly driven to reconsider the scandalous reputation of the woman in question, Alice Perrers, less an ‘unspeakable whore’ as one misogynistic chronicler put it and more a capable, clever woman who was able to seize opportunity to prosper when it arose. Men have been praised for much less.

As the century thunders towards its close, Carr turns her talented hand towards a fresh appraisal of the Peasants’ Revolt and an absorbing impression of the car crash that was Richard II’s reign, a king regarded ‘unsafe, untrustworthy and unpredictable’, one who came to preside over ‘a court of corruption, treason, deceit and murder’. Carr does observe that despite Richard’s cold, calculating and obsessed nature, he was nonetheless capable of great generosity to his wife and a selective few but, in the end, the despot’s ‘narcissism had a habit of rearing it's ugly head when life did not to plan’ – what a mirror this is to current affairs.

Weaved throughout the familiar episodes are lesser-known affairs, pointedly explored and illuminated by an historian enthusiastic in littering her work with the stories of the other. We are introduced to Maud de Burgh, whose husband Gilbert de Clare was killed fighting in battle against Robert Bruce, the husband of Maud’s sister Elizabeth. Her position was fraught with great difficulty during a traumatic widowhood, and for two years she existed in a curious state of ‘pregnancy’, in which it was believed she may have the de Clare heir in her womb. No child, however, was forthcoming, and this in turn impacted the fate of three sisters of Gilbert de Clare whose status as co-heiresses reduced two of the three to powerless pawns on the marital market, with little control over their choice of husband. They were the assets of the men around them, used to further alliances or forge new ones, with little though paid to their individual desires.

The death of Princess Joan of England from plague, meanwhile, is touchingly told, though elsewhere, we are grimly reminded of the devastating violence that occurred throughout the century, recounted in shivering detail that makes for uneasy reading at times. Friar John Latimer, for example, was tortured by a lead weight affixed to his genitals and both his feet, with a fire lit beneath his soles. Meanwhile, he was suffocated by a rope that eventually broke his spinal cord. Carr admirably also takes care not to omit the experiences of the other peoples on the British mainland during the fourteenth century, turning her gaze throughout to events in Scotland and Wales to avoid yet another solely Anglocentric account.

Sceptred Isle is a vividly-told, immersive story that will draw in an entire new generation to what may just very well be British history’s most enthralling, catastrophic, and consequential century, one in which plague, war and famine wreaked widespread ruin on the everyday person going about their business. Sometimes we pay such close attention to individual episodes, we forget to occasionally take a necessary step back to consider the wider picture or the impact it had on those who endured such burdens.

A gripping Crécy-esque triumph from Carr that I savoured with each suspenseful session of reading.