Reviews - The White Ship: Conquest, Anarchy and the Wrecking of Henry I's Dream

168 reviews for:

The White Ship: Conquest, Anarchy and the Wrecking of Henry I's Dream

Charles Spencer

3.89 AVERAGE

harveyhorse321's review against another edition

4.5

adventurous dark informative reflective tense medium-paced

Anthony Horowitz reviewed this book as ‘Game of Thrones but in the real world’. This is incredibly accurate, the things that this covers are often unbelievable. Any fan of fantasy like Game of Thrones should read this book.

hekate24's review against another edition

5.0

Yes, the author is that Charles Spencer. Princess Diana’s brother. After I finished, I tried to see if we could trace their family tree back to Henry I and… yep you can!

I’ve tried to read this book multiple times, and it only clicked with me this week. A couple things at play here:

-The queen’s death. Most of this book is about the setup for a situation where England very nearly had a queen regnant all the way back in the 12th century. It was unthinkable then, which is wild since so many of England’s most iconic rulers have been women. Love them or hate them (and there’s a lot of reason to hate them.)
-I’ve been enjoying House of the Dragon, which is basically just a fantasy retelling of the Anarchy.
-A podcast where Spencer talked about a weird situation in which courtiers knew about the white ship crash ahead of the king and we’re afraid to tell him, so they had to hide their own grief until someone mustered up the courage to tell him.

I’ll be honest, I read this book thinking it would have more about the White Ship incident itself. I fell down a Titanic rabbit hole back in the spring and so I’m used to reading about agonizingly slow ship wrecks. But no, this one was the equivalent of a DUI. The passengers went from partying hard, to being tossed into the sea and dying within seconds. You really can’t get a minute by minute account if that. In the end the white ship incident is like the climactic event that divides a play into two bits; Henry I’s rise and then the chaos that followed him.

It speaks to the strength of this non-fiction book that I went in expecting one thing, got something else, and was riveted. I’ve never been particular interested in the British monarchy until around Henry II but this changed my mind.

I mean… How can you not be fascinated by a historical time period that has the illegitimate daughter of a king trying to kill him with a crossbow and then jumping into the moat to avoid retribution? And then later being welcomed back into the fold with gifts of silver? Give me this tv show, please.

didactylos's review against another edition

4.0

Not what I thought it was going to be. I expected a focus on the actual White Ship and possible exploration of what might have happened and why. Instead this forms the centre point of a very interesting history of the Normans up until the end of the Anarchy and the beginning of Henry 2 as a Plantagenet. Fascinating to see just how political and robber baron it really was.