Review of “William II: Rufus, the Red King” by Emma Mason

It’s no exaggeration to say that Emma Mason’s 2005 biography of William Rufus is the product of a career spent studying the king. For nearly thirty years Mason, who taught medieval history at Birkbeck College and wrote several well-regrade books on the era, has written a series of articles about William and his historical reputation. The latter undoubtedly made her a natural choice when the editors of Tempus’s “English Monarchs” series were looking for someone to contribute a volume on William’s life and reign.

Mason hearkens back to her work in her first chapter, which examines the evolution of William’s historical reputation and the importance of his reign. It’s an approach that allows her to address the sources of the negative judgments of William (Orderic Vitalis being the primary culprit) and how this has led modern historians to underrate the importance of William’s reign. It’s written with the patient determination of someone who has spent decades making the case for greater study of William’s achievements, and it certainly makes the case for the book that follows.

From there Mason delves into her subject’s life. Her approach is mainly chronological, as in seven chapters she walks her readers through the events of William’s life, from his birth through his untimely death. While it lacks the chapter-length coverage of the institutions of Norman England that Frank Barlow provides, she does supply context within the chapters themselves. This lack’s Barlow’s depth, but it’s a worthwhile trade-off in terms of the pacing of her book and it ensures that her focus remains unwaveringly on the king himself.

Most of Mason’s book is devoted to the political and military history of William’s reign. It’s one in which assesses events in light of her critical assessment of the sources, occasionally challenging the traditional story (such as with Anselm’s selection as Archbishop of Canterbury) with a combination of details and logic. For the most part this is well done, but there are two areas where her examination differs from that of William’s other biographers. The first of these is with regards to William’s sexuality, where she adopts a more circumspect approach than Barlow and ultimately dismisses the question as unanswerable. This contrasts dramatically with her coverage of William’s death. While she doesn’t state outright that she believes that William was assassinated, the pages she spends detailing the events of his death and her consideration about the possible culprits suggests that she is far more open to the possibility that his death was intended rather than accidental.

Mason’s indulgence in such speculation adds a melodramatic air to an otherwise thoughtful study of William’s life and times. It certainly explains why her publisher went the more sensational subtitle “The Life and Murder of William II of England” for the paperback edition. This shouldn’t obscure, however, the quality of Mason’s perceptive book. As a study of William Rufus it offers a nice balance of detail and concision for the reader seeking to learn something about him, as well as a strong case for why his achievements deserve greater acknowledgement than they have received over the centuries.

Review of “William II: The Red King” by John Gillingham

One of the things I’m learning from my ongoing effort to read biographies of all of the British monarchs is the importance of scale. When I started this project my preference when it came to histories and biographies was for big books on the subjects in which I was interested. While I did understand the value of the quick overview, usually what I enjoy more is reading a work that provides an all-encompassing account of its subject, one that leaves my interest in it fully sated. As I read multiple works in succession on the same subject, however, I began to appreciate the virtues of a shorter account that trades comprehensiveness for a focus that allows important points to stand out better. Less can indeed be more in that respect.

No book better demonstrates this lesson for me than John Gillingham’s biography of William Rufus. Having recently finished Frank Barlow’s substantive study, I felt as though I had a good understanding of the man and his reign. Gillingham disabused me of this notion with his very first chapter. Entitled “The Personality of the King,” it’s a masterful examination of the development of William’s historical reputation. In it he challenges the negative image William has been saddled with for centuries by tracing its origins to Eadmer’s hagiographies of Anselm of Canterbury, in which William was often portrayed as a moral foil. Once such biases are taken into consideration, the William who emerges from the surviving sources is an easy-going man with a sense of humor, whose opposition to the efforts to impose celibacy on clerics may have been more popular than religious reformers would have liked to admit.

From there Gillingham launches into a brisk overview of William’s life and times. This he does in a series of thematic chapters, starting with William’s early years and his assumption to the throne, then focusing on various aspects of his reign: relations with the Church, William’s military campaigns and relations with other kingdoms, sex life at the court, and contemporary society. These he addresses with the efficient assuredness of someone with a masterful understanding of the era and a command of the literature about it, yet he avoids the sort of assumptions of his readers’ knowledge that this usually engenders. Though his final chapter is dramatically entitled “Assassination,” he spends the book’s last few pages critically dismissing such claims, ending with the comment that “[w]e cannot say whether or not Rufus was assassinated; we can be more confident that he was the target of an attempted character assassination.”

Such pithy observations are typical of Gillingham’s fine book. In it he offers a great balance of detail, context, and analysis that brings William Rufus alive in a way that Barlow’s more detailed study doesn’t. It’s a superbly revisionist work that convincingly rehabilitates his subject against the disparagements of William’s earliest chroniclers. Other monarchs should be so fortunate as to enjoy such treatment, especially in a work that is written in a way that is so accessible to a general audience.