|
|
FDU PRESS
 |
| Scholarly Review |
 | The Death-Ego and the Vital Self: Romances of Desire in Literature and Psychoanalysis
ISBN# 0838639216
Reviewed by: G.W. Bernard, Southampton
Welsh History Review, Vol. 22 #3 |
|  | |
f there is an air of familiarity about N. P. Sils latest volume, that is partly because it brings together what has already been published elsewhere, but also because it remains set in the historiographically moment at which it was conceived (as Sils description of books published in 1975 and 1976 as recent reveals). It was in the mid-1970s that David Starkey began challenging Sir Geoffrey Eltons model of a Tudor revolution in government by emphasizing the importance of the royal court, and the privy chamber within it, rather than of administrative institutions. If courtiers were so important then clearly they deserved detailed studies, and it was this task that Sil undertook, tracing the lives of four of them.
Sir Thomas Heneage (c.1480-l553), a servant of Cardinal Wolsey and from c. 1527 a servant of Henry VIII, succeeded Henry Norris as groom of the stool in 1536; he was a loyal servant of the crown who skillfully and diligently carried out his humdrum chores. He was of course richly rewarded for his services, and yet his prosperity was not stained by dishonesty or corruption. Sir Anthony Denny (d. 1549) served the king in the royal household from the 1530s, especially as keeper of the kings privy purse c.1536-46. Sir John Gates (1504-53) served in the kings privy chamber from the mid-1530s and then became an assiduous councillor during the ascendancy of John Dudley, duke of Northumberland, in the minority of Edward VI: he paid with his life for his support of Lady Jane Grey. If Heneage, Denny and Gates can be despatched in eleven, eighteen and twenty- one pages respectively, the Welsh swashbuckler William Herbert (1507-70), first earl of Pembroke, receives ninety-five pages, first published as a freestanding book in 1988 and then revised in 1992: this is in effect the third edition. A member of Henry VIIIs household from the 1530s, repeatedly rewarded with lands and grants, Herbert became prominent in the minority of Edward VI, helping to defeat the Western Rising in 1549 and emerging as one of the most important councillors under John Dudley, duke of Northumberland: in 1551 he was created earl of Pembroke. Deftly switching loyalties in 1553, he served Mary and Philip, not least in war, and despite ill-health remained prominent in Queen Elizabeths first decade.
|
|
|
