Lanterna Rally

Author: Henry Dwight Sedgwick

Publisher:

Published: 1993

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 9781566191562

Henry Dwight Sedgwick, widely known for his biographies of LaFayette, Cortez, Henry of Navarre, and Alfred de Musset, has here chosen for his subject Edward, the Black Prince. Richard Coeur de Lion stepped into the sunlight in "Ivanhoe" and "The Talisman." Shakespeare took Henry the Fifth as the exemplar of English manhood. To the third great martial hero of the royal house of England fate has been less kind. Great literature has passed him by. This could hardly have been from lack of appreciation. In England the name of the Black Prince has always been renowned. Perhaps poets and dramatists could not find in his simple straighforwardness such traits of passion, revenge, or treachery as would befit their tempestuous verse. But his forthright story, in which appear alike the pageantry and inequality of chivalry, the gallant deeds and the deep tragedy of the Hundred Years' War, is gloriously interesting material for biography. Mr. Sedgwick is fortunate in his subject and the Black Prince, after six centuries, fortunate in his biographer. Mr. Sedgwick has gone to the contemporary chroniclers, Froissart, the Herald Chandos, Geoffrey Baker, Cuvelier and others. Where the original sources are in conflict he is skillful in reconciling them. His study of Crécy and Poitiers makes much more clear what happened at those extraordinary and obscure battles. His choice of material preserves the colors, bright and dark, of a transition age, and the flashing figure of the gallant Prince stands out brilliantly. The Black Prince is a typical Englishman, a bulldog for tenacity, the flower of the world's chivalry, in his generosity, his arrogance, and his extravagance, true to his age. Around him are a host of interesting figures: his father, Edward III; his mother, Philippa, who begged for the lives of the burghers of Calais; his wife, the truly fair "Fair Maid of Kent," and her romantic story. His lieutenants, members with him of the newly-founded Order of the Garter, patterned themselves after King Arthur's Knights but served a very practical purpose. There were bright spirits like Geoffrey Chaucer, Froissart, William of Wykeham, John Wyclif, and, from the East, the Black Death, greatest conqueror of all. These are the forty-six years of a strenuous life in a turbulent age in the "April of Patriotism," amid the battles, sieges, plundering of the Hundred Years' War. "With the Black Prince's death died the hope of Englishmen," not soon to be born again. When it was reborn, it was the fulfillment of his life, for Edward the Black Prince, is one of the few martial heroes who have made England England. - Jacket flap.