The House of Beaufort by Nathen Amin (Amberley, £9.99)

The 15th century is a confusing part of English history, and that’s before you get to the Wars of the Roses.

Imagine trying to paint a compelling and illuminating account, if your main sources of information are the equivalent of Acts of Parliament, the minutes of the Privy Council, decisions of the Chiefs of Defence Staff, the royal accounts and the odd set of household accounts.

That’s the task that Nathen Amin both sets himself and achieves.

His sources become more varied as the century progresses and therefore his task becomes easier, but even in the less informed early part of the century, he keeps the reader’s attention.

He does this by concentrating in turn on each of the four Beaufort children of John of Gaunt, third son of Edward III, and his mistress, later wife, Katherine Swynford, and their descendants. Between them the four siblings were a duke, two chancellors of England, a cardinal and the wife of one of the most powerful land barons of the era.

Amin traces their progress through the complicated politics of the time which from this distance resembles a series of inter-family feuds culminating in the Wars of the Roses.

He shows how loyalty to their stepbrother King Henry IV and the ability to handle financial affairs laid the foundation for Beaufort power, winning battles for a warmongering king (Henry V) and diplomatic expertise consolidated it, and how not winning battles and not mastering the baronial free-for-all under a weak king (Henry VI) lost power.

At times, Amin dons rose-coloured specs to gloss over more disreputable deeds by the Beauforts or to put the worst interpretation on their opponents’ actions. But that is a common fault of historians intent on championing a person, or in this case, a family.

The book has a good style that makes it a pleasure to read and at the end I felt more confident about the 15th century.

I have two caveats. In an era when family connections and ties were so important, it would have been useful to have a set of family trees instead of a single skeleton tree concentrating on the male Beauforts.

Finally, Amin has the annoying habit of referring to characters by the title they had at the time of the event he is describing. So the first Thomas Beaufort moves from Beaufort to Dorset to Exeter and the name Exeter is also used to refer to two other non-Beaufort men. All very confusing, particularly when the index only lists people by surname.

Megi Rychlikova