The Maligned Monarch: A Life of King John of England

"Agnostic, wanton, slothful, unjust, vindictive, cruel, cowardly — the colours sloshed on the legendary portrait of John were as dark as they were fanciful." From this viewpoint, and with a freshness of vision augmented by the light of detailed research, Alan Lloyd paints here a unique, new picture of John as a far-from-monstrous, actually progressive, ruler. Starting with his inheritance of no tangible bequests from his father, Henry II, and his mother, Eleanor of Acquitaine — whence his contemptous nickname, John Lackland — the author goes from John's quite legal accession to the throne in 1199 through a reign climaxed by the Magna Carta, of which the real story further reveals John not as a foe of human rights but as a harassed governor squeezed by the special-interest Establishment of his day. In this engrossing, full and skillfully-told biography, Mr. Lloyd evokes the image of a fascinating man in a long-ago world, so remote and yet at times so surprisingly similar to ours today.