Edward IV

Though in his own time Edward IV was popularly seen as an able and successful king who rescued England from the miseries of civil war and provided the country with firm, judicious and popular government, later historians cast doubt on his achievement. This classic study - now reissued with a substantial new foreword by R. A. Griffiths - places the reign firmly in the context of late-medieval power politics, assessing the king's relations with the politically-active classes, and evaluating the many innovations in government on which Edward's reputation rests. Revealing the king as an enigmatic character intelligent, active and forceful, but also pleasure-loving and, in his later years, increasingly arbitrary and avaricious, Ross endorses Edward as a ruler of substantial accomplishment, whose methods and policies carved the foundation of early Tudor government.