Charles Spencer (1)Ressenyes

THIS REVIEW CONTAINS DETAILS OF SEVERE CHILD ABUSE AND RESULTING LIFE-LONG TRAUMA. READ BOTH THE BOOK AND MY REVIEW WITH CARE.

I've not thought about Charles Spencer since he gave the eulogy at the funeral of his sister, Princess Diana. Occasionally my Instagram feed shows me pictures of his grand home in Northamptonshire, Althorp, where Diana is buried. He's the 9th Earl Spencer now, on his third wife, and the father of seven children.

Born into immense privilege, I assumed that his life was a relatively happy one. I was so incredibly wrong. Sent to boarding school at age eight, his sufferings at the hands of the staff at Maidwell Hall make for excruicating listening. (I listened to the audiobook.) I did not realize that there were such hells in boarding schools. The almost-daily physical abuse, the persistent sexual abuse, and constant bullying from both teachers and peers made this the most upsetting book I've ever read. Forty years on, Mr. Spencer has scars on his buttocks, so cruel and heavy the punishment, and the deep psychological scars he bears have affected his life in every conceivable way.

I don't know what the upper middle class and the peerage of the UK are thinking when they send small boys away from every comfort, every loving face and embrace, every freedom, into boarding schools. Even schools without institutionalised abuse must seem so cold and bleak and unfriendly to little boys who have never before spent a night away from their families, their pets, their bedrooms. I think it's barbaric.

The book is very detailed as pertains to the abuse. I can't fathom a young woman sexually molesting young boys, having plied them first with kindness and lots of candy. The other staff musst have known about all the forms of abuse going on, and not one person spoke up for the boys. It's criminal, it's haunting.

My apologies if there are typos or spelling mishaps in this review. I keep bursting into tearrs, and it's hard to type through watering eyes.

The book is exceptionally well-written, intelligent, descriptive, and it flowed beautifully. It was also read by Earl Spencer, who has a nice voice and good diction. I'm impressed by the bravery of Mr. Spencer, who reveals so much about his life then and now, and the many other Maidwell Hall survivors, who have spoken to the author and allowed their names to be attached to the book.

Be careful reading it. It was informative and interesting and absolute hell. I grant it a full five stars.

This was a raw, emotional account of Charles Spencer's years at Maidwell Hall, a private boarding school for boys in Northamptonshire. I read this book in a day. It's absolutely riveting. It's shocking that things went on as they did. I understand that, since the publication of Lord Spencer's memoir, the school has turned themselves in to the local council. I will follow that story with interest.

A heartbreaking, gut-wrenching story of a young boy's seeming abandonment at a place of horror and terror. Very well-written.½

Good but a little brief and general in some respects. At other times too, the book's narrative seemed to move entirely too fast which may be a benefit for some readers but wasn't to my taste.

The White Ship by Charles Spencer is a thorough account of the events leading up to the dumping of dozens of nobles into the dark and frigid waters of the English channel. As if England were not in a precarious state before these events, it surely was afterwards. The author does a good job of setting up the events by scaling back the timeline to William the Conqueror. This in turn gives us an idea of how much the actual death of the sole heir to the Crown would create a series of holes and fracture in the Kingdom. Some readers have criticized the author because much of the book has very little to do with the actual sinking of the ship, but that is a cats tail when it comes to history and attempting to explain events and round them out. For fans of English History this book is highly recommended and will make a nice addition to anyone’s library while imparting a sense of empathy for those involved. Was the accident preventable, was it because of tunnel vision and typical royal behavior? Yes and no. All in all the tragedy was a vast oversight due to negligence. Although as several reviewers have mentioned. This book is a ball of tightly wound rubber bands of characters that gets bigger and bigger and bouncier and bouncier as it progesses. The sheer amount of people involved in this is astounding, but then again that is expected with the space the story occupies. Be ready for crossed eyes by the time you are done. But do not allow that to take away from the value of the book. This is by no means a Dan Jones book, but then again it was not meant to be. There is without a doubt something to be learned from not only The White Ship, but the state of mind regarding the time period, people involved and the geography of the situation. The cause and effect literally changed the course of the world and the direction not only of a continent but how the countries involved would move forward (sometimes backwards) through the ages. This is Black Adder meets Game of thrones in a manner that is far from humorous, but deadly apparent.

This is a comprehensive book about the events leading up to the Anarchy, including the wars up to the coronation of Henry II. It's almost a biography of Henry I, and the sinking of the White Ship is covered in that context. The result of losing about 200 people, many royal or noble, was catastrophic in England and northern France, especially the death of Henry I's heir, William.
If you've been watching the tv series, The House of Dragons, this is the material that the show is based on - very roughly. Obviously, there were no dragons in medieval England, but George RR Martin used the people and events liberally in writing his fantasy.
Mr. Spencer has done a good job of covering the history of that era. Occasionally he gets very detailed - probably too much for an average reader - but I enjoy English history, so I can understand most of it. This is a must-read for those who want to know more about the Conquest and era leading up to the Plantagenets.

One review of the book states that it is just as gripping as a thriller. I beg to differ. The writing style is scholarly and while it tells a part of English history most of us are unfamiliar with, it was rather dull. I was expecting the book to be about a ship that sank at sea and wondered whether there would be some mystery concerning the sinking. The ship didn't sink until the halfway point in the story and the book was really about King Henry 1.

Spenser packs a lot into this book. A couple of times I felt overwhelmed by the number of names and relationships* (for example, there are so many Matildas!), but I enjoyed it and will never forget Henry I, his daughter Empress Matilda, or the idiocy that sunk the White Ship 901 years ago on 25 November 1120.

I’d actually like to read more about Empress Matilda. Anyone have reading recommendations?

* Spencer does a good job of reminding the reader who’s who, it just took some extra brain power to keep them all organized in my mind.

This book describes the life and death of Henry I of England’s only legitimate male heir to the throne, William AEthling. William died in the wreck of the White Ship, along with many of the young noble elite. Following this disaster and Henry’s death, England fell into anarchy as rule of the country was fought over by forces supporting either Stephen (Henry’s nephew) or Matilda (Henry’s daughter, to whom Henry’s barons were asked to swear loyalty). The writing was fine, and I appreciated the visible endnoting of direct quotes. However, it took me a while to pick up and I didn’t feel compelled to finish it before the library wanted it back, so it’s a 3-star for me.

Narrative history of events of Henry I and his children, with the sinking of the White Ship occurring nearly exactly half-way through. It is the pivot point on which the fortunes of Henry rise and then fall. Spencer makes the case it had repercussions for the rest of the Middle Ages and even to the present. Henry lost his male heir, was unable to create another, allowing the mixing of a new royal house the Plantagenet ie. the houses of Lancaster and York, leading to the Wars of the Roses, Tudors, and so on. It's a reasonable argument, but also counter-factual "what if", which historians sometimes like to emphasize to demonstrate how important an event was. In the same way certain battles are pivotal to broader history. Hard to imagine another ship sinking more influential to English history. And it was so stupid, like tripping and breaking you neck, or getting hit by a bus, we look for meaning but find only banality and lady fortune for consolation. Spencer has managed to make a decent book with it at the core.

This is an account of a 900 year old shipwreck that had a profound effect on English history, leading to civil war and anarchy on a scale that was unprecedented in British history (or at least as far as we know, given that we know comparatively little, for example, about the chaos that must have took place during the vacuum after the Roman legions left 700 years earlier). The White Ship was an advanced craft for 1120, and it was piloted by an experienced captain, whose father had captained the flagship of King Henry I's father William the Conqueror when he had invaded England 54 years earlier. But disaster ensued on a rock off the coast of Barfleur in Normandy on a freezing cold late November night, sending almost all the 300 or so passengers and crew to the bottom of the Channel, including King Henry's only legitimate son and heir, William, two of his numerous illegitimate children (several of whom who were fairly important figures in their own right) and a significant chunk of the cream of the Anglo-Norman ruling class. The cause was chronic drunkenness among both crew and passengers, ironically given large amounts of wine by Prince William himself; intoxication so obvious that several passengers actually disembarked before launch in fear of the consequences, including the king's nephew and eventual successor Stephen of Blois (though he also apparently had diarrhoea brought on by his excessive drinking). William was initially taken away in the only lifeboat by his bodyguards, but he ordered the boat to turn back to rescue his half sister Mathilda, and the boat was swamped by desperate drowning people. We know all this through the account of the only survivor, probably the lowliest of the ship's complement, a butcher named Berold who had joined the ship to chase debts he was owed and whose life was saved by his rough woolen garments protecting him from the extreme cold, and his managing to cling on to part of the ship's mast. Very few bodies were ever recovered, though one of these was that of Richard of Lincoln, one of the king's illegitimate sons.

Henry had invested all his hopes in his son William. Possibly due to the intense rivalry he had experienced with his own elder brothers, Robert Curthose and king William II Rufus, Henry only had one legitimate son, in a probable attempt to provide clarity and a clear undisputed succession for both the throne of England and the ducal seat of Normandy. (He had around 9 illegitimate sons, out of over 20 children born out of wedlock to a total of over half a dozen different women). His wife Mathilda had died a couple of years before the disaster. He married again, to Adeliza of Louvain, but they had no children. He forced his barons to swear allegiance to his legitimate daughter Mathilda as his successor, but this was disputed by his nephew Stephen who seized the crown and a bitter civil war ensued, in which much of the country was ravaged, plundered by both sides and by bands of mercenaries. The ebb and flow of war shifted but there was no peace until 1153 when finally Stephen acknowledged as his successor his rival Mathilda's son Henry. Almost certainly none of this would have happened had the White Ship not sank. So it is fair to say that, while there have been many better known shipwrecks (Mary Rose, Titanic, Lusitania), none of these were as politically influential as the White Ship disaster; as the author concludes, "The shipwreck impacted spectacularly on the next generation, resulting in the bloodiest anarchy that England has ever suffered.", the "vacuum" of William's death having, following Henry's failure to produce a replacement heir with his second wife, "morphed into a chasm, into which the subjects on both sides of the Channel fell headlong". Great narrative history that explains the contextual historical background very clearly and colourfully.

When the ship carrying the only son of Henry I of England was dashed on the rocks outside Barfleur harbour in 1120 a great swathe of the Anglo-Norman aristocracy was lost. This led to 'The Chaos', a civil war between the descendants of William the Conqueror that was only ended by the ascension of Henry II and the start of the Plantagenet dynasty. This shipwreck was a turning point in English history in the early middle ages.
Whilst the book is called the White Ship, the shipwreck itself only occupies a few chapters. What Spencer does in place the tragedy in the context of the political machinations of western Europe in the early twelfth century. As a book about the Normans it is very good, the story follows William from Normandy to England and then focuses on the rivalry between his sons. This period is not often written about in an accessible form for the lay reader and I really enjoyed it.