Dan Jones

speaker

216 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Apr 2026 last heard 7 Apr

Dan Jones’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 1.

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How To Fail With Elizabeth Day · Elizabeth's New Show: History’s Greatest Fails · 7 Apr 2026 podcast

So Edward IV, he didn't trust his marriage.

He's got the two children.

Up until the point of Edward IV dying, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, has been like the right-hand man.

But he has this decision to make in 1483 that,

as to whether he's going to allow the new king effectively to be captured by the other side of the family.

And when he decides he's not, that he's going to force himself on the situation, it's where the sort of spiral begins.

And every decision he makes thereafter

starts to drag him into this zero-sum politics where if he backs off at this point, he can't anymore surrender to the Woodvilles because it becomes kill or be killed.

He has made enough decisions at that point when the princes are in the tower.

that have been extremely ruthless and politically calculated, that it seems to me utterly bizarre and out of keeping with his 15th century brutal politics head on.

And if you've been born in 1452, you know politics is kill or be killed.

If he doesn't kill those princes in the tower, he's insane.

It doesn't have to be hypothetical.

I think it's a necessary political decision, but it can also be morally abhorrent.

I think the slight red herring about his failure or success is that we zoom in on the Princes in the Tower instead of the Battle of Bosworth.

The Battle of Bosworth is connected to the Princes in the Tower in the sense that when you fight a battle, you're inviting God's judgment.

And so Richard fights this battle against Henry Tudor and God decides.

We tend to, I think, when we look at this from our sort of post-enlightenment, rational 20th, 21st century worldview, think that stuff about God, well, yes, they go to church a bit more than we do, but that's the only difference.

No, this is like baked into your understanding of the world, which is that by fighting this battle,

God will decide who is right and who is wrong.

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