Royal minorities have always intrigued historians. The ultimate anomaly in the dynastic principle arose where the enormous panoply of royal power had to be borne by monarchs who at their accession were sometimes only adolescents, sometimes barely within the age of reason, or sometimes mere mewling babies. The conventional expressions of foreboding that accompanied such accidents of succession—“Woe to thee, oh land, when they king is a child [Eccles. 10.16]” (1)—betray the very real practical problems and sociocultural anxieties that could be provoked when the child who symbolically wore the crown was blatantly incapable of fulfilling the functions of office. After 1066, England witnessed six occasions on which the succession passed to a child or youth judged too young to rule in his own right. The monarchs in question—Henry III, Edward III, Richard II, Henry VI, Edward V, and Edward VI—form the subjects of the studies drawn together in this new collection, authored, respectively, by Christian Hillen and Frank Wiswall, James Bothwell, Gwilym Dodd, Ralph Griffiths, Michael Hicks, and Charles Beem.

In his brief introduction to the book, Beem explains that, as editor, he set his authors no particular agenda except that they should address “whether those six reigns … have any substantive historical relationship to one another” (5). Oddly and ironically it is this very crucial issue—the degree to which the administrative systems set up to cope with minorities were consciously informed by historical precedent—that seems to be sacrificed not only by authors’ obvious desire to concentrate on their own cases but also by the editor's reluctance to provide some overarching analysis and categorization. As a consequence, royal minorities emerge largely as matters emergency or inconvenience that required pragmatic solutions and tended deliberately to avoid longer-term implications arising from the temporary redistribution of power and authority. Admittedly, this is an important conclusion in its own right: the whole point about preferring a legitimate heir who was unable to rule rather than allowing the succession of a royal uncle or cousin amply qualified to do so was that the former maintained the stability of the dynasty and, thus, of the realm at large. It also has the advantage of avoiding any Whiggish notion of a clear linear process of development between the regency of William Marshal in the thirteenth century and the protectorate of the duke of Somerset in the sixteenth. But it also fundamentally compromises the ability of the authors to draw out much by way of thematic analysis and comparison.

What emerges instead is a rather uneven set of accounts of the practices of government in the six minorities covered by the book. Three authors (Bothwell, Dodd, and Beem) aim to provide some significant revisionism. Drawing on new archival material, they attempt—in some cases more successfully than in others—to expose the constant shifts in the distribution of power that determined the relatively stability of, and tensions within, the minority administrations of Edward III, Richard II, and Edward VI. Such studies are especially useful in highlighting the methodological difficulties faced when attempting to define the real locus of royal grace during minorities and the emerging role of the adolescent king as active ruler. The other authors provide rather more conventional narratives of the early years of the respective reigns. Hillen and Wiswall's very brief account of Henry III's minority is supplemented with a comparative study of royal minorities in other parts of thirteenth-century Europe. And Griffiths and Hicks interpret their brief as largely to provide a harmonized account of their given kings, with the result that both authors tend to avoid exposing the considerable divisions of opinion that remain among scholars on the relative activism of the teenage Henry VI and the motives and circumstances of Richard of Gloucester's assumption of rule from Edward V. It may be remarked in passing that the lack of any intellectual coordination tends to be exposed by the fact that each author's bibliographical conventions have been left as they stand (complete with their own internal inconsistencies): here, the minimal effort of editor, copy editor, and publisher are rather embarrassingly apparent.

Whither, then, might this new set of studies on royal minorities direct future research? First, there ought surely to be a much greater and more creative engagement with the cultural history of childhood and gender. Christopher Fletcher's recent work, Richard II: Manhood, Youth and Politics, 1377–1399 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), which appeared since the publication of The Royal Minorities, provides a very important analysis of the way in which the cultural politics of youth could inform not just the accession of boy kings but also the achievement of, and challenges to, their majority regimes. Second, as Bothwell, Dodd, and Griffiths indicate, we need to move away from the notion that minorities ended decisively with the instant and complete transfer of power from commission to king and instead to treat the move to majority as a process and a trend discernible over a longer period—one which, at least in Henry VI's case, could be significantly protracted and might expose significant problems. Finally, we need to take Beem's own lead and create an informed and accessible account of contemporary legal and cultural approaches to the age at which a king might be expected to achieve his majority and thus understand more about contemporary attitudes to the distinction between the public and private faces of monarchy. Beem's team has provided some exemplary case studies that will assist creatively with all these enterprises, but a holistic history of royal minorities in medieval and early modern England still remains to be written.