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Desmond Eric Christopher Seward (22 May 1935 – 3 April 2022) was an Anglo-Irish Popular history and the author of many books, including biographies of Henry IV of France, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Marie Antoinette, Empress Eugénie and Napoleon's family. He specialised in Britain and France in the late Middle Ages.
He lived in the English countryside on the Berkshire-Wiltshire border. He died on 3 April 2022 at the age of 86. A requiem mass was arranged at Douai Abbey in Reading.
The Hundred Years War: The English in France 1337–1453 (1978) was rated "a well written narrative, beautifully illustrated, and which takes into account most recent research. It is also a good read." in the view of Richard Cobb writing in the New Statesman. The New Yorker noted that "Mr Seward shows us all the famous sights of those roaring times ... and illuminates them with an easy scholarship, a nice sense of detail ... and a most agreeable clarity of style."
Richard III: England's Black Legend (1983) proved controversial because of the author's rejection of the modern argument that Richard's "black legend" was no more than Tudor propaganda. Members of the Richard III Society took issue with Seward's description of the king as "a peculiarly grim young English precursor of Machiavelli's Prince". A.L. Rowse, however, described the book as "a sensible, reliable account." John Julius Norwich judged it "perhaps the best, and certainly the most readable, of recent biographies." In August 2014, the Folio Society published an updated edition of Richard III: England's Black Legend in the light of evidence from his skeleton. Seward argues that the savage way in which Richard was hacked to death demonstrates how much he was hated and that, with the proof of a deformity, this strengthens the case for Shakespeare's portrait being not so far from the truth.
Seward, a conservative Roman Catholic, was strongly criticised by Frank McLynn in The Independent for credulity in endorsing such religious phenomena as the "sun dancing" spectacle at Fátima in Portugal and elsewhere.Frank McLynn, "Maybe the Sun Dances, Maybe Saucers Fly"; The Independent; Tuesday, 22 June 1993. Other reviewers disagreed, The London Evening Standard noting that The Dancing Sun: Journeys to the Miracle Shrines (1993) "is not, however, a book of credulous modern piety, but an example of that much more interesting English literary genre, the journey as a means of personal discovery." London Evening Standard, 30 December 1993. The Tablet concurred, observing that Seward had approached the subject as a sceptic but was "honest about the fact that his journey is also in part a search for reassurance for his own faltering faith" The Tablet, 26 June 1993.
Reviewing Renishaw Hall: The Story of the Sitwells (2015) in the Sunday Times John Carey observed that of Osbert, Edith and Sacheverell Sitwell "Seward takes a sensible view of the trio's literary output, grading it second-rate at best", while observing drily that Edith's poetry "still has its admirers.". Sunday Times, 28 June 2015. The Literary Review noted approvingly that "Desmond Seward has written a revisionist history of those birds of brilliant plumage, the Sitwells." The Literary Review, August 2015.
In 2019 Seward produced what was regarded by some critics as one of his best works, The King Over the Water, a history of the Jacobitism.
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