Writing the Women
The King’s Mother, takes us through the bitter endgame of the Wars of the Roses. At its heart are four powerful mothers, each prepared to risk everything to secure the throne for their sons. Here I reflect on their careers – and on my own determination to bring their stories to life.
Shortly after the publication of my first novel, Cecily, I visited a bookshop in the north of England – in Whitley Bay, in fact, on a rare sunny day! I was on a whistle stop bookshop tour and had been invited in to sign copies of the book. It never ceases to amaze me how much readers value an author’s signature on a flyleaf – or how much I enjoy signing them! Anyway, as I was scribbling quietly away at the back of the shop, a couple interrupted their browsing to come over and chat. They were visiting the northeast from Cambridge they told me, catching up with family. They’d both read Cecily and were enthusiastic, excited even.
He was a teacher. “I’ve been teaching the Wars of the Roses to my sixth form students,” he told me. “The boys loved it, of course...” I’m not surprised, I thought, lots of fighting, battles and swagger – I know how the story goes. “But I couldn’t get the girls interested at all.” He shook his head. Looked disappointed. Then smiled. “So I gave them each a copy of Cecily, and now they won’t talk about anything but the Wars of the Roses!”
I confess, this made me grin like a loon. It’s perhaps the most gratifying endorsement of my writing I’ve ever received – the one that moved me most – the one I remind myself of most often. More than forty years ago, a teacher handed me a novel (We Speak No Treason by Rosemary Hawley Jarman, in case you want to give it a try) that inspired my lifelong love of history and sparked my fascination with the characters you’ll find in The King’s Mother. Now here was another teacher using a novel of my own to encourage a new generation of women to consider the role their foremothers have played in history; the lasting, indelible marks they’ve made on the past that can still be felt in our present; the importance, the sheer vitality of their lives.
Too many male historians overlook this. I recently asked one – a specialist in this period – his opinion of Margaret Beaufort. He looked perplexed. “I’ve never given the woman a moment’s thought,” he said. Which is odd, really. After all, she wasn’t just the first Tudor King’s mother, she was the firmly guiding hand on the tiller of his reign. That’s not all. As well as actively directing the trajectory of the Tudor dynasty, she supported the development of printing, translated works of theology, founded schools and built churches. The Tudor age may be done and dusted, but the two Cambridge Colleges Margaret founded still operate, and Lady Margaret Hall, the first women’s college at Oxford University, was named in her honour. These are reasons enough, surely, that Margaret – along with the other three women at the heart of this book – are worthy of something more than ‘a moment’s thought’. Now, let’s turn to Cecily, who may have been ‘down’ as this novel closes, but was never ‘out’. She lived ten years after Bosworth, active as one of the country’s premier landholders, exercising ‘good ladyship’ across vast territories. After eighty years of purposeful life, she merits recognition as one of the most significant people – of either sex – in 15th century politics, and an era-defining personality.
I’m so grateful to that teacher for sharing Cecily with the young women in his Cambridge classroom. I hope it’s gone some way to convince them that medieval women were far from the passive victims of a patriarchal system, or the beautiful-but-oppressed heroines that Hollywood and a male historical tradition have been all too ready to present us with. Perhaps it will inspire them to consider what their own lives might be; the mark they might make on the world.
Cecily, Marguerite, Elizabeth, Margaret
“It’s impossible to understand the Wars of the Roses, or navigate their complexity, without considering the motives and machinations of these women.”
Cecily, Marguerite, Elizabeth and Margeret were women of intelligence, determination and skill, operating at the sharp end of a deadly political system. They were absolutely in the thick of it, surviving and indeed engineering multiple regime changes. The didn’t always win, but they fought with wit and courage, or, as Kate Griffin put it after reading this book, “with the cunning of vixens and the hearts of lionesses.” I suppose The King’s Mother begs a question: Did Henry VII bring down Richard III to end the House of York? Or was it Margaret Beaufort that brought down Cecily to achieve that goal? Certainly Henry was triumphant at Bosworth, but he’d never have made it to the battlefield without his mother’s behind the scenes manoeuvrings – her fierce mother’s love. Quite simply, it’s impossible to understand the Wars of the Roses, or navigate their complexity, without considering the motives and machinations of these women.
Cecily Neville,
As you might imagine, I’ve pondered long and hard on the careers of these four. What I’ve learned to admire most is their tenacity: their ability to play the long game, to keep a goal in mind and pursue it doggedly over decades. And then, when it matters, the wit to act quickly; to see the slimmest chance and turn it into life-changing, world-changing – opportunity.
Cecily triumphant
At the start of this novel, Cecily is triumphant as King’s Mother as her son Edward is crowned. But she’d walked a long, hard road to get there. She had upheld her husband’s interests in the face of persistent, violent adversity. She believed him worthy of kingship, prepared the ground for that eventuality and, when the chance came, backed him to achieve it. Then, when his efforts failed in ignominy and death, she resolutely put her shoulder to the wheel of her son’s cause – and pushed. While Edward, sword in hand, fought his way to the throne, she overcame bitter grief to go into a battle of her own. With no sharper weapon than her wit, she held the gates of London closed against Marguerite of Anjou’s army, winning the support of the men in charge of the city with persuasive oratory and what we must surely recognise today as cool-headed political lobbying. Had she failed – had Marguerite taken London in January 1461 – there would almost certainly never have been a Yorkist dynasty at all. And if no Yorkist dynasty, then likely no Tudor dynasty, either. Most likely Marguerite would have taken the city, held the country, and her son Edouard would, in time, have succeeded his father. No Henry VII, No Henry VIII with his six wives, no break with Rome, no Elizabeth I. In fact, rethink the past 500 years and more of English history.
Margaret’s long campaign
Margaret Beaufort campaigned for fourteen long years to bring her son home from exile, working tirelessly for his return and the restoration of his titles under a Yorkist king she was content to serve. But, when it became evident that Edward IV’s diplomatic efforts to extricate Henry from Brittany had foundered after his death, she amended her plan. With ruthless clarity of purpose, she took advantage of the turmoil that followed Edward’s death and Richard III’s accession to ‘dream big’. France was muscling up for a fight with Yorkist England and was happy to use her boy Henry as a weapon in that fight, and there were enough malcontents in England to make opposition to Richard’s rule possible. She saw her chance, not just to bring her son home, but to crown him king. She took that chance, at considerable personal risk and, against ferocious odds, she won. When I consider the stress and danger she placed herself into from the moment of Buckingham’s rebellion in the winter of 1483 to Henry’s invasion of England in 1485, my heart almost quails.
Margaret Beaufort
Margaret and Cecily were worthy adversaries. If Cecily had truly taught Margaret the games of chess and power-broking, then Margaret had learned them well. Though Cecily must have cursed this friend-turned-traitor whose blade cut so deep, I like to think she’d have admired her game. I can imagine her looking at Margaret on that bitter day at Westminster, a month after Bosworth, and thinking, well, Margaret, you’ve only done as I would have done – anything for our boys.
Life lessons
These women of the Wars have taught me some life lessons too. Certainly, I’ve played a long game to bring these novels – first Cecily and now The King’s Mother – to life. The idea for them was born when I was barely out of my teens, but I was in my fifties before I finally sat down to write. I’d hoped to do so when I left university aged twenty-two but, with no financial backing and already in debt (yes, I’d managed to rack up a student debt despite a full grant, how on earth do young people manage today?), I needed a job that would pay and a career that would give me the financial security I lacked and craved. I’m not complaining. It’s a challenge every working-class writer has faced and faces still. But I knew such a career would leave little time for much else.
So, with Cecily-like pragmatism, I accepted that the luxury of time to thoroughly research and write so complex a story would have to come later in life. I made the decision to focus on business, but promised myself that, at age fifty-five, I would give it up and write. People sometimes ask me if I regret waiting so long. The honest answer is no. Though it was sometimes frustrating to view my goal from such a distance, my career gave me thirty years and more, not only to nurture the essential craft of writing, but to flex my strategic muscles alongside my 15th century heroines. In the business world, I learned the mental toughness to formulate and follow long-term success strategies, to rally support for goals that mattered to me, to hold my nerve when challenged, and to change course at speed when disaster threatened or opportunity knocked. It would be arrogant to claim that my skills matched these women’s, but I gained valuable insights into how they acquired and polished them. And, though of course I was playing for much lower stakes (nobody was going to die if my plans went awry!), I experienced at times some watered-down version of the breath-stealing relief they must have felt when they snatched triumph from the jaws of defeat. On the surface, you might suppose the corporate world of the late 20th and early 21st centuries to be nothing like the political maelstrom of 15th century England. But beneath the surface, believe me, they are not so unalike, and human nature, as we all know, never changes.
“As writers we must excavate, not only the lives of our characters, but our own if we want to create stories that chime with readers.”
So, do I regret waiting all those years to write? No. During this time my own life experience brought me closer to these women and equipped me to write their story. As writers we must excavate, not only the lives of our characters, but our own if we want to create stories that chime with readers.
But still, it was a long and sometimes painful wait. I remember once a dear friend commended me for being ‘the best consumer of art’ she knew. It was a generous compliment, and it I took it as such, but it brought me to the brink of impatient tears. I wanted to be ‘making’ art, not ‘consuming’ it – and I was, at that point, still ten or more years from fifty-five!
She was right though, to applaud the consumption of art. It was that novel given to me by my history teacher that first ignited my passion for this story, and it’s always been words set artfully down on the page that set my imagination alight, so I’m sure half a lifetime of reading was good preparation for the writing when it finally came. I consumed history books ravenously of course, but fiction was the feast on which I gorged.
Historical accounts inform us, certainly. They challenge our assumptions and, when read critically, improve our grasp on both historical fact and historians’ assumptions. But it’s the exploration of those ‘facts’ in fiction, and the excavation of character that only the novelist is free to undertake that has always excited me most. When I think of the historical fictions I’ve loved most, they’re the ones that have explored both the historical record and the gaps within it to tell us something surprising, enlightening or new about human nature and the business of living – both in times past and time present.
“History is not the past. It’s what’s left in the sieve when the centuries have run through it.”
Messy history
The historical record – incomplete, frequently misinterpreted and always misremembered – is, for the fiction writer, the starting point for an exploration of what might have happened, what it might have felt like, who these people might have been. Hilary Mantel, who I admire beyond measure, said it better than I ever could. “History,” she said, “is not the past… It’s what’s left in the sieve when the centuries have run through it – a few stones, scraps of writing, scraps of cloth. It is no more ‘the past’ than a birth certificate is a birth, or a script is a performance, or a map is a journey. It is the multiplication of the evidence of fallible and biased witnesses, combined with incomplete accounts of actions not fully understood by the people who performed them.”
But it is the starting point for a novelist’s imaginative leap!
The period and subject I’ve chosen to write about is among the most contentious in our nation’s history. No two historians share the same opinions of what happened or why; who was innocent or who at fault; who a hero or who a villain. Much of the contemporary evidence has been lost, or deliberately destroyed. As novelists, we study historians’ divergent opinions – and the sieved scraps on which they depend – and draw our own conclusions about what’s likely, what’s plausible, what might have happened and how it might have felt. There are those, for sure, who will disagree with some of my interpretations. That’s fine – I can be no more nor less certain of my assumptions than the much-divided historians. But I hope they will find the exploration interesting and the characters insightful. My primary aim has been to investigate how women – particularly these four women – exercised authority and power; how they operated within the confines of their male-dominated society while embroiled in a series of bloody wars that robbed them of so much. And, beyond that, to explore the universal and timeless themes of motherhood, ambition, loyalty, betrayal and grief.
What I can say with certainty, among all the dispute and doubt, is that these women made history. Through their actions, their mothering and their political ambition, they determined – at least as much as their men – the progress and outcomes of the Wars. They were brave and bold, fearless and fearsome, and they took their lives into their own hands
Returning to that teacher I met in Whitley Bay, I say to him, thank you for giving the young women in your class a glimpse of their female heritage and an insight into what their own power might be. Janina Ramirez whose book Femina offers ‘a new history of the Middle Ages through the women written out of it’ mounts a strong case against the male-dominated tradition; “If sources are continually to reinforce an idea of a past where women haven’t contributed, women will feel they have always been invisible,” she says. “We need a new relationship with the past, one we can all feel part of.”
Yes, Janina, wholeheartedly, yes!
I’ll close with one more story from my book-touring days. At a history festival in the summer of 2023 at which I’d given a talk about Cecily, a young Ukrainian man came up to me, his daughter, (I’d hazard around three years old), hitched in his arms. Perhaps they were refugees from the conflict, I don’t know. He wanted me to sign his copy of my book and dedicate it to his child. “I want her to read it when she grows up,” he said. “I want her to know she can be like Cecily. That she can be strong and make a difference in the world.”
He had summed up in so few words the reason why I write.