Much as I love Shakespeare's Richard III, I also love to see Richard portrayed more positively. Philippa Gregory's latest in her "Cousin's War" series, The Kingmaker's Daughter (2012), takes up the end of the Wars of the Roses from the point of view of Anne Neville, the woman who is "in this humor wooed/in this humor won" in the Shakespeare's notorious seduction scene.
I think this is the first of Gregory's works that I've read, and I was quite favorably impressed. I am not a particular scholar of the era, but I know the basics, and her research seems sound to me. She includes a five-page bibliography of resources in case anyone feels like checking her work. Everything I casually checked was accurate or accepted as possible.
Anne's story, unfortunately, is a fairly depressing one: married at fourteen to the ill-fated Prince Edward, son of Henry VI and Margaret of Anjou; widowed at fifteen; imprisoned; married to Richard; one surviving child; two years as queen to the embattled Richard, during which reign their son dies; then dying herself at twenty-eight only a few months before Richard is killed by the future Henry VII. All this I knew before. But Gregory manages to bring alive not only Anne herself but the members of her family whose history I'd never thought much about: Richard Neville, a.k.a. the Kingmaker, 16th Earl of Warwick, whose machinations and shifting loyalties drove much of the latter part of the Wars of the Roses; Anne Beauchamp, her mother, a great heiress in her own right; and her older sister Isabel, married to Richard's older brother George, Duke of Clarence, famously said to have been drowned in a butt of malmsey.
Anne's tale opens during Warwick's first split with his Yorkist allies, when the new king Edward IV marries the widowed Elizabeth Woodville Grey, embarrassing Warwick, who had been negotiating for a marriage with a French princess. The numerous members of the Woodville and Grey families rapidly take Warwick's place as Edward's confidants and advisors, derailing his plans to marry Isabel and Anne to their cousins, the king's brothers, George and Richard. A failed rebellion against the Woodville influence rapidly turns to a plot to depose Edward on trumped-up grounds of illegitimacy in favor of George, now married hastily to Isabel. "Cousin's War" doesn't begin to describe this mess of shifting allegiances. Not only is this brother against brother, but the mother of all the York brothers, Cecilly, Warwick's aunt, is secretly scheming against her older son in favor of her younger. I hadn't absorbed exactly how shifty George was before, or how much reason Richard would have later had to mistrust him, given his record.
The scheme to put George and Isabel on the throne is quickly abandoned in favor of a complete shift in loyalty, the formerly Yorkist Warwick now making common cause with the Lancastrians in the person of the cold and clever Margaret of Anjou and her son by Henry Vi, another Edward, to whom the teenaged Anne is quickly married. Not a single one of these people are likeable: Isabel is a whiny schemer, George (Clarence) a traitor to his brother, Warwick and his wife a power-hungry pair of manipulators, Margaret of Anjou a brutal ice queen, and Prince Edward an abusive jerk who treats Anne like dirt. The obedient Anne is hopelessly lost in these shifting alliances. Her loyalty is to her family and the father she believes loves her, and she confusedly tries to adopt whatever factional role is called for. It takes the Anne rather longer than it should to realize that she is really nothing but a pawn.
Richard, however, comes across fairly well in the early part of the book: a courtly knight, entirely loyal to his brother and genuinely fond of Anne. His supposed deformity is nowhere in evidence. And after Anne's father and husband are killed, her mother and mother-in-law are imprisoned, and her sister's allegiance shifted firmly back to the Yorkists, Anne is completely isolated. At that point she finally tries to make some choices of her own, though still shadowed by her father's passionate wish that she or her sister should become queen and put Neville blood on the throne of England in the next generation. And then she is reunited with Richard. It's hard to believe that at this point, married then widowed and remarried, she is still only sixteen.
After a relatively happy decade of marriage to Richard, despite some indications that he is perhaps not quite as perfect a knight as she wishes, and the birth of their son (yet another Edward), Edward IV dies, and Richard is drawn directly into conflict with the Woodville faction over the control of the young princes. As depicted in Shakespeare, this does not end well, though Anne's death before the end of the reign means we never reach the final defeat of the Yorkists.
It's an impressive tale, despite its sadness, and I enjoyed how Gregory takes up the tale of the women who are usually given short shrift by history. Isabel's harrowing experience of childbirth aboard a ship, the legal trickery that gives the two sisters their mother's lands while she is still alive, and the cruel choices facing the women involved in this level of politics are brought vividly to life. I did raise my eyebrows a bit at the credence given to the Woodville women's supposed powers of witchcraft, but Gregory never quite steps over the line; all the supposed acts of witchcraft could simply be bad luck, bad weather, or outright delusion.
While it is frustrating that Anne is definitely one of the pawns rather than one of the power-players, and her passivity can be maddening, this is still a worthwhile read that adds another dimension to my understanding of the Wars of the Roses. I'd recommend it to anyone interested in this era of history.
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