The Beginning of the Wars of the Roses? By Catherine Hokin

Anyone who cares about history is obsessed with dates. We locate rulers with them. We decide what's historical and what's too close to our own lifetime to dare creep into that camp with them. As historical fiction writers we frequently weep over them and wish we could smudge a birth date here or a battle there to make our plot lines work. But how many, to borrow a phrase from 1066 and All That, can we trust are genuine - is it, as Misters Sellars and Yeatman would have it, really only two, reduced from four as two weren't memorable?

 Warren Field Lunar Calendar: University of Birmingham

Trying to keep track of the time goes back almost to the dawn of it. The first formulized calendars date from the Bronze Age, but the title of 'world's oldest calendar', awarded in 2013 (more than three sources quote this date so I'm going to accept it) goes to an arrangement of twelve pits and an arc in Warren Field, Scotland which is approximately 10,000 years old. The oldest-still-in-use award is claimed by the Jewish calendar which was introduced in the ninth century BC. 

 The Lost 11 Days: Today in History

Baked into the development of all our measuring systems is the differing lunar year (354 days) and solar year (365 days). The Roman Calendar, 45 BC, introduced the concept of leap years to try and solve this mismatch. By the time the Gregorian Calendar was floated in 1582, the Roman's miscalculation of the solar year had thrown the seasons, and therefore Easter, out of sync. Pope Gregory's attempts to solve this involved changing the leap year system to a new calculation based on years divisible by four rather than an extra day every four years. Or something on those lines that defies my understanding. Anyway it obviously worked because, as we all know, Easter is now an immovable feast. Not everyone liked the changes: Germany resisted the swap until 1700 and England, as warm then to the idea of European regulations as it ever was, stuck it out on the old system until 1752. By this point the seasons were so messed up, Parliament took the rather fabulous decision to advance the year overnight from September 2nd to September 14th, thus removing 11 days at a stroke. Take all this into account and is it any wonder that the dates we choose as significant can sometimes feel more like a collective act of will than a fixed and certain point?

 Assassination of Franz Ferdinand

Which brings me back, finally, to where you might have thought this article was going: the beginning of the Wars of the Roses. Dating the start of conflicts is always a troublesome thing. I remember my confusion at school after being initially taught that dates were absolute and then being introduced to the Hundred Years War. Rounding down its extra 16 years seemed to offend both the laws of History and Maths. That the conflict was a series of wars and didn't even attract that name until the nineteenth century was a revelation left for university, by which time I was, luckily, a more cynical creature. If the Thirty Years war lasted longer than the 1618-1648 timeline given to it, I don't want to know.

Perhaps the problem goes back to our need to define the reasons for a key event in a way that can be regurgitated in an exam format. Four causes good, one cause even better. The start date for WWI is recorded across all common sources as 28 July 1914, when Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. If asked, I would guess most people would state the main cause as the assassination of Franz Ferdinand - or, as Baldrick so beautifully puts it in Blackadder Goes Forth, when 'Archie Duke shot an ostrich because he was hungry'. That act has become our shorthand for all the colonial and dynastic disputes that went before. Similarly we start WWII on 1 September 1939 with its blitzkrieg images rather than the 1938 Anschluss, or the 1933 Nazi rise to power, or the end of WWI...  Obviously only the world's biggest bore would refuse to accept the commonly-agreed answer and we'd soon lose the pub quiz and all our mates if we disputed every date. The narrative of remembering is however, as always, in the victors' hands.

 Henry VI Part One

Today, May 22nd, is the anniversary of the First Battle of St Albans, fought between the rival houses of York and Lancaster in 1455 and commonly given as the starting point for the Wars of the Roses. The battle itself was a short-lived thing, lasting less than an hour and without major casualties (in context of the engagements that would follow), apart from Edmund Beaufort, Earl of Somerset who was killed. Its consequences, however, were widespread. The alignment of Somerset with the House of Lancaster led not only to his but to the death of all his male heirs, ending the House of Beaufort. The bravery displayed by the Earl of Warwick began the myth-building around him which led to his 'kingmaker' title and his later over-reaching. King Henry VI's capture paved the way for the Duke of York to reclaim his position as Protector of England and take again the controlling hand over the kingdom the Lancastrians had only just seized back following the King's prolonged period of physical and mental incapacitation. And the Yorkists won, so they liked to remember it.

The battle started the openly bloody phase but it did not start the civil war. The origins of that go back to the eleventh century and the first Plantagenet king, Henry II, and his battling brood. No one sat comfortable on the throne for two hundred years and then, in 1399, the key split came: the deposition of Richard II by his cousin Henry Bolingbroke, the future Henry IV. That particular tussle split an already hostile family into two competing branches (the Lancastrians following Henry's line and the Yorkists from Richard) and the original Game of Thrones began. What finally tipped the dynastic feuding into full-blown conflict? A weak king. The saintly Henry VI with his catatonic illness was, by any measure, unfit to rule. Pair that with a strong man in opposition (Richard, Duke of York), a Queen with a long-awaited heir and no intention of relinquishing power (Margaret of Anjou) and all the fortunes tied up in aristocratic privilege and it's little surprise that a war erupted. And our shorthand for all that is the First Battle of St Albans. (And yes, I appreciate that's a whirlwind tour but there's a lot more detail in my novel, just saying). Perhaps the next question should be when did the civil war end? Easy: 1485 and the Battle of Bosworth. Except, of course, it didn't - the ramifications were still shaking the throne when the Tudors climbed on it. 

Mary Beard's Twitter Challenge

Causes and dates. We need them to make sense of where we are in the world and what brought us here but they aren't always reliable. A few months ago, Mary Beard asked her followers on Twitter to set future exam questions on what got us to Brexit. The answers were depressingly entertaining. A Level, 2069: Summarise the latest plan for Britain to exit the EU. Discuss the shifting relationship between Britain and Europe, using examples from 6200 BCE, 55 BCE, 43 CE, 410 CE, 865, 1066, 1534 and 2016-2019. To what extent did Brexit mean Brexit? My particular favourite was the short and to the point: When did Brexit End? Hopefully we can all agree on a date to that soon.

Remembering The Battle of Bosworth by Catherine Hokin

The first of these Welsh kings was Henry who defeated all the other kings at the Battle of Boswell and took away all their roses. After the battle the crown was found hanging up in a hawthorn tree at the top of the hill. This is memorable as being the only occasion on which the crown has been found after a battle hanging up in a hawthorn tree at the top of the hill.

With thanks to 1066 and All That by Sellar and Yeatman



As Sellar and Yeatman put it in 1066 and All That - probably still my favourite historical book of all time which may explain a lot - History is not what you thought. It is what you can remember. One of the things many people are pretty certain they can remember is the Wars of the Roses, which ended (or didn't but we'll get to that) 533 years ago today on the 22nd August 1485 with the Battle of Bosworth. History buffs or not, ask a sample of your friends about this time period and I guarantee they'll all have some sense of it. Whether it's the lost princes in the Tower, the ill-fittingly romantic name, Richard and his hunch-back, or his car-park discovery, the Wars of the Roses and its characters still resonate. They also inspire great passion. My father was a member of the Ricardian Society and a war-gamer whose sand-table battles (ask your parents) re-enacted every twist of that August day. As I said many times when my novel about Margaret of Anjou came out, he was so obsessed with the conflict that, as a child, I was fairly certain that it was still going on. And who can forget the Channel 4 documentary after the discovery of Richard III's body and Philippa Langley's face when she looked at that re-created head.

 Bosworth Memorial

Perhaps one of the reasons the Battle of Bosworth still attracts such attention (apart from the fact that a king died) is that it still courts controversy. We have no eye-witness accounts - all our knowledge of the day's events is derived from documents written after the fact and under a regime with a need to remember history in its own particular way if it was going to have any kind of a future. Some sources in fact come even later - for example there was no real attempt to analyse the use, type and position of troops  for nearly another 200 years. The site itself has long been a matter of dispute - the stone marking the spot of Richard's death is at Ambion Hill, near Sutton Cheney in Leicestershire. In 2010, after a major archaeological project, the actual site of the battle was announced as being 3km away from the memorial. Part of the evidence which relocated the battle site were 22 pieces of lead shot, ranging from gunshot to grapefruit-sized canonballs. Not only did this discovery change the location, it also dispelled a myth that the armies fought each other with bows and arrows rather than firepower.

 Stanley Coat of Arms

Controversies over the site are one thing but the issue of treachery - and that of Lord Stanley in particular - is quite another blood-boiler. Listen to my father and William Stanley made Attila the Hun sound like Winnie the Pooh. The version he subscribes to has the hitherto loyal Stanley turning his coat at the last minute, swooping his troops down the hill behind Richard in a shock move that ensured the king was butchered. That Stanley declared for Henry at the last minute is as certain as anything in this battle can be but the idea of the attack having no deeper roots than a self-serving decision on the day as been re-examined by historians such as David Hipshon. He cites Stanley's failure to support Richard not as a sudden change in loyalty but as coming out of a 20 year power-struggle in Lancashire; a personal score being settled in a bigger political arena. And I can already hear the cry - "tomaytoes/tomatoes: it's still treachery!"

Reconstructed head of Richard III

The site, the type of weapons used, who turned coat and who didn't: it all disappears into the mist when we get to what happened to Richard himself. Oh the ire it used to raise. The stories of his removal from the battlefield are told in a number of the chronicles which later reported the battle. According to Vergil, the body was ‘nakyd of all clothing, and layd uppon an horse bake with the armes and legges hanginge downe on both sides’, a scene the Crowland Chronicle described as a ‘miserable spectacle in good sooth’. His body was then taken back to Leicester, his head supposedly hitting the stones of Bow Bridge as it was carried across. Most accounts agree that the body was put on public display for two days at Greyfriars church. Some then have the corpse interred in a plain unmarked tomb inside the church, others talk about an alabaster tomb, with an effigy of Richard on top, being erected at a later date on the orders of Henry VII. If that ever existed it was lost, as was the King with the most commonly believed story having him tipped unceremoniously into the River Soar.

 Leicester Council Sign

Except, of course, he wasn't. In 2012, an archaeological excavation discovered a battle-damaged skeleton in a Leicester City Council car park, believed to be the site once occupied by Greyfriars Priory Church. The body showed that the skeleton had 10 wounds, eight of them to the head, inflicted in battle and suggesting the soldier had lost his helmet. A blade had hacked away part of the rear of the skull. In 2013 DNA testing identified ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ the remains as those of Richard. The University of Leicester identified the skeleton as a result of radiocarbon dating, comparison with contemporary reports of his appearance, and comparison of his mitochondrial DNA with that of two matrilineal descendants of Richard’s eldest sister, Anne of York. So we had Richard but we didn't have an end to the arguing with both York and Leicester campaigning to host his remains - a battle Leicester's tourism department won.

Was 1485 the end of the Wars of the Roses? Not for Henry VII who lived under the shadow of pretenders and resurrected dead princes throughout his reign and probably never sat that comfortably on his throne. And, beyond a categorisation date of the here ends/here starts type, not for historians who still have so much of the battle left to pick over. And don't forget there's another controversy to come: the lost princes, one of history's ultimate cold cases. There's bones, they've never been tested and Philippa Langley is on the case...

The House of Beaufort by Mary Hoffman

I can't remember when I first became interested in the Beauforts, the children conceived by Katherine Swynford by her lover, John of Gaunt, and later legitimised by their marriage.

Unlike many History Girls, I never read the novel "Katherine" by Anya Seton. It was published in 1954 and has remained popular ever since but somehow passed me by. (The only historical fiction I read before adulthood was the Regency romances of Georgette Heyer).

Perhaps it was the RSC's performances of Shakepeare's History Cycle, from Richard the Second to Richard the Third in Michael Boyd's exhilarating productions of a decade ago. We saw them as they came out, in Shakespeare's writing order and then plunged a terrifying amount of money on seeing all eight in their chronological, historical order in four days, named "The Glorious Moment," in Stratford in the spring of 2008. And there were many glorious moments in that long weekend at the Courtyard Theatre, from the astonishing appearances of Jonathan Slinger as both Richards, and Katy Stephens as both Joan of Arc and Margaret of Anjou, to John MacKay as the Dauphin, along with the rest of the French court in dazzling costumes on trapezes, while Geoffrey Streatfeild excelled on the ground as Henry the Fifth and Jonathan Slinger (again) popped up through a trapdoor as the Bastard of Orléans.

Thrilling stuff. But what of the Beauforts? Well, it all begins with John of Gaunt, the third son of Edward the Third. Which of us did not learn at school the "sceptred isle" speech from Richard the Second? I remember even singing it in the setting by Parry in school choral competitions.

But I didn't know then that the dying Duke of Lancaster, King Richard's uncle and father of the perplexingly named Bolingbroke, was the richest and most hated man in the England Shakespeare makes him praise so lyrically. The man whose most lavish home, the Savoy palace, was burned to the ground in the People's Revolt of 1371, the proud and arrogant lord who liked to be called king, by virtue of his second marriage, to Constance of Castile, the venal man whose sexual adventures might have caused him to die horribly of an STD and – mind-bogglingly – Chaucer's brother-in-law.

The wedding of Blanche of Lancaster and John of Gaunt

 Finding out all this was to come but in was in another of the History plays that I first encountered my first Beaufort, the Bishop of Winchester, who later became a Cardinal. He is the one who has the huge speech about Salic law in Henry the Sixth, part one, justifying the English right to the French throne.

And Shakespeare dramatises the cardinal's feud with Henry the Fifth's brother, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, and his presiding over the trial of Joan of Arc in the next play.

This Beaufort was Henry, the second child of Katherine Swynford by John of Gaunt and brought up to go into the Church, like many second sons.

Shakespeare doesn't portray Katherine, or her daughter Joan. The only female Beaufort descendants we see on stage are – briefly –  Joan's daughter, Cecily Neville, Duchess of York, who was mother of Edward the Fourth and Richard the Third, and Anne Neville, Cecily's great-niece, who is so memorably seduced at the beginning of Richard the Third.

And yet, the more I researched this remarkable family, the more I became aware that it is the women who drive the story of the House of Beaufort, from Katherine Swynford to Margaret, the mother of Henry the Seventh. After all, Henry claimed the throne through his mother's line and his descent from John of Gaunt; without Margaret we'd have no House of Tudor.

Along comes Nathen Amin's The House of Beaufort: the Bastard Line that Captured the Crown (Amberley Publishing) a beautifully produced hardback that satisfying fills out the history of the women as well as the men who descended from John and Katherine's long-lasting relationship and provided the backbone of the house of Lancaster.

And yet, and yet ... Cecily Neville, Katherine and John's granddaughter, married Richard Duke of York, a possibility of uniting the houses of Lancaster and York long before Henry Tudor came along. It was not to be.

Amin reminds us of the entangled and complex relationships within the royal line of England.  John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster by virtue of his first marriage, to Blanche of Lancaster, who inherited her father's great wealth, was the third son of Edward the Third. The first was Edward the Black Prince who died before his father, leaving Richard the Second to inherit the throne when his grandfather died. The second was Lionel Duke of Clarence, who died without male heirs, but his daughter Philippa married Edmund Mortimer and their granddaughter Anne Mortimer married Richard, Earl of Cambridge. The fourth son of Edward the Third was Edmund, Duke of York and it was his second son that Anne Mortimer married.

So if you accept inheritance through the maternal line, as you must if you believe Henry Tudor had a legitimate claim to the throne, then the Yorks had the better case.

(If you find any of this confusing, I urge you to read John Julius Norwich's Shakespeare's Kings, which sorts it all out once and for all.)

Henry Tudor

 These are the amazing "history girls" of the Beaufort family:

Katherine Swynford

Born Katherine de Roet in Hainault, she came to England where her sister Philippa was lady in waiting to Blanche of Lancaster, John of Gaunt's first wife. Philippa married Geoffrey Chaucer, who wrote The Book of the Duchess, to celebrate Blanche, at the request of his friend and almost exact contemporary, John of Gaunt. Katherine married Sir Hugh Swynford and bore him at least three children. He died in 1371 and Katherine must have started her affair with John soon afterwards, since their first child John was born a year or two later.

By then Blanche had died of the plague and John had married Constance of Castile, by whom he had one daughter and a son who died in infancy. But in the course of that marriage he fathered John, Henry, Thomas and Joan on Katherine Swynford, who had been governess to two of his daughters by his first wife.

Not laudable behaviour on either side and the medieval equivalent of the tabloids had a field day with the scandalous story. But what was remarkable was that two years after after Constance had died, John married his mistress. She brought no fortune to the marriage or any dynastic advantage, unlike his first two wives, so one must conclude it was a love match.

Whatever you think of Katherine's morals, she was clearly a remarkable person with a strong hold over the richest lord and most powerful person in England after the king.

Joan Beaufort

The children were all given the surname Beaufort, after a lost castle in France. After their parents married, Richard the Second declared them legitimate. Joan, like her three elder brothers, was cousin  to the king and there was clearly some contact between them.

When Bolingbroke deposed his cousin Richard, the Beauforts were now even closer kin to the throne, half-siblings to the new king. Like her mother, Joan married twice, first to  Robert Ferrers by whom she had two daughters before he died. Her second husband was Ralph, Earl of Westmorland, who had also been married before, He had twelve children by his first wife and went on to have fourteen more with Joan. (This is a story of fecundity; if Edward the Third and his wife Philippa hadn't had quite so many sons to war for the succession, history would have been very different).

Joan and Ralph made advantageous marriages for all their children, playing on their close relationship with the king. Their youngest child was Cecily Neville, famed for her beauty and nicknamed "the Rose of Raby." When Joan died she was buried with her mother in Lincoln Cathedral.

Katherine Swynford and Joan Neville's tomb

Cecily Neville

Married Richard, Duke of York, who so nearly became king and fathered two sons who did, Edward the Fourth and Richard the Third. Shakespeare portrays her as a strong matriarch, the Duchess of York, who rails against her youngest son as misshapen and evil.

She was a tenacious and fiercely loyal woman who fought for the rights of the house of York and believed she should have been queen.

 Margaret Beaufort

The granddaughter of John Beaufort and Edmund Tudor, Henry the Fifth's half-brother by his mother's second marriage. She gave birth to her only child, Henry, when she was only thirteen. Although Margaret married twice more, there were no more children and it is assumed that the difficult birth at such a young age damaged her physically. She was separated from her son for most of his childhood and youth, as the Wars of the Roses raged, but remained fanatically attached to her only child and devoted to the idea of his inheriting the throne.

This aspect of her was memorably portrayed by Amanda Hale in the television adaptation of Philippa Gregory's The White Queen, a somewhat fanciful re-imagination of what was known then as The Cousins' War.

Nathen Amin has done his research and filled in a lot of the gaps. No-one interested in the remarkable Beaufort line will want to be without it.

The House of Beaufort: the Bastard Line that Captured the Crown by Nathen Amin (Amberley Publishing 2017)
John of Gaunt by Anthony Goodman (Longman 1992)
Shakespeare's Kings by John Julius Norwich (Viking 1999)
A Pride of Bastards by Geoffrey Richardson (Baildon Books 2002)
Katherine Swynford: the Story of John of Gaunt and his Scandalous Duchess by Alison Weir (Jonathan Cape 2007)

Richard Of York Gave/Gained Battles In Vain - Katherine Roberts

We're having that sort of year. Heavy showers and sunshine, sometimes both at once, which produce one of the most beautiful weather effects we have on earth - the rainbow. And every time I see a rainbow, the phrase in the title of this post "Richard Of York Gained Battles In Vain" pops into my head. It's how I was taught to remember the colours of the spectrum - Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet - and it's apparently the most common mnemonic used here in Britain (with the exception of Yorkshire, where I've heard it injures local pride... what method do they use in Yorkshire? Can anyone enlighten us?).

But who was Richard of York, and which battles did he gain in vain? For the past 40 years or so, I've had a vague idea of some wimpy northern nobleman swinging a sword angrily at his enemies but still not getting what he wanted - so before I get thrown off the History Girls blog, I thought it was about time I found out more!

Richard Plantagenet... please can I be king of England?

'Richard of York' refers to Richard Plantagenet, the 3rd Duke of York and great grandson of King Edward III. Richard was the second most powerful nobleman in England after the troubled king Henry VI, with a strong claim to the throne. He tried to take over when it became obvious that Henry's bouts of insanity made the young king incapable of ruling England, but Henry's wife Margaret of Anjou would not hear of it. So Richard had to be content with an agreement that he would be crowned king if Henry died before he did.

Richard of York's coat of arms

Richard's 'vain' battles probably refer to the many battles he fought in France and Ireland as leader of the opposition, where he gained much support for his claim to the throne. But all his efforts came to nothing on 30th December 1460 at the Battle of Wakefield, a major battle in the Wars of the Roses fought between the House of Lancaster and the House of York. The Lancaster forces (supporting Margaret of Anjou and her small son Edward Prince of Wales) won, and Richard Duke of York was killed only a few weeks after securing his historic agreement.

The sense of futility he must have felt is expressed in this popular folk song (which I remember learning with all the actions when I used to be a morris dancer.. good for warming up the knees!)



Oh, The grand old Duke of York,
He had ten thousand men;
He marched them up to the top of the hill,
And he marched them down again.

And when they were up, they were up,
And when they were down, they were down,
And when they were only half-way up,
They were neither up nor down.
As far as I'm aware, there is no real proof that the Duke of York in the rhyme is our Richard of York from the rainbow mnemonic, but he's certainly one of the more popular candidates. He was quite old at the time of his final battle (49 - a good age in those days, and older than King Henry), fairly grand (second in line to the throne), the Battle of Wakefield was fought near a castle on a hill (Sandal Castle), and Richard commanded 8,000 men and was apparently awaiting reinforcements when he died.

Since Henry was still alive that day, poor old Richard never became king.

the red rose of Lancaster vs. the white rose of York

Now I understand a bit better why my mother, who grew up in Lancashire and wore a red rose on her college blazer and whose middle name is Margaret, taught me the 'Richard of York Gained Battles in Vain" rainbow mnemonic with a sly smile on her face!

Margaret of Anjou... Don't worry, Henry dear, I'll look after England.

How do you remember the colours of the rainbow? And what's the history behind your favourite method?

***

Katherine Roberts writes legend and fantasy for young readers. Her latest series is the Pendragon Legacy quartet about King Arthur's daughter.

Find out more at www.katherineroberts.co.uk where young readers can win signed copies of "Grail of Stars" and Pendragon Legacy bookmarks in this summer's competition (closing date 31st July).

When legend becomes history by Mary Hoffman

On Saturday I spent the day in Bath Theatre Royal watching the Globe's Touring Company perform all three of Shakespeare's Henry the Sixth plays in a day.

And very good they were too but this is not a review of them. I want to talk about the scene in the Temple Gardens (Henry Sixth, Part One, Act ll, scene iv)). In this production, the characters pluck roses of different colours not from bushes in bloom but from the floral St. George's cross on the coffin of King Henry V that has been conveniently left onstage to house swords needed for battles with the French.

The white rose of York is an ancient symbol thought to date back to its adoption by Edmund Langley, the first Duke of York, in the fourteenth century. The red rose of Lancaster on the other hand might not have been used symbolically till Henry Vll copied the York idea a century later after Bosworth Field (1485) and immediately united the two colours in the one Tudor rose - a brilliant piece of political spin.

However, the persistence of both symbols owes a lot to this scene by Shakespeare (and possibly other hands) in which members of the two factions identify themselves by their choice of flowers. By dating it to a generation before Henry Tudor won the crown on rather shaky hereditary grounds, Shakespeare did a lot to popularise the notion of The Wars of the Roses - a  phrase not adopted till the nineteenth century, thanks to Sir Walter Scott.

According to Philippa Gregory, whose White Queen sequence of books has been recently televised, it was known before that as The Cousins' War, for obvious reasons, since all the quarrels began from disputes about the hereditary rights of descendants of Edward the Third's many sons.

The nineteenth century was very good at producing ideas that stuck and became facts. Take the ravens at the Tower of London.

Me, researching, with Merlin

I have nearly finished writing the first draft of a novel featuring ravens at the Tower of London. It is set January - May 1536 (months that will ring - or toll - a bell with anyone familiar with Tudor history). And there were almost certainly no ravens kept in the Tower then. In fact there is a whole book about it - City of Ravens by Boria Sax, Duckworth 2012.

Wait a minute, I hear you say. What about the legend that if the Ravens desert the Tower, the city of London will fall? Or the one about the head of Bran (though you might be a bit hazy about that one). Or Charles the Second's charter to protect the birds? Well, they are all still there for you to hear in the famous Warders' Tours of the Tower.

But Sax has trawled through all the possible sources and there is absolutely no authenticated reference to ravens at the Tower till - you've guessed it - the nineteenth century.

Of course I shall add a historical note to my novel saying what liberties I have taken. But will that be read or remembered or will I merely have added to another legend-as-history?

So, did King Alfred burn any cakes? Did Cnut command the waves to fall back (or was he demonstrating to his followers that he had no such powers?) Perhaps the Pope is not really a Catholic after all and bears defecate in tiled bathrooms?

Thomas Browne called widely-believed but erroneous ideas "Pseudodoxia Epidemica" or "Vulgar Errors" and wrote a book of that name in 1646. Some of the beliefs demolished therein were that the human heart is found on the left-hand side of the chest; that swans sing before dying and that salamanders live in fire.

Here are some more:

Viking helmets had horns
Marco Polo brought pasta to Italy from China
Marie Antoinette said "Let them eat cake."
Bulls are enraged by the colour red
Jesus was born on December 25th

I'm sure you can think of many others!

Blood Sisters - a review by Mary Hoffman

The Plantagenets are the new Tudors, to paraphrase a press release for the book reviewed here and I couldn't be more pleased to hear it.

Last month in my 1st September slot, I reviewed She-wolves by Helen Castor. I admitted to being a bit slow off the mark with reading it but this month, I want to tell you about a book that was published just over two weeks ago.

Blood Sisters by Sarah Gristwood (Harper Press) begins properly where Helen Castor's book left off, with the time of Margaret (Marguerite) of Anjou. But like Castor, Gristwood begins with a later death in a Prologue - this time that of Elizabeth of York, the princess that Richard the Third wanted to marry and Henry Tudor succeeded in marrying, thus strengthening his distinctly dodgy claim to the English throne.

PD-Art

The Wikipedia entry for this Queen suggests that she is the model for the Queen court card in sets of playing cards and you can see from this image in the National Portrait Gallery why that idea might have sprung up. However, no-one seems to have found any evidence other than anecdotal for the identification.

Back to Marguerite of Anjou, Shakespeare's original "She-wolf." I recently saw the all-male production of Richard the Third at the Globe) with the marvellous Mark Rylance as Richard, and could not believe that the old queen had been cut from the play. Her scenes with Elizabeth Woodville (Elizabeth of York's mother) and the Duchess of York (Richard's mother) are among the most haunting in the tragedy.

Still, at the beginning of Blood Sisters, Marguerite is just the 15-year-old sent from France to marry the sickly young man of twenty-three who had become Henry the Sixth while still a child. The French princess wasn't in good shape herself, having suffered terribly from sea-sickness crossing the channel and had no clothes grand enough for meeting her future husband - a touching personal detail effectively presented by Gristwood.

Indeed the whole book is full of them. It is subtitled "The Hidden Lives of the Women behind the Wars of the Roses." It really lives up to this, sharing facts gleaned from obscure historical documents about Marguerite, Elizabeth Woodville, who married Edward lV,  Cicely Neville, his indomitable mother, Margaret Beaufort, the mother of Henry Tudor and Anne Neville, the luckless wife of Richard the Third. But Gristwood adds a woman scarcely known today: Margaret of Burgundy, who was sister to Edward lV, George, Duke of Clarence and Richard lll and married off to Charles, Duke of Burgundy, a man ten years older than her.

I hadn't realised what a player this Margaret was and Gristwood brings her so far into the foreground that it is her portrait on the front cover of Blood Sisters. She had no children of her own but was a brilliant stepmother and politician, fighting for her rights at a time when widowed aristocrats were fair game for kings. She it was who sponsored Perkin Warbeck in his claim to the English throne, "recognising" him as her nephew Richard of York (the younger of the two "Princes in the Tower" who disappeared in 1483). Warbeck was executed in 1499 and Margaret of Burgundy did not outlive her protegé for long, dying herself in 1503, the same year as Elizabeth of York her niece.

Margaret Beaufort, mother of the first Tudor King, had four husbands but only that one child, when she was thirteen, at Elizabeth Woodville's Coronation three courses each of fifteen to twenty dishes were served,  At Margaret of Burgundy's presentation at the French court, there were monkeys, a camel and a gilded lion, Cecily Neville was the mother-in-law from hell, Anne Neville wore furs in July at her Coronation ... the details proliferate and melt the centuries away between us and these women, some of whom were used as dynastic pawns while others became forces to reckon with in their own right.

There is a distinct dearth of forenames in the Plantagenet dynasty, which makes for some confusion in the reader among all the Elizabeths, Margarets and Annes, Richards, Edwards and Henrys but Gristwood does an admirable job of both entwining the stories and distinguishing the players.

The family tree at the front is some help but as with She-wolves not nearly full enough. I'd like to see a link to a website that makes it clear that Lionel, Duke of Clarence, from whom the York claim derived, was the second surviving son of Edward the Third not the last, as it would appear here. Just putting in the dates would have helped.

But I am pleased to say we are getting a visit from Sarah Gristwood here on The History Girls later in the year and will have copies of her book to give away.

Effigies of Henry Vll and his Queen, Elizabeth of York
(Dean and Chapter of Westminster Abbey)

CAUTION, NOVELISTS: historians at work - Emma Darwin

The other day I was talking to a writer friend about my current project, and she urged me to read a particular novel set in the same period, centred on the same sort of people. I made a polite but non-committal answer, because I can't tell you how certain I was that I'd do nothing of the kind.

The thing is, someone else's historical novel is their re-visioning and re-imagining of that time. How the novel is structured, how it's voiced, what historical material it uses, what it writes on the spaces between the facts, what it elaborates in the gaps in the record... all of those are the product of that writer's self. Their consciousness, their nature as a storyteller, is the creative engine and the organising principle, not mine. It's not just a question of not wanting to plagiarise unconsciously (and Heyer spotted Cartland's plagiarism in Cartland's taking things Heyer had invented as historical material). It's much more that while all writers of historical fiction are at one remove from the world they're trying to evoke, I don't want mine to be a third-hand world.

Charles Dickens' French Revolution in A Tale of Two Cities is not the same as Hilary Mantel's in A Place of Greater Safety, or Marge Piercy's contemporaneous City of Darkness, City of Light. Georgette Heyer's Waterloo is not Thackeray's (she was shocked by how wrong many of his facts are!), and I avoided both when I was writing The Mathematics of Love. From the moment when I realise I want to write about a period, I stop reading historical fiction set in it.

What's less obvious is that a similar problem exists with the history books. What a historian writes is also - to an extent that historians haven't always been willing to acknowledge - filtered through that historian's consciousness: not just their personality but the biases and discourses of their time. Carlyle's French Revolution is not the same as Simon Schama's, and both will leave things out - different things - that I need to know about.

Mind you, History, as a discipline, has changed. J H Elliott's classic short study, Imperial Spain, was first published in 1963, and has been on syllabuses and reading lists ever since. For the second, revised edition, which came out in 2002, he points out that a book of this kind written now would never have so little to say about the experience of women. In the meantime, Women's History has brought us treasure troves such as Marilyn Yalom's History of the Wife. As someone who writes battles and politics, but also childbirth and cooking, that's not the only kind of book I need, but it helps a lot.

But there's a more fundamental problem. History, as a discipline, is about finding the larger patterns and forces which shaped lives in the past. An honest historian may acknowledge some evidence which exists but has yet to be fitted in. But still, the project will be to synthesise things to explain the whole picture. And yet always, as a novelist, I'm aware that the opposite was probably also true. You know that plan of a medieval village you copied into your exercise book, aged around ten? No one village looks like that because they all have their quirks, but that plan is more true as History, beause it presents the essence of the matter. If you think round your friends I'd put money on every single one of them having several characteristics which don't fit the norm for their job/background/class/ethnicity/gender/nationality. The essence of gender history is that husbands batter wives, but that doesn't mean that no wife has ever battered her husband, and my characters are individuals, not essences. If I want to put a battered husband in my novel, I shall. I'll have to work harder to convince the reader, but that's never a bad thing for me as a writer, or for my reader. As I was talking about on my own blog a while ago, the expected thing slips past the reader too easily: it's the surprising, the off-beat, the taking-aback thing, done properly, which catches the reader and holds them long enough for the story to come alive.

Of course ordinary, individual lives aren't ignored by historians: history "from below" is big business. We've got more sophisticated, too: a book such as Judith Flanders' The Victorian House starts with the evidence of books about etiquette and household management, but then the much more complex and slippery reality needs a different kind of teasing out. Even the absence of evidence can now have shrewd insights read into it, which is something at which novelists might be able to teach historians a thing or two: apparently Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall is on several undergraduate History syllabuses, not because it should be read as History, but as an example of the kind of imaginative effort that should be part of any historian's practice.

And you can go back to original sources. If you're trying to bring to life a real, historical character then with luck there will be plenty of those - though again, you have to be wary of the biases and discourses forming anything with more creative input than an account book or a warrant of execution. As Alison Weir describes, Eleanor of Aquitaine's contemporaries didn't find her day-to-day presence, ruling the kingdom for Henry II, worthy of record: women were only good for sex and procreation, so that's what was written down about Eleanor, and you need to go back to charters and Privy Council records to discover otherwise. Yet (as I found, similarly, when researching Elizabeth Woodville for A Secret Alchemy), later historians still didn't examine, let alone challenge, the version of the Queen that was handed down from her own time: the discourse of their times wasn't so different. What we think of as History is, much of the time, just someone else's version of it.

So original sources are no guarantee that your apprehension of your period hasn't been pre-sifted, limited, interfered with, and that's always supposing that you can find the sources. If your novel's about a fishwife in 12th century Cumberland, the original sources will all be in Welsh, except when they're in Norman French, and they're extremely unlikely to be in any such woman's own hand or voice (the same is true for, say, accounts of ordinary soldiers before the 19th century.) What's more, one particular, real fishwife's experience may not be at all what you want or can use, because your novel isn't about her, it's about someone else. So you might well be better off with more general accounts: a History of the Wife, and a History of the Medieval Cumbrian Fishing Industry, and any number of other histories of religion, food, textiles, architecture, transport, politics. And then you do the maths - the listening - the imagining - the dreaming - in the spaces between all that history. Historians are in the business of synthesising a general picture from particular experience. Novelists do it the other way round.

BLOODY BATTLES & PLEASURE PALACES by Emma Darwin

It was 2007, and I was whizzing along the A64 in North Yorkshire because in the novel that wasn't yet A Secret Alchemy one of my narrators whizzes along it. A small sign suddenly said TOWTON. I stamped on the brake and turned left, and the whole structure of the novel changed.

Modern-day Una Pryor drives the A64 because she's researching another of my narrators, Antony Wydvil, uncle and guardian of the Princes in the Tower. He rode this way to his death in 1483, but I hadn't realised till I got there that the road might take him into his own past: to 1461 and the Battle of Towton. It's the bloodiest battle ever fought on English soil, and it was Antony's first. Towton battlefield, I found, is high and open and eerily silent, and you can see how, when the two armies wheeled in the blinding snow on Palm Sunday, soldiers tumbled down the slope to drown in Cock Beck. It was said the water ran red for days.

So that became the shape of Antony's story: one, long, midsummer day's ride from the bleak, private Plantagenet stronghold of Sheriff Hutton, to the squat yellow muscle of the great administrative centre of Pontefract - and from it I strung his whole life. For him it was a pilgrimage, and Elysabeth his sister also tells her story as a series of stops on her life's journey through this glamorous and violent world. She was left a widow with two small sons when her husband was killed fighting for Henry VI. Edward Plantagenet's victory at Towton a couple of months later made him Edward IV, and caused the Wydvils to change their allegiance. What was it like for them, I'd wondered? The historical record is largely made by the Wydvil's enemies, but I wanted to understand them from the inside.

And then I realised that Una, too, makes a pilgrimage almost the length of England; she's looking for the Wydvils, but she also re-finds her own past, and thus her future. Una's pilgrimage through the book, therefore, became mine. And what I found was how late medieval politics is all about roads. Battles happen on the roads which lead from the great lords' powerbases to London and Westminster:  Barnet, Northampton, Tewkesbury and two at St Albans. If it's not battles, it's still about land. Elysabeth's first husband, Sir John Grey, lived at Groby, just up the A5 (Watling Street) from her childhood home at Grafton, and their wedding consolidated their fathers' local power. I've stood in the church at Ratby where they were married; I've seen his childhood home too; I've glimpsed the burnt-out shell of the manor house where their two sons were probably born. It was from the royal hunting lodge at Stony Stratford that Edward IV rode out secretly to woo the beautiful widow Elysabeth Grey; it was at Stony Stratford twenty years later that his brother Richard of Gloucester took control of their son Edward V, and sent Antony to his death; the stones of Bermondsey Abbey keep turning up as they build smart new flats there.

One of the pivotal events of the novel is the siege of the Tower of London, and I gave Una a house just along the riverbank in Narrow St. It's actually an agreeable pub, half-hanging above the dark grey waters of the Thames; I had lunch there. And several scenes are set at Eltham Palace, the beautiful little late-medieval pleasure palace now in South London, then handy for the royal dockyard - and the brothels - at Deptford. And necessity is sometimes the mother of inspiration. For dull reasons of chronology I had to set Una's narrative a few years back, but in 1990 Eltham - the 14th century palace and the Art Deco country house it became - was being restored by English Heritage. So Una goes to see what's being done to make it come alive, and the whole of A Secret Alchemy came to be about how restoring a historic house is like writing a historical novel.

How, in telling stories, can we - and can't we - bring the past alive? When you're restoring a house, says Mark in the novel, it's not enough just to tidy up what's left of the original. If you want to evoke the lives that once lived there, then leaving out everything which would have been there, but is no longer visible, would be another kind of lie. "You have to make the story whole." And one way I did so was to show how the separate strands are wound together into that whole: to make explicit what the whole novel is doing implicitly. Mark and Una are being shown round the restoration at Eltham:

The craftsmen and builders have gone for the day. ‘I was involved with excavating Bermondsey Abbey in the sixties,’ I say, and Charlie’s eyes light up. I tell him what I remember about the dig while we walk along a wide, curving, sleek-panelled corridor that wouldn’t look out of place in a grand ocean liner, and into the huge quiet of the Great Hall.

The space seems to hum against me. The windows are high in the walls and so big their stone mullions shimmer against the light, and a great hammerbeam roof of age-darkened oak lowers above and between them. Charlie says proudly it’s the original. He’s talking about the firebomb that came through it in 1940: the burn-marks are there, on the stones of the floor, and must be kept, for they’re part of the history too. Mark’s asking him about the masons’ marks and carpenters’ joints, and what the principle of restoration is.

'Well, in art restoration the rule is that the new work must be visible at two feet, and invisible at four,’ says Charlie. ‘That way you’re not pretending it’s real, but there’s a sense of realness. Obviously here it’s a bit different. We might darken a new wooden beam so it blends in with the originals, but we wouldn’t falsify. No fake wormholes or smoke-marks. On the other hand, where you have to conjure up from nothing, it works better to do something completely modern, not faux-historical. Clean glass and steel, or whatever: something good in itself. The Courtaulds’ architect in the twenties mostly knew that.’

I’m not thinking about the twenties, I’m thinking that here Elizabeth and Anthony danced, here ambassadors were given audience and wedding feasts were held, nobles drank and fenced, and the children ran riot on wet days, perhaps, with the dogs barking around them. Did they come here when Edward’s sister Margaret of York had been safely married off to the Duke of Burgundy? What did it smell like, then? Velvets and flower-water? Sweet herbs and banquets? Latrines and fly-blown meat? Sweat and fear? What did it sound like? The court was famous across Europe for its music, but how did they hear it? Did it creep into Elizabeth’s ears as it does mine, and make her want to laugh, and cry, and love? She wasn’t in love with either of her husbands, it’s a fair guess. But there’s nothing – not a single whisper in a court full of her enemies – that murmurs of anyone else. Did she ever love someone so much that she hurt for joy, so much that it seemed beyond reason? Did she regret that she never had? 

There’s ancient dust gritty under my feet and outside a last late chisel rings like a bell on the stone. If I strain my ears enough, perhaps I might hear them. If I could only peer hard enough through this time-thickened, time-thinned air, they might come before my eyes.