Gone Medieval - Richard III's Mother: Cecily

Episode Date: August 2, 2024

Cecily Neville was the matriarch of the House of York, the mother of two kings of England and an ancestor of every monarch since Henry VIII. Born in the year of Agincourt and at the centre of the Wars of the Roses; Cecily lived through some of the most tumultuous events in medieval English history.Matt Lewis is joined by Annie Garthwaite to celebrate this often overlooked woman, her dangerous rivals and maybe a little bit of Richard III.Gone Medieval is presented by Matt Lewis and edited by Ella Blaxill. The producer is Rob Weinberg and the senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcast.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original TV documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Sign up HERE for 50% off your first 3 months using code ‘MEDIEVAL’ https://historyhit.com/subscriptionYou can take part in our listener survey here: https://uk.surveymonkey.com/r/6FFT7MK Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Find out who we really were. We've gone medieval. Cecily Neville was the matriarch of the House of York, the mother of two kings of England, and an ancestor of every monarch since Henry VIII. She was the wife of my historical mancrush, Richard Duke of York, and mother, to my unhealthy obsession, Richard III. Cessaly lived for 80 years through some of the most tumultuous events in medieval English history. She was born in the year of Agincourt and was at the centre of the Wars of the Roses, rising high but suffering devastating losses too. Cessaly is a fascinating figure, often, along with other women of the period, overlooked. Shakespeare gave us a grumpy, snarky old lady.

That she might have been grumpy and snarky, aren't we all sometimes? but there's so much more to her than this. Annie Garthwaite's new book, The King's Mother, picks up where her last, Cecily, left off to tell the story of this woman and her rivals. It's a stunning piece of historical fiction that I loved reading, and it offered me the perfect excuse to get Annie back round for a cup of tea and a chat about Cecily,

the other women of the Wars of the Roses, and maybe a little bit of Richard III. Welcome back to Gone Medieval, Annie. Thank you very much. It was good tea. That's a great start. It's brilliant to have you back. So the King's mother follows on from where Cecily left off. Can you just give us a quick recap of who Cecily Neville is at the centre of your book

and where she is at the beginning of the King's mother? Well, as you saw rightly said, Cecily is the matriarch of the House of York. So she's the wife of Richard Duke of York, the widow as the book opens, and she is the mother of Edward IV and subsequently Richard III. So she's a mother of two kings. But as this book opens, she is a very known. woman because she is a widow of four-month standing. Her husband and her second son were both killed in battle. And Edward IV, her eldest, who is not yet Edward the Four, is off in the North

country fighting again and trying to secure his throne. And everything is dependent upon her. and she is in London trying to hold on to the reins of power and keep this nascent succession secure while he is off fighting. And we're just waiting to see what will happen to her. So she is in the white-hot heat of London at the birth of this new dynasty while actually the new king isn't there? She absolutely is. And the crucial thing to understand is that she's not just sitting there doing nothing.

Edward has gone north, leaving her in charge of his kingdom. When he goes north to fight, he leaves his kingdom in her hands. He makes her head of his household, the royal household. So effectively, his regent. So she is holding on to the reins of power. And you can imagine what Westminster would have been like at that point, you know, full of European ambassadors trying to understand what is going on in England. where are the dice going to fall?

And Cecily is the point of power to which they come for news and information. And she is managing that whole situation. I've twisted your arm to do us a couple of readings because you did that last time and they were so wonderful. So I wonder if we can bother you for one now, please. Yeah, I would love to. And I'm going to read you a piece right from the very beginning of the novel, which I think sets the scene for the moment of stress that. Cecily is in.

So it's Easter Saturday, the 4th of April in 1461. Her husband and her son died in the previous December. So this is all very current. And Cecily is at Westminster. Tenebrae. Vigil for the crucified Christ. And in the darkness before dawn, a single candle is passed hand to hand.

Cecily is cold. She has not slept nor broken her fast since the passion began. But when the flame comes at last to her, she wraps a hand about it and arcs her face to its bright heat. She curls her fingers close, then closer still, till they begin to burn and her eyes to smart. She won't shrink from it. Instead, she lowers her lids, lets the light play upon them, and smiles tight against the pain. This is God's promise, she tells herself. Edward, her son, still lives, so far from her, yet still her flesh feels the fire in him.

It's three weeks since he rode to war against language. a king proclaimed but not yet crowned. Let me earn it first, he told the cheering crowd. The usurper Henry still lives, his bitch queen, Marguerite and her bastard son. When I've put them down, then I'll take up my kingdom. They cheered him all the more for that, just as Cecily said they would when she told him to say it. She stood beside him, relisholed him. him relishing the weight of his army at her back, the bladed ranks of arches, pikemen,

and foot, the lumbering artillery with its pent-up violence of powder and shot. His men called out for him as he mounted, then quieted at their captain's barking, till there was only the impatient creek of harness, the chink and shear of steel, and high above her head, and high above her head the snapping of royal penance, the lions of England rampant, and his own devices bright and new, the sun in splendour, the white gilded rose. She watched him stand in the saddle for one last look behind, a brisk nod to his captains, then a settling, a shift in his focus, a widening of the space between them before even a step was taken. She laid her hand on his horse's shoulder

and felt the slide of muscle over bone. He checked it, reined in and leaned down so only she would see his grin. Keep my kingdom, Captain Mother, till I come back for it. Then he grasped her hand and kissed it, his mouth against her. fingers warm as a bed. I was enjoying that so much. I forgot I was supposed to ask a question afterwards.

Thank you. And that really just set the scene for the distance that there is between Cecily and Edward in Edward's early reign. Edward is doing the fighting up in the north, but Cecilie is left to deal with the politics in London. So what kind of role do we see Cecily playing early on in Edward's reign? Is she given any kind of formal precedence in his government? Well, she was certainly because Edward was 18 years old and unmarried at that point, so she effectively became England's first lady. And in many ways, she exercised the sort of power that a queen would have. And I think that suited Cecily very well. She had always expected to be a queen or at least wanted to be one. And if you think about why Edward gave her that position of responsibility, to me it makes complete sense because, Edwards is an 18-year-old man who wasn't brought up with the expectation of being king. He was a great guy and very good with the sword and won every battle you ever pitched him into.

But he wasn't an experienced politician and he didn't know the quarterly game in the way that Cecily did. Cecily was a woman in her mid-40s who knew the political game very well and had played it alongside her husband for decades. She was already a very seasoned political player. So she was the perfect foil for Edward, really. And also in a time of regime change and drama, who was the one person in the world that Edward knew that he could rely on unfailingly his mum? And she certainly had the intelligence and the political nouns to take on that role very well. Yeah. And I think it says interesting things about Edward and

Cecily that Edward is willing to give his mother that role that he's not saying, you know, I know everything, lots of 18-year-old men are like, I know best, I know everything, I'm the king. He is actually happy to step back and say, Mom, you can probably do this better than me. Yeah. Or what should I do, Mom? Yeah. Do we have examples of the kinds of things that Edward is trusting Cecily with during this period? During the early reign, well, certainly he was quite prepared to leave her with an effective regency during his absence. And, you know, after he succeeded at the Battle of Tauton, he was in no great rush to get back to London. You know, he took his time because he kind of knew that London was safe in her hands.

And it's very clear to me that he relies upon her for counsel and advice sort of behind the scenes, but that she's also to the forefront in a lot of the political maneuvering that goes on to establish the early years of Iran. So when there are meetings with foreign dignitaries and ambassadors and so on and so forth, Cecily is very much there holding court and making that experience good. And in the early years of his reign, Edward is away from London a lot, making memorial progresses, making his presence felt around the country. And Cecily is left in London, in the south at least, managing affairs. She's that solid rock that he knows he can rely on.

Yeah, he can go away and do these things. because she's there and he knows he can trust her to keep control. What do you think that says then about the relationship between Edward and Cecily during those early years? I mean, you have Edward call her captain mother in the book. And throughout Cecily in this book, we get that sense that Edward is her favourite child. How do you think their relationship played out in those early years of Edward's reign? Yeah, I think this question of a favourite child is a difficult one. isn't it? But the more I look at it, the more I get a sense that he was. There was something

about Edward that just compelled her so utterly. And then I think that was compounded by this terrible situation that she found herself in on the 30th of December the year before when her husband and Edmund were killed. And Edward became the absolute focus of her hope. He became in so many ways, the savior of the House of York, because he was able to fight. He evaded capture. He won at Mortimer's Cross. He came to London. He went north and won at Tauting again. So it must have felt to her that all her faith in him was justified. And there is something so hot about him. She can hardly bear to touch him because he has realized for her the salvation of her entire family. I think that plays out in those early years.

Yeah. And obviously you have the benefit with fiction of talking about those relationships that we can't know too much about. But I wonder whether it's less of being a favourite child and more about being the basket that she could place all of her eggs in in the face of the problems at the end of 1460.

He represents that only hope for the future. And he delivers. And he delivers 110%. He really does. So for those first few years of Edward the Fourth reign, Cecily has this position as effectively the role of a queen, but then Edward married. So do we see their relationship and do we see Cecily's status change once Edward gets married in 1464? Well, and it's a contentious marriage too, isn't it?

Because it is probably fair to say that it's not the marriage that Cecily would have chosen for him at all. And Edward famously marries Elizabeth Woodville, the widow of a Lancastrian knight with all ready to have her own children in tow. and it's all very difficult, and they marry in secret, and she's presented with a fait accompli. And there's the one thing I get a strong feeling Cecily didn't like was not being in control and knowing what was going on, so that would certainly have made a very unhappy.

But I think that once he had married, she buckled down and accepted it. And I don't think she saw Elizabeth Woodville as a threat to her power. my sense of it is, and you're so right in saying these are things that we cannot prove, but a novelist is free to speculate. But based on the way things went on, my impression is that she would have seen Elizabeth as no diminution of her power of Edward, because her power of Edward was forged in the white

heat of rebellion and threat, and she knows how much Edward. relies upon her and respects her opinion. And married or not, that isn't going to change. Okay, she's no longer England's first lady. Okay, she does have to bend the knee to his wife. Slightly more galling than it might otherwise have been since that happens to be Elizabeth Woodville rather than a French princess. But she's big enough to get beyond that, I think.

Yeah, she always seems like someone who's capable of seeing the much bigger picture than the moment where she's having to do something she doesn't really want to do. Yes. Do you think any resentment that she might have felt about the change in her situation and that marriage to Elizabeth and her lack of involvement in the arrangements for that marriage to Elizabeth? Play into your depiction of the relationship between Cecily and Elizabeth, which I found in the book, I found that relationship, the tensions, but the ways that they bounced off each other and worked together really, really interesting. Do you see Cecily as someone who was slightly resentful but willing to make a go of it? Yes, I do. People tend to view that. this relationship between Cecily and Elizabeth in a very black and white way,

that Elizabeth was the sort of outsider coming in and queering Cecily's pitch, and Cecily would always have been angry and resentful of Elizabeth, and there were sort of natural enemies from the beginning. And I think that's a massive oversimplification of what was really going on. Because Cessaly was confronted with the fetacomplee. Edward was married. Elizabeth was her wife. It was witnessed and done, and there was no way she could get out of it.

And Cecily was enough of a pragmatist to say, okay, just accept that and move on. And she was also inclined to do that because the one thing that mattered to Cecily more than anything else was the security of the dynasty, this new dynasty that had been established. So she wasn't going to make a huge fuss about this difficult marriage and run the risk of that destabilizing her dynasty. So it becomes in her interest then to make the marriage as successful as it can possibly be. And there's evidence that she went to some lengths to do that. Edward may not have been prepared to be king, but Elizabeth certainly wasn't prepared by her education or her background to be a queen. This was a real step up. So there's evidence of Cecily lending servants and ladies and companions to Elizabeth to sort of help her prepare for this role to help.

help her perform well. So you really do get a sense of Cecily saying, okay, I'm just going to work with this and I'm going to help you, Elizabeth, because it's in both of our interests for this marriage to succeed. And as much as I don't like it privately, it's where we are. Yeah, there is a much bigger game to play and Cecily is willing to play that bigger game. Yes. In the longer term. Yeah. Do you think Edwards' reliance on his mother also changes not just because he's married. And quite often I think we see Elizabeth Woodville's arrival as the moment that changes so much in Edward the fourth reign. Do you think it's also that Edward is beginning to settle into being king and finds he doesn't need to rely on his mom quite so much, which is going to change the

dynamic between them? Yes, and that's inevitable, isn't it? As he begins to find his feet and find his confidence that he is going to be less reliant on her advice. But I still get to the sense that when Edwards, you know, got a really knotty problem to unravel, he'll pop down and see his mom and drink a few glasses of wine and have a chat about it. My strong sense is that she remains this confidant. But again, you know, it's in her interests. I guess this isn't the intelligence of a mother allowing her children to grow up too, and we all have to learn that. That it is in her interests for him to be independent and successful as a king and not to in her pockets, not to be seen to be in her pockets. So like any good mother, she would manage

that transition well, I think. Yeah. And we see something similar going on in Edwards reign with the Earl of Warwick. Absolutely we do. Yeah. And he is Cecily's nephew as well. So she's, again, a pivot in that kind of relationship and must have been trying to work out how you keep this family unit together while it's busy trying to tear itself apart. Yes. And there we have the Earl of Warwick not managing to successfully let Edward grow into his independence and his kingship and really struggling with the change in his status with Edward because at the point of the Woodville marriage Edward is 22 so he's just beginning to be a grown-up Richard Earl of Warwick is 14 years older so he's a mature man of 36 and Edward

and the Earl of Warwick have been together through thick and thin. They both lost their fathers in the same battles. They were allies, they were confidence they shared exile together. They were sort of brothers of the heart. You know, and at the beginning of this, Edward was a boy, a teenager. My sense is of a bit of hero worship between Edward and the Earl of Warwick, and the Earl of Warwick probably quite liking that. And a real sort of cousinly love between the two of them,

well. And then suddenly Edward has grown up and he's not a boy anymore, he's a man, and worse, he's a king. That's very hard for Warwick to swallow. The Earl of Warwick is already struggling with that a bit and then Edward marries Elizabeth Woodville. And this kind of bromance that has been going on between Edward and the Earl of Warwick comes under threat. And it is a kind of bromance gone wrong story because they both love each other but they can't deal with each other anymore. I think it's striking how Cecily and Warwick go through the same sort of process of being gradually eased out of the centre of power in the way that they were at the beginning of Edward's reign, but they both react to it and with very different consequences. And I don't know

whether it talks to kind of the emotional and intelligence of Cecily that she's able, we see her throughout her life, I guess, navigating these moments perfectly, really deftly and with skill. And for all Warwick's fame and abilities and everything else, he simply doesn't do that. He just goes off the deep end. Yeah. He absolutely lacks emotional intelligence, doesn't he? And you can see that in him, not just in this relationship with Edward, but in so many of the decisions that he makes, he just doesn't see them through.

He hasn't got the imagination and the emotional intelligence to see the likely consequences of his action. And of course, that's why his entire life unravels in such a terrible way. We see in the book Cecily faced with problems, with falling outs between her sons, with her nephew, with the Woodville's, all of these really tricky relationships that Cecily is sort of at the center of and is a pivot around which all of these things move. Do you see medieval women working kind of between the lines of what Chronicles tell us to exercise that. sort of soft power in relationships that maybe doesn't get recorded because it's not a fight on a battlefield that's full of blood and gore, but it definitely goes on.

Oh, absolutely. And sometimes that power isn't soft. It's pretty hard. And in this book, the King's Mother, the second of the two, you know, the first book, Cecily was very much Cecily's story. She was its life and its heart. This book focuses on the four women of the Wars of the Roses, really. And obviously, Cessley, who is King's mother as the book, opened, and then Marguerite von Jue, Elizabeth Woodville, and Margaret Beaufort, who at various times over the next 30 years and for various reasons do sometimes quite terrible things to try and put their boy on the throne and become King's mother themselves.

And it's the intensity of the relationships between those four women and the power plays that go on and the extremes to which each of them are driven by circumstance that is what makes this book exciting and interesting, I think. And historians, when they look at the wars of the roses, it's a series of wars and battles. And surely men are at the forefront of that. Well, yes, they are on the battlefield. But in so many ways, these four women not only endured the wars, but they shaped them. And in some cases, directly drove them. It was Marguerite of Anjou, who led an army into England to try and bring down Edward VIII. It wasn't Henry VI that did that. He was just pulled along in her petticoats. Henry the 7th finally defeated Richard III on the battlefield at Bosworth, spoiler. He'd never have made it to the battlefield if his mother, Margaret Beaufort, hadn't paved the way for him to get there. So, you know, soft power, hard power?

I'm not sure. Yeah, but definitely power. Definitely power. Yeah. Do you think that considering history like this from a woman's perspective offers a different, window into events that we think we know quite well. Yes, absolutely. And the Wars of the Roses particularly, you know, because we know how contentious this period is in history, don't we? And, you know, no two historians can sit down together and agree on what happened and why it

happened. And sometimes it can appear quite mystifying the decisions that people take. But if you turn it on its head and put the women in the middle instead of the men and look at their actions and their motivations and their fears, then suddenly all that stuff that appears incomprehensible starts to make a lot more sense. So I was at a history conference a few months ago, and there was a very eminent historian of this period there when I won't name names,

but I was interested in his opinion on Margaret Bofitt, so I asked him, and he said, why, I've never given the woman a moment's thought, which is hard to fathom, really, because I kind of think you should. She is the mother of the Tudor dynasty and she did pave of the way for Henry the 7th reign and she did during the early years of Henry the 7th reign

absolutely to direct his kingship. So yes, put the women in the middle of the story and the story makes a lot more sense. Yeah, it sometimes feels like the missing piece of the jigsaw that you put it in and then you go, oh, now I can see what the picture's meant to be. Absolutely, absolutely. Can I trouble you for another reading?

Because I enjoyed the first one and I'd like a little bit of it. Yes. So we absolutely are talking. about a series of wars and battles. And the one thing that women are always having to do is send their men off to fight and wait and hope that they'll come home. And Cessaly spends a good deal of her life waiting for her men to come home from battle and having to deal with all the fear and uncertainty of that. So I'd like to read you a little bit from the book where Cessaly is in that situation. And she is in the rare circumstance at this point where all three

of her surviving sons are on the same battlefield, fighting on the same side for once. And I found myself wondering how harrowing that must have been. So it's just before the Battle of Barnett, which was one of the more conclusive battles in the Wars of the Roses. And it was fought in Barnett, you know, 10 miles from central London. And Cecily is in the tower waiting to see what will happen. Barnett was fought in terrible weather, rolling fog that almost blinded the participants. So I imagined a foggy night and a foggy morning. So imagine that Cecily is waiting to hear news. A messenger comes at midnight to say Edward has drawn up his battle lines north of Barnett,

10 miles from the city, another sleepless night. At last, she gives up waiting for dawn to light her window and goes south, to seek it out upon the walls. The stones are coldly wet against her hand, and the walkway between lonely guardposts pooled in torchlight is treacherously shadowed. She looks east and waits again, until at last a thin smudge of milky whiteness marks the distant horizon. Nothing like mourning yet, but the promise of it.

Now she knows the camp will be rousing, her sons rising from camp beds by lamplight, making confession, breaking their fast. Her husband once admitted he could never eat before battle, nor drink much for fear of pissing himself. She wonders what it's like to feel such fear in the body, to master it and fight. They'll be calling their squires to arm them now. They'll stand, chin up, legs wide, the pinions of their arms lifted, so that naked flesh can be wrapped in leather, encased in steel, their vulnerable flesh hidden, their pulsing veins

buried deep. Still the sky doesn't lighten. The day seems weighted and the air thick and cold. But she hears the tolling of the bell that marked the hour and knows that even now they'll be stepping from their tents onto the dew-soaked grass. Fisers raised descent the air. They'll test the slide of swords from scabbards, the hang of daggers at the hip.

Their captains will come up for final orders, signed off with a dry-mouthed prayer. The darkness fades to grey but no sun comes. A mist lies thick upon the river so that even the wharves of the opposite bank are lost to sight. She blinks and beads of moisture fall from her lashes. She touches her face and brings her hand away wet. Now they're mounting to ride to their command positions.

She hopes they'll embrace before they go. She strains her eyes. and wonders where the fog rolls over the battleground, where the death will come for them unseen. She feels the restless shift of the horses at the early cannons volley, the windy rush of the first arrow's flight. Her heart hammers as the charge begins, as limbs stretch in the gallop and swords lift in a swing,

not ten miles from where she stands. She could find a horse and be there within the hour. She's down the steps already, walking fast to the chapel where the air hangs heavy with incense and the women wrestle in prayer. So regular listeners to gone medieval will probably be waiting for this because I can't not talk about Richard the 3rd, who does appear in this book. How do you approach writing a character like Richard in The King's Mother, someone about whom almost everything is contentious? It's not really a book about Richard III. How do you go about approaching that character?

Putting Richard III on paper has been a real ambition of mine, but it's also been something I've been terrified of doing because the need to get it right and to acknowledge all of the contention that surrounds him as a character and who he was and how his life concluded. But I've been thinking about him for a very long time. And I felt I had to create a character. that reflected the man that he was in the years leading up to 1483 and the taking of the throne,

that had proved himself to be a loyal brother, capable soldier, a lawyer, an administrator, a man of fairness, and squaring that personality with the sort of myth of Richard III that we've been handed down. as a tyrant and a child murderer and a terrible king. I can't square those two things. They're impossible to reconcile unless you say that the man suddenly in summer of 1483 and took an enormous personality change. You either take the man's life pre-1483, his 30 years of life up until that point, or you allow your views of him to be completely overshadowed

by what history has chosen to tell us about those final two or three years of his life. Well, that becomes an easy choice, doesn't it? And I see Richard as a man of fairness. I see him in many ways. If he has a flaw, it's that he sees things simply and too clearly sometimes. And he lacks the subtlety that certainly his mother had. You know, there's one point in the book where she asks him about his loyalty. And he says, you know, what can I tell you?

My brother is the king and I love him. That's it. Surely my loyalty should just be assumed. because he has always assumed it himself. So that's the character of Richard III for me, and that character essentially doesn't change when he suddenly becomes king in 1883. And people will have to read the book

to see how that plays out in practice. They will. You mentioned the dynamic between the women at the centre of this book. There is Cecily, but there is also Margaret von Jou, there is Elizabeth Woodville, Margaret Beaufort. Are they good exemplars of just how powerful a medieval woman

really could be and the ways that they could wield that power? Yes, they are, and they are also really good examples of how that power can be thwarted. Because, you know, if you look at Margarita Vanchou, she was French, she came from a country where women were afforded perhaps more legitimate power, you know, where women could, for example,

act as a regent for a husband who was indisposed. Marguerite was not allowed to in England. So she certainly had the intelligence and the capability to take on that role, but was forbidden it by convention. By necessity, she had to exercise her power in more controversial ways, let's say, without putting too fine a point on it. Elizabeth, having become queen against all expectation, clearly studied very hard to make a decent hand of it,

and in so many ways was a very competent queen and fulfilled that role. You know, I described her at one point in the book as been a bit of a stickler for protocol, you know, She was so anxious to get it right. And she got it right at every turn in so many ways. She even did that tricky job of giving Edward two heirs. And yet, after Edward's death, and it's tricky to do this without giving out too many spoilers,

but, you know, a secret is uncovered that makes her situation tenuous at best, untenable at worst. So all of the advantage that she's gained and the credibility that she's gained as queen is just lost. And Margaret Balford, who eventually wins through, that can't be as we all know that she's Henry the 7th's mother. I just admired her more and more writing this book because, you know, she must have had complete nerves of steel. Absolute nerves of steel. But her relationships with men, the power that men were at times able to exercise over her and were authorized to exercise over her, was terrible.

So that's the invidious position for women in the middle ages, I think. have intellect, capacity, capability and power, but that power is so easily thwarted. And if I'm cynical, I say not much has changed. And I think one of the things that you do so well in the book is almost precisely what you've described there, that you take the reputations of these women that have come down to us and kind of flip them on their head. So we just remember Marguerite is a terrible woman who kind of drives the country into the wars of the roses.

Elizabeth Woodville is this awful parvenu woman who doesn't deserve anything and just grasps at everything when she gets there. But you have her doing actually quite a good job and being really conscientious about being queen and you pick out the positives of what she does. I think it's really interesting that you've taken that approach to those women of, I don't want to say rewriting them, but flipping their historical reputations almost on their heads and looking at them in a completely different way. Yeah, giving them a fair crack of the whip, probably. We often look at women in history and we turn them into caricatures, you know, and it comes back to the old virgin and whore thing. You know, women are really,

they're perfectly good and angelic, or they are wicked and subversive and they are Eve incarnate. Of course that's all nonsense. They are complex characters and have complex motivations for their actions. But the one thing all four of these women have in common is motherhood. And the one thing that all four of them do in the end is do extreme things to, protect their children and particularly to protect and enhance their sons. And I describe this book in some ways as a story of maternal ferocity and female ambition. And we know how ferocious women can be when they're fighting for their children. And they're all placed in that situation. And it so affects

the relationship between the four of them. And again, that's something we don't understand from history. And I've been reading the history of these women for years. And even so, it was a long time before it really registered with me that these were not just four disparate women. They were four women who were intimately linked by family and friendship and social structures. They all knew each other intimately and well. Cessaly first met Marguerite when Marguerite was 16 years old and coming to England from France to marry Henry the Six. Cessaly was her host in Ruan before she left to make that journey. And they remained on good terms for many years until it all went terribly wrong. Cessley was very good friends with Elizabeth Woodville's mother. They were together

in France when both of their husbands were stationed there, when their children were very small. Their children grew up together. You can almost imagine a young Elizabeth Woodville peering over the crib into Edward VIII when he was a baby. And Margaret Balford was from the same fact. And Margaret Balford was from the same family as Cecily, if you want to take it right back. And through all of the years of Edward the Fourth's kingship, I think Margaret modeled her behavior on Cecily, looked up to her as an older and accomplished role model of a woman. And that becomes very evident when Henry the 7th becomes king, because Margaret absolutely models her behavior as King's mother on Cecily's own. So this is not just the story of four different women. They're the story of the

story of four women who are close. When Cecily finally reaches the end of her, comparatively very long life, do you think she would have felt more pride at what she'd achieved or regret at what she'd lost? She's the ancestor of every monarch of England and Britain from Henry VIII onwards to today, but it cost her a lot to do that. Yeah, it absolutely did. And also, she didn't know that at the time of her death. So Cessaly was 70 years old when Richard lost the crown at Bosworth and she lived another 10 years into the Tudor dynasty and she died at age 80 in 1495. So at some point she had to reconcile herself to Henry the 7th's reign and the defeat of all her house. And that must have been an extremely bitter pill to swallow

because it also meant the loss of her children. Edward by this time was dead, Richard newly dead. She was only survived by two daughters, only two daughters outlived her of her 12 children. So huge personal loss. But I think in 1485,

she reconciled herself to Henry Tudor because she didn't have a great deal of choice and she could console herself with the fact that he was marrying Edward's daughter, her granddaughter, so that at least, I imagine herself saying to herself, at least Edward's children will live on long after Henry V. 7th is mouldering in his grave. And perhaps she consoled herself with that. But she didn't have the benefit that we have of being able to look back in hindsight and say,

yes, her blood still flows in the English royal family. At the point of her death, I'm sure the kingdom still felt very unstable. We know that those early years of Henry the 7th reign were threatened and were unstable. So I don't think she was and could have been entirely convinced that the future was secure. And I think she saw the marriage between Henry the 7th and her granddaughter as salvage, you know, from the wreckage of her dynasty. This was the salvage that she could rescue. Just to end on, after two fabulous novels about Cecily Neville. Do you like her?

Oh, I think she's marvelous. I do, because she's not always likable. And often people who read the books say that. You say, you know, I really admire, but I'm not sure I like her very much. Because she does some really not very nice things, but she's very honest about what she does, and she's very forthright. She treats Elizabeth Woodville pretty well. She treats Margaret Beaufort very well.

but it's tough love at times and she will stick at nothing. But I admire her intelligence and I admire her emotional intelligence and I admire her determination and her integrity. And I think this is again a bit of brainwashing that we've had as women, that women have to be nice. They have to be likable. We don't expect men to be nice and likable all of the time, but women are expected to be.

So she kind of kicks against the traces because she's not nice, but she's admirable and she's good. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for joining us again, Annie. It's been an absolute pleasure to talk to you, and I have absolutely no doubt the King's Mother is going to do every bit as well as Cecily did.

Oh, let's hope so. I'm sure. Thank you so much. The King's Mother is out now and comes with a hard recommendation from me. Grab a copy and let me and Annie know what you think. You can catch Annie's. last visit to Gone Medieval to talk about her first book, Cecily, amongst our back catalogue.

And there's also a series of explainers on The Wars of the Roses if you'd like to get more context for the events of the King's mother. There are new instalments of Gone Medieval every Tuesday and Friday, so please come back and join Eleanor and I for more from the greatest millennium in human history. Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts and tell all of your friends and family that you've Gone Medieval. You can listen to us and all of History Hits podcasts, add free and watch hundreds of TV documentaries when you subscribe at historyhit.com forward slash subscribe.

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