Virgin Widow (47 page)

To complete the history outside the scope of this novel, Anne died in 1485 at the age of twenty-eight or twenty-nine, Queen of England for a little less than two years. She had been ill for some months, possibly suffering from cancer. Her son, Edward of Middleham, had already died in 1484 and she had no more children. Richard’s life after Anne’s death is well documented in history and in fiction.

Read all about it…

2 Questions for your reading group

4 Inspiration for writing
Virgin Widow

5 A closer look at Anne Neville

6 Further reading about Anne Neville

7 Author biography

8 Why I write

9 Q&A on writing

13 A writer’s life

15 A day in the life

17 Top Ten Books

1. A wife was regarded as little more than a possession of her husband. To what extent does the life of Anne Neville and her family support this view of marriage in the fifteenth century?

2. How was the role and life of women in fifteenth-century England different from today? To what extent was this a good time to be a woman? Did Anne have a better experience of life than many women of her time?

3. Why was King Edward not willing to uphold the law with regard to Anne’s inheritance? Was he justified in taking this stand in the circumstances?

4. At what point do you consider that Anne came of age and left her childhood behind?

5. Eventually Anne was driven to put much of the blame for her family’s sufferings at the door of her father, the Earl of Warwick. Do you think she was right to do so? Was Warwick in any way justified?

6. A ‘What If…’ question…If Edward of Lancaster had lived and the Lancastrians had been victorious at Tewkesbury, do you consider that Anne would have had any chance of happiness as Queen of England?

7. Richard was guilty of Prince Edward’s death. How hard would you consider it to be for Anne to accept the death of her husband at the hands of the man she loved? Should she have accepted it as a necessity?

8. What do we learn about Richard’s character in his stance over the imprisonment of the Countess of Warwick and her eventual release? Does it make him a more or a less acceptable character?

9. Anne’s relationship with the King and Queen is uneasy. What do we learn about the characters and motivations of King Edward and Queen Elizabeth?

10. This is a period of unscrupulous treachery and bloody warfare. Is there any proof that ends justify means in bringing peace and stability to a country? Were such ethics in the fifteenth century any different from today in our attitude to modern conflicts?

“…What if she had inherited all the self-will and pride of her Neville and Beauchamp ancestors…?”

My inspiration for
Virgin Widow
was very simple. Anne was Queen of England and wife to one of the most notorious Kings, and yet we know so very little about her. History records the dates of her life and her two marriages and a meagre outline of her life. Her family of course is well documented. The Earl of Warwick, her father, figures prominently in the history of the Wars of the Roses, a dominant force in the making and unmaking of kings, whilst Richard III, her husband, needs no introduction.

But Anne appears a shadowy figure, without form or depth.

It seemed to me that, surrounded as she was by strong characters, Anne too might have been a young woman of considerable spirit.

I considered this to be a gift to an historical novelist. How could I resist the opportunity to put words into Anne’s mouth and encourage her to emerge as a living entity? Equally hard to resist was the possibility of a romance between Anne and Richard.

Without doubt, Anne was used as a pawn in the unscrupulous political manoeuvrings of the Wars of the Roses, as any young girl of birth and fortune would have been. But what if she had inherited all the self-will and pride of her Neville and Beauchamp ancestors…?

I was inspired to recreate her.

“…Anne was used in the game of high politics where the stakes were high…”

The skeleton of facts we have about Anne as an historical character are these.

She was the younger daughter of Warwick the Kingmaker and Anne Beauchamp, a considerable heiress in her own right whose inheritance would be passed to Anne and her elder sister Isabel. In her youth, Anne was betrothed to Richard of Gloucester, the future Richard III, brother of King Edward IV. When Warwick challenged the Yorkist King Edward, failed in his rebellion and was declared traitor, Anne was forced to flee with her family to France, the betrothal annulled. From there Anne was used in the game of high politics where the stakes were high. To cement a difficult alliance between her father and the Lancastrians, she was married to Edward of Lancaster, the exiled heir to the English throne. In an attempt to keep control of the situation by her mother-in-law, Margaret of Anjou, Anne’s marriage was never consummated. Isolated in Margaret’s hostile court, Anne returned to England in the wake of the invading Lancastrian army. In the battles of Barnet and Tewkesbury and their aftermath – episodes in the Wars of the Roses – both her father and her husband were killed and her mother imprisoned. Prince Edward, so history judges, was murdered at the hands of Richard of Gloucester. Taken prisoner by King Edward, Anne was betrayed by her sister and brother-in-law–the Duke of Clarence – who planned to snatch her inheritance and enclose her in a nunnery. Richard of Gloucester rescued her, saved her inheritance, released her mother and finally wed Anne.

From this framework,
Virgin Widow
was created.

There is astonishingly little. The only recent historical biography dedicated to Anne is:

Anne Neville, Queen to Richard III by
Michael Hicks.

Jean Plaidy’s novel about Anne –
Anne of York
– has recently been reissued.

I was born in the West Riding of Yorkshire. After gaining a BA Honours degree in History at Manchester University and a Master’s degree in education at Hull, I lived in the East Riding for many years as a teacher of history. Always a prolific reader, I enjoyed historical fiction and was encouraged to try my hand at writing. Success in short story competitions spurred me on.

Leaving teaching – but not my love of history – I wrote my first historical romance, a Regency, which was published by Harlequin Mills & Boon in 2005. To date, nine historical novels and a novella, ranging from medieval, through the Civil War and Restoration and back to Regency, have been published in the UK, North America and Australia, as well as in translation throughout Europe and in Japan.

I now live with my husband in an eighteenth-century timber-framed cottage in the depths of the Welsh Marches in Herefordshire. It is a wild, beautiful place on the borders between England and Wales, renowned for its black-and-white timbered houses, ruined castles and priories and magnificent churches. It is steeped in history, famous people and bloody deeds as well as ghosts and folklore, all of which give me inspiration and sources for my writing, particularly in medieval times.

Virgin Widow
is my first novel based on the life of an historical character. I am at present working on my second book, featuring Eleanor of Aquitaine.

“…I find writing a compulsive necessity in my life…”

I recall the days, when I was still teaching history, when I wanted to write but found it difficult. What to write, how to construct a plot, how to make it interesting – I never seemed to make any progress. What do I write about?? That was the real problem. I felt an urge to write, but the subject matter defeated me. When I did, short stories were as much as I could cope with, and I admit to still finding it hard to write stories set in contemporary situations. The change came when I realised that I could use what I knew: when I discovered the rich vein of history as subject matter, my imagination was fired. Now I find writing a compulsive necessity in my life, the ideas springing from a combination of events, characters, conflicts that enable me to visualise a situation. When my interest is caught I feel a need to breathe life into a scene or situation by allowing the characters to speak.

I write because I enjoy the experience – both the process of it and its end result.

“…to tell the story so that distant historical events come alive…”

I think it is the control factor. Manipulating and directing characters to allow them – or sometimes to force them – to tell the story so that distant historical events come alive through conversation and the interaction of characters, proving that in some ways we are not too different today from our ancestors. We are driven by the same ambitions and motivations. I love seeing the scenes develop as the characters speak.

In general, my garden. Weeding a flower bed or picking raspberries frees the mind to allow ideas to flow. But ideas come in the most unlikely places. I once plotted the whole of an historical whodunit on a motorway in a traffic jam. If I need a specific atmosphere I might visit a place associated with the character. When researching Anne Neville, I visited Tewkesbury Abbey and the adjacent battle field – Tewkesbury is quite close to where I live. I knew Middleham Castle well from my days of living in Yorkshire. Eleanor of Aquitaine, my present project, presents me with some difficulties, but a visit to Goodrich castle gave me the atmosphere of a small border fortress in the early twelfth century.

To sit down and write. It is so easy, as I know, to make excuses of lack of time, lack of ideas, lack of somewhere to sit and write. I made these excuses for years. Whether it’s longhand or by computer, it will not happen unless you accept that it’s a time-consuming, often inconvenient and lonely exercise. On the other side of the
coin, it can become an all-embracing way of life, bringing amazing enjoyment and fulfilment.

“…The acceptance of my first book was wonderful…”

But you have to make a start – and persist by working out a routine and sticking to it, even if it’s a somewhat haphazard routine.

I think it has to be Dorothy Dunnett’s
The Game of Kings
– see my top ten books – and the other five to complete the Lymond series. I was seriously hooked when I read the first of them.

Astonished, I think. The timescale from starting writing, through agents and publishers, and the inevitable rejections, is so vast and success seems to be an impossibility. It is difficult to remain confident and patient. The acceptance of my first book was wonderful – and definitely worthy of a bottle of champagne with my husband.

Reading to begin with – any biography of the historical character. Once I have a plan of their life – main dates and events – with overlapping plans to indicate where they interact with the other characters in the story – then I make a list of the scenes which will obviously bring some element of tension or excitement or emotion into the story. This is most important, I find. I also make a list of areas which can be omitted or given a mere passing reference, with the pace of the story in mind or its relevance to the overall novel. Sometimes events just don’t fit and it’s as important to recognise these as it is the explosively important ones. Although sometimes it
surprises me – that scenes I’ve jettisoned demand to be included when I begin writing.

“…she…strove to grasp her own happiness from the grief and degradation. I have to admire her…”

Characters certainly surprise me. Sometimes they resist the direction I wish them to take. Sometimes they carry conversations into directions I had no idea of. Characters develop as I write, so I have to take this into consideration and allow them to be headstrong if that is what they wish. I know I must not force a character into an action that is not in keeping with the character I have given them. If a particular action is vital to the story, then it may be that I have to tweak the character.

It has to be Anne herself. I like her because she is a prime example of a character who surprised me. At the beginning, when she was very young, she insisted on being heard with a very definite voice. As she matured she became quite demanding with a sense of her own place and worth and what was due to her. She has an arrogance that is not unattractive. Throughout all her sufferings – the dangers, the loneliness, the humiliation – she remained determinedly stoical and forward-looking. She knew that she was being manipulated for political ends, but strove to grasp her own happiness from the grief and degradation. I have to admire her.

General: I immerse myself in the period so that I know how people lived and to some extent thought. I need a sense of place and time for my characters. I have a good selection of reference books – I live near Hay on Wye, a magnificent
place for browsing for books – on food and fashion, architecture and gardens, health, sex and witchcraft, so that I can put my characters into a scene. This research tends to be ongoing throughout the time I am writing the novel.

Specific: focusing on the lives of the characters at the centre of the novel as I first envisage it. For the most part these are secondary rather than primary sources, although the opinions of contemporaries are invaluable.

Physical: I visit places associated with the characters or similar venues to give me an idea of atmosphere. Sometimes I use contemporary music to set a mood. I use a local group who specialise in medieval and Renaissance costume and dancing to give me some visual stimulus. Poetry and literature can help me to visualise the ideas that influenced my characters.