Whilst I have no doubt that Cecily influenced York, let's not forget that York was a talented spinner of PR. Not once did Garthwaite break out into history textbook dryness - a la Sunne in Splendour - to get the reader understanding what was going on. Edward enters London saluting his Captain Mother, and she gives her ‘sun in splendour” over to the cheers of the crowd.

The language is more contemporary colloquial than historical, but that quickly ceased to bother me: I accepted it as part of creating an accessible page-turner. All the while continuing to give birth and maintaining her religious virtue - how did she have the time? I really loved the take on Margaret of Anjou too – she’s depicted as a wily, very strong and sometimes sympathetic opponent for Cecily.Cecily lived to see her eightieth birthday, saw kings and queens come and go, outlived most of her children (including her four sons who lived to adulthood), saw her husband and her brother killed in battle.

If you understand anything about the War of the Roses, and the royal family dynamic at the time, Cecily is hardly given a mention. In the end, she decides to go to the king to plead for her husband’s life, and if too late for that, for her children’s and her own. She was a powerful matriarch during the Wars of the Roses; someone always at the very heart of the Yorkist cause. It’s a good save for anyone who would accuse the author of being reductive/ dismissive towards certain figures - because Garthwaite surely couldn’t mean the historical Henry Holland to just be his dogs , but through Cecily we don’t get much more complexity and that’s just a limited POV thing not a statement that certain historical figures were inherently menign and we should consider them so. This might involve a little modern wishful thinking - or maybe not: a real proto-feminist text, The City of Ladies, by Christine de Pizan, is mentioned a couple of times.Because Richard is a traitor’s son, they must first establish his loyalty and competence before the crown will formally grant him the estates. We also see Cecily’s attitude towards them soften for one hot second during that chapter ; only to turn with the escalation of the political conflict after St Albans when she turns back to enmity but for good reason. I found myself wondering just how much of the holy, childlike amiability was an act to hide behind while he played everyone off each other for his own amusement? This sets our aforementioned feeling of proximity to the historical premises making for a successful novel.

She also betrays her emotions when she sends her two young sons George and Dickon off to exile in Burgundy. I’ve seen it avoid prose pitfalls we find in certain histfic classics: slamming the brakes in the plot at certain points to give us meaningless and long-winded vignettes or expositions of certain figures, their feelings (or motivation - yuck! I was alerted to it by my friend Brian Wainwright, a fellow historical novelist and Ricardian and without his recommendation I might have passed it by -- scarred by trying to read (not recently) 2 terrible novels about Cecily Duchess of York.

This is why I never miss the chance to sing Jarman’s praises no matter how often she defames my favourites or busts out with her extreme Richardianism. And what a novel - it's beautifully written, full of carefully crafted and realistic-feeling characters, chock full of tension and intrigue, and ever-atmospheric as it chronicles the merciless ebb and flow of fortune of its titular heroine. She is also a great storyteller, bringing sense and coherence to a very convoluted and complex period. The book opens in 1431 as Cecily witnesses the burning to death of Joan d’Arc and later the crowning of the young King Henry VI of England as King of France, although his realm does not extend to the whole of France and a rival, King Charles of France, also claims that title. It also probably has to do something with the fact that I’m not a Yorkist or Ricardian, and as the story progresses past 1447, it takes a distinctive Yorkist bent in narrative choices.