The Manor wasn’t a terribly progressive school back in the 1970s. A secondary modern on a north-eastern council estate, it went comprehensive the year I passed the Eleven Plus. It typically turned out boys for the steelworks. Its girls would go to the chicken factory or build telephone exchanges for Siemens. Women’s work, you see. Nimble fingers. We lived across the road, so geography dictated I go. Mum wasn’t best pleased. ‘She should be going to the grammar.’ That was one fight Dad wouldn’t back her in. A union man and a socialist from cap to boot soles. Anyway, she knew he was right. I think so, too.

It worked out well enough. Keith Hill taught fifteenth-century history like it happened yesterday, brought its long-dead characters to life and set them walking the corridors of my imagination. ‘So why do you think she did that?’ he would ask. ‘What was in his mind when …?’ My final exam mark wasn’t that impressive. I was a bit woolly on dates and politics, but very strong on character motivation.

If you ask who was the stand-out figure for me then, I’d have to say Richard III. The hunchback, the tyrant, the child-murderer. I’d been about to write him off. ‘But was he?’ Keith Hill asked. ‘Who says so?’ And that was the moment when the story/history penny truly dropped. The past, I realized, isn’t fixed, definitive or singular. It’s the raw material of story, open to interpretation, investigation, retelling.

Long after school, history remained a passion, Richard III an abiding interest. But, increasingly, it was the strong women whose stories entwined with his that commanded my attention. I’d met most of them in my reading, but couldn’t escape the nagging sense that one of them was eluding me. Where was Richard’s mother? The bare bones are obvious enough. She was Cecily Neville, granddaughter of John of Gaunt and his mistress-come-wife, Katherine Swynford. Her own mother, Joan, though born a bastard, rose to become a countess. But, in all the novels and biographies I’d read, I’d never really encountered Cecily. Why?

Well, you might say Shakespeare ‘did for Cecily’, no less than he did for her son. Her appearances in his history plays are brief. She has no political agenda, exercises no power and serves no purpose other than to curse her misbegotten offspring. Shakespeare’s summation of Cecily is simple: old, pious, embittered and dull. No wonder historians and novelists marginalized her for five hundred years. There were more interesting women to write about. Bigger fish to fry.

Really?

Cecily lived through eighty years of tumultuous history, never far from the beating heart of power. She mothered kings, created a dynasty, brought her family through civil war. She met victories and defeats in equal measure and, in face of them all, lived on. Last woman standing. There had to be a story there, surely?