Shortly after the young princess Elizabeth of York arrived at Richard’s court, his only son and heir died and his wife, Anne Neville, became fatally ill. Almost certainly, Richard and Elizabeth fell in love and perhaps intended to marry. We know this for certain, because on the death of his wife, rumors that Richard was to marry his niece Elizabeth were so widespread that he was forced to deny them in public. We have a contemporary account of him standing in the great hall at St. John’s in the presence of the mayor and citizens of London and swearing that there was nothing between him and his beautiful niece.

There is wonderful research done, and waiting to be done, around this! From a lost letter in which Elizabeth declares her love for Richard, the rumors that Richard poisoned his wife so that he would be free to marry her—any historian who takes this story on has to decide whether Elizabeth of York, only eighteen years old, was gambling her own life and happiness on the outcome of the battle of Bosworth: formally betrothed to Henry Tudor, the Lancaster claimant, who was waiting to invade, but in love with Richard III.

At this dramatic moment this novel begins, and you will see how the story unfolds. Researching it and finding the actions and character of Elizabeth; her mother; her sisters; her cousins; her strange and formidable in-laws, the Tudors; and the young man who claimed that he was her lost brother was a fascinating journey of discovery and sifting of facts.

Because I write women’s history I rarely have the luxury of a full and fair biography to study. Until about 1960 there were very few histories written about women at all, and often I am faced with a blank or—worse—with an unfair condemnation of the woman. Tracing Elizabeth of York’s life was often speculation, and sometimes I found myself simply rebelling against the picture that the medieval chroniclers tried to force on the real woman; those who spoke of her “truly wonderful obedience.” Clearly, we cannot believe that she was only the passive pawn of Tudor ambition, a baby-making machine who chose a married motto of “Humble and penitent” when she had been raised by a rebel, was a princess of royal blood, and her own motto before marriage was “Sans removyr” which means (surely defiantly?) “unmoving” or “unchanging.”

A young woman of eighteen, who has witnessed her father driven from the throne and restored, her mother give birth in prison, her brother disappear from his own castle, who has engaged in an adulterous love affair with the king while betrothed to his enemy, and who claims the defiant motto “unchanging” is not anyone’s pawn! When I consider her education, her upbringing as a princess during a civil war, the teachings of her sophisticated and successful mother and diplomat grandmother, I certainly don’t see a passive victim. She must have been a dynamic character: someone who thinks about her circumstances, who makes up her own mind, and has a determination to work her will on her world.