Over and over again the historical record tells me only about the men, and I have to struggle to prevent my story veering towards male heroes. It is hard to tell the story of Elizabeth of York without her farbetter-known husband, Henry VII, as the hero. Henry himself, Jasper Tudor, and Thomas Stanley are all described as powerful coherent agents of their own lives, but the enemies that Henry feared—Margaret, Dowager Duchess of Burgundy, and Elizabeth Woodville—are written off as harpies filled with pointless malice, or as women crazed by grief. His greatest supporter, the leader of the anti-York rebellion to put Henry Tudor on his throne, was his mother, Margaret Beaufort—but the conventional histories follow her own declaration that she was wholly guided by God’s will, as if she did not live her life with absolute determination and successful strategy. The rebellion against Richard III that she led has gone down in history as “Buckingham’s Rebellion,” because Margaret Beaufort, as mother of the king of England, used the official court history to cover her tracks as a powerful politician, royal advisor, and treasonous rebel against the Plantagenet kings. For the benefit of her reputation she herself hid her determined and ruthless ambition.

She is not the only woman whose ambition and political power have been concealed as if these qualities are an unladylike embarrassment. There is a convention that Elizabeth Woodville, the White Queen, made the terrible mistake of giving her two sons up to their murderer, and then retired, heartbroken, into private life. But there is no doubt in my mind that she continued to rally her forces and cleverly and carefully plotted for the return of her missing son. The king certainly feared this—the massive expansion of a spy system to look for “the Boy” shows up in the royal accounts. Elizabeth Woodville’s enmity to the Tudor usurper was so cleverly concealed that it is hard to find traces of it then or now except in Henry VII’s panicky reaction. But that does not mean that it did not exist. When her son-in-law Henry VII put her under house arrest at Bermondsey Abbey, it was her third imprisonment; she had been a persistent and courageous conspirator all her life. We can see from her will that, even on her deathbed, she was still plotting: financing a rebellion against him.

But the misogynistic view of history explains women’s motives as neurotic, even psychotic. It is the get-out clause for lazy historians who cannot account for active, powerful women. Margaret Beaufort; Margaret, Dowager Duchess of York; Elizabeth Woodville; and Jacquetta Rivers have all been labeled as religious fanatics, hysterics, or witches. But in fact they were formidable and persistent politicians, deploying the weapons they had available. It is such a mistake to try to write them out of history! We should try to understand and explain them—rather than explaining them away.

I am proud of my working life, looking through the historical record to see what really happened, and reading through the stereotypes to imagine what real women were like. I am pleased when people discover these wonderful women. I feel I owe it to the women that their stories should be told fully by us—the descendants and heirs to their very real struggles and genuine victories. And so I hope very much that you will find this novel is a gateway to take you closer to the lives of your inheritance, your forebears: these real women and their world.