Bringing Cecily to life

The many-year journey that ended in this book 

The journey towards this book started in my teens. I have to admit, that’s a very long time ago. My love of story – and history – started even earlier.

I can’t remember not being able to read. I know Mum taught me, long before school started. It wasn’t that she was an early educationalist or a pushy mother. Just that she loved stories and wanted to give her daughter the key to unlock them. We progressed beyond children’s books quickly enough. By ten or so I’d just read whatever she was reading. Catherine Cookson for a long time, I remember. Story after story in which indomitable working class women overcame adversity through relentless effort, sustained only by thick black tea, drunk caustic and scalding. It was an authorial indicator of rare good times if there was a penny to spare for a pinch of sugar to sweeten it. In my mind’s eye I see those women still; tight jawed, sleeves rolled, ploughing up cobbled streets to the defence of their men or their children. Towering matriarchs, every one. They’d take on all comers.

When it wasn’t gritty family sagas, it was romantic histories. Jean Plaidy, Georgette Heyer, you know the drill. When Dad was on nightshift we’d curl up in her bed and read long into the night, turning page after page to find out whether Lady this, or Queen that would find freedom, or justice, or peace or, well, love mostly, if I’m honest. We’d fall asleep with sentimental tears still wet on our cheeks. She wasn’t above sentiment, my mum. Sometime factory worker, shop girl or cleaner, a nurse early on, obliged to give it up when she married. She knew the way the world worked, but would indulge a bit of romance. A pragmatist come morning though. If I was still swooning at breakfast, she’d give one of her wry smiles, put hot tea in front of me and say, yes well, don’t get too caught up in all that.

Ultimately she gifted me with a love of story and an untutored conviction that it and history were two sides of the same coin. Later, I met a history teacher who seemed to share that conviction. 

A perfectly imperfect education

The Manor wasn’t a terribly progressive school back in the 1970s. A secondary modern on a north-east council estate it went comprehensive the year I passed the Eleven Plus. It typically churned 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 had to 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 history like it happened yesterday, and fanned the story/history flame my mother had lit into a consuming blaze. I think he was just glad to have an interested pupil to be fair, and would rattle on as long as I’d sit and listen. He’d bring in extra-curricular books and lob them across the desk at me. “You might take a look at this,” he’d say, knowing I would. History text books mostly. Novels, occasionally. It was The Wars of the Roses for ‘A’ Level and my head was alight with vicious rivalries, breath-taking treacheries, unlikely triumphs, fearful fates. And towering characters! Edward IV, the golden boy who avenged his father and hacked through swathes of enemies to reach the throne. Hapless Henry Six, the mad heir of Agincourt. And the women were no less seismic than the men. Marguerite of Anjou, who put on armour and rode at the head of an army with her five-year-old son. Elizabeth Woodville, the impoverished widow who denied the king her body till he married her to get it. Margaret Beaufort, who lost her only son to exile, but conspired lifelong to bring him home and make him England’s first Tudor king. 

Marguerite of Anjou, Henry VI’s queen

“So why do you think she did that?” Keith Hill 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 was about to write him off. “But was he?” Keith Hill asked, eyes closed, leaning back in his chair. “Who says so?” And that was the moment when the story/history penny decisively dropped. The past, I realised, isn’t fixed, definitive or singular. It’s the raw material of story, open to interpretation, investigation, retelling.  “Read that,” he said. The book lobbed across the desk this time was Rosemary Hawley Jarman’s novel We Speak No Treason, and it had me entranced. It gave me a new Richard. Not a murdering tyrant, just a man making hard decisions in tough times. A hero, actually. Keith Hill was out of the stalls like a greyhound. Revisionist histories started flying across the desk. The other side of Richard. The history Shakespeare didn’t write. 

Now. Shakespeare. There’s another thing. Keith Hill had his match in Bob Martin, the English teacher. The ‘A’ level text was King Lear, but it was hard to get him to stick to the point.  He’d come into class glassy-eyed and say, “Now, I was reading Othello last night, listen to this.” And the hour would pass in Desdemona’s bedroom, or Lady Macbeth’s hall, occasionally on the blasted heath, revelling in language, the magical mercury of words. My classmates would be banging their heads on their desks. My head was reeling without the need for blows. One day I remember saying to him, “It’s just beyond beautiful, isn’t it?” The smile he gave me was the widest I’ve ever seen on anyone. “Yes,” he answered. “It absolutely is.” 

It was a perfectly imperfect education. I left for university – among the first to do so from the Manor – knowing that whatever happened next, story would be my sustaining tea; language my penn’orth of sweetness.

From Richard III to Cecily

History remained a passion, Richard III an abiding interest. On a wet day in 2012 I found myself staring into a grubby hole in a carpark the day after his body was exhumed from it. Later, I followed his hearse to Bosworth, stood in the rain outside Leicester cathedral to watch his funeral on a big screen, laid my tribute of white roses. It was part apology, really. When I left school I’d imagined I’d one day write a novel and it would be about him. In honesty though, and long before Richard emerged from the carpark, my interest had shifted. 

Richard’s life is entwined with that of so many strong women, and I’d met most of them in my reading. But I couldn’t escape a nagging sense that one was eluding me. Where was Richard’s mother?  The bare bones were obvious enough. She was Cecily Neville, granddaughter of John of Gaunt and his mistress-come-wife Katherine Swynford. Her own mother, Joan, though born their bastard, rose to become a Countess. I knew Cecily’s children’s stories like the back of my hand. Her parents’ and grandparents’, too. But in all the novels and biographies I’d read – so many over the years – 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 dramatic 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 marginalised 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 all, lived on. Last woman standing. There had to be a story there, surely.

Women of business

It was the 1990’s by this time. I was in my thirties, heading up European communications for an American multinational. I remember almost no other women at my managerial level, few enough in the company at all. I was learning first-hand how women exercise power in environments dominated by men. Cecily seemed to be getting closer. Within a few years I’d leave to set up my own business, which I ran for twenty years. But I’d made myself a promise. For now I had to make my way in the world. Once that was done, I’d find Cecily’s story, and I’d set it down. I set myself a target. At age fifty-five I’d stop work. I’d write.

So, in 2017, at age fifty-five, I stopped work and started a creative writing MA at Warwick. I gave myself two years to bring Cecily to the page.

Early chapters of Cecily published in the Warwick 2019 anthology

At the same time – serendipity – the historian and specialist in medieval women Joanna Laynesmith, published a biography of Cecily. I read it and begged her to have lunch with me. We talked through to dinner.  I compared what I’d long suspected about Cecily to what she knew. Matched my storyteller’s intuition to her meticulous scholarship. In the days that followed, the shadow figure of Cecily came gradually into focus. Here was a woman who could give any of us a lesson in how operate as a woman in a man’s world. 

I’d long understood that the journey towards female emancipation hasn’t been a steady upward progression. Medieval women, especially those of the aristocracy, or in what we might today think of as the middle classes, had freedoms their Victorian counterparts, or even our post-war mothers, could only dream of.  They could own property, run businesses, take up trades. Widows especially could achieve significant economic independence.  Men ruled, certainly, but in the margins women could exercise agency, assume authority, push boundaries. Women of Cecily’s status, with huge households and vast estates, would be responsible for enterprises similar in size and complexity to mid-sized FTSE companies. They would be highly literate, understand finance and the law, have a firm grasp of politics.  They’d be, in short, women of business. 

At the same time, they’d be expected to support their husbands’ political careers and advance their family’s interests within intricate and hierarchical social networks. Above all they were expected to breed. Children, ultimately, were the measure of their value. If they failed in that regard, nothing else counted. Come now, did you think it was only twenty-first century women who were expected to ‘do it all’?

Cecily excelled on all these fronts. But that was just the start of it. She not only lived through seismic political and historic events; she shaped them. A lifelong dynast, she engineered her husband’s bid for the throne and, when that failed, her son’s. She was brazen enough to maintain a cordial exchange of letters with Henry VI’s queen while, at her husband’s side, planning a rebellion. Bold enough when defeated to barter for her children’s future with an enemy king. In the aftermath of her husband’s death, it was her London home that became the centre of Yorkist planning as her son fought his way across England to claim his crown. And when he left the city to fight again, he had the good sense to leave management of his kingdom in no one’s hands but hers. Old, pious, dull?  I don’t think so. 

I could see her clearly now, at last. Striding the fifteenth century’s corridors of power with her sleeves rolled up, knocking on doors she had no business to enter, defending her own against all comers. Here was my matriarch.

I spent my childhood in Richard III country. As his brother Edward’s loyal Lord of the North he kept the Scots at bay. In my teenage years I trailed his border castles, narrowed my eyes, as he would have, to watch the weather roll across rolling dales. On the day of the Queen’s silver jubilee my mother took me to his principal seat, Middleham castle. In the inevitable gift shop she bought me a wax replica of his royal seal. It sits on my desk as I write. 

Ludlow Castle, Cecily’s home for much of her life. Copyright: Manuel Diaz

Today I live in Cecily country, close to the Welsh border, and to Ludlow castle where she and Richard’s father ruled supreme for a time and where, on the darkest of days, she faced down an army alone. I go there often. I stand at the foot of the castle steps as she did and imagine her enemies coming up through the town, bladed and bloody. I square my shoulders, lift my chin. Let them come.