Who was Cecily Neville - really?

A 15th century woman for all time

Cecily was born in the year of Agincourt, lived into the early years of the Tudors, created a dynasty, mothered two kings and led her family through civil war. For most of her life, she was one of, if not the most powerful women in England. And yet…

“Cecily who?” 

… is the reaction of most people when I tell them the subject of my novel.

How could such an important woman – such an extraordinary, high-profile, high-achieving woman – slip through history’s net like that?

Easily, I suppose. Women have been falling through it for years.

The history of the 15th century was written by men, for men. Women didn’t get much attention. And Shakespeare didn’t help. In his history plays Cecily barely merits a mention. And when she does appear, she’s not very interesting – no political agenda, no power, no dramatic purpose.

The truth couldn’t be more different.

The real Cecily was an energetic dynastic schemer and a political mover and shaker of the first rank. A strategist, politician and administrator par excellence. What’s more, and quite simply, she was there; not just in the Wars of the Roses but at the very heart of them. In fact, she was the only major protagonist to survive from their violent beginnings to their blood-soaked end. 

Cecily with her mother

Ralph with his sons

History has given us few visual representations of Cecily, but I found one that revealed her character to me.  It’s in the French national library, in a Book of Hours Cecily commissioned, perhaps as a gift for her mother, when she was in France, the year she watched Joan of Arc burn. She was sixteen. In it, Cecily’s parents face each other across the page, flanked by their sons and daughters.  Below, a series of armorial shields displays the status of each parent and child. Though the youngest of the daughters, Cecily has placed herself in the first rank, kneeling almost on her mother’s black hem. She has dressed herself in the richest colours, the finest jewels. Behind her, her sisters, countesses and duchesses in their own right, become a pale crowd, muted, shadowed, plain. The men opposite are smart enough, I suppose. Me first, says Cecily. At sixteen she understood that to exercise power in a man’s world you have to assume it. You have to look the part and turn the language of power – images such as this, in Cecily’s world – into your own propaganda.

Cecily Luton Guild. Image courtesy of The Culture Trust.

In a later image, created after her eldest son became Edward IV, Cecily is shown kneeling behind his wife, Elizabeth Woodville. Elizabeth’s the queen here, but it’s Cecily that’s cloaked herself in the royal arms of England. She’s sending a very clear message: Don’t for even a minute imagine I’m not the most important woman in the room.

What’s not to like?

So, Cecily is rich, royal and ruthless. For a novelist, what’s not to like? It’s hard to believe that, for more than five hundred years, fiction writers have largely ignored her. Can all of the blame be laid at Shakespeare’s door? Probably not. As I’ve said, Cecily isn’t the only powerful woman in history to have been overlooked or misrepresented. The historian and novelist, Sharan Best, describes the problem by pointing out that film and fiction too often revert to stereotypes when it comes to medieval women. They’re either objects of chivalry, pampered and adored, or they’re repressed, voiceless victims.

So, in my novel, I’ve tried to deliver a version of Cecily that’s closer to the 15th century truth. Along the way, I realised she’s not too far from 21st century truth either.

Yes, Cecily was a woman of her time – of a pre-reformation, pre-feminist, Catholic, male-dominated world. But she was also a woman we can feel kinship with today; fighting with words when swords were denied her, exercising whatever power was given to her and pushing for more. Testing boundaries, holding her own. She faced the questions women still struggle with today. What comes first, love or ambition? Which family commands our first loyalty, the one we’re born into or the one we make? How far will your courage take you?

I hope you’ll enjoy her story.