3 MAY 1415
Birth of Cecily Neville (mother of Edward IV and Richard III) at Raby Castle, Durham
Tags: Cecily Neville, Family
Birth of Cecily Neville (mother of Edward IV and Richard III) at Raby Castle, Durham
Tags: Cecily Neville, Family
Our next General Meeting will be held on Saturday, 13 April 2019, at 2 pm at the Sydney Mechanics Institute, Level 1, 280 Pitt Street, Sydney.
Our featured speaker will be our own long-serving executive committee member Dorothea, who will take us on a visit to Richard III’s mum, Cecily, at her long-time residence of Berkhamsted in Hertfordshire. She will tell us about the town and the castle, starting from its pre-conquest origins to the present day. The castle was very significant in the development of the town. Along the way, you will meet some of its colourful residents.
Please join us for this most interesting sounding program!
You might also like to watch a YouTube video with an Animated Tour of Berkhamsted Castle here.
Tags: Berkhamsted, Cecily Neville, Hertfordshire, NSW Branch
Anne Easter Smith, Queen by Right. Touchstone, New York, 2011. ISBN 9781416550471 (paperback)
The queen of the title of Anne Easter Smith’s latest novel is Cecily Neville, the mother of Edward IV and Richard III. Many readers of historical fiction will shared the experiences of her sons in novels, but this has been much less the case for Cecily. And after meeting Anne Easter Smith’s Cecily I can only wonder why.
Queen by Right covers Cecily’s life from 1423, when she is eight years old, until her son Edward’s coronation in June 1461. And while the events of the remaining 34 years of Cecily’s life would easily provide enough material for at least one other novel, I welcome her decision to limit this one to the earlier – and at least for me – less well-known period. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Cecily Neville, Ricardian Authors, Richard Duke of York, Wars of the Roses
We are thrilled to welcome a guest post by well-known Ricardian novelist Anne Easter Smith, author of A Rose for the Crown, Daughter of York and The King’s Grace. I loved all her previous novels and am now impatiently awaiting delivery of her recently published Queen by Right about Cecily Neville, duchess of York. In her guest post Anne examines the rumour that Edward IV was not the son of Richard, duke of York. Thank you so much, Anne, for sharing this with us.
I was drawn to writing about Cecily Neville as soon as I began researching my first – and what I thought would be my only – book A Rose for the Crown. I could not write Richard III’s story without knowing a lot about his parents and his siblings. Oddly, Cecily did not appear at all in that book, but in a few scenes her absence hung over the brothers Edward and Richard and you feel she is an indomitable presence in their lives. Indeed, I think one of the reasons Edward chose not to reveal his secret marriage to Elizabeth Woodville for so long was because he feared a slap upside the head from Proud Cis. And boy, did she give him one when the marriage was finally outed, and, according to the Italian visitor Dominic Mancini who was in London in 1484 – twenty years after the fact – and was the first to write about the rumor, Cecily “fell into a frenzy.” It was partly because of the scorn she had for this upstart nobody Woodville woman who must now be called queen that she began to style herself, “Cecily, the king’s mother, and late wife unto Richard, by right king of England and of France and lord of Ireland.” Or as my title infers, “Queen by Right.” Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Books, Cecily Neville, Ricardian Authors
May promises to be an interesting month for friends of Ricardian fiction. Anne Easter Smith’s much anticipated novel about Cecily Neville, Queen by Right, will be published early in the month. This book on the mother of Edward IV and Richard III should be a real treat, as anyone who has read Anne’s previous books can confirm, including A Rose for the Crown, Daughter of York and The King’s Grace. These are what historical fiction should be: well-researched and sticking to the facts as we know them with some romance mixed in.
We now hear that Joan Szechtman will continue with the adventures of Richard III in This Time also in May in Loyalty Binds Me. In This Time we shared Richard’s experiences when he has been transported by time travel from the moment before his death into present day America.
Lots to look forward to in May.
Tags: Books, Cecily Neville, Family, Ricardian Authors, Richard III
Congratulations to Anne Easter Smith who just let us know that she won the 2010 Romantic Times Book Review Magazine Award for Best Historical Biography for The King’s Grace. The Grace of the title is Grace Plantagenet, an illegitimate daughter of Edward IV, her mother is unknown. Indeed all we know about her is that she was one of two mourners (the other is an unnamed “gentilwoman”) on the funeral barge of Elizabeth Woodville in 1492. From this Anne spins a fascinating story about the Perkin Warbeck mystery. For if Perkin Warbeck was indeed Richard of York, this Grace would have been his half-sister.
With the award Anne beat another contender, which also deals with the question of what happened to Elizabeth Woodville’s sons by Edward IV: Philippa Gregory’s The White Queen. Having read both books, I can only agree with the judges. We congratulate Anne on this award. It is her first, but should not be her last. I believe Anne is at present working on a book on Cecily of York, the mother of among others Edward IV, Richard III as well as Margaret of Burgundy. Richard played an important role in Anne’s A Rose for the Crown, while Margaret was portrayed in Daughter of York. Can’t wait for her to bring Cecily to life!
Tags: Books, Cecily Neville, Edward IV, Elizabeth Woodville, Richard III