My review of Blood Sisters: The Women Behind The Wars Of The Roses, by Sarah Gristwood

Blood Sisters: The Women Behind The Wars Of The Roses

by Sarah Gristwood

My rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Framing this period as a female saga has become a popular theme. This example, conceptually sharp and intriguing, stands higher than some of recent years.

My usual history reading centres on the pre- and post- Tudor periods, which offers context for the popular, multidimensional Tudor period itself. My usual history reading also often centres on the female players, invariably more humanly depicted than the stick-like male players and so more accessible.

Women in non-fiction and fiction alike make for better drama (e.g. who is the more fascinating, Henry VIII or his six wives?). We hear not of 'drama kings' only drama queens. They make for more fascinating studies than their men. Their social positioning at that time necessitated limitations both subtle and severe in formal power structures, creating complex tensions.

This typically narrowed the women's options: to politically scheming, under the guise of marital and maternal dutifulness. With notable exceptions, this usually required more silent anguish, patience, sagacity and prolonged focus, with little or no outside counsel, than most men could muster. (We thankfully also encounter the token termagants here and there, to fire things up). Survival often required them to become devious, thick-skinned creatures.

Sarah Gristwood's take on these murky politics, times and events is presented in a more studious, less 'popular' style than others it sits amongst. (I relish both styles, having fun and frivolity with the latter.) Gristwood prioritises erudition over sensation, without becoming overtly dry. Though I have read both more entertaining and more impenetrable versions of these events, this one strikes an attractive chord of balance.

The Cousins' War, or Wars of the Roses, is a tangled web that has left many put off by its hefty timeframe and complexity. Many a lay historian has skimmed over it, drawn to the more popular Tudors, only to end up devoid of vital context. Such works as this help address that issue.

Here we enjoy candid close ups of, for example, the proud and tempestuous Cecily Neville, wife of Richard 3rd Duke of York, who narrowly lost her grand opportunity of becoming queen when her husband died at the Battle of Wakefield. Cecily's illustrious Plantagenet brood included not only King Edward IV, but usurping Shakespearian villain Richard III whose fall at the Battle of Bosworth Field made way for the Tudors. Cecily's ill-fated third son was the ill-fated Duke of Clarence, whose 'private execution' was long rumoured to have involved drowning in a butt of Malmsey wine.

Juxtaposed against hard bitten Yorkist matriarch Cecily is her notably less aristocratic new daughter-in-law, the legendary beauty and romantic figurehead Elizabeth Woodville. Already widowed with children, Elizabeth married Cecily's eldest son Edward IV in secret, becoming his queen consort to Cecily's chagrin and widespread courtly disapproval. Accused by her adversaries of bewitching Edward into marriage, it was from this great-grandmother that Queen Elizabeth I got her name and her fiery red hair.

Then there's the pious, erudite and parentally ambitious Lady Margaret Beaufort, of impeccable ancient stock and mother of Henry Tudor (Henry VII). Her web of machinations probably included wooing her husband Lord Stanley, previously a Yorkist player, to side ultimately with the Lancastrians, ensuring Henry VII's victory. With her son's rise to monarchy Lady Margaret became England's first lady, outranking even her daughter-in-law queen consort Elizabeth of York, daughter of Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville.

Shadowed, as always, by her fellow central female characters is Cecily Neville's grandniece Anne Neville, daughter of Warwick 'the Kingmaker', tossed from suitor to suitor, from the Lancastrian to the Yorkist sides, then dead at twenty-eight. As wife of the deposed King Henry VI's Lancastrian heir, Edward of Westminster, Anne became Princess of Wales and daughter-in-law to the fierce Margaret of Anjou. Widowed young when Prince Edward died at the Battle of Tewkesbury, Anne later became the Yorkist Duchess of Gloucester and then Queen of England as the wife of King Richard III who, it was rumoured, poisoned Anne in preparation to marry his niece Elizabeth of York - a marriage which never eventuated due to Richard's fall in battle to Henry Tudor, who would marry Elizabeth himself, ending the thirty year conflict between his house of Lancaster and hers of York. Traditionally downplayed by historians due to a lack of material, Anne is sadly once more presented in a ghostly light, though Gristwood no doubt suffered the same drawbacks as others, faced with the dearth of personal detail about Anne to draw from.

After the immense popularity of the dramatised 'White Queen' TV series, based on Philippa Gregory's series of novels about this same circle of women, any keen reader of this period would be seriously missing out by excluding 'Blood Sister's' from their non-fiction.  

Highly recommend this important book, especially to those seeking to distinguish the hard facts from the syrupy folklore of this complex episode of English history without becoming numbed by the convoluted series of dates and battles that fill so many non-fictional accounts.