Richard III has been written off in history as one of England's evil kings. His usurpation of the throne from his nephew Edward V and then subsequent generations of pro-Tudor historians ensured his fame as the disfigured murderer portrayed by Shakespeare. In the twentieth century, Richard found his apologists, those who saw him as more sinned against than sinning.This biography – by the leading expert on Richard – strips away the propaganda of the centuries...

Anne Neville was queen to England's most notorious king, Richard III. She was immortalised by Shakespeare for the remarkable nature of her marriage, a union which brought together a sorrowing widow with her husband's murderer. Anne's misfortune did not end there. In addition to killing her first husband, Richard also helped kill her father, father-in-law and brother-in-law, imprisoned her mother, and was suspected of poisoning Anne herself. Dying before the age of thirty, ...

Known to be proud, regal and beautiful, Cecily Neville was born in the year of the great English victory at Agincourt and survived long enough to witness the arrival of the future Henry VIII, her great-grandson. Her life spanned most of the fifteenth century. Cecily’s marriage to Richard, Duke of York, was successful, even happy, and she travelled with him wherever his career dictated, bearing his children in England, Ireland and France, including the future Edward IV and Richard III. What...

Elizabeth Woodville is a historical character whose life no novelist would ever have dared invent. She has been portrayed as an enchantress, as an unprincipled advancer of her family's fortunes and a plucky but pitiful queen in Shakespeare's histories. She has been alternatively championed and vilified by her contemporaries and five centuries of historians, dramatists and novelists, but what was she really like?In this revealing account of Elizabeth's life...

The earliest known and longest lasting mistress of Henry VIII, Bessie Blount was the kings first love. More beautiful that Anne Boleyn or any of Henrys other wives or concubines, Bessies beauty and other charms ensured that she turned heads, winning a place at court as one of Catherine of Aragons ladies. Within months she was partnering the king in dancing and she rose to be the woman with the most influence over Henry, much to Catherine of Aragons despair. The affair lasted five years (lo...

Richard III is a paradox - the most hated of English kings, yet the most beloved, a deeply pious man, yet materialistic to the point of obsession, puritan, yet the father of at least two illegitimate children. This new biography concentrates on the much neglected early part of Richards life - from his birth in 1452 as a cadet of the House of York to his marriage to the beautiful Anne Neville - and shows how his experiences as the son of an ambitious duke, a prisoner of war, an exile, his k...

The extraordinary true story of the 'Red Queen'. Born in the midst of the Wars of the Roses, Margaret Beaufort became the greatest heiress of her time. She survived a turbulent life, marrying four times and enduring imprisonment before passing her claim to the crown of England to her son, Henry VII, the first of the Tudor monarchs. Margaret's royal blood placed her on the fringes of the Lancastrian royal dynasty. After divorcing her first husband at the age of ten, she married the king's h...

Not many people would claim to be saints, or alternatively, consider themselves entirely without redeeming qualities. Some are unquestionably worse than others, but few have been held in greater infamy than Richard Plantagenet, afterwards Duke of Gloucester and, later still, King Richard III. Richards character has been besmirched as often as it has been defended, and the arguments between his detractors and supporters still rage after several centuries. Was he a ruthless hunchback who but...

In June 1405, King Henry IV stopped at a small Yorkshire manor house to shelter from a storm. That night he awoke screaming that traitors were burning his skin. His instinctive belief that he was being poisoned was understandable: he had already survived at least eight plots to dethrone or kill him in the first six years of his reign.Henry IV had not always been so unpopular. In his youth he had been a great chivalric champion and crusader. The son of John of Gaunt, he was courteou...

When Edward IV died in 1483, the Yorkist succession was called into question by doubts about the legitimacy of his sons (the 'Princes in the Tower'). The crown therefore passed to Edward IV's undoubtedly legitimate younger brother, Richard, Duke of Gloucester. But Richard, too, found himself entangled in the web of uncertainly, since those who believed in the legitimacy of Edward IV's children viewed Richard III's own accession with suspicion.From the day that Edwa...

Warwick the Kingmaker, the Earl of Warwick & Salisbury whose wealth and power was so great that he could effectively decide who would rule England during the Wars of the Roses (1455-1487), had six sisters: Joan, Cecily, Alice, Eleanor, Katherine and Margaret. They all married powerful noblemen who fought on opposing sides during this turbulent period.The Kingmaker's Sisters examines the role that they played in late fifteenth-century England, as wives, mot...

In 1455 John Howard was an untitled and relatively obscure Suffolk gentleman. Thirty years later, at the time of his death at the Battle of Bosworth Field, he was Earl Marshal, Duke of Norfolk, Lord Admiral and a very rich man (and his direct descendant is Duke of Norfolk today). How had Howard attained these elevations? Through his service to the House of York, and in particular to King Richard III during the setting aside of Edward V.John Ashdown-Hill examines wh...