The King’s Sister

INSPIRATION FOR THE KING’S SISTER

My compulsion to write about Elizabeth of Lancaster, younger daughter of John of Gaunt and Blanche of Lancaster, was born out of my own initial ignorance about her, followed by a visit to the Church of St Mary, a tiny rural church in Burford, Shropshire, close to where I live.

It all began when I was invited by a local historical society to give a talk on her life, together with a guided tour to her tomb. Being an ‘incomer’ to the area, I was forced to admit that I knew nothing about her other than her parentage and that Katherine Swynford had been employed as her governess. A personal visit to her tomb was essential.

And there she was, the heroine of my new novel. I think I knew it as soon as I saw her effigy, clad regally in red with a purple cloak trimmed with ermine. Her hair is fair, her face oval and her nose long. Plantagenet features, I suppose. She wears a ducal coronet and her hands are raised in prayer, an angel supporting her pillow and a little dog holding the edge of her cloak in its mouth. She is quite lovely.

But to write about her as a heroine I needed to discover more. And how little there was, either in contemporary sources or modern historians. But one comment, written in 1994, intrigued me when it damned her with the only opinion given about her as ‘frankly wanton and highly sexed.’

Was there nothing more to say about her than this? And was this simply based on the fact that she had three husbands during her lifetime of fifty years? And that John Holland, her second husband, ‘was struck down passionately, so that day and night he sought her out’ while she was still not free to wed him? I expect that it had a bearing on the judgement, but surely there must be more to say about this daughter of Lancaster.

And then I came to appreciate the political setting in which Elizabeth lived in 1399 and 1400, the years of the overthrow of King Richard II by Henry Bolingbroke, who became Henry IV, followed by the Rising of the Earls in which John Holland, the Duke of Exeter, half-brother to King Richard, was implicated. Elizabeth was in the very centre of this maelstrom. First cousin to Richard, sister to Henry, wife of John Holland, how difficult were family loyalties for her within that setting? What would be her role in the dynamics of this vital Plantagenet family?

What a marvellously emotional story this would make, mapping the pressures of blood and loyalty and duty when a family was torn apart by ambition and poor government.

This was to be the story of Elizabeth of Lancaster, the king’s sister.