Kathy Martin's Blog - Posts Tagged "middleham"
Happy Birthday, Richard of Gloucester!
Today is the 561st anniversary of the birth of the man remembered by history as Richard III, although he actually held that title for barely more than two years (from June 1483 to August 1485). For a much greater part of his short life he was known as the Duke of Gloucester, having been given his dukedom at the tender age of eight. It is as Richard, Duke of Gloucester that he appears in my first historical novel, The Woodville Connection, a murder mystery set in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire in 1472.
I became an ardent supporter of Richard III when I was 13 and read We Speak No Treason, Rosemary Hawley-Jarman’s magnificent novel-based paean to Richard. Having fallen in love with this fictional version of the young Richard, a few years later I determined to seek out more information about him and thus bought myself a copy of Paul Murray Kendall’s admirable biography, Richard The Third. I found this book so fascinating and readable that I returned to it time and time again, to the extent that the jacket is now in tatters and some of the pages are marred by tea stains, a reminder that I was just as clumsy as a teenager as I am today. It remains one of my favourite books of all time, even though I am now able to see that Murray Kendall might not have been quite as impartial as I once thought him.
I realise that by rambling on about Richard of Gloucester/Richard III, I might have created the impression that he is the central character in my novel. This is very much not the case; that honour falls to Francis Cranley, my totally fictitious, illegitimate hero who has been raised alongside Richard and counts him his dearest friend.
Personable, keen-witted and handy in a scrap, Francis is the man Richard looks to when he has a tricky situation that needs attention. That’s how he comes to be riding off to Lincolnshire one cold December morning, tasked with finding out if the Duke’s old friend Will Fielding is truly innocent, as he claims, of murder.
I became an ardent supporter of Richard III when I was 13 and read We Speak No Treason, Rosemary Hawley-Jarman’s magnificent novel-based paean to Richard. Having fallen in love with this fictional version of the young Richard, a few years later I determined to seek out more information about him and thus bought myself a copy of Paul Murray Kendall’s admirable biography, Richard The Third. I found this book so fascinating and readable that I returned to it time and time again, to the extent that the jacket is now in tatters and some of the pages are marred by tea stains, a reminder that I was just as clumsy as a teenager as I am today. It remains one of my favourite books of all time, even though I am now able to see that Murray Kendall might not have been quite as impartial as I once thought him.
I realise that by rambling on about Richard of Gloucester/Richard III, I might have created the impression that he is the central character in my novel. This is very much not the case; that honour falls to Francis Cranley, my totally fictitious, illegitimate hero who has been raised alongside Richard and counts him his dearest friend.
Personable, keen-witted and handy in a scrap, Francis is the man Richard looks to when he has a tricky situation that needs attention. That’s how he comes to be riding off to Lincolnshire one cold December morning, tasked with finding out if the Duke’s old friend Will Fielding is truly innocent, as he claims, of murder.
