Joanna Hickson: Red Rose, White Rose

Joanna Hickson is very good at creating romance from the bare bones of history. She did it to good effect in her duology featuring Catherine de Valois, The Agincourt Bride and The Tudor Bride. She attempts this again in Red Rose, White Rose, a novel based on the life of Cicely Neville, Duchess if York and mother of both Edward IV and Richard III.

The novel deals well with the political issues of the times, the growing antipathy between reigning Lancaster and ambitious York, and the various historical nobles whose actions led to the continuation of the Wars of the Roses that resulted in the reign of the two Yorkist kings and the ultimate triumph of the Tudor line.

It also shows, through the viewpoint of Cicely and the relationships of her sisters, friends and daughters, many of the harsh realities of the lives of the noble women of the times. Often the wives and daughters of the great lords were little more than pawns, their marriages serving as ways of solidifying political alliances, their bodies useful only as the producers of heirs.

However, it is in the realm of personal relationships, that I feel Hickson goes somewhat astray. Hickson invents a story of an abduction and seduction by an estranged kinsman when Cicely was young and not yet married that turned into love unrequited for many years after that. I feel that the relationship between Cicely and her husband Richard of York was complex enough without inventing secret lifelong adulterous desires.

The novel has as one of the two viewpoint characters (Cicely herself being the other) a supposed bastard half-brother, Cuthbert of Middleham. I liked the invented character, and Hickson effectively uses him to allow us to see further than even a politically active woman like Cicely Neville could reasonably take us - into the councils of men, and into battle. But the naming of this character was to my mind inappropriate and potentially confusing. It's certainly true that Cicely's father, having had 20 legitimate children, could easily have had more than a few illegitimate children, and might have brought one into his house to be raised alongside his half-siblings - but Cicely did have an older, legitimate brother named Cuthbert (who died young) so why not call the invented brother something else?

Red Rose, White Rose carries Cicely's story through to the moment when, her husband dead in battle, her eldest son Edward is offered the crown - though not before he has managed to defeat the Lancastrian forces and capture Henry VI. There is a postscript which notes that Cicely outlived all but two of her children, both daughters.

Aside from the quibbles I have with certain invented elements (which Hickson actually addresses in her Afterward), I found the novel both enjoyable and an interesting look at the events surrounding the York rebellion and Edward IV's rise to the throne.