CECILY – ANNIE GARTHWAITE – REVIEW

No matter how many times I read about the Wars of the Roses – and perhaps embarrassingly given how much time I spent there during my undergraduate degree – I am forced to revert to the family tree, or rather the family trees of the period.

Of all the branches of English history, these are perhaps the most magnificently tangled. I’m not going to attempt to explain them all here, but just as an example, take Edmund Mortimer, once heir presumptive to Richard II, the King who was both his paternal first cousin twice removed and maternal half grand-uncle.

Mortimer was skipped over in the succession after Henry IV’s deposition of Richard III but if he had become king, it would have moved the succession away from Lancaster and Beaufort. If Mortimer had been King of England, then Richard of York, a man who will ultimately become synonymous with rainbows and giving battle in vain would have been King not Regent or Protector, legitimate ruler rather than usurper. Cecily Neville, Richard of York’s wife, would have been Queen, except that as twelfth child (from the Beaufort branch of Gaunt) she would never have been given to an heir to the throne in the same way she was given, in reality, to a deposed son of a traitor, heir only potentially at that point to the dukedom of York.

Confused? Don’t be. An exhaustive knowledge of tangled medieval family trees is not required to enjoy this magnificent novel. Cecily confides to her mother at one point that “our inheritance didn’t come to us in a tidy bundle”. Spoiler alert, at this point in England, nobody’s does. Cecily will untangle some of the mess, gradually reminding us that it is strength, as well as the purity of a claim, that gives a man a golden crown, and puts a woman by his side. That it manages to achieve a measure of clarity stretching back to Henry V and Joan of Arc without ever attempting to oversimplify is an impressive achievement.

In fact, part of what Cecily does so brilliantly is show us the often-forgotten half of the family trees – the great men’s women. The resut is a novel that is twice as rich as those that skip these branches. And that half will become vital to York’s cause. For, depending how you look at it, you can trace York from the second son of Edward III (it all goes back to Edward III) if only you are willing to go through the female line. Doing so gives Richard of York a better claim than Henry VI, descended from the third son. It is, Cecily reminds both the reader and her husband, custom rather than law that means a man cannot claim a crown through his mother’s blood. Custom has perhaps always been more of a force against women than law.

But Cecily is her own force in the world. She is a harder presence than her Richard, less likely to baulk at bloodshed, more likely to demand that he returns to court to secure power than to her bed.

At times, her demanding nature boils over into the narrative, which becomes scornful of impasses and poor governance, and especially when it comes to the feats of men. It is in this way that the English army has, by early in the novel, been “tossed out (of Paris) on its raggedy arse”

At other moments the narrative voice is more accepting, attuned to the harsh realities of the age, the inevitability of setbacks and recoveries that any great family playing politics must surely face.

Cecily Neville is constantly torn between these two, giving a powerful sense of a woman treading the tightrope of her times, playing a feminine role while fighting men, if not quite at their own games, then very similar ones. She may not gallop a horse into battle but, with her husband’s support and trust, she can plot deployments and strategies and raise revenues with the best of them. Cecily always knows what to say and what to bite back, what to show and what to hide. As the novel progresses, she will show a fine of when to fight and when to beg for mercy.

And when the time comes to decide the ultimate strategy, to choose whether to remain loyal to a weak and ailing king of England who has lost France or to raise rebellion against him, Cecily will help make the decision.

So often, historical fiction from a men’s perspective is impoverished by not recognising women. Here, when the shoe is on the other foot, Garthwaite makes no such mistake. Cecily does not neglect the contributions of men. Instead, it shows how women contribute alongside men. How they make the same and different sacrifices. How they labour for the same and different goals.

As for labour, childbirth is adroitly handled, which is no easy feat given that Cecily had twelve children. It must have been a tricky dilemma for the author. How to make the fear, pain and isolation of childbirth seem as much of an ordeal as it would have been without devoting half the novel to Cecily lying in. Garthwaite deals with it ably. When she details preparations and contractions it is to show fear and strength, when she breezes past them it is to avoid distracting from Cecily’s political career. That is, one suspects, just how the Rose of Raby would have wanted it. Early on we see Cecily miscarrying, “lying ill and listless at Fotheringay while Richard was in the south, recruiting soldiers, calling up ordnance, and organising the thousand details necessary when men must cross the sea.” In that list, we glimpse her frustration and impatience. In other moments, when waiting desperately for news from her husband or sons, that impatience is clearer still. Cecily, we sense, would not want the novel of her life to spend all its pages in the birthing room.

So how ultimately to sum up Cecily, both book and woman? Two words spring to mind, that the grand old duchess, urger of the most lethal battle in English history, mother to the sun in splendour would surely not have disdained. Cecily was a bloody and brilliant woman. Cecily is a bloody brilliant novel.