I fell in love with Rosemary Hawley Jarman [I wrote] when I read two short stories of hers in The Mammoth Book of Historical Erotica and saw a photo of her on the dust jacket of another of her books (Crown In Candlelight - I have just checked and she is still as beautiful as ever). Now all this may seem irrelevant in a review of a book by Freda Warrington, but these two writers have great deal in common - a fact that Freda Warrington seems to acknowledge when she quotes Rosemary Hawley Jarman at the front of her book: "Richard is gone from us, yet his name fascinates every tongue."
They are both in love with Richard III.
Having always been one for the bad guy and the underdog, especially the born loser for whom nothing ever goes right, I found Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time not only to my taste but totally convincing. (Here I go again, you may be thinking, but I am on course.) It was the first book on this subject that I read. Tey's police inspector, Alan Grant, laid up in bed, becomes intrigued by the anomalies in the received version of the murder of the princes in the Tower and proceeds to investigate. Her title comes from the saying "Truth is the daughter of time," and indeed it does seem to be.
Next, I came across Rosemary Hawley Jarman's We Speak No Treason, a romantic novel based on the life of Richard and his relationship with the original Nut-Brown Maiden, the girl who becomes the mother of his illegitimate daughter, Katherine Plantagenet.
And now I have come across Rosemary's book again, republished as two books: The Flowering Of The Rose, and its sequel (which I will review next month) White Rose Turned To Blood. (I want to say here, in parenthesis, that I cannot keep writing Rosemary Hawley Jarman and will not write simply Jarman: to me, though I have never had the honour of meeting or corresponding with her, she is Rosemary, and has been since well, you have the story above. The absurdity - quite apart from the absolute awfulness - of referring to women writers by their surnames was brought home to me when I read an article in which the author of Frankenstein was repeatedly referred to as Shelley!)
Like Anya Seton's John of Gaunt (in Katherine), the Richard of Gloucester we meet here is a man of honour. Like John, he is afflicted with an exaggerated sense of loyalty that makes it imposssible for him to seize the throne and order the murder of his dead brother's child(ren).
In The Flowering Of The Rose, we see him first through through the eyes of our heroine who, though the daughter of a knight, is, at twelve, a skivvy at the beck and call of both the nurse and the cook in the household of Lady Elizabeth Grey. [The nurse's] wrinkled eye was upon me and I searched my mind for a task left undone, a duty neglected. I had been beaten once already that day; thus was I standing to watch Dick and Thomas Grey from the window. I could not sit down easily. But a beautiful skivvy, for on May Day in the local village, all men gaze at her, the King's jester, Patch, just passing through (his master visiting her mistress) falls in love with her, and a wandering minstrel dedicates the ballad he has been working on for months to her: The Nut-Brown Maid. It becomes famous.
She is a Cinderella figure. Her mistress marries King Edward (there is witchcraft involved) and four years later, when she is sixteen, the Maid follows her to London where she meets the King's young brother, Richard of Gloucester.
I heard Patch's light step behind me in the passage, and without taking my joyful gaze from the scene below, stretched out my hand, crying:
'Ah, my friend, remember you this day! When all men called me fair, and the old ballad-maker said I would be a true maid, and fashioned this song for me ere he died! Take my hand and say you have not forgotten!'
And I felt his hand in mine, and we stood together listening to the music until it ended, and I turned with shining face to give him one kiss out of my true pleasure, for after all he was my friend and had shared this moment with me. And the hand which held mine did not belong to a fool, but to the King's youngest brother, who stood looking down at me with, God be praised, the same look I had seen in the eyes of men that May Day long ago.
For a long time their love affair consumes them both, then they are separated by events of state. And she later bears him a daughter of whom he knows nothing.
In Part Two, the Jester ("Piers, the man, Patch, the fool") continues the story. He has, he tells us, "loved two women in my life". These two are our Nut-Brown Maiden and Lady Anne Neville, daughter of Warwick the King-maker and, when her father is killed, heir to enormous wealth and lands.
Richard wants to marry her, but his brother George of Clarence is against this as the marriage will make Richard much too powerful. Then the girl disappears.
Richard searches for her, apparently heart-broken, but Patch believes him to be interested only in her money, and when by chance he comes across her he does not at first inform Richard.
Now we have a reversal of the Cinderella story, for Anne, the princess, is concealed as a kitchen-maid among folk who have no idea who she is. And Richard, who truly loves her - she was his childhood sweetheart - is still desperately searching for her (the Nut-Brown Maid apparently quite forgotten!)
Eventually, of course, Patch tells him, the girl is saved, they marry, and Richard and Anne live in the north - with Patch, who becomes Richard's jester. They have a son, Richard's heir.
Then King Edward dies.
And that is the end of this book.
You will want to read on, that is for sure.
And here, from this book, is a glimpse Rosemary gives us in advance of Henry Tudor, the bad guy of the next book, the contender for the throne whom no one took seriously until it was too late. After all, he had no claim to the throne whatsoever ...
His Majesty keeps mastiffs. They lie outside his chamber of a night. Soon after his coronation we had a big baiting at Smithfield: in its way an innovation because instead of a bull, he commanded that a lion should be tried against three of his dogs. When the great tawny beast lay dead, and the curs, all gaping gory wounds, stood panting froth, King Henry ordered a strange conclusion to the sport.
'Hang them,' he said in his high Welsh voice. 'Traitorous dogs shall not rise against a king.' It took long moments for the big animals to choke on the end of a felon's halter.
Lovely man.
MBG
