The White Queen (57 page)

Weir, Alison.
Lancaster and York: The Wars of the Roses.
London: Jonathan Cape, 1995.

———.
The Princes in the Tower.
London: Bodley Head, 1992.

Williams, Neville.
The Life and Times of Henry VII.
London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1973.

Willamson, Audrey.
The Mystery of the Princes: An Investigation into a Supposed Murder.
Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing, 1978.

Wilson-Smith, Timothy.
Joan of Arc: Maid, Myth and History,
Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing, 2006.

Wroe, Ann.
Perkin: A Story of Deception.
London: Jonathan Cape, 2003.

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W
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For Discussion

1. Discuss Elizabeth’s first few encounters with Edward and her motives for seeking
him out. Do they marry for love? Did you find it surprising that Edward defied his
mentor Warwick and upheld his secret marriage to Elizabeth? Why or why not?

2. How does Elizabeth and Edward’s clandestine marriage change England’s political
landscape?

3. Anthony tells Elizabeth that she and Edward are creating enemies by distributing
wealth to their “favorites, not to the deserving” (page 266). What are your thoughts
on Edward and Elizabeth as monarchs? How adept is Elizabeth at playing the political
game, both before and after Edward’s death?

4. What is your view of Elizabeth as a daughter, a sister, and a mother? Her daughter
Elizabeth says to her, “You love the crown more than your children” (page 402). Does
Elizabeth, in fact, place her
ambition ahead of her children’s well-being? How does she regard her daughters versus
her sons?

5. Compare the Plantagenets and the House of York with the Woodvilles. What are the
most apparent differences between the two families? What similarities do they share?

6. Elizabeth makes some questionable moral choices, such as standing silently by while
her husband and his brothers murder Henry VI and knowingly putting a page boy in harm’s
way by sending him to the Tower in place of her son. Are her actions justifiable or
not? How does she feel about the choices she made?

7. What is the significance of the legend of Melusina? Anthony dismisses Elizabeth’s
belief in Melusina and in her own mystical abilities as “part fairy tale and part
Bible and all nonsense” (page 311). Is he right, or are she and Jacquetta really able
to perform magic? With the penalty for witchcraft being death, why do they take the
risk? What unintended consequences are there of some of their actions?

8. In what ways are women especially vulnerable during this tumultuous time? What
power do women have? How do Elizabeth, Jacquetta, Cecily, and other female characters
in the novel use their intelligence and influence?

9. Elizabeth is aware of and even tolerates the king’s adultery. Why, then, does she
take exception to his association with Elizabeth Shore? Why does Edward’s former mistress
later come to the queen’s aid while she is living in sanctuary?

10. When the younger Elizabeth pleads with her mother to come to an agreement with
Duke Richard, why does she refuse to even consider the idea? How does the relationship
between mother and daughter change while they are in sanctuary for the second time?

11. “Despite my own caution, despite my own fears, I start to hope,” muses Elizabeth.
“I start to think that if King Richard marries Elizabeth and makes her his queen I
will be welcomed at court again, I will take up my place as My Lady, the Queen’s Mother”
(page 509). After all the bloodshed, why is she willing to risk putting her daughter
on the throne?

12. The fate of the two princes in the Tower is a mystery historians have been trying
to solve for centuries. What is your opinion of the way Philippa Gregory presents
this aspect of the story? Richard, Duke of Gloucester, is suspected of being responsible
for their deaths. Why is Elizabeth inclined to believe him when he says he did not
order her sons to be killed?

13. Elizabeth paid a high price for the throne, losing her father, brothers, and two
of her sons. What, if anything, do you think she would do differently if given the
chance? What would you have done in her situation?

14. When Edward is overthrown and flees to France, Elizabeth says, “It is as he warned
me: he could not spread out the wealth quickly enough, fairly enough, to enough people”
(page 170). What does
The White Queen
reveal about human nature?

15. How does
The White Queen
compare to other works of historical fiction you have read, including books by Philippa
Gregory? The novel has somewhat of a cliffhanger ending. Are you interested in reading
the next book in the series? Why or why not?

For readers who love your books set in Tudor England, what you would like them to
know about the Plantagenets and the House of York?

I suppose I’d like them to know that here is a family just as fascinating as the Tudors,
perhaps more so. Certainly, they are more complicated, more wicked, and more passionate—takers
of great risk. I think people have been put off this period because it has been so
well studied by military historians that it has been regarded as being just about
battles. But there is so much more to it than this! The history of the women of the
period has been very neglected because of this emphasis on battles and thus the male
leaders.

What appealed to you about using Elizabeth Woodville as the main character in a novel?
In what ways do you think modern women can identify with Elizabeth?

The things I discovered about Elizabeth in the first days of my reading about this
period told me at once that she would fascinate me, and she has done so. Her background
as a descendant of a family who claim to be related to a goddess was enough to have
me
absolutely enchanted straightaway. It is in the historical record that her mother
was widely believed to be a witch, and that charge was leveled at Elizabeth also.
This is exciting enough, but it also indicates that people were afraid of Elizabeth’s
power, and I am interested in powerful women. I think she will fascinate modern women
in the same way that many historical women strike a chord: despite so many changes
in the world, women are still trying to find happiness, manage their children, seek
advantage, and avoid the persecution of misogynists. As women of any time, we have
a lot in common. Despite the amazing advances in the rights of women (and I am so
grateful for these myself), the struggle for women’s freedom, independence, and the
right to exercise power goes on.

Throughout the novel there are scenes relating the story of the goddess Melusina.
Is this based on an actual historical fable, or is it something you created for the
novel?

A number of readers have been curious about Melusina, the water goddess, whose legend
I have retold and woven through this story of Elizabeth Woodville, her descendant.

Stories of Melusina are told in many countries, in many forms, from the Celtic west
of Europe to Germany and Scandinavia. There even seem to be some Native American tales
of a woman who is half fish but tries to become mortal for love of a man. Rewritten,
she appears in the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm and in
Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid” (and so to Disney!); in the legend
of Undine, or Ondine, she appears in the tarot pack and is the subject of a ballet
of that name.

The story is much as Elizabeth Woodville tells it in this novel. A girl, herself the
daughter of a water fairy, meets a knight in a forest (different families and different
forests feature in different parts of Europe). They agree to marry; but she imposes
some restriction on his seeing her. After a happy marriage and after bearing her husband
children, her husband breaks the interdict and sees that she has the body of a serpent
or fish. In some versions she knows immediately that he has seen her and goes away
at once. In others, he pretends not to know, but the truth bursts from him when their
monstrous sons kill each other. In some versions he dies without her; in others he
lives on sorrowing, or she haunts the house where they were happy. Sometimes she is
vengeful, sometimes bereft. In the rewritten versions he leaves her preferring a mortal
woman, and in one wonderful old version her response to this is to stretch her gigantic
foot through the ceiling at his wedding banquet. In Ireland, Melusina is the banshee
calling over the castle to warn of a death. In France, she is one of the
dames blanches,
or the white ladies, who haunt the forests and trick mortals with riddles and dances
and foretell deaths by crying outside houses. In Luxembourg she rises from the river
Alzette every seven years with the key to the castle that she built in her mouth.

Melusina’s roots may be older still. Legends of water women and the sirens go back
to Homer; drawings of mermaids are found in ancient Egypt and Assyria. The folklorist
Reverend S. Baring-Gould suggested that Melusina could be a Celtic version of an even
more ancient legend.

The legend was first written down in 1393 (Jean d’Arras,
La noble Hystoire de Lusignan
) as part of the history of Château Lusignan, the house Melusina is said to have built
for her husband. She is often described as a master builder: she could erect a house
in a single night with an army of fairy workpeople. But the buildings were always
flawed, just as her children were always malformed. The ruins of her château can be
seen today in France, just outside Poitiers, where a statue of her monstrous son looks
over the river Vonne. Her presence is so well known and so accepted that you can walk
around the ruins of her château and then have a pizza in the Pizzeria Melusina on
the town square. In Luxembourg she was the wife of the founder of the city and duchy:
Count Siegfried married her in 963, and she built him the most formidable castle in
Europe before disappearing as her bath sank into the rock.

Melusina’s significance goes even further than this powerful folklore. The psychoanalyst
C. G. Jung took an interest in her role in alchemy. Here Melusina is a manifestation
of Luna—the element of dark, cold, water, and spirit—and as such she makes the alchemical
union with her opposite, Sol, the source of warmth and light. The union is known by
alchemists as the
“chymical wedding” which signified to Jung the union of body and spirit, consciousness
and unconsciousness.

I won’t pretend to understand this except at a level of wonderment, but I must admit
to having a sense of shock when I read the words: “Luna and Sol often appear as White
Queen and Red King” a year after I had finished my novel on Melusina’s descendant
and titled it
The White Queen
. The internet site (
http://members.tripod.com/~nysticorax/coniunctio.html
) goes on: “. . . note these colors’ corresponding stages of transmutation; the symbol
of this relationship is a rose.” A rose, indeed, was what the people called Elizabeth’s
grandson Arthur, “the rose of England.”

I came across the Melusina myth very early in my research for
The White Queen
when I was looking for some element in the stories of Elizabeth, or of her parents,
to help me to imagine her. The discovery that Jacquetta traced her family back to
Melusina was tremendously exciting for me, and led me to research the myth and even
visit the Château Lusignan and her other castle in Luxembourg City. The suggestion
that I make in the novel that Jacquetta herself believed in her unworldly ancestry
is a likely one. Certainly she believed in witchcraft and was indeed captured and
accused of practicing magic. The evidence produced against her consisted of some little
lead figures tied with wire that a witness claimed she had used for charming. She
was cleared of these charges when her son-in-law was returned to power as king.

She was also dogged all her life by the accusation that
the surprising marriage between her daughter and the king was brought about by enchantment.
The scenes I created of her and Elizabeth calling up mist, whistling up wind, and
summoning rain are all imaginary, but they seemed to me to be what one would do in
such circumstances—especially if one thought it might work! In a world where there
was little science, there was faith in magic and a deep trust in what we would now
call superstitions. It is hard for us now to imagine, but the medieval world was absolutely
convinced by alchemical and magical explanations. For educated people as well as the
poor, the uncertainty of the world around them could only be explained by the working
of invisible forces that might—perhaps—be harnessed by prayers or spells or wishing.
The legend of Melusina would have been regarded as a powerful metaphor that told some
sort of truth about the family history. It might even have been regarded as literally
true.