Wendy Johnson, The Traitor’s Son (MadeGlobal Publishing 2024)
Beautiful Wars of the Roses bio-pic of Richard III as good guy
Richard Plantagenet, later to be crowned the IIIrd, grows up in Baynard’s Castle. His brother Edward sees three suns in the sky, portents of a York victory.
Fleeing Marguerite, the Red Queen, he and his brother George are sent to safety in the Low countries. He is driven by a desire to disprove the Red Queen’s slander that his father was a traitor.
When Edward is crowned, everything changes—titles, palaces, ceremonies, servants, gifts. Yet new jealousies fester among the brothers York. Everyone is up in arms over the secret marriage to the Lancastrian widow Elizabeth Wydeville, yet Richard feels a surprising empathy. Edward’s court is ‘blighted by the stink of treason’.
Entrusted to his cousin Richard Neville, earl of Warwick, he forms a bond, but his loyalties are tested. Will he support his royal brother or his cousin, later to be nicknamed the Kingmaker?
This novel contains some beautiful time and place appropriate metaphors—his parting with Warwick is ‘as final as the raising of a drawbridge’. He remembers his father’s last embrace, ‘a sweep of heavy wool, breathing scents of oily leather’.
Maligned by Shakespeare and by the Tudors, we tend to think of Richard III as a hunchbacked monster. Johnson’s Richard is honest, filial and eager to please as a child, struggles to keep his spinal condition secret as a youth and is utterly loyal to his brother king. Indeed, Johnson was one of the leading lights in the movement to rehabilitate Richard which culminated in finding his skeleton underneath a Leicester carpark in 2012.
A wealth of information on the noble Yorks and Lancasters is available; Johnson adds subtlety and a personal touch, full of drama, free of info-dump. For all our familiarity with this history, Johnson’s puts personalities and emotions into the picture. The characters are sympathetic, especially Richard, and the mediaeval lifestyle well painted.
This review first appeared in Historical Novels Review.
Susie Helme 
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