The Sunne in Splendour: A Novel of Richard III by Sharon Kay Penman

claim, all were unexpectedly reluctant to strip the crown from a man who'd been born a King's son, had been acknowledged as England's King since his tenth month of life.
It had taken Marguerite nearly ten years of unrelenting hostility to transform York from a loyal peer of the realm into the royal rival she'd always perceived him to be. But now he'd crossed the Rubicon as he crossed the Irish Sea and he was stubbornly and single-mindedly convinced that he had no choice but to claim the crown, was not to be dissuaded, even when faced with a conspicuous lack of enthusiasm for his claims by his Neville kindred and his own eldest son. It was not that they had any sentimental attachment to the man they referred to among themselves as "Holy Harry." But they'd read the mood of the
Commons and the country more accurately than York. Mad though Harry might be, he was the man anointed by God to reign, and the fact that he was utterly incompetent to rule seemed suddenly to be of little consequence when it had become a question of dethroning him.
In the end, a compromise of sorts was reached, one that satisfied no one and outraged most. Under the
Act of Accord passed on October 24, Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York, was formally recognized as the heir to the English throne, but he was compelled to defer his claims during the course of Harry's lifetime. Only upon Harry's death would he ascend the throne as the third Richard to rule England since the Conquest.
As Harry was then thirty-nine years of age, a full ten years younger than the Duke of York, and enjoyed the robust health of one unburdened by the worldly concerns that so aged and encumbered other men, not sur
    prisingly York and his supporters were less than thrilled by this Solomonlike solution. And as, under the
Act of Accord, Marguerite's seven-year-old son was summarily disinherited, an action of expediency many saw to be confirmation of the suspicions so prevalent as to the boy's paternity, there was never any possibility that Marguerite and her adherents would give consent except at sword-point. The only one professing satisfaction with the Accord was Harry himself, who in his beclouded eccentric way clung tenaciously to his crown, yet strangely evidenced little concern that his son was thus rudely uprooted from the line of succession.
After the July battle that had delivered the King into Warwick's power, Marguerite had retreated into
Wales and then into Yorkshire, long an enclave of Lancastrian loyalties. There she'd been reunited with the Duke of Somerset and Andrew Trollope, who'd spent several frustrating months attempting to dislodge Warwick and Edward from Calais.
These Lancastrian lords were now securely ensconced in the massive stronghold of Pontefract Castle, just eight miles from York's own Sandal Castle, and they'd recently been joined by two men who'd long nurtured a bitter hatred for the House of York, Lord Clifford and the Earl of Northumberland; their fathers had died with Somerset's at the battle of St Albans won by York and Warwick five years past and they'd neither forgotten nor forgiven. Marguerite herself had ventured up into Scotland in hopes of forging an alliance with the Scots; the bait she dangled was a proposed marriage between her small son and the daughter of the Queen of Scotland.
And so Edmund found himself spending the Christmas season in a region he little liked, finding Yorkshire stark and bleak and unfriendly to the House of York, with the grim prospect ahead of a battle soon to come in the new year, a battle that would decide whether England should be Yorkist or Lancastrian, at a cost of lives too high to contemplate.
It had been one of the bleakest Christmas seasons within his memory. His father and uncle were too preoccupied with the coming confrontation with Lancaster to have either the time or the inclination for holiday cheer. Edmund, acutely sensitive to the disadvantages of being a seventeen-year-old novice to warfare midst seasoned