✧ Book Review ✧ The Godmother’s Secret by Elizabeth St.John #HistoricalFiction #WarOfTheRoses #BookReview @ElizStJohn @cathiedunn

 

The Godmother’s Secret
By Elizabeth St.John

What if you knew what happened to the Princes in the Tower. Would you tell? Or would you forever keep the secret?

November, 1470: Westminster Abbey. 

Lady Elysabeth Scrope faces a perilous royal duty when ordered into sanctuary with Elizabeth Woodville–witness the birth of Edward IV’s Yorkist son. Margaret Beaufort, Elysabeth’s sister, is desperately seeking a pardon for her exiled son Henry Tudor. Strategically, she coerces Lancastrian Elysabeth to be appointed godmother to Prince Edward, embedding her in the heart of the Plantagenets and uniting them in a destiny of impossible choices and heartbreaking conflict.

Bound by blood and torn by honour, when the king dies and Elysabeth delivers her young godson into the Tower of London to prepare for his coronation, she is engulfed in political turmoil. Within months, the prince and his brother have disappeared, Richard III is declared king, and Margaret conspires with Henry Tudor to invade England and claim the throne. Desperate to protect her godson, Elysabeth battles the intrigue, betrayal and power of the last medieval court, defying her husband and her sister under her godmother’s sacred oath to keep Prince Edward safe.

Were the princes murdered by their uncle, Richard III? Was the rebel Duke of Buckingham to blame? Or did Margaret Beaufort mastermind their disappearance to usher in the Tudor dynasty? Of anyone at the royal court, Elysabeth has the most to lose–and the most to gain–by keeping secret the fate of the Princes in the Tower.     

Inspired by England’s most enduring historical mystery, Elizabeth St.John, best-selling author of The Lydiard Chronicles, blends her own family history with known facts and centuries of speculation to create an intriguing alternative story illuminating the disappearance of the Princes in the Tower. 

✧ Review ✧

Elizabeth St.John has really captured the attention of her readers with The Godmother's Secret. Told in the first person we, the reader, are taken on a very personal and at times precarious journey starting with the birth of Edward V and ending with his uncle's death at the Battle of Bosworth. Through the eyes of Lady Elysabeth Scrope, the rather reluctant godmother of Edward, we experience it all.

I thought the author had drawn a very vivid setting, and she seems to have a keen sense of the history as well as the scandals of this era. The fate of the two young princes in the Tower will probably never be known for certain, but I think the author has given her readers a plausible explanation which ties in with the history that would come after.

There are several characters, besides Elysabeth, that really intrigued me and caught my attention. I came away from this book with mixed feelings about Richard III. I know his reputation has had somewhat of a makeover in the last decade or so, but there can be no doubt about his ambition - he may or may not have killed his nephews, but he certainly had no qualms about executing men he saw as rivals, and yet there is a softer side to him, he is a loving husband and devoted father, but then again so was Edward I! Those Plantagenets were a strange lot.

Lady Margaret Beaufort really made my blood boil in this story. Her ambitions are well documented in history, but in this book, she truly is a horrible narcissist, whose every action is calculated. I could not decide if Margaret was truly longing to see her son, or was longing to see him sitting on the throne. There is a very thin thread between a mother's love and a mother's ambition in this book. Or perhaps she was just a pure Lancastrian and would do anything in her power to rid the kingdom of the Yorkist rules.

The prince's plight really pulled at my heartstrings and it seemed that they never really stood a chance as the people around them begin to betray them. I thought the boys were portrayed with a great deal of compassion and they were just two very innocent children who were caught up in this ever-changing game of thrones.

There is nothing about this story that I did not like. It is one of those books that I will certainly be reading again, and it would make a brilliant TV series. Move other Philippa Gregory, it is Elizabeth St.John's time to shine. I will certainly be on the lookout for more books from this author. 

✧ Purchase Links ✧

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This title is on #KindleUnlimited. 

Elizabeth St.John

Elizabeth St.John spends her time between California, England, and the past. An acclaimed author, historian, and genealogist, she has tracked down family papers and residences from Lydiard Park and Nottingham Castle to Richmond Palace and the Tower of London to inspire her novels. Although the family sold a few country homes along the way (it's hard to keep a good castle going these days), Elizabeth's family still occupy them— in the form of portraits, memoirs, and gardens that carry their legacy. And the occasional ghost. But that's a different story.

Having spent a significant part of her life with her seventeenth-century family while writing The Lydiard Chronicles trilogy and Counterpoint series, Elizabeth St.John is now discovering new family stories with her fifteenth-century namesake Elysabeth St.John Scrope, and her half-sister, Margaret Beaufort.

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