Linda Porter
Tending the White Rose
Elizabeth of York: The First Tudor Queen
By Alison Weir
Jonathan Cape 556pp £20 order from our bookshop
Elizabeth of York was the first Tudor queen consort and played a crucial role in establishing the new dynasty, but she has been strangely overlooked by historians until now. The general impression has always been of a passive beauty who grew plump with child-bearing, was completely dominated by her overbearing mother-in-law, Margaret Beaufort, and was perhaps not entirely trusted by her husband, Henry VII, who had married her to bolster his hold on the throne of England. She was, after all, the eldest daughter of Edward IV; the hopes of the Yorkists rested with her after the disappearance of her two brothers (the Princes in the Tower) and the death of her uncle Richard III at Bosworth in 1485. But she has not been seriously considered as
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