Succession

Book excerpt: 1445. King Henry VI is married by proxy to Margaret of Anjou. French, beautiful and unpopular, her marriage causes a national uproar. At the same time, the infant Margaret Beaufort is made a great heiress and suddenly becomes the most important commodity in the nation. Her childhood is lived in remote, echoing castles, while everyone at King Henry's court competes to be her guardian and engineer an advantageous alliance with her uncle, the Duke of Somerset. With the collapse of Henry VI's hold on France, discord among the English nobles breaks out into civil war. Henry becomes the mad king, and Margaret of Anjou declares herself Queen Regent, left alone to fight for her son's position as rightful heir. Meanwhile, Margaret Beaufort, although still little more than a child at thirteen, has been married twice and given birth to her only son—the future King of England. Succession is an imaginative and engrossing novel about the events that inspired George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire. It's the story of the fall of the House of Lancaster and of the two remarkable women who gave birth to the Tudor dynasty. The dramatic plot is supplemented with short chronicles that were written at the time, further rooting readers in the history.