The Northern White Princess
History remembers the Battle of Towton as the bloodiest day on English soil, yet the true agony of the Wars of the Roses was not measured in a single afternoon of slaughter. It was a prolonged, bleeding wound spanning decades-from the bitter fractures sown by Elizabeth Woodville's rise in 1464 to the brutal, chaotic clashes at Barnet and Tewkesbury. But nothing compared to the final catastrophe at Bosworth Field. There, the House of York broke under a blood-red sky, and Richard III fell fighting-the last anointed King of England to die upon the field of battle.
With his death, the crown passed to the shadows. Henry Tudor claimed the throne and bound the warring houses by force, wedding Elizabeth of York while casting a paranoid eye over the remaining Plantagenet bloodline. Young Edward Plantagenet, Earl of Warwick, was dragged to the Tower at just ten years old, and the royal children were hunted, silenced, or sidelined under a new regime desperate to rewrite history. To the south, Richard III was painted as a tyrant and a monster.
Yet, in the rugged, storm-scoured expanse of Northern England, the people remembered a very different man. To them, Richard had never been a usurper; he was their beloved warden, their protector, and their king. And in the dark heart of that northern loyalty, a secret survived. While the world believed the bloodline extinguished with Edward of Middleham, eleven-year-old Joan Plantagenet-hidden in the remote stone keeps of her father's most faithful lords-remains alive. She is the forgotten daughter of Richard and Anne Neville, the last true spark of a fallen dynasty, and the northern ghost who threatens to burn the Tudor kingdom to the ground.