King Richard III Plantagenet, formerly Duke of Gloucester, died young. He was only 33, living from 1452 to 1485 and a usurping king for two years after the death of his brother King Edward IV. Vanora Bennett's very learned novel FIGURES IN SILK covers Richard's royal career from 1471 to his death 14 years later. The novel's treatment of real historical figures is accurate and based on good sources, notably Sir Thomas More.

Two daughters of silk merchant John Lambert become mistresses of the two royal brothers Edward and Richard. The elder, Mrs Jane Shore, is a good-hearted flirt attracting several powerful men. The younger sister, Isabel (who, unlike the historical Jane, I suspect is fictional) we meet when she is 14 and about to marry a young man soon killed in battle. At the same time she first meets incognito young "Dickon," whom only much later does she recognize as the powerful Duke of Gloucester.

The widowed Isabel makes herself by sheer will power a creative force in pioneering efforts to create a domestic English silk industry. Her enemies are wealthy Lombards, especially Venetians. Sister Jane helps her win licenses and premises from Edward IV. And during the brief reign of Richard III ("A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse!"), she holds on to  her silk monopoly.

 In the process Isabel befriends the ten years younger, virtually imprisoned Princess Elizabeth of York, one of the heirs of his brother that Richard does not kill. It doesn't hurt Isabel's career that Elizabeth before novel's end marries handsome Henry Tudor who becomes Henry VII at Richard III's death. Henry VII, of course, is father of Henry VIII and grandfather of Queens Mary and Elizabeth of England and Mary Queen of Scots.

This is a powerful historical novel true to the genre invented by Sir Walter Scott in WAVERLY.  -OOO-

http://www.biblio.com/books/201209673.html

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 II. for epinions.com

Title of this review:  We all end up equal at the bottom of a bag of chessmen
Written: May 14 '09

Reviewer's rating of FIGURES IN SILK: * * * *


Pros: Follows all canons laid down for the historical novel by Sir Walter Scott, genre's founder.

Cons: Occasional anachronisms, e. g. "Jesuitry" in 1483. The Jesuit order was not founded until 1540.

The Bottom Line: As historical novel, FIGURES IN SILK is close to perfect. Fictional 14-year old commoner girl meets anonymous 19-year old prince. Life, like chess, is played by Richard's new rules.

aohcapablanca's Full Review:
 
King Richard III of England died young, at 33. Born in 1452, Richard was 19 in 1471 when his brother was crowned King Edward IV. In that year, riding into London alone and incognito, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, entered a church to pray. There he found a sobbing 14 year old on her knees beseeching God and the Blessed Virgin Mary to spare her from a marriage about to be imposed by her merchant father. Richard stood beside Isabel Lambert. After comforting pleasantries, the young man said: 


Richard then muttered a prayer asking God's help against his enemies. Isabel watched him coming to some unrevealed life-changing personal decision. After suggesting that God would provide for both of them, Richard then invited Isabel to join him at the Bush tavern down the way on Aldersgate.

There he scooped up chessmen left behind by a previous guest and dropped them into the tavern's leather bag provided for them.  The young warrior said:


The two young people then exchange the stories of their lives. The mysterious nobleman is obsessed with being one of three orphans left by their father with neither marriage contracts nor political alliances. By implication, once married and himself a father, he will make better arrangements for his own sons. Both young people confront their futures. The future king, using chess, explains the pair's strategic life choices in terms of their social rank. Both life and chess are games of fighting and maneuver. In chess, if a king is blocked in one direction, he can still move in another. 


A few years later, Isabel's older sister Jane (a historically attested person) is King Edward IV's most beautiful of four mistresses. Jane is also humbly, chastely, silently admired by future pioneering English printer Will Caxton. Will shares with young Isabel some more analogies between chess and life. A chess bishop, for example is 


Isabel then mentions to Caxton a variant of what the mysterious stranger had taught her during their only meeting: 


Caxton added that chess is no longer a game only for the nobility. Printed books abound applying its strategies to life: especially to war and sexual love.

Ten years after their first encounter, the handsome stranger meets again by chance widowed 24-year old silk entrepreneur Isabel. She learns for the first time his name, Dickon. He teaches her a brand new version of chess just imported from Spain,  a game with powerful warrior women able to move across the board in all directions. Under the new rules, a common pawn that makes it all the way to the other end of the chessboard can morph into a queen. 

Isabel: "So if I just keep going, I can be a queen?" Dickon compares this new style chess to the English court with its many pawns rushing to become queens or queenlets -- including Isabel's sister Jane. Dickon knows (he says not how) of Isabel's support from King Edward for secretly establishing England's first silk cloth manufactory on the grounds of Westminster Abbey. "You'll be the Queen of Silk." The two then impetuously make love upstairs in the tavern. Only afterwards does Isabel learn that Dickon is Richard, the now married Duke of Gloucester.

Toward novel's end 27-year old Isabel tells a disapproving Will Claxton all that Dickon had done for and meant to her. 



When 17 year old Elizabeth, the princess of York, for whom Isabel has long sewn rich garments, tells her that Henry Tudor has defeated and slain Richard III, Isabel


Then Princess Elizabeth revealed how she herself had unscrupulously made use of Isabel to prevent King Richard from marrying her, by inducing Isabel to spread the probably false rumor that Richard had poisoned his ailing, depressed wife Queen Anne.

The novel's 22 chapters are distributed among four parts:

ONE: SILK

TWO: COUP

THREE: CHESS

FOUR: LOVE (the final chapter).

If you think this review overly long and detailed, it nonetheless leaves 90% of the plot untold and for you to discover. Enjoy a nearly perfect historical novel in which little nobody fictional people interact with grand movers of history. See romantic love war with self-interest. Probe, as have Shakespeare, Sir Thomas More and others before you, the enigmatic character of England's last Plantagenet king, Richard III. Learn the evolving rules of chess that allow humble pawns suddenly to  become powerful queens. See how the age compared chess with war, politics, religion and romantic love. Feel in imagination the diamonds, embroideries, jewels, intrigues and financial aspects of silk trading and manufacturing in late 15th century England, the Continent of Europe, the Levant and as far away as Persia.

The chess metaphor pervades the novel, especially the thought that the game's rules are arbitrary and can and do change. In life we play by whatever rules are current. And as he reaches ruthlessly for supreme power, Dickon tells his despairing lover:


 Learn your history through an entertaining yarn, FIGURES IN SILK. 
-OOO-

Recommended:
Yes

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III. for amazon.com

Title of this review:  A very good historical novel in the manner of Sir Walter Scott's WAVERLEY, May 14, 2009

Reviewer's rating of FIGURES IN SILK  * * * *  FOUR STARS

Sir Walter Scott wrought well when in WAVERLEY (1814) he created the "historical novel" literary genre. Vanora Bennett's FIGURES IN SILK (2008) echoes on every page Scott's well-known criteria for a historical novel. FIGURES IN SILK is set in and about London in the years between 1471 and 1485, the reigns of the last two Plantagenet kings of England: the Yorkist Edward IV and his brother Richard III (of Shakespeare fame: "A horse, a horse! My kingdom for a horse!").

This period is indeed a Walter Scott mandated "turning point in history." Henry Tudor, exiled Earl of Richmond, Lancastrian, toward novel's end deposes 33-year old Richard III and then reigns as Henry VII. He also weds Elizabeth of York, daughter of Edward and niece of Richard. This unites the two warring royal families and ends "the War of the Roses." Descendants of Henry VII include Queens Mary and Elizabeth of England and Mary Queen of Scots and her Stuart descendants through James II to Anne, Queen of the new (1707) United Kingdom. The descendants of Edward IV and Henry Tudor will also soon enough come to terms with the Reformation of Christianity set in motion by Martin Luther in 1517. Yes, we are plunged, in FIGURES IN SILK, into a turning point in history.

A surprising number of the principal players in Vanora Bennett's novel are historically real figures. This is true of commoner Jane Shore whose principal claim to fame was as one of sensuous Edward IV's mistresses. The author's imagination seems to ask a series of questions that beget her plot: What if Jane Shore had had a fictitious, two years younger sister named Isabel who became the lover of Richard Duke of Gloucester, the future King Richard III? What if Isabel, only 14 years old in 1471 and like sister Jane, about to be married off by their merchant father to husbands not of their choosing, was as tough-minded, creative and hard working as her sister Jane was ditzy, flirtatious and good-hearted? What if Isabel's young husband soon died fighting for King Edward? What if she then apprenticed herself to her mother-in-law, an historically real woman prominent in the silk trade? What if Isabel later befriended Princess Elizabeth, ambitious future wife of King Henry VII? What if? What if? And the historical novel a la Sir Walter Scott is off and running.

FIGURES IN SILK has something for everyone:

-- romance between the tortured, cruel Richard, introduced to 14-year old Elinor as "Dickon," a mysterious, darkly romantic stranger she could confide in;

-- ongoing economic rise of the cloth guilds and their dependence on Lombard/Venetian suppliers and bankers;

-- reliance of the impoverished kings Edward and Richard on English merchants for loans;

-- and especially Vanora Bennett's personal go at unraveling the tortured psyche of Richard Duke of Gloucester, later King Richard III.

This rich world is seen through Isabel's eyes as is Richard/Dickon. Isabel is surprisingly slow to grasp or at least accept the truth behind Richard's reputation as a murderer of his relatives, as increasingly paranoid and delusional, as an unscrupulous, amoral man who uses Isabel's innocent approval of her lover to stay at peace with his own conscience. Vanora Bennett joins Sir Thomas More, Will Shakespeare and scores of others who have tried to sort out fact from legend in the biography of Richard III. Her different, notably 21st century, take on the man is arguably as credible as theirs.

FIGURES IN SILK is very good reading in the historical novel tradition. And, oh by the way, that genre's creator Sir Walter Scott covered some of the same characters of real history in his novels QUENTIN DURWARD (1823) and ANNE OF GEIERSTEIN (1829). Both Bennett and Scott give readers a good sense of the interactions in the late 1480s between insular England and various parts of continental Europe. Bennett, for her part, embeds the English silk trade in the low countries across the Channel and in the Lombard plains of Italy while Scott's continental focus is more on France and Burgundy. Good historical novels can be wonderfully informative introductions to serious history. -OOO-

Your Tags: historical fiction, richard iii, silk, sir walter scott, quentin durward, anne of geierstein, war of the roses

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