Mary Plantagenet is the second daughter of King Edward IV. Her best friend is her sister, Elizabeth of York, only eighteen months her senior. Two small girls who had once lived an almost fairytale life, the sisters are suddenly caught in the upheaval of the Wars of the Roses when Warwick the Kingmaker turns against their father and Edward flees into exile. Fearing capture, the girls rush with their heavily pregnant mother, Elizabeth Woodville, to sanctuary in the abbot’s house at Westminster where they dwell in uncertainty and dread.
With father victorious at Barnet and Tewkesbury, they finally resume their roles as princesses, and ‘Merrie England’ reaches its zenith, especially when their little brother, Richard of Shrewsbury marries the Norfolk heiress, little Anne Mowbray, and Anne joins the two sisters in the nursery at Placentia in Greenwich.
But both power struggles and plague afflicts England, and the lives of Mary and her family are always in danger.
