Anne Easter Smith's Blog, page 2

Saw it in a Wheelchair!

 I finally got to see The Lost King this week! Having taken a fall last week, broken bones in my right foot and sprained/strained the other knee, I had to be pushed into the movie theater in Port Charlotte by my long-suffering husband, Scott. In the interests of full disclosure, I did see the film in January at a friend's house who had managed to stream it with an unlocked thingamajig, but sitting in her sunny apartment living room with me answering her questions as we went along, it was not the same as actually SEEING it. On the big screen. In the dark. With an audience. And with surround-sound! 

I was transported back a decade to the thrilling announcement that an archeological dig in a car park in Leicester had actually uncovered what they thought were Richard III's remains. Six months later the DNA confirmed it.

Steve Coogan and Jeff Pope (who also teamed to write Philomena) were obviously intrigued enough to think this amazing and historic discovery by a middle-aged, Scottish mother of two, was worthy of a film script. When they brought the talented Stephen Frears (The Queen) on board to direct and Sally Hawkins to star, the project took off. 

How Philippa Langley became passionate about finding Richard III's mortal remains after 550 years, taking on a skeptical family and an even more skeptical academia, in the hopes of restoring his maligned reputation and to give the poor man a proper burial is beautifully brought to life by Coogan, Pope, Hawkins et al. I was glad to see Philippa's name as an executive producer, which gave me confidence this was not going to be total fiction. "Based on a true story" was a disclaimer at the start. For the most part, it was factual, although the 20-year timeline of Philippa's obsession with Richard is telescoped greatly. 

Two things struck me while thoroughly enjoying the movie: 

How much historical information was woven into the dialogue--all of which made perfect sense to me, but I was worried if a general member of the public wandering in to the theater would get it. Apparently the writers did a good job as those sitting near us who we quizzed at the end appeared to have been absorbed by and enjoyed the story.How creative Coogan and Pope were to have written Richard into the movie as a character--albeit as an apparition, but very real in Philippa's mind. I have talked to a couple of my historical author friends who agreed that of course we think our characters are alive and so we talk to them, we ask them stuff, and (in one author's case) write down what they say! It seems perfectly natural to us that Philippa would also do this and so I LOVED this aspect of the film, although some of my friends less inclined to willingly suspend disbelief found it distracting. Who could not be blown away by Sally Hawkins' performance. I know Philippa through Zooms with the RIII Society, and she is tall with long dirty-blond tresses, so it took me a few frames to get used to Sally's elfin physique and black pixie-cut hair, but the passion for her project that Philippa always exudes was more than enough to convince me it was Philippa up on the screen fighting for Richard. Sally was luminous. Steve Coogan ably partnered her with a wryness and exasperation of an ex-husband still fond of his dynamic if one-track-minded wife. In the "villain" role of a University of Leicester dean, Lee Inglesby showed a mysogynistic and snarky side, scornfully dismissing Philippa's "feelings" and indeed pushing her out of the spotlight.

The most dramatic of moments in the film was when Philippa came running back to the dig from a cafe with Richard on his white steed (White Surrey was its name in Richard's real life) galloping beside her in response to a phone text to "Come back now!" I confess it caused me to sniffle. She slowed to a stop and then step by step haltingly reached the gravesite as the camera above revealed the half-unearthed skeleton of a man with a gross degree of scoliosis. Without saying a word, you saw the amazement, shock, delight, and joy flit over her face in an instant. What an actor! (I have since walked over that grave--now topped with plexiglass--in a special chapel room of its own at the RIII Visitor Centre in Leicester. I cried then, too.)

So yes, I did enjoy The Lost King, and I highly recommend it (and my book This Son of York!) to anyone interested in knowing more about the last Plantagenet king of England. It's on limited release, so hurry!

Missing Princes Project

 

Philippa Langley with Harry Lloyd, who plays Richard III in The Lost King
In the middle of composing a blog about "Who Killed the Princes in the Tower," I received an email from Philippa Langley, she of the amazing discovery of Richard III's bones under the Leicester car park. It was perfect timing! 

In the interests of full disclosure, I became acquainted via email with Philippa back in 2011, when I sent money to her Finding Richard project. In 2013, when I started writing Richard's story in This Son of York, I asked Philippa's permission to use several of her passages from the book she co-wrote with Michael K. Jones, The King's Grave, and she graciously gave me permission.

Philippa is as humble about her historic search as Sally Hawkins portrays her in the new film The Lost King. Not satisfied with spending years following her dream to unearth the last Plantagenet king of England, she has spent the last six years delving into "what happened to the Princes," involving dozens of Richard III Society members worldwide and many others in The Missing Princes Project.

The New England chapter of the Richard III Society, in which I was active before moving to Florida, wanted to support her efforts to try and solve the mystery of the missing princes and sent her some money in 2017 to help fund the research. 

The email yesterday was to thank me and her other contact, and let us know the money had finally been put to good use, viz: "The Missing Princes Project has now used your donation to commission a translation of two Latin documents from The National Archives by a leading specialist at York University and to purchase a set of The York House Books (both volumes, out of print) for the project so they can be loaned to one of the researchers in the Low Countries for some key research work they’re currently undertaking."

Philippa also wrote to me for inclusion in this blog: "Please let your readers know that the project began in 2015 at the reburial of the king and was formerly launched at the Richard III Festival at Middleham in North Yorkshire in early July 2016. Hopefully this will give a sense of the years of research work and archival searches thus far."

It's thrilling to imagine scholars and lay people drawn to the project and recruited by Philippa scouring archives, libraries, universities etc. all over the world, because the records and sources of the 15th century have been spread far and wide over five hundred years. Those of us passionate about setting the historical record straight--not just for Richard--are rooting for Philippa to again be successful in her quest.

Next week--finally, the week of the movie's launch, I will focus on suspects/theories in the disappearance of those princes!

O, those darling Little Princes!

    

   Just look at these paintings! Doesn’t your heart break for these brothers, “imprisoned” in the Tower of London and unaware of their fate? One of the paintings (Victorian, granted) shows the “murderers” hovering over those adorable boys.     What really happened to them? After July 1483, they were never seen again — or were they? This is probably the most intriguing mystery of English history after who was Jack the Ripper. It has gripped me for most of my adult life, too.     All I know, in my heart of hearts, is that Richard III was not the killer, although history loves to say he was!     So who were they, and why were they important? Edward, 13, and Richard, 11, were the only sons of King Edward IV and when Edward died suddenly at age 42, young Edward--I'll call him Ned to avoid confusion with his Dad--was named (but not crowned) King Edward V. In medieval times, it was never a good idea to have a boy king, too much of a temptation for greedy people to take power and use the child. One of those was their mother, Queen Elizabeth Woodville.    In this case, however, on his deathbed in April 1483 the late king had decreed that his brother, Richard of Gloucester, be named young Ned's Protector until the lad came of age. Trouble was, Richard was many hundreds of miles away from London in the North of England, where he had been governing for many years in the name of Edward IV (in those days the north was almost another country--wild and sparsely populated).    In Ludlow, close to Wales, the young prince was being raised and tutored in his own household with his uncle, Anthony Woodville, as was the custom in those days.    The queen, fearing her loss of power if Richard of Gloucester was in charge of her son, quickly persuaded the befuddled council still in shock to stand behind her wish to be regent, and as such demanded her brother bring the young king to London complete with a small army and weapons so that they would beat Richard to London and to defend themselves from him.     From Yorkshire, Richard had also instructed Anthony to leave Ludlow with Ned and meet him in Northampton en route to London. Who was in the right here? Elizabeth, the mother not wanting to give up her status as the tempting power behind her son, or Richard, who was doing his duty by returning to London to take up his responsibilities as Protector?     Thus it was a surprised Richard who arrived at the proscribed meeting place on April 29 only to find the young king's party had already moved on south to Stony Stratford. By this time, Richard had heard that the queen was attempting to deny him the Protectorship and he acted swiftly: he took a few knights with him and rode after Anthony. His first action was to dismount in the square at Stony Stratford, where the Ludlow entourage was already on horseback and preparing to ride off to London, and kneel in front of the young king, publicly declaring his allegiance and vowing to be his Protector.     He now suspected treason on behalf of the Woodvilles and their adherents to overturn his Protectorate. And he wasn't wrong. Not showing his hand, he invited Anthony to return to to Northampton and dine with him, which the unsuspecting Woodville did. Richard did not want to upset his young nephew by arresting his beloved Uncle Tony in front of the boy, so took him into custody after dinner.     Then he joined Ned the next day and they made the journey to London together, where they would prepare for Ned's coronation on June 24th. Things proceeded fairly smoothly at this time.    (I always felt it spoke volumes for Elizabeth's guilt that she rushed into sanctuary at Westminster Abbey--taking her other son with her--before Richard arrived in London and did not come out until 1484.)     But Ned's coronation never took place, and it was the conundrum that arose in those weeks following King Edward's untimely death that ultimately led to the disappearance of the two princes in the Tower and our fascination with the mystery to this day.     So what happened????      You can read my take on the reason Ned was never crowned in my latest book This Son of York or hang on until next week's blog in my series leading up to the US release of the movie The Lost King!                                          Until then.......      

Richard III as a Good Guy

I was pleased to see, for a change, that The Lost King movie chose a nice-looking, undeformed young actor named Harry Lloyd to play the fantasy Richard. And he was downright pleasant throughout, unlike the character in the famous Shakespeare play!

Harry Lloyd as Richard IIIAnyone who has read or seen Richard III should know that our Will played hard and fast with the historical record. Such a brilliant play with an enviable lead for an actor, but oh so wrong in many ways.

For example, there's the hunchback bit, which I covered in last week's blog. It was scoliosis--sideways curvature, not kyphosis--hunchbacked.

Then there were the murders attributed to him on his way to "usurping" the throne--even that of Edmund Beaufort, duke of Somerset, who actually died in the first Battle of St. Albans when Richard was only three! How's that for a skilled toddler-warrior? 

And his inappropriate, sleazy seduction of Anne Neville at the funeral of her husband, Edward, prince of Wales? Another aberration! In fact, Anne was forced to marry Edward by her father, the ambitious earl of Warwick, and, far from being terrified of Richard, Anne had known him like a brother during the years of his knightly training at Middleham with her father.

Sadly, what Shakespeare never bothered to tell us, was the moral, loyal and good governor Richard was, first as Edward IV's stalwart support in the north of England for most of Edward's second reign, and then when Richard became king. From his one and only Parliament in 1484, here are some of the statutes he enacted to benefit his subjects:

The second statute: "The subjects of this realm shall not be charged with any benevolences." Benevolences, created by Edward IV, were arbitrary taxes. Benevolences were considered out and out gifts to the Crown. This statute abolished them.The first, fifth and seventh statutes: These statutes protected those who purchased land. Because much land had been confiscated during the previous reigns, the complications of common law could not control the fraudulent disposing of land resulting in frequent lawsuits over property rights.The third statute: This important statute was the creation of bail for suspected felons, protecting them from imprisonment before trial. It also covered the prevention of the forfeiture of goods before conviction.The fourth statute: The aim of this statute was to set property qualifications for jurors. In order to have a better selection, jurors had to be “of good name and fame' (reputation) and had to own 20 shillings worth of freehold land or copyhold land worth 26 shillings, eight pence. It was thought those of no means were easily bribed to bring about a desired conclusion.The eighth statute: This statute sought the prevention of commercial dishonesty in the cloth trade. Safeguards were put in place to ensure that the cloth met strict standards.

And, as a writer, my favorite:

The ninth statute: Designed to regulate the importing and exporting of goods by merchants, BUT it exempted the printing and selling of books, earning for King Richard III the honor of having created the first legislation that protected the art of printing and fostered learning by books.

So you tell me--Good Guy or Bad Guy? 

Next week, I'll try and change your mind about the demise of those Princes in the Tower!

Richard III's Bones

 

Richard III's skeleton

Was Richard really a hunchback? I get that question over and over during my book tours, and up until 2012, my answer was enigmatic. "We don't know," wasn't satisfactory, I know, but being a writer meticulous about accuracy, I chose not to even refer much to his physicality in all my books--except the last one, This Son of York. I needed to write the final book in my series about Richard's family precisely so I could now set the record straight and answer the question truthfully. It added to his story immeasurably.

No, he was not a hunchback: he had a bad case of scoliosis that developed gradually only during his teen years, which is very different from kyphosis (hunchback). 

With the discovery of his skeleton under that car park in Leicester, the dreaded words "crooked spine" were used to describe what the osteologist saw in the makeshift grave. "Oh no," I thought, "and I haven't mentioned his back in any of my books." Visions of Shakespeare's "crookback" monster creeping about the stage arose, and I just couldn't believe in all my research that such a disability wouldn't have been mentioned in the contemporary sources I had studied.

Why not I asked myself? Because scoliosis--even to the degree Richard had--can be disguised. By clever tailoring, Richard's fashionable, padded jackets and bespoke armor hid the slightly raised right shoulder and jutting ribs from all but those who saw him shirtless.

The condition didn't seem to hamper his fighting ability as you can see in this BBC film focusing on a young man in Leicester today, Dominic Smee, who has almost the exact same degree of scoliosis as Richard. I have met Dom and can attest that his scoliosis is barely noticeable under clothes.

It was only when the king was killed at Bosworth, stripped naked and tied to the back of a horse that the shape of his torso was revealed to the soldiers lining the route back to Leicester. It was probably when somebody cried, “Why, he was a crookback!” that the story of him being a hunchback was born and eagerly exploited by the usurping Tudors. No one writing during Richard’s life ever mentioned a disability, but historian John Rous, of the Rous Roll, did mention uneven shoulders in 1491 (6 years after Richard's death in Henry Tudor's reign).

Thanks to science and an amazing discovery in 2012, we now know the truth! 

Next week, on our way to the release of The Lost King feature film: Richard's children--were there three or four?

Two months and counting...

 ....to the US/Canada release of The Lost King!

 (right) Sally Hawkins as Philippa Langley, and (left) Philippa Langley and Richard III 

The Stephen Frears directed film about the extraordinary story of finding Richard III’s bones under a car park in Leicester will be released in US on March 24th. What serendipity for me as I am now able to announce the publication of the Second Edition of This Son of York, under my own EasterSmithPress. The book is newly available at all the usual on-line book-buying platforms.

 I was lucky enough to get a sneak, pirated viewing of the film last week (I might get buried alive if I disclose the source!)and I was delighted to relive the whole exciting time for Ricardians in 2012. 

I loved that Richard appears in the film as protagonist Philippa Langley’s muse, allowing her to “think” things through with him as he quietly stands by encouraging her monologues with a small smile, a nod of the head, or a raised eyebrow. 

Sally Hawkins is wonderful as Philippa. You have to get past the fact that character Philippa has short black hair whereas the real Philippa has long blonde locks (see photo above), but you so buy into Sally’s ability to convey Philippa’s passion for her project that it’s just me (the fact-obsessed historical fiction writer) being picky!

As we lead up to the movie’s release, I would love for you to read This Son of York first so you will really understand why it is so important for history to take another look (in a very different entertainment media from Shakespeare’s day) at the much maligned Richard III. And this film will help—as will my book!

So in the next two months, I will be posting weekly fun facts about Richard, his family, the Wars of the Roses, publishing ups and downs for This Son of York, etc. etc. 

Watch this space!

My interview with Rilla Askew

 I have been doing some interviews with fellow Historical Novel Society authors who are launching a new book for more than a year now. Protagonist Anne Askew in Prize for the Fire sparked a lively 75-minute conversation with Rilla, which had to be reduced to 1,000 words for the article. I hope I captured Rilla's passion for her subject.

https://historicalnovelsociety.org/launch-rilla-askews-prize-for-the-fire/

The Lost King film!

 I have had about a year and a half of getting excited about the possibility of a film about Richard III and now the release date of October 7th has been announced! 

The Lost King will be premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in September, and how I would dearly love to be there with a boatload of my books to peddle outside the theater! The film is billed as a "comedy-drama" about one woman's quest to unearth the burial site of Richard after his mutilated body was ignominiously tied over the back of a horse and ordered buried "somewhere" in the Greyfriars monastery grounds in Leicester following the Battle of Bosworth.

As soon as I heard that Sally Hawkins was cast to play the bones' discoverer, Philippa Langley, I took the liberty of sending my new book, This Son of York, to her publicist in the hopes it would reach her as she did her research for the movie. Sadly, I never heard if she received it. But I tried!

Here's all you need to know!

https://www.thehollywoodnews.com/2022/06/01/the-lost-king-with-sally-hawkins-and-steve-coogan-sets-october-release/

Recording This Son of York

 

As many of you who prefer listening to a reading have probably noticed, the narrator can make or break a book. The narrator for my first books was the award-winning former actor Rosalyn Landor. She made my characters come alive so well that I was pleased and proud of her work. 

The same cannot be said for Royal Mistress! Despite my agent's insistence that the contract with Audible included hiring Roz Landor again, they ignored her and me and the result was not as pleasing IMHO.

When it came to This Son of York's publishing process, as many of you know, I was on my own; like so many of my fellow writers subject to the vagaries of traditional publishers, I was left out to dry. The result was contracting with Bellastoria Press, a small independent publisher, who did a beautiful job on creating and distributing the print and ebook versions, albeit leaving me alone to do marketing.

But when it came to an audiobook, my husband and I thought long and hard as to whether to invest any more of our hard-earned cash in this book. It was during an unrelated chat with fellow author and friend, Chris (C.C.) Humphreys, that he mentioned he was narrating a friend's book at that time. I almost jumped through the phone! Here was the perfect voice for my Richard book, and judging from the reviews so far, listeners agree. "Mellifluous" was one reaction, and another said: "I appreciated Mr Humphreys’ clear enunciation. He’s wonderfully easy to listen to!"

"Would you read mine?" I asked timidly, knowing what a busy writer he is, too. "I would," he replied, and that was that!

An experienced narrator, he works for himself as well as known recording studios. He showed me the cubby hole he has erected as a studio in his apartment on Salt Spring Island; it's basically three folding screens with a duvet over the top as a sound barrier, a chair, a mike in a baffle and a wall mounted-screen upon which is the text he is reading. I would get claustrophobic after an hour, but he sits there hour after hour reading. Then there's the editing and mastering that is needed to meet the standards of FindAway Voices, the recording distribution company he likes to use because they distribute more widely, "Not everyone listens to Audible, who make you sign an exclusive. I'd rather be inclusive than exclusive and distribute widely, although the Audible percentage is higher."

As for his time on task:"It takes about two and a half hours to do one finished hour," he said. This Son of York's final finished tally is 19 hours, so you figure out how long he sat there perfecting the book! Does he ever get any unexpected disruptive interruptions? "The worst were the birds that constantly visited my first studio down the hill," he remembers. "I used to have to run outside banging and shouting to get them to fly off."

A talented actor--in fact, his first career after leaving the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London was the stage. He uses his voice technique to create characters, differentiating between genders by range and timbre or with accents. "Distinguishing between women in your book was a little more difficult. You don't want to just give them stereotypical high voices," he explains. "Anne Neville has to be very distinct from Queen Elizabeth, for example, so I varied their speed of delivery, making Anne more deliberate and Elizabeth flightier and prone to moodiness."

Was it hard for him to go from stage and voiceover acting to reading many characters one after the other, and how many times did he have to read a passage before recording it? "I don't practice a lot," he said. "I am lucky that I have always been good at sight-reading especially after voicing lots of cartoons in the 90s, so it wasn't much of a stretch [to do narration]."

One mustn't forget that Chris, as C.C. Humphreys, is also a well known historical and fantasy fiction author. He promises his fans he is balancing his time between writing and narrating. Watch out for The Runestone Saga--a new series coming soon! 

Thanks, Chris, for a fun and hopefully profitable collaboration!

For your listening pleasure...

This Son of York is finally audible! I am delighted to announce that the most talented author/actor Chris (C.C.) Humphreys http://www.authorchrishumphreys.com/ has finished laying down the tracks--all 19 hours--of what I believe is my most important book. And I couldn't be happier with the result.

Chris and I met at a Historical Novel Society conference when we were asked by Diana Gabaldon to read sex scenes from our books. What I loved about Chris's scene was the humor he brought to his reading, and together with obvious stage experience and a rich resonant voice, I think I must have known one day he would be my narrator: he is a native Brit, trained for the stage at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, and--he admitted sheepishly--has been a Ricardian (Richard III fan!) since the age of seventeen. How perfect was that?

We have kept in touch over the years, even visiting each other's homes once, and he gave me a quote for the back jacket of This Son of York. Here we are on Chris's island outside his one-time writing studio.


Oddly, I have to thank the pandemic for this union in a way; being stuck on a small island off the coast of British Columbia, he took advantage of a lull in publishing obligations to set up a tiny studio in his living room and record one of his friend's books as well as his own. Aready familiar with my book, he readily agreed to be hired!

Once he was off and running, he kept up a furious pace of sending me chapters to evaluate and edit. On went my director's hat, but other than a few repeat passages for extra drama and some pronunciation corrections, I hardly found fault with his reading. (Not so in the printed version, typos which I am correcting even now!) Hour after hour, I sat glued to my seat, headphones shutting out a 21st century Florida world, and following Chris's narration along in the text. I don't know how he managed to sound as fresh as a daisy for all thirty-one chapters, but he did! I came away with backaches, brain fog, and buggy eyes.

Sadly, we didn't meet the hoped-for Christmas market, but those gift certificates might come very handy if you are in the mood for a damn fine listening experience! Thanks, Chris, for making this dream of mine come true.