Hi! I just love digging into the accuracies of The Cousins War, and I just wanted to say, I started out by reading “Phillipa Gregory” novels… Bad choice. I dislike the *Religious* portrayal of Margaret Beaufort, aren’t the medieval ages around the same level of “God is our savior” of büllshìt? And what’s more I feel the “Red Queen” title should be much more fitting for Margaret d’Anjou. What’s your thought on this?

I confess I haven’t actually read The Red Queen. of the Cousin’s War series, I (barely) made it through The White Queen, and even that enraged me so much that I couldn’t be bothered to read the rest. That Margaret Beaufort was an incredibly pious and religiously inclined woman is certainly backed up by primary sources, but PGregs’ choice to depict her as a fanatic is deeply problematic in many ways. There is absolutely no indication that she was angling to put her son on the throne any earlier than the mid-1480s when the Yorkists were already in disarray, and even then one can make the argument that all she wanted was to get Henry back into the country–that his claim to the throne was secondary.

And, yes, when I saw that there was a book titled The Red Queen in the series, my immediate assumption was that it was about Margaret of Anjou. When I realized it was about Margaret Beaufort, I was mostly just confused.