Anne Easter Smith novel traces the rise and fall of pretender Perkin Warbeck

“I’d read about this bastard daughter of Edward IV, who had been one of only two attendants on Queen Elizabeth Woodville’s funeral barge going up to Windsor,” says King's Grace author Anne Easter Smith.

     “I wondered why a wife would choose a reminder of her late husbands’s infidelilty to accompany her. It struck me that Grace might be just the person to be close to Elizabeth, who was the mother of the princes in the Tower, and so perhaps of this pretender Perkin, and be our eyes and ears at court.”

     In King’s Grace Easter Smith follows Grace, an obscure bastard daughter of Edward IV, to tell the story of Perkin Warbeck, a pretender to the English throne. Warbeck was officially recognized as Richard of Shrewsbury by Margaret of Burgundy, Edward IV's sister and the widow of Charles I, Duke of Burgundy.

     “As we know nothing more about Grace, I had license to make up her back story, which is the central story in the book,” says Easter Smith. “The Perkin mystery is the subplot.”

     “While researching in England for Daughter of York and staying with my sister, she took me along to a dinner party at a friend’s house,” says Easter Smith. “My sister and everyone else there were either current or former actors. Three of them were finishing up filming a BBC docudrama about Perkin Warbeck and had expressed curiosity about my knowledge of Margaret, she being a key player in the story. Their dinner conversation about Perkin’s tragic tale made me want to write about him.”

      “I needed to find my narrator, because I don’t attempt to get into a male character’s head in my books and my editor likes female protagonists,” Easter Smith. “One day, while trying to get Perkin Warbeck’s story straight, I had my huge wall-chart where I keep my characters, dates and places in order on the floor. I had four different resource books around me each positing different theories.”

     “Until I have seen the places they lived, walked, loved and worked, I don’t get a feel for them,” says Easter Smith. “I walk in my characters’ footsteps. I talk to historians and curators, search archives, spend a lot of time in museums and libraries, and use the Internet to fill in a few gaps. I research right up until I complete the last page; it is pretty much ongoing.”

     Anne Easter Smith grew up near Winchester in Hampshire. She currently lives in Newburyport, Massachusetts. She’s working on her fourth book about Cecily, Duchess of York, the mother of Edward IV, Richard III and Margaret of York and the ancestor of every king and queen of England, except for Henry VII.