What am I working on now?”
The answer is that I have been incredibly fortunate. My biography of Joan Beaufort, Katherine Swynford’s Daughter: Matriarch of the North has been accepted for publication by Pen & Sword Books, and I am now deep into researching and writing my next book for the same publisher—a full-length biography of Eleanor Neville, Countess of Northumberland.
Some people have asked why I chose Eleanor. After spending years immersed in the life of Katherine Swynford, surely it was time to move on to someone completely different?
The truth is that I haven’t really moved away from Katherine at all.
If anything, I have found myself following the threads of her remarkable legacy further than I ever expected.
When I first began researching Katherine, I thought I was writing about one extraordinary woman whose life intersected with kings, princes and the highest levels of medieval society. By the time I finished, I realised I had also uncovered the story of a family whose influence would shape England for generations. Katherine’s children and grandchildren carried her legacy into almost every corner of fifteenth-century politics.
That realisation eventually led me to Joan Beaufort.
Joan was much more than Katherine’s daughter. She became the matriarch of the Neville family, one of the greatest dynasties in medieval England, and through her children she shaped the political landscape that would eventually erupt into the Wars of the Roses. It quickly became clear to me that Joan deserved a biography in her own right, and I am delighted that Pen & Sword shared that view.
Yet even while researching Joan, one of her daughters kept quietly appearing in my notes.
Eleanor Neville.
At first she seemed little more than another name in an extraordinary family tree. Daughter of Joan Beaufort and Ralph Neville. Wife of Henry Percy, 2nd Earl of Northumberland. Mother of Henry Percy, 3rd Earl of Northumberland.
The more I looked, however, the more I realised that Eleanor had somehow become almost invisible.
Historians have written extensively about the remarkable men who surrounded her. Her father, husband, brothers and sons all occupy prominent places in the history of fifteenth-century England. Yet Eleanor herself has often been reduced to little more than a connecting branch in the genealogy.
That immediately made me curious.
Readers of this blog will know that I have always been drawn to people whose stories have slipped into the margins. Katherine herself spent centuries being remembered largely as John of Gaunt’s mistress before historians began to appreciate the significance of her own life and achievements. Joan Beaufort, too, deserves to be recognised as far more than simply Katherine’s daughter.
Now I find myself trying to do something similar for Eleanor.
As I write this, I am surrounded by archive references, estate records, maps, photographs from recent research trips and far too many notebooks. Much of my time is currently spent following Eleanor across northern England—from Beverley and Leconfield to Warkworth, Alnwick and Towton—trying to understand not only the great political events that shaped her life but also the places where she actually lived.
One of the pleasures of writing history is that every answer seems to generate two new questions. A single surviving letter, an overlooked account roll or a forgotten legal record can suddenly illuminate an entire chapter. Equally, there are moments when the honest conclusion has to be, “We simply don’t know.”
I have become increasingly comfortable with that.
Good history is not about filling every silence with speculation. It is about recognising what the evidence allows us to say and admitting when it does not. If readers of my Katherine Swynford blog have learned anything about me over the years, I hope it is that I would rather leave a question unanswered than offer certainty where none exists.
What has surprised me most about Eleanor is how contemporary she feels.
She lived through unimaginable political upheaval. She lost her husband at the First Battle of St Albans. She buried sons killed during the Wars of the Roses. She experienced the confiscation and eventual restoration of family estates. Time and again, she adapted to circumstances over which she had little control.
History remembers those battles.
It remembers the men who fought them.
This book asks a different question.
How did Eleanor Neville live through them?
That single question has become the heart of the biography.
Looking back, I now see these three books as a natural progression rather than separate projects.
Katherine Swynford laid the foundations.
Joan Beaufort built upon them.
Eleanor Neville inherited both that extraordinary legacy and the challenges that came with it.
Together they tell the story of three generations of remarkable women whose lives deserve to be understood on their own terms, not simply through the men to whom they were related.
Researching Eleanor has reminded me why I began writing history in the first place. There is a quiet satisfaction in finding someone who has stood unnoticed for centuries and allowing the surviving evidence to reveal the richness of their life.
I hope that, when Eleanor’s biography is finally published by Pen & Sword, readers who first discovered my work through Katherine Swynford will feel they have continued the same remarkable family story.
After all, I never really left Katherine behind.
She simply led me to her granddaughter.
