A Historical Romance Recalls A Bloody Palm Sunday Battle

Yorkists and Lancastrians drowned in their chain mail at England’s Antietam in the Wars of the Roses

A 19th-century engraving of the Battle of Towton / Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

Here’s a fact that may cheer you up if you’ve been plowing stony ground on Tinder or OKCupid: At least your brother the king can’t marry you off to a thuggish Duke of Burgundy as part of a package deal that includes the lifting of a ban on Burgundian imports in England.

That’s more or less what happened to Margaret of York, a sister of Edward IV, who sent her off in 1468 to wed the expansionist Charles the Bold.

It was clearly the kind of marriage that a modern therapist would call “challenging” — if not “dysfunctional” — at least on the evidence of Daughter of York, the second historical romance from Anne Easter Smith.

Margaret soon learns that her husband’s favorite activities include annexing large parts of the Habsburg Empire and hanging people from walnut trees. She is distressed to hear that after one conquest, he drowned all the people he hadn’t strung up: “What little respect she had for Charles was being eroded day by day.”

Small wonder, given a messenger’s report to her mother about England’s Antietam, which occurred during the Wars of the Roses: the Battle of Towton, or…