Proud Cis’ Plea for George Plantagenet’s Life February, 1478 Palace of Westminister In April, 1477, George, Duke of Clarence, the brother of King Edward IV, sent eighty armed men from Warwick Castle to fetch Ankarette Twynyho at her home in Somerset. Ankarette was a former lady’s maid to, Isabel Neville, George’s late wife. While it is likely Isabel had died of childbed fever, George accused poor Ankarette of poisoning his Isabel with a toxic cup of ale. Paranoid grief necessitates retribution. Isabel’s maid was his misbegotten revenge for Isabel’s death, natural though it probably was. Ankarette was taken ninety miles to Warwick in three days, a speedy journey on horseback. George set her before a jury he bought and paid for. Ankarette was hanged alongside a man accused of the same invented crime. It was murder wearing the borrowed robes of the law. George did not seem to care. When King Edward IV heard of his brother's latest act of defiance against the crown, he was at turns, angry, frustrated and grieved. It was the third incident where George committed treason against the Crown of England. Edward, who had definitively won England at the Battle of Tewkesbury in 1471, could no longer excuse a traitor. Edward had George, his own brother, arrested. By January 1478, Parliament heard the case brought by the king himself. The charges of treason were vast, echoing with a decade of swallowed grievances, rebellions, and betrayals. No one else dared prosecute a royal duke, so Edward bore the terrible weight of it himself. The court condemned George to death after finding him guilty of his crimes. All that remained was the stroke of a quill. Cecily Neville, Duchess of York, did not wait to be summoned to the privy chamber to discuss George’s fate. “Proud Cis,” they called her—a woman with the blood of kings in her veins, a matriarch who had given life to George and Edward, then shaped and disciplined them to adulthood and beyond. At sixty-two, she possessed a spine of absolute steel. But as she stood outside her son’s privy chamber in the freezing dark of the morning, she was only a mother facing the unthinkable: one of her children was about to allow the slaughter of another.