Anne Neville - a fragment

I wrote most of this - until 'exactly the same' - while I was reading The Kingmaker's Daughter by Philippa Gregpry and disliking the fact that it's all so one-sided and that Anne never seems to get over the 'my father is always right' stage. She doesn't question her perception and neither does anybody else.

When I was a child what my father said was gospel to me. I never thought to question his wisdom. The possibility that he may be in the wrong never occurred to me. But now, after all I have been through, after getting to know the people who father considered his mortal enemies, living in close quarters with them, I know he was not always right. That he, like me and everybody else, was often wrong. Like many others he was sometimes blinded by ambition.
When Edward IV married Elizabeth Grey, the widow of a Lancastrian knight, behind my father's back, he was rightly infuriated. When, as the new queen, Elizabeth vigorously promoted her family, arranging brilliant marriages for her many siblings and helping them to receive honours and fortunes, my father was right to complain bitterly that no family should be favoured so exclusively. That no family should counsel the king to the exclusion of all others.
But when he rebelled against Edward, it was not to ensure that all the great and noble families would receive a share of the king's patronage, according to their status and merit. It was not that he wanted to make the king listen to many voices. All he wanted was to be the one who counselled the king and who received the lion's share of honours and lands the king had to bestow.
Did he not see that he was no better than the woman he hated so much? Both the queen and my father wanted to be the only person the king took advice from. Both wanted their family to be the only one to benefit from the king's largesse.
In the end, they both wanted exactly the same.
When my father rebelled against Edward, when his actions forced us to flee the country in disgrace, I was still too young to start to question father's decisions. All the horrible things that happened on our flight, I put squarely on the doorstep of Edward and his evil wife - as I thought of her then.
That all changed when one of the fundamental tenets of my life was overthrown. It changed when father decided to throw in his lot with Queen Margaret. The woman whom he had regarded as the devil incarnate so far.

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