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Final Interview: Brian Wainwright

© Wendy J. Dunn

WJD: Your final answer in the first part of this interview does lead to another question. When did Constance, your wonderful princess and main character of "Within the Fetterlock" begin to tug at your interest?

BW:I was very interested in this era, and one day I was reading a book "The Political History of England" I think, and it mentioned Constance's escape from Windsor with the boys. It was a very brief reference, but up to that time I had not even known that Edmund of Langley had a daughter. She is often left out of family trees - just check out any books on the wars of the roses!

This escape was such an amazing event that I had to know more and I spent literally years, on and off, trying to discover as much as I could about Constance. There is no one text book about her, and to an extent I had to delve into things like the Calender of Patent Rolls, Complete Peerage and one or two of the various Chronicles.

Some information printed on her is quite wrong, it claims she was Edmund Holland's mistress before she was Thomas Despenser's wife, which is manifestly absurd in terms of chronology; indeed she was almost certainly married to Thomas before Edmund was even born. "Married" in name, you understand. What emerged from this scratching around was a quite amazing life story and I am a bit surprised that no modern novelist has written about her before me, though she does appear as a bit character in some novels. (Actually there is a Victorian Novel about her, White Rose of Langley by Emily S Holt, but you are very unlikely to be able to get hold of a copy).

The thing is, the more I found out, the more I seemed to be "hooked". To be honest I am not quite sure exactly when I started writing about her but it was a long time ago; there were several versions before Fetterlock and very little of the original remains. I don't want to give you the idea that I did nothing else - I had various other hobbies as well as a full time job, and sometimes literally years went by before I did anything more on Constance. One problem was that I could not keep up with either my own style developments or the new research findings I discovered, so I would typically "complete" it and then start again! I also wrote "Alianore Audley", in remarkably quick time by my standards, during a rest break! The research findings continued almost to the end. For example Nigel Saul's superb book on Richard II was published and demonstrated that Richard had visited the Despensers at Hanley