St. Marget Pole is one of my heroines, so I was delighted to find this excellent novel of her life. Margaret was a Planagenit princess, the nice of Richard III. Her family was in the sights of Henry VI and later Henry VIII. Married off to a baron below her station, it became a love match and she had five children that lived to adulthood.

The book begins a few years before her youngest child's death and end with her execution in the 1540's. Her life was full of ups and downs and this book spares us little of it. Because of her York heritage Margaret and her family were a threat to Henry VIII, especially after he broke from the Catholic Church.

Margaret was ultimately imprisoned by Henry, first under house arrest and ultimately in the Tower, where she was executed without trial, the oldest of the Tudor martyrs under Henry.

The details of her life are not well-known and Wilcoxson's book does a wonderful job of bringing them to light.