Cousins' War Books in Order

The Cousins’ War novels focus on the Wars of the Roses, when rival branches of the royal family fought over England’s crown for a generation. Gregory tells this story through the women whose marriages, children and alliances stitched those families together and pulled them apart.

The opening book, The White Queen, follows Elizabeth Woodville, a Lancastrian widow who secretly marries the new Yorkist king, Edward IV. Overnight she becomes queen, and her large Woodville family pour into court, provoking the anger of old allies such as Richard Neville, the Earl of Warwick. Elizabeth’s mother, Jacquetta of Luxembourg, steps into the spotlight in The Lady of the Rivers, which reaches back into the last years of the Hundred Years’ War and shows how court politics, prophecy and personal loyalty prepare the ground for civil conflict.

On the opposing side stands The Red Queen, Margaret Beaufort, who is convinced from childhood that her son Henry Tudor is God’s chosen king. Margaret’s piety, stubbornness and political talent underpin years of plotting in exile and at home. The Kingmaker’s Daughter then turns to Anne Neville, Warwick’s younger daughter, who moves from pawn to princess to queen as her father shifts his support between York and Lancaster.

Later in the sequence, The White Princess follows Elizabeth of York as she marries Henry Tudor to seal peace between the houses, all while rumours about the lost princes in the Tower refuse to die. The King’s Curse completes the arc through Margaret Pole, a surviving Plantagenet who tries to serve the Tudor court faithfully and instead finds her family destroyed under Henry VIII. Together these novels show how the politics of legitimacy and bloodline flow directly into the anxieties of the early Tudor years.

The Cousins’ War books can be read as a self contained cycle about the rise and fall of Plantagenet power, or as the first half of the wider Plantagenet and Tudor saga. Either way they offer a close look at how queens, heiresses and “mothers of kings” experienced a war usually described in terms of dukes and battles.