Twenty years after first putting pen to paper, a retired police officer from Grantham has written a book on the life of Francis Lovel, a lifelong friend of King Richard III.
Richard Hogg, 49, has completed and published ‘Loyalty in me Lieth: King Richard III and Francis Viscount Lovel’.
It was a fascination with the mystery surrounding the death of Lovel, who Richard calls “one of history’s forgotten heroes”, that sparked his desire to write. Lovel was a principal instigator in the Lambert Simnel Rebellion of the 1400s, the first major challenge to Henry VII’s rule.
Richard, of Belton Lane, said: “He was probably the foremost magnate/councillor of Richard III’s reign but, to date, no other books have been written about his life, other than a pamphlet by the Richard III Society. Indeed Francis gets merely one line in Shakespeare’s Richard III.”
Keen to avoid creating a “stuffy” book, Richard decided to write the book in the style of a novel to “bring the true history of what is a complicated and ruthless age, yet is also quite fascinating, to a larger readership”.
Equal importance was placed on giving readers in-depth descriptions to allow them to use their imaginations. He hopes that by stirring their imaginations, some readers may go on to use the book to plan day trips, to visit the sites he describes.
Richard said: “Indeed, if one visits Ravensworth, where Francis’s wife comes from, you drive into the village and there in the middle of a field, not mentioned on any standard maps, is her father’s castle.
“So hopefully readers can use the book to plan days out and even a week-long walking holiday, as I did, which traces the progress of Francis’s invasion in 1487 from Foulney Island on Morecombe Bay down through Wensleydale, to where the army mustered at Middleham Castle in North Yorkshire. From there they came south to East Stoke where they lost the battle.”
The book is available to buy via Amazon at www.amazon.co.uk