"In 1485, Henry Tudor triumphed over staggering odds to become the first Tudor King of England. His victory owed much to his mother, Lady Margaret Beaufort. Born a Lancaster during the War of the Roses, which saw her house fighting with the Yorks for supremacy, Margaret was caught up in male relatives' plans for the fate of England. She was married to Edmund Tudor, half-brother to the Lancaster King Henry VI. At thirteen, with her husband dead from...

Dame Frevisse of St. Frideswide's nunnery, travels to London in the summer of 1450 to purchase funeral vestments for the Duke of Suffolk, and becomes caught up in a web of intrigue and murder centered around the widowed seamstress Anne Blakhall and her lover, Daved Weir, a merchant hiding the fact that he is a Jew.

After gentle Henry VI takes the throne and is promised a royal bride from France, the rival royal line, the House of York, begins their quest to oust him.

In fifteenth-century England, Richard Lanyon, who had sacrificed the happiness of his own family to become a landowner, finds he can no longer live with the guilt of his past, while his son, agreeing to an arranged marriage, harbors his own lost dreams.