WELCOME TO RACHEL’S FICTION WRITING AND REVIEWS BLOG
This is where Rachel keeps you up to date with her novels and stories and also shares reviews, highlights and extracts from other authors.
How a Birthday Party at Chinon Kickstarted a Civil War (5 March 1173)
Today is my birthday 😁. And as birthdays go, I could have shared mine with worse people, because 5 March 1133 was also the birthday of Henry II of England, born at Le Mans, one of the most formidable rulers medieval Europe ever produced.
Henry II’s Birthday was 5th March
Soldier, lawgiver, empire-builder, father of eight legitimate children (and countless illegitimate ones), and a man whose family would become both his greatest weapon, his biggest headache, and eventually most spectacular downfall.
Which makes today a good day to talk about what happened on his fortieth birthday, in 1173. Because that evening a feast was held at Château de Chinon. The great hall would have been ablaze with candlelight and Henry, thinking he’d managed to control his spoiled, entitled (but courteous and generous) namesake son, allowed the goblets to be repeatedly refilled by his son’s own hand.
The drunkenness that followed led to everything that followed: the Great Rebellion, where Henry’s family were torn apart, and his throne would never feel secure again.
This event, and the Great Rebellion itself, runs through the heart of my novel Lady of Lincoln.
Herstory Refuses to Be Forgotten!
ady of Lincoln opens in 1168, when a fourteen-year-old Nicola de la Haye stood in the barracks of Lincoln Castle, a young girl surrounded by sleeping soldiers, determined to help a boy who didn't belong. It was a small act of defiance in a world that would soon demand much larger ones.
I'm honoured to share that Lady of Lincoln has been named a semi-finalist in the 2025 Chanticleer Chaucer Awards for Early Historical Fiction.
The novel has already won awards, and this is a highly prestigious one. Chuffed as I am, it’s not really about awards and recognition that I can weave a good tale (although I’m thrilled about that!). It's about what Nicola's story represents—a woman who inherited a barony and a castle in her own right, who found herself caught between impossible loyalties when her husband joined the Great Rebellion of 1173-4, and who chose to defend what was hers.
That’s what inspired me to write about her in the first place.
Richard the Lionheart at Sixteen: the Making of a Warrior Duke
In 1173, a boy of sixteen took his first step onto the stage of war. His name was Richard, Duke of Aquitaine, though he had yet to earn the epithet Lionheart.
Before he became the crusader-king of legend, before his songs and sieges, Richard was a restless teenager thrust into the most dangerous political storm of the twelfth century: the Great Rebellion against his father, King Henry II.
It was a rebellion born of pride, family betrayal, and the impossible weight of expectation. And it was here — amid defeat, shame, and fire — that the making of a warrior began.
A Son in His Mother’s Shadow
Richard was Eleanor of Aquitaine’s favourite son, and in many ways her reflection: intelligent, impulsive, proud. Born in Oxford but raised in the cultured courts of Poitiers and Bordeaux, he was steeped in his mother’s world of poetry and politics. By his mid-teens he could compose in Occitan, debate theology in Latin, and command a hall full of barons — yet he was still a boy in a man’s game.
In 1172, Henry II had forced Eleanor to surrender the duchy of Aquitaine to her teenage son, intending to bind the region more tightly to the English crown. But Aquitaine was Eleanor’s inheritance, her life’s work, and Richard was fiercely loyal to her. The gift was both a promotion and a trap: the young duke found himself governing a proud and fractious land, surrounded by lords twice his age and loyalty only thinly pledged.
When the rebellion of 1173 began, Richard stood between two worlds — son of a king, heir to a duchy, and caught between the two towering figures who defined his destiny.
Medieval Succession: When Henry II’s Empire Imploded
When Succession first aired, audiences were transfixed by its portrait of a modern dynasty at war with itself: scheming heirs, a manipulative patriarch, and a fortune vast enough to make loyalty negotiable. But centuries before Logan Roy was terrifying his children in glass-walled boardrooms, another ruthless family feud was playing out across medieval Europe.
In 1173, the most powerful man in Christendom—King Henry II of England—faced a rebellion led not by rivals or barons, but by his own wife and sons. Chroniclers called it the Great Rebellion; historians often dub it the Revolt of the Eaglets, after the young “eagles” who turned on the parent bird.
And just like in Succession, the real question was: who inherits the empire?
Richard de Brito: The Forgotten Killer; and a very Dangerous Friend
In legend he struck the final blow; in fiction, he will cause a torrent of trouble for his friend William FitzErneis in Lady of Lincoln.
When Archbishop Thomas Becket was cut down before the altar of Canterbury Cathedral in December 1170, the man who delivered the fatal stroke was Richard de Brito—sometimes styled le Breton. His sword, witnesses said, split Becket’s skull so deeply that the blade snapped on the flagstones.
Unlike the other knights, de Brito cried out as he struck:
“Take that for the love of my lord William FitzEmpress!”
The words stunned those who heard them. He was killing the archbishop not in Henry II’s name, but in that of Henry’s brother—the late William FitzEmpress, Henry II’s brother.