Kingmaker: Winter Pilgrims follows the epic tale of two heroic young people who unwittingly hold the key to the throne and must survive against incredible odds in the savage world of 1460’s England. With a deadly enemy closing in and a mysterious ledger in their hands, wherever they flee they are drawn into the calamitous events of the time, culminating in the terrible slaughter at Towton field on Palm Sunday 1461.
This epic tale of survival, courage and love amidst the carnage of the times inspired the creation of our Towton Audio ® publishing platform www.towtonaudio.com and was dramatised by Greg Evans from the original book written by Toby Clements and is the first in the Kingmaker Series.
Spread over five one hour episodes, Kingmaker: Winter Pilgrims was recorded at the wonderfully atmospheric Leiston Abbey in Suffolk and directed by Fiona McAlpine who worked with 27 actors and 11 crew over an 8 day period and was the first of many historic full cast audio dramas that we are releasing.
Discover the complete Kingmaker Series here along with it's trailer and loads of other behind the scenes footage, photos and profiles of our incredible cast & crew who enabled this thrilling epic come to life.
Reviews for Kingmaker
An enthralling adventure story, honest and powerful. The Wars of the Roses are imagined here with energy, with ferocity, with hunger to engage the reader.
It is Clements’s ability to excite both tender emotions and a capacity for bloodthirstiness that has allowed him to achieve what Shakespeare couldn’t manage, and spin a consistently enthralling story out of the Wars of the Roses.
Prepare to be immersed in a brutal, mesmerising tale.
Toby Clements captures the grimness, grit and grime of 15th-century life, but with compassion and humanity, as seen through the eyes of common people ... period detail is wonderfully accurate as are the set piece skirmishes and bloodbath at Towton.
Clements truly lets rip with the poleaxes, billhooks and glaives, sparing no detail as he recreates the blood and thunder of the battlefield ... But mere retro-bloodfest this is not - amid the butchery emerges a tender, heroic love story.
About Toby Clements
Toby Clements worked as a journalist and literary editor on The Daily Telegraph before becoming a full time writer in 2013, but he has been obsessed with the fifteenth century and the Wars of the Roses in particular since childhood trips to Tewkesbury, one of the key battlefields in this era.
He read everything on the subject he could get hold of, but while most histories are focused on the nobility of the time, Kingmaker required immersion in the life as it was lived, and so he has spent long weekends under canvas in re enactment camps all over the country and on the continent, and he has learned to use the longbow, to fight with pollaxe, to brew ale, bake bread, and even tan leather in the way it would have then been done. As he went on he found he became less taken by the dealings of the high and mighty and more interested in the common folk of the time: how they lived and loved, fought and died. So in addition to being simple, rollicking adventure stories, the Kingmaker novels are also a hymn to the courage and resilience of our forebears.