Today, I am pleased to welcome Rachel Elwiss Joyce to my blog to share a guest post about the heroine of her novel, Lady of Lincoln, Nicola de la Haye. I would like to thank The Coffee Pot Book Club and Rachel Elwiss Joyce for allowing me to participate in this blog tour.
In October 1216, as England staggered through civil war and a French invasion, a dying King John made one of the last appointments of his life.
He named a woman sheriff of Lincolnshire.
That may not sound dramatic to modern ears. But in thirteenth-century England, a sheriff wasn’t a local official in any minor sense. Sheriffs collected royal revenues, administered justice, and represented the king’s authority in the shire. It was a powerful, public, unmistakably male role.
Nicola de la Haye was the first woman appointed sheriff of an English county in her own right.
She was also hereditary constable of Lincoln Castle, and when widowed, she was by extraordinary exception allowed to keep that role for herself.
And in 1217, when English rebels and French forces besieged Lincoln, she held the castle until royalist relief arrived. Her defence helped secure the throne of the young Henry III and turn back the French invasion entirely.
Historian Sharon Bennett Connolly calls her “the woman who saved England.”
So why haven’t most people heard of her?
Born to inherit. Not expected to rule.
Nicola’s father was the constable of Lincoln Castle. His father had been before him. Without a son, that title and the barony of Brattleby would pass to Nicola.
Being a medieval heiress sounds glamorous, but the reality was more complicated.
An inheritance wasn’t just wealth. It was power, duty, military obligation, and political loyalty all rolled into one. It meant men, rents, courts, and the security of the Crown. And for a woman, all of that came with a catch.
She needed a husband.
A husband was expected to manage her estates, command her garrison, and deal with the world on her behalf. A good one could protect everything she’d inherited. A bad one could destroy it through debt, bad decisions, or outright disloyalty.
Nicola was caught in a bind from the very beginning. She was born to inherit Lincoln Castle, but told her whole life that she needed a man to carry it. Her name mattered, her lands mattered, and her marriage mattered.
Her own voice was unlikely to have mattered much at all.
That tension is at the heart of Lady of Lincoln.
A kingdom under strain
Nicola’s early life unfolded during one of the most turbulent periods of Henry II’s reign.
Henry’s empire stretched from the Scottish borders to the Pyrenees. It was vast, powerful, and under constant pressure. In 1170, his quarrel with Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, ended with Becket’s murder on the floor of his own cathedral. The shock rippled across Christendom.
Barely three years later, Henry’s own teenage sons rose against him. The Young King Henry led the rebellion, along with his brothers, and their mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine, and many powerful barons across England and France.
For Nicola, this was not distant politics, but danger literally knocking at her castle door.
She had probably married her first husband, William FitzErneis, around the time of her father’s death in 1169. Marriage, for a young heiress, was meant to be protection. But by 1173, FitzErneis had joined the rebellion against the king.
Which raises a question that history has never answered.
Her husband rebelled, so why does Lincoln Castle never appear as a rebel stronghold?
By then, Nicola was the hereditary constable. Did she defy him? Did her loyalty to her father’s legacy outweigh her duty to her marriage? Did she find herself trapped between the man she had married and the castle she was born to protect?
We will probably never know.
But for a novelist, that silence is irresistible.
When private life becomes political
One thing I try to do in my writing is show that history wasn’t happening somewhere in the background. For people like Nicola, it determined who you married, what you owned, and whether you were safe.
Almost every great crisis of her age hit her directly. Church against Crown, rebellion in the royal family, and an empire splitting at the seams.
And because she was an heiress, her marriage was never simply private. Who she married affected Lincoln Castle, and Lincoln Castle affected the security of the kingdom.
Nicola was also born into the generation that grew up in the shadow of the Anarchy – the brutal civil war between King Stephen and Empress Matilda, with Lincoln at its very centre. The older people around her would have remembered what it looked like when loyalty broke down, and castles became prizes in someone else’s war.
That memory shaped everything. It shaped her father and her father’s fears. And in Lady of Lincoln, it shapes the novel’s opening: his terror that without the right man beside her, Nicola cannot hold what she was born to protect.
The making of Nicola de la Haye
The Nicola history remembers is formidable: she holds castles, becomes sheriff, endures sieges, and helps save kings. She becomes one of the few women of her age to exercise power so openly that chroniclers, who rarely bothered with women, had no choice but to acknowledge her.
But I didn’t want to start with the legend.
I wanted to ask how she became that woman.
What would it have done to you, being told from childhood that you’re responsible for everything but incapable of handling it yourself? Being valued for your land, not for who you are? And then having the husband who was supposed to protect your inheritance become one of the biggest threats to it?
The Great Rebellion of 1173–4 may have been Nicola’s first real turning point: the moment when marriage, inheritance, and loyalty collided, and everything she stood to lose became terrifyingly real. That collision, and what she might have done about it, is at the heart of Lady of Lincoln.
She was born an heiress in a man’s world.
She was repeatedly tested in one of the most turbulent times of the Middle Ages.
And those challenges would turn her into the woman who would eventually stand between England and conquest.
Lady of Lincoln is the first novel in the Nicola de la Haye trilogy, in which a young Nicola learns to fight to keep and protect what is hers.
Blurb:
A true story. A forgotten heroine. In a time when women were told to stay silent, could she become the saviour her people need?
12th-century England. Nicola de la Haye wants to do her duty. But though she’s taught that a female cannot lead alone, the young noblewoman bristles at the marriage her father has arranged to secure her inheritance. And when an unexpected death leaves her unguided, the impetuous girl shuns the king’s blessing and weds a handsome-but-landless knight.
Harshly fined by Henry II for her unsanctioned union, Nicola struggles to salvage her estates while dealing with devastating betrayals from her husband… and his choice to join rebels in a brewing civil war. Yet after averting a tragedy and gaining the castle garrison’s respect, she still must face the might of powerful men determined to crush her under their will.
Can she survive love, threats, and violent ambition to prove she’s worthy of authority?
In this carefully researched and vividly human series debut, Rachel Elwiss Joyce showcases the complex themes of honour, responsibility, and freedom in the story of a remarkable heroine who men tried to erase from history. And as readers dive into a world defined by violence and turmoil, they’ll be stunned by this courageous young woman’s journey toward greatness.
Lady of Lincoln is the gritty first book in the Nicola de la Haye Series historical fiction saga. If you like richly textured female heroes, courtly drama, and fast-paced intrigue, then you’ll adore Rachel Elwiss Joyce’s gripping true-life tale.
Buy Link:
Universal Buy Link: https://books2read.com/u/4980nW
This title is available to read on #KindleUnlimited.
Author Bio:
After a rewarding career in the sciences, Rachel returned to her first love—history and the art of storytelling. Fascinated by the women history has neglected or tried to forget, she creates meticulously researched, emotionally resonant fiction that brings her characters’ stories vividly to life.
Her fascination with the past began early. At six years old, she was already inventing tales about medieval women in castles, inspired by her treasured Ladybird books and other picture-rich stories that transported her to another time. By the time she discovered Katherine by Anya Seton as a teenager, she knew the joy and escape that only great historical fiction can bring.
Rachel’s two grown-up children still tease her (fondly) about childhoods spent being “dragged” around castles, archaeological sites, and historical re-enactments. For Rachel, history and imagination have always gone hand in hand.
There was, however, a long gap between the stories of her childhood and her decision to write her own novel. The spark came when she discovered the remarkable true story of Nicola de la Haye—the first female sheriff of England, who defended Lincoln Castle against a French invasion and became known as “the woman who saved England.” Rachel knew she had found her heroine and a story she was destined to tell.
Rachel lives in the UK, where she continues to explore the lives of women who shaped history but were left out of its pages.
Author Links:
Website: https://www.rachelelwissjoyce.com/
Twitter / X: https://x.com/RachelElwJoyce
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/RachelElwissJoyce
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/racheljoycehello/
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/rachelelwjoyce.bsky.social
Book Bub: https://www.bookbub.com/authors/rachel-elwiss-joyce
Amazon Author Page: https://www.amazon.co.uk/stores/Rachel-Elwiss-Joyce/author/B0G25Q32PV
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/61878154.Rachel_Elwiss_Joyce
Medieval England, under the reign of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, was a turbulent time. The focus tends to be on the rebellion of Henry’s sons against their father and how Eleanor sided with her sons. This story has been told, but there is a story of another woman who was caught directly in the middle of the entire ordeal. Her story is most known for her role during the reign of King John and the Magna Carta, but that was when she was an older woman. The story of Nicola de la Haye and Lincoln Castle has been told in biographies and nonfiction books, but not really in historical fiction novels. Rachel Elwiss Joyce hopes to change that with her novel, “Lady of Lincoln.”
The year is 1217, and Lincoln Castle is being attacked. King John is dead, and his son Henry III is now king, but chaos still reigns. Noblemen are fighting against each other, and amid this conflict is a woman in her sixties. She is used to the instability of England as she is not only the constable of the castle being besieged, but she has earned the right to be named the first female sheriff of England. She was a daughter, a wife, a mother, a widow, and someone the Plantagenets could depend on. The name of this remarkable woman is Nicholaa de la Haye, and her unbelievable story is told in Sharon Bennett Connolly’s latest book, “King John’s Right Hand Lady: The Story of Nicholaa de la Haye.”