Aztecs, Vikings, Graves and Mammoths by Mary Hoffman

March can't seem to decide if it's coming in like a lion or a lamb. While it makes up its mind, I want to fill you in a bit on what's happening on The History Girls in the next 31 days.

Unusually we have not one but TWO competitions, to make up for the fact that February had its usual 28 days and no scope for a guest.

On March 4th, Sophia Bennett will be talking about her YA novel featuring the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Following Ophelia and asking a competition question. Then, on 29th we will be having a guest post and competition from Georgia Hunter.

On 18th March, I am swapping my usual first of the month post with Celia Rees and she will post on 1st April. The reason for this is a meeting at the Society of Authors on 16th March, Past Imperfect, called by Histeria, a group to which I also belong. The meeting is specifically to talk about historical fiction for children and Young Adults and will be Chaired by Kevin Crossley-Holland, who was our first ever History Boy (our first male guest).

So lots for you to look out for.

In the meantime, I'm giving you a round up of history-related stories I've read about this month.

First up, the search for the grave of James the First of Scotland:

National Gallery of Scotland

Ever since the skeleton of Richard the Third was excavated from a Leicestershire car park, the quest to find the resting place of other dead monarchs has become the new metal-detecting. You can read the full story here. A hostage, a victim of assassination and father of eight, he was married to Joan Beaufort (granddaughter of John of Gaunt), whose grave is also being sought.

The last resting-place of Margaret Tudor, Henry the Eighth's sister and another Queen of Scots, might also be discovered.

Next, two great English 16th century names together: Thomas Tallis and Katherine Parr. This fascinating story begins in 1976 when some papers were discovered in a wall at Corpus Christi College Oxford and identified as music by the Tudor composer.

Only recently were the words confirmed to be by Henry the Eighth's last queen, who had translated the Psalms into English in 1544 and published them anonymously.

The shortlist for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction will be announced this month. Here is the longlist:

Jo Baker A Country Road, A Tree (Doubleday)
Julian Barnes The Noise of Time (Jonathan Cape)
Sebastian Barry Days Without End (Faber)
Richard Francis Crane Pond (Europa)
Linda Grant The Dark Circle (Virago)
Charlotte Hobson The Vanishing Futurist (Faber)
Hannah Kent The Good People (Picador Australia)
Ed O’Loughlin Minds of Winter (riverrun)
Sarah Perry The Essex Serpent (Profile)
Dominic Smith The Last Painting of Sara de Vos (Allen & Unwin Australia)
Francis Spufford Golden Hill (Faber)
Graham Swift Mothering Sunday (Scribner)
Rose Tremain The Gustav Sonata (Chatto & Windus)

A Harvard team of scientists has claimed to be able to make woolly mammoths "de-extinct" within two years. The boast created some scepticism.

Mammoth at Ecomuseum in Rousse, Bulgaria. Photo by Tiia Monto

Could the Aztecs have died out because of Salmonella? We are all familiar with the idea that colonists bring weapons with them that are more deadly than guns and swords but this is a new theory. It's not yet confirmed but interesting.

In 2011 a Viking Boat Burial was unearthed in the appropriately named Swordle Bay in Scotland. A first report has just been issued describing the process of such a burial, the status of the corpse and the type of grave goods that were burial with him (they were rarely female).

Photograph of the Ardnamurchan Viking boat grave site, near Ockle in Scotland, taken by Jon Haylett.

(I acknowledge History's Headlines in History as the source for some of the above)

Elizabeth Fremantle discusses the poet Aemilia Lanyer

I’ve always been interested in early modern female writers. Katherine Parr, the heroine of of my first novel, Queen’s Gambit, was one such writer; Parr wrote two devotional and political texts, which were widely read and hugely successful. At the time it was considered controversial for a woman to write, particularly to write secular works and even more so to seek to publish, and Parr put herself at great personal risk promoting her politics through her work.

An early modern woman was required to be meek, silent and obedient, her domain was the domestic and publishing placed her in the public, male, realm. However as the sixteenth century wore on an increasing number of aristocratic women, like the Countess of Pembroke, who turned Wilton House into a ‘paradise for poets’, were producing secular poetry and dramas for private circulation.

For me one late Elizabethan woman writer always stood out though, as she wasn’t aristocratic and also because she was the first English woman who could be called a professional poet. Yet Aemilia Lanyer is almost unknown outside of academic circles. It is for this reason that I wanted to depict her in my novel The Girl in the Glass Tower alongside Arbella Stuart, to whom she dedicated one of her poems.

Aemilia Lanyer was born in 1569 to a family of renowned court musicians the Bassanos. There is circumstantial evidence that they were of Jewish heritage but Aemilia was baptised as a Christian. After the death of her father she was taken under the aegis of the Countess of Kent, who ensured that she received a humanist education, learning Latin. She also spent time in the household of the Countess of Cumberland as a tutor to her daughter, the diarist, Anne Clifford.

As a young woman she became the mistress of Henry Hunsdon, the first cousin of Elizabeth I, who was some forty-five years her senior. Hunsdon was a great patron of the theatre, and so Aemilia would almost certainly have been familiar with Shakespeare’s circle. Indeed, there has been much speculation that she was the ‘Dark Lady’ of the sonnets, though any evidence for this is at best sketchy. On becoming pregnant, most probably with Hunsdon’s child, she was married to her relative the musician, Alfonso Lanyer.

In 1611 she published her book containing several short poems dedicated to prominent women,including Arbella Stuart, alongside the very fine Description of Cooke-ham, the first country house poem published in English, an accolade that is usually given to Ben Johnson’s exceedingly more famous To Penshurst, which was not published until 1616. Dominating the collection is the long poem, Salve Deus Rex Judeorum, a work, satirical in tone and proto-feminist in spirit, which seeks to redeem the vilified women of the Bible, and particularly Eve.

I take up Lanyer’s story in my novel four years later, after she has been widowed and left penniless by her husband’s reckless spending. I imagine her coming across a manuscript written by Arbella Stuart when she was imprisoned at the Tower of London, telling of her life. Aemilia (or Ami, as she is known in the novel) is forced to reconcile herself with the tragic consequences of the time when her own past coincided with Arbella’s. Almost nothing is known about Aemilia Lanyer during this time and these events are the product of my imagination for the purposes of my novel. But what we do know about Aemilia Lanyer’s later life is that she fulfilled her ambition to set up a school near Covent Garden, though it was not without its problems. She finally died in 1645, aged seventy-six but her legacy as an author lives on.

Ref: Woods Susanne, Ed. (1993) The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer & (1999) Lanyer, A Renaissance Woman Poet, Oxford UP

For more information about Elizabeth Fremantle's novels you can find her website on Elizabethfremantle.com. The Girl in the Glass Tower is published by Penguin

THERE'S SOMETHING ABOUT KATHERINE PARR – Elizabeth Fremantle

We all know that you can wait a hour for a bus and then three come along at once, but this seems to also apply to characters in historical novels. The particular character I have in mind, due to a personal interest, is Tudor Queen Katherine Parr, about whom there have been three very different fictional explorations in as many years.

In 2013 I published my novel QUEEN'S GAMBIT, which focuses on Parr's role as not only a royal wife but a political operator and flawed but canny survivor, last year there was CJ Sansom's acclaimed LAMENTATION, a thriller which places Parr's controversial and dangerous text, Lamentation of a Sinner, at the heart of a mystery and this year Philippa Gregory's THE TAMING OF THE QUEEN explores Parr's marriage to Henry VIII.

There are probably many reasons for a single figure to become the focus of such attention and in this case it is likely that some very good recent historical scholarship such as Linda Porter's excellent biography of 2010, KATHERINE THE QUEEN: THE REMARKABLE LIFE OF KATHERINE PARR, has played a part in bringing Parr's extraordinary life to our attention. Porter's  research has worked to rid Parr of the reputation of the dull nursemaid of popular belief and show her as an intelligent and ambitious woman who strove to further religious reform during the upheaval of the Reformation.

This portrayal of Parr as an intellectual who was prepared to  forward her beliefs at great personal risk and engage in political power-play in a man's world, casts her, in my mind, as rounded and interesting subject likely to engage modern readers. As Parr was not born into royalty, yet rose to be the most powerful woman in England, she serves in some ways to prefigure ideas of social mobility and as a woman (indeed one of the first) to publish an original work in English she was trying to circumvent contemporary notions of female silence and obedience in her resolute determination to be heard. This refusal to be silent is another decidedly modern trait.

Yet Parr was no po-faced scholar; she was a passionate and headstrong woman – her ill-advised fourth marriage, a mistake that would ultimately be her undoing, serves as testimony to this. It is her flaws as much as her strengths, the contradictions in her character, that made her appeal so greatly to me as a writer of fiction.  I think what lies at the heart of Parr's recent popularity is that, as an individual and, to use a Gladwellism, an 'outlier', she seems somehow less distant than other Tudor women – more like us.


Elizabeth Fremantle is the author of a trilogy of Tudor novels all focusing on notable women: QUEEN'S GAMBIT on Katherine Parr, SISTERS OF TREASON on the younger sisters of Lady Jane Grey and WATCH THE LADY on Penelope Devereux, the controversial sister of the Earl of Essex. Her next book, about Arbella Stuart, will be published by Penguin next year. Find more information about Elizabeth's work on elizabethfremantle.com

DOG TALES – Elizabeth Fremantle

It is no secret that I'm a dog lover and a recent research trip to look at Dutch art offered up a multitude of painted canines which brought to mind the dogs in my novels.  My work is teeming with  the creatures but they are not only included on authorial whim, the beloved pets of my protagonists can more often than not be found in the historical record.

The first of these is Katherine Parr's dog Rig who is featured in Queen's Gambit. When I was first researching the book I visited Sudeley Castle where Queen Katherine died. There are a few personal items that belonged to her in the collection there: a love letter she wrote to Thomas Seymour before they married, as well as a lock of her hair and a tooth, both taken from her grave when it was rediscovered in the eighteenth century. It was the tooth, clearly an item of great sentimental significance to have been buried with her, that particularly resonated for me. It was not a human tooth and seemed to have once belonged to a small dog. Knowing about her dog Rig I thought it possible that this was a carefully kept relic from a beloved pet. From this I gained a glimpse of understanding across the years about my protagonist and her love for her canine companion.

Many women in the Tudor court had small dogs, as we can see from the portraiture of the period. An amusing anecdote which made it into Queen's Gambit is that of Katherine Parr's dear friend and fellow religious reformer, the Duchess of Suffolk, who named her dog Gardiner. Seemingly innocuous, the name was in fact an audacious dig at her enemy Bishop Gardiner a religious conservative who would eventually attempt, and nearly succeed, to topple Queen Katherine.

Another Katherine, Lady Katherine Grey, of my second novel Sisters of Treason, had a great love of animals and kept a number of dogs. We know this because it is recorded that her pets, canines amongst them, destroyed the furniture in her rooms when she was imprisoned in the Tower of London. I characterised her as a girl who loved to be loved and what more fitting a symbol of this than a pack of small, adoring dogs. We have no names for her pets so I had to invent them and one, Stan, has a story of his own. As I was writing the first scene of Katherine Grey surrounded by her pets my editor emailed to say that her much loved terrier had died, so I thought it fitting to name one of Katherine's puppies in memory of him.

Dogs feature again in Watch the Lady but my protagonist, Penelope Devereux's puppy Fides is pure invention. I have included however The Earl of Leicester's old russet and white hound, who wanders about lost at Wanstead after his owner's death. This dog was taken from a painting from the mid 1560s where such a hound can be found in the corner of the image gazing lovingly at his master.

Dogs were often included in portraits to signify fidelity and presumably the hound here is included as a demonstration of Leicester's loyalty to Queen Elizabeth, who favoured him and many believed might marry him. Interestingly though, he is said to have had a flirtation with one of the Queen's maids Lettice Knollys (later to become his wife) in 1565 and by 1568 he was conducting a liaison with the recently widowed Lady Sheffield, who maintained they had married in secret even on her deathbed. This was never proven and the son they produced was named a bastard. In the light of this it is amusing to speculate that the dog in the painting might well be there more as a way to cover Leicester's disloyalty, than to indicate his faithfulness.

There is a delightful picture of Arbella Stuart, the heroine of my next novel, with two parrots, a pair of finches, a monkey and a small white dog. I rather fancifully took this dog to be Geddon, Mary Queen of Scot's Skye terrier who it is said had to be prised from her decapitated corpse. I have imagined that the animal found its way back to  Arbella at Chatsworth with Mary's host/jailer, the Earl of Shrewsbury, who was Arbella's step grandfather. Another portrait of Arbella in later life, shows her with a tan and white spaniel tucked in the crook of her arm. In the novel this little dog, which I named Ruff, becomes the device by which she encounters someone who is to change the course of her life.

It's hard to imagine creating the world of a novel without including the creatures that were so much part of the fabric of life in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, either as pets or working animals. For me they are a means to conjure the past and also a way to help draw my characters. The way an individual responds to the  animals, as well as the people, around them can reveal a great deal about their personality.


Find out more about Elizabeth Fremantle's books on her website elizabethfremantle.com

"Here lyeth Quene Kateryn" by Ann Turnbull

From Cleeve Hill in the Cotswolds you can look down and see Sudeley Castle, close to the small town of Winchcombe.

Sudeley has been restored, but some of the ruins of earlier buildings remain - notably the walls and tall Gothic windows of Richard III's banqueting hall, and the shell of a 15th century tithe barn, which now houses an enchanting garden of roses, hollyhocks, clematis and wisteria.

Sudeley - a stronghold since Anglo-Saxon times - was slighted after the Civil Wars and left uninhabitable. For two centuries it was used by tenant farmers for sheltering animals, and some of its stones were carried away. King Charles I's campaign bed - a great demountable four-poster of solid carved oak - lay forgotten in a barn on the estate. And the body of Queen Katherine Parr lay buried beneath a wall in the ruined chapel and was not rediscovered for more than two hundred years.

Katherine Parr? Well, when Henry VIII died in 1547, Sudeley passed to Thomas Seymour, who went on to marry the king's widow, Katherine Parr. So Katherine came to live at Sudeley, along with Thomas's ward, the eleven-year-old Lady Jane Grey. Sadly, Katherine's time at Sudeley was short - little more than a year. She became pregnant and died of puerperal fever a week after the birth, aged thirty-six. When her lead coffin was discovered and opened in 1782, her body was found to be wrapped in six layers of linen cerecloth, which had kept it perfectly preserved (though later openings eventually reduced it to dust.)  In the 19th century the chapel was rebuilt and re-dedicated as St Mary's Church, and Katherine was laid in a marble tomb inscribed with the words found on her coffin, "Here lyeth Quene Kateryn, wife to Kyng Henry VIII..."

The castle was sensitively restored by John and William Dent, wealthy glove-makers, who bought it in 1837. Since then, the present owners have built up some fascinating collections and exhibitions. Emma Dent, the Victorian chatelaine, was a great collector, and there is a room full of antique lace and embroidery, including a 16th century lace canopy said to have been made by Anne Boleyn for the christening of Princess Elizabeth. Emma also devoted energy to both buildings and gardens, and can be seen below, in topiary, sitting in her herb garden, reading a book - though she was so busy with good works around Winchcombe (providing almshouses, a school, a new church, a piped water supply, teaching at a night school and running sewing classes) that it's hard to imagine she had much time to sit and read.

Some highlights of the exhibitions for me were:

Katherine Parr's privy, curtained and upholstered in crimson velvet.

The Vertue drawings - copies of thirty-three portraits by Holbein of members of the Tudor court.

Charles I's despatch box, in which he kept all his correspondence during the Civil War - one of the spoils of the battle of Naseby.

Charles I's campaign bed - now restored and refurnished.

Katherine Parr's books and her letter to Thomas Seymour accepting his marriage proposal.

Oh, and the Roman mosaic - another thing for which we have to thank Emma Dent. But that will be the subject of a separate blog...

TUDOR FICTION: is it all sex and scandal?

I thought I’d run out of things to say about Wolf Hall when my attention was drawn to Laura Miller’s article in Salon, in which she responds to the TV adaptation of Wolf Hall in the context of other Tudor texts. In it Miller sings the praises of Mantel’s serious approach to a period that she scathingly describes as ‘for chicks,’ applauding the way the author draws out the idea of the Tudor period marking the break from Medieval feudalism and the beginning of the modern world, with the increase of social mobility in figures like Cromwell.

This is all well and good and cogently argued, but Miller also takes an opportunity to serve a crushing and sweeping blow to pretty much all other fictional material set in the period. She compares Mantel’s ‘high-brow’ approach with what she disparagingly terms ‘princess novels’ or Tudor set fiction that is focused on women’s lives. Her main point being that such fiction foregrounds lascivious sex and scandal and in so doing makes it no different to schlocky high-school teen dramas.

Philippa Gregory comes in for a particularly contemptuous drubbing, accused of digging out uninteresting female figures from the past and padding out their stories with romance that has no historical validity. Though Miller makes her point well and there is legitimacy to some of what she says, certainly about the gratuitous soft-porn elements of the Showtime series The Tudors, and the wilful manipulation of history in the teen drama Reign, what she overlooks is the serious nature of some of the themes of much Tudor set fiction.

Even the more commercial, romance led, Tudor novels have a profound darkness that makes them a poor comparison to the teen dramas cited. Yes, there are parallels to situations in which young women are living at close quarters and competing for prestige. Miller correctly points out that in such novels much is made of clothing but refrains from exploring the value and symbolic resonance of women’s clothing in these texts. For the Tudors, an upstart family with a tenuous grip on the throne, clothing was a crucial indication of status and thus merits description. Indeed Mantle also employs, to great effect, descriptions of clothing to create a sense of the importance of the outward representation of rank and affiliation through apparel within the courtly arena, where position and allegiance were of primary significance.

The cumbersome clothing women were laced into was also a part of the broader denial of female freedom in much the same way 21st century women living in fundamentalist Islamic communities are required to cover and restrict their bodies. The early modern female body was a precious commodity and was at once expected to be a site of allure and yet also to be contained and kept out of sight to guard its value.

To view such narratives as inconsequential refuses to acknowledge that for these Tudor ‘princesses’ the stakes were vertiginously high. They describe a world in which young women were brutally murdered for political ends and had to negotiate a dangerous path through a male power structure that gave them no agency.

Surely any woman who can gain even a modicum of power in an oppressively misogynist system merits having her story told, and many of the generation of serious historians who are rediscovering such stories would agree. It is unhelpful to regard all such fiction as romantic clap-trap that uses sex as its narrative drive, when marriage was the primary route to power for women. What is noteworthy about these stories is that it becomes impossible to separate sexual and state policy. Princesses are interesting because of, rather than in spite of, the power that was invested in their bodies, and how they used that power makes for fascinating reading.

By comparing a novel about Anne Boleyn to Gossip Girl, Miller is refusing to acknowledge that these privileged young women are unlike their contemporary counterparts because their stories are inherently tragic – real tragedy that ends in brutal death – when he worst outcome in teen drama is social ostracisation. What could be more pitiful than the execution of of Catherine Howard. Yes, she may have been a shallow girl preoccupied with love (she was seventeen, for goodness' sake) but her life was caught up in a political vortex over which she had no control and as such it is worth inspecting as a means to understand the extraordinary lack of power such women – even queen consorts – had in those days. These women were rendered shallow and infantalised by the paternal hegemony to which they belonged. To compare them with modern women who have sexual and professional freedom, who are educated and, importantly, choose to be largely concerned with superficial matters is missing the point.

Early modern women had no freedom, yet they found ways to make themselves heard. For the first time the humanist project, led in England by Thomas More, encouraged education for women, albeit for a limited and privileged cohort, which was surely an important social change that merits our attention. Take Katherine Parr for example, a minor queen of apparently little political importance, but few are aware that she was one of the first women to publish an original text in the English language. At a time when women were obliged to be silent and submissive, to publish religious political texts was an audacious and dangerous act. Indeed these educated females laid the ground for an unprecedented half-century of female rule in England. To say such lives are not worth examining and reduce them to little more than titillating tales, plays into the hands of the misogyny that sought to silence them in the first place.

Because Cromwell’s story is essentially one of social mobility and money, doesn’t automatically invest it with greater legitimacy, as Miller suggests, indeed it could be said that as women’s bodies were a currency traded at the highest level their stories have equal importance from a socio-economic perspective. Social mobility too was mediated through the bodies of women. Consider how the minor landed gentry such as the Seymours and the Parrs became elevated in such a way. These women’s lives provide a vital key in understanding the period, so please let’s not do as David Starkey has long done, and dismiss them as trivial.

For Miller's article:
http://www.salon.com/2015/04/05/our_enduring_tudor_obsession_sex_ambition_wealth_and_power_never_go_out_of_style/

Elizabeth Fremantle is the author of Tudor trilogy: Queen's Gambit, Sisters of Treason and Watch the Lady. ElizabethFremantle.com

Queen's Gambit, about the life of Katherine Parr, has been chosen for World Book Night.

Being Heard: From Pamphleteers to Twitter Trolls – Elizabeth Fremantle

Twitter Trolls are a twenty-first century phenomenon and one that exposes the darkness that lurks beneath the surface of society. I am always shocked to hear of the venomous attacks launched on people who find themselves in the public eye by those hidden behind the veil of anonymity that social media offers. Such practices have once more come to light with the recent news of Brenda Leyland's presumed suicide in the wake of allegations that she was behind a Twitter smear campaign against the McCanns, a couple who have not only suffered the loss of their daughter but also had to bear a tirade of abuse and accusation, mostly based on poor reporting and misinformation. It seems people are determined to have their say, no matter what the cost.

But though the platforms that allow such anonymous personal outpourings are a recent innovation, the desire to have one's opinions heard, however unpalatable or inaccurate, is nothing new and can be traced back to the rise of the pamphlet in the sixteenth century. Pamphlets originated in the wake of the invention of the printing press, with the Reformation, and were used to spread the new religious ideas that were taking hold across northern Europe. But before long pamphleteers, who were often anonymous or hidden behind pseudonyms, were spreading scandal as much as politics and religion; and the pamphlets themselves were much like today's social media in that they were ephemeral and not designed to endure.

The heroine of my novel Queen's Gambit, Katherine Parr, widow of Henry VIII, fell foul of the scurrilous pamphleteers when she married her fourth husband Thomas Seymour with what was considered indecent haste in the wake of Henry's death. The scandal mongers had a field-day, loudly citing her hasty marriage as evidence of her wantonness and the insatiable nature of womankind. London's watering holes reverberated with lewd jokes about the Dowager Queen and her untrammelled sexual desire, so much so that Seymour tried to suppress the crude tirade with an act of parliament.

By the middle of Elizabeth I's reign pamphlets had superseded ballads as a means of imparting news and scandal to the public and were increasingly used in attempts to topple unpopular powerful figures such as the Queen's favourite The Earl of Leicester. A long pamphlet titled Leicester's Commonwealth was published with the sub-heading: 'Conceived, spoken and published with most earnest protestation of dutiful good-will and affection towards the realm.' It was actually a character assassination of the earl and filled with accusations of all kinds of wicked behaviour directed at him, suggesting that he was behind the murder of his first wife Amy Robsart, a scandal I write about in my novel Sisters of Treason, and also that he had a hand in the death of Lettice Knollys first husband, to pave the way for his own marriage to Lettice. 'No man's wife' the anonymous author stated, 'can be free from him, whom his fiery lust he liketh to abuse.' The Queen, however, was unswayed by the pamphleteer's scurrilous accusations and Leicester remained her favourite until his death.

Find out more about Elizabeth Fremantle and her Tudor novels on elizabethfremantle.com 


References:

Pamphlets and Pamphleteers in Early Modern England – Joad Raymond

Katherine the Queen: The Remarkable Life of Katherine Parr – Linda Porter

KATHERINE PARR: Character, Courage and Commitment – by Elizabeth Fremantle

As March is National Women’s History Month, celebrating women of character, courage and commitment and also coincides with the paperback publication of my novel QUEEN’S GAMBIT I felt it apt to take a look at my protagonist Katherine Parr, best known for being the wife who ‘survived’ marriage to England’s best known Tudor tyrant, Henry VIII.

I am often asked why I chose to write about Katherine Parr and it is true that superficially she seems less interesting than some of her more obviously glamorous predecessors. But scratch the surface of her story and a dynamic, charismatic woman emerges. She may not have been born a princess to make a great alliance, nor did her life come to a truly dramatic climax with execution, but she was a highly intelligent well-loved woman and an astute political operator who understood how to play the game of power in a dissembling court, using her position to support religious reform at great personal cost. This is a woman who managed to out-fox her powerful adversaries and survive a plot on her life. She was an author too, publishing two books at a time when to publish at best risked ridicule and at worst might seriously compromise a woman’s virtue. She was canny enough to wait until after Henry’s death to publish her second book, a highly political and unashamedly reformist tome. She might not have become known as the wife who ‘survived’ had she not had the sense to defer publication.

Katherine Parr NPG

There is much to admire about Katherine Parr’s dynamism, intellect and ability to survive. She was also married no less than four times.  But one of the things that most appealed to me about her story was that she was also flawed. She made a disastrous decision in the name of misguided romance with devastating consequences, and it is this picture of a truly accomplished woman becoming a fool for love that fascinated me. The contradiction in her character makes her, for me, so very human and relatable to us today. Who doesn’t know of a clever woman who has fallen foul of romance?

But QUEEN’S GAMBIT does not only tell of a remarkable queen. There are so many women’s lives; lives lived with character, courage and commitment, which went unrecorded. I wanted to explore another view of the Tudor court through a forgotten woman, endowing her with these characteristics. Katherine Parr’s maid Dorothy Fountain allowed me to do this. Dorothy, or Dot as she is named in the novel, is largely a creation of my imagination, a kind of everywoman who embodies all those forgotten lives. We know almost nothing about her; only that she served as maid to Katherine Parr’s stepdaughter Margaret Neville during her second marriage. We know she remained with the family, serving Katherine Parr when she was Queen, that she was left four pounds a year in Margaret’s will and that she married a man named William Savage who might have been a musician. She is little more than a name on a list in the annals of history.

An unsung woman like Dot

It is not much to go on and for the purposes of QUEEN’S GAMBIT I made Dot lower born than she was likely to have been in reality, as I wanted to offer a different perspective on the court – a 'below stairs' view. In the novel, she is visited by exceptional circumstances and comes to move in an elevated world, but her experience of it is utterly different to those born into the nobility.

 Dot gave me the chance to look at loyalty and true friendship between women, allowing me to show Katherine as a woman who was both loyal herself, and inspired great loyalty, even in an uneducated young woman well beneath her in the social scale. Literacy and education was something entirely beyond such a woman’s reach and in Dot I wanted to imagine her as having an intellectual curiosity, striving to educate herself against the expectations of her age. As an adjunct to this I touched on the possibilities for social mobility that were beginning to open up (it must be said mostly for men) in the renaissance period.

Through the eyes of these two women whose lives intersect and yet are so different, I hoped to convey something of what it was like to be a woman living in the court of Henry VIII at a tumultuous time in history.

QUEENS GAMBIT by Elizabeth Fremantle is published in paperback on March 13th

ElizabethFremantle.com