"Hans the Most Famous"* by Mary Hoffman

 

Hans Holbein the Younger, Self-portrait

Think of Henry Vlll and what picture floats into yoir mind? Or Thomas Cromwell, or Thomas More? The likely answer is an image painted by Hans Holbein the Younger, a German-Swiss Master who spent more than a third of his life in England and weathered the stresses of the king's marriages, religious reforms and and the many shocks that Tudor England was heir to. In fact you can't really think of the Tudors at all without the man who became known as the King's Painter.

There is an exhibition on till 14th April at the King's Gallery in Buckingham Palace (though it was still the Queen's Gallery when we visited it in January) called Holbein at the Tudor Court and it is well worth your time to go and see it. 

Young Hans was born in the autumn/winter of 1497 in Augsburg, Bavaria the son of Hans the Elder, who was also a professional painter. His older brother, Ambrosius, was a painter too and their uncle Sigismund (or Sigmund) seems also to have worked in Hans the Elder's studio. The boys would have been brought up in an atmosphere of portraits and altarpieces, of oil paints and book design.

Augsburg had been passed over by the plague that ravaged most of Europe in earlier centuries and, with access to the forests and rivers of Bavaria, had become a booming centre for timber, metal, paper and textile industries.The Holbeins lived in a three-storey building by a narrow canal, reached  over a little wooden bridge.

Hans the Elder's art was largely devotional, paintings and murals on religious themes, painting textiles and carpets in exquisite detail, a technical skill inherited by his younger and more famous son. 200 sketches survive from Hnas the Elder, mostly portraits. But art at the time was not valued in the way it became in later centuries. An "artist" was an alien concept in the Renaissance; even Vasari in 1550 wrote his Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects without use of that term. The social position of the Holbeins and other what we would now call 'artists" in both Northern and Southern Europe was that of an artisan, someone paid for his labours as piecework or on commission.

But the prosperous merchants and bankers of Augsburg were keen to have their likenesses commemorated, whether in portraits or as donors on lavish altarpieces.

Ambrosius and Hans, drawn by their father

 

By his late teenage years Hans the younger had moved to Basel with his older brother Ambrosius, where they became apprenticed to another Hans, Herbster, Basel's leading painting of his day. They found work making woodcuts for use in book production in the young industry of printing and one of their first jobs was to drawmarginal pictures for a work by Desiderius Erasmus, the leading Humanist of BNorthern Europe.

A few years later it seems that Ambrosius might have died, since nothing more is recorded of his work. Young Hans, on the other hand, thrived, marrying a well-off widow, Elsbeth, who already had one sone and started bearing more children to her second husband. And in 1923, Hans painted his first portrait of Erasmus, who recommended the artist to his friend Sir Thomas More in England.

Desiderius Erasmus by Hans Holbein the Younger

 

Three years later and Hans quit Basel to seek his fortune in London but this was just his first foray into England. He went back to Basel for four more years, painting his wife and their two older children, in the time between many commissions. But Basel was a hotspot for Protestant Reform and the political upheavals there made the city a dangerous place for artists, whose freedom to paint whatever they liked was strictly curtailed.

Perhaps this is why Hans went back to London in 1532, where another kind of upheaval was soon to rock the Tudor court. By then Henry Vlll had convinced himself that the lack of a male heir from his wife Katherine of Aragon was God's punishment of the king for marryting his older brother's widow. At least, that was Henry's justification for wanting to divorce his wife and marry a young lady-in-waiting, Anne Boleyn, in the belief she would bring forth a prince to inherit his crown. Henry was infatuated with Anne and took his case to the Pope and to anyone that would listen. To make a long and complicated story short, he solved his problem by splitting from the Church in Rome and becomiong Supreme Head of the Church of England - a strategem suggested by Thomas Cromwell, who was becoming the king's right hand man.

Useless then for Holbein to play his card of introduction from Thomas More, who was opposed to the king's second marriage, and he might have returned to Basel with his tail between his legs, since More resigned his role as Lord Chancellor in May 1532.

Sir Thomas More by Hans Holbein the Younger

The coming men were of the Boleyn faction and Thomas Cromwell himself; Holbein lost no time in making himself known to them and it seems as if art won out over politics as this former protegé of More's gained favour at the Tudor Court. He started modestly, with portraits of rich merchants, which must have recalled his early life in Augsburg, but in 1533, Holbein painted what is probably still his most famous work, The Ambassadors, now in the National Gallery. Aristocrat Jean de Dinteville and  Bishop Georges de Selve were French diplomats for Francis 1, who were both in London at the time. 

This enigmatic painting, with the elongated skull in the foreground, has led to much speculation. It is said to combine the Arts and Sciences, religion and politics and its technical skill is beyond doubt. Maybe it was this that established young Hans, not yet forty, as the premier painter of the 16th century in England.

1533 was a momentous year for England and Henry. He had married his Anne but his divorce from Katherine had not been sanctioned by the Pope and he was excommunicated. Holbein was commissioned to paint a portrait of Anne Boleyn, but after her fall from grace and execution in 1536, all memorials of her were expunged from the record. This charming drawing of her in a night cap survives and is in the exhibition:

By 1536, Holbein the Younger was designated "the king's painter" (not the only one) and paid £30 a year by Henry for his services. Franny Moyle's magnificent book The King's Painter (Head of Zeus 2021) suggests that the king had a genuine affection for the artist and held him in great esteem. But it was a dangerous thing to be a friend of Henry's as Thomas More and Thomas Wolsey had found to their cost and Thomas Cromwell would in time experience. 

Earl of Essex (Thomas Cromwell) by Holbein the Younger

 

Holbein was not so associated with the Boleyns that he suffered for the connection after Anne's death and he continued to paint the prominent men and women of the court. In 1537, the king gave Holbein the commission of depicting his whole family in a mural for Whitehall and, although this work is lost, a copy of it is the origin of all our ideas of the Tudor monarch in his heyday, sumptuously dressed, legs apart in perhaps the first "power stance" of English politics.

Copy by Remigius after Holbein the Younger

 

The mural featured Henry's parents, Henry Vll and Elizabeth of York, behind him and Jane Seymour, his third queen, on the right. Holbein also painted a full portrait of Queen Jane, the sketch for which is in the exhibition.

Jane Seymour by Hans Holbein the Younger

As, surely, everyone knows, Queen Jane died shortly after giving birth to Hanry's only legitimater son and heir, who became Edward Vl. This was when things became perilous for Holbein, who was tasked with depicting the candidates to be Henry's fourth wife. One of the king's early choices was Cristina of Denmark, whose half-portrait is in the exhibition (a copy - for the dazzling full-length portrait you must go to the National Gallery).

Cristina of Denmark by Holbein the Younger

Henry's courtship of Cristina was unsuccessful - she is said to have valued her head too much to accept him - and a later candidate was Anne of Cleves. Hans painted a most beguiling portrait of her but Henry found it untrue to life. The disastrous marriage and annulment that followed might have cost Holbein his head, since it contributed to the execution of Thomas Cromwell, who had brokered the match. But Hans kept his head down, and attached to his shoulders. He had lost all his patrons - More, Anne Boleyn and Cromwell but he survived in the torrid world of King Henry's Court, to fight another day.

Anne of Cleves by Holbein the Younger (Louvre, Paris)

 

There is a miniature that might be of Henry's fifth wife, the ill-fated and short-lived Katherine Howard. Certainly many of Holbein's paintinhgs were copied as miniatures and circulated among Tudor nobles. The exhibition is full of these and many, many exquisite drawings - Mary Shelton, Thomas Wyatt, Thomas More, to name just a few. But you might want to supplement the experience with a an add-on trip to the National Gallery to see Cristina and the Ambassadors. And the National Portrait Gallery for Thomas Cromwell and a copy of Sir Thomas More. The shop at the Monarch's Gallery will sell you the catalogue but I recommend Franny Moyle's book in preference. It is lavishly illustrated and you should not skimp but buy the hardback, as the paperback is inferior.

What were the qualities that made Holbein ther Younger so prominent and his work so enduring in its appeal? Flattery certainly wasn't among them. The king looks powerful, yes, but his tiny mouth and meaty face are far from attrractive and Jane Seymour is positively plain. (Even Holbein's own self-portrait at the head of this post, painted in the year before his death, does him no favours). It is of course possible that standards of beauty/handsomeness have changed somewhat since Tudor times.  

Holbein's technical skills afre beyond doubt, whether in depicting rich fabrics, furs and lace in detail or the modest folds of a simple gown. His main strength seems to be an unsurpassed ability to present us with the sitter itself. Whether the figure is noble, distinguished, sly or "looking like a murderer." as a character in Hilary Mantel's Cromwell trilogy describes his poirtrait, he or she looks out at us over the centuries, saying "this is who I am; take me or leave me."

Hans Holbein the Younger died in 1543, at the age of around 46, possibly of the plague that ravaged London in that year. His luck finally ran out but at the time of his death he was the "most famous" English painter (he had taken English citizenship so let us claim him as our own). Nearly six hundred years later his works are exhibited in a sell-out show, which you should try to see before it closes. 

 

* from a poem by Nicholas Bourbon

History – fact or fiction? By Mary Hoffman

 

Most of us in this group, since it started in 2011, have been writers of historical fiction. We’ve had “straight” historians, like John Guy, as guests and some of our number, like Clare Mulley have written non-fiction, Some people do both – and it can be quite confusing.



Take Alison Weir, for example. She, who has also been a guest on The History Girls blog, is a prolific writer on historical subjects such as the Wars of the Roses, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Henry Vlll and the Boleyn sisters. But she also writes novels about some of the same characters, notably her Six Tudor Queens sequence about Henry’s notorious marriages.



So how do they differ, since they inevitably share the same events and characters? I’ve had an opportunity to compare two books that cover some of the same period to see how a novelist chooses to write about the same plots that appear in a historian’s account of the identical events. The novelist is Alison Weir herself, in her new novel, published last May by Headline, Elizabeth of York: The Last White Rose. The non-fiction writer is Michèle Schindler, whose De la Pole Father and Son: the Duke, the Earl and the Struggle for Power, was published by Amberley last December.



So, two books about Plantagenet history and those famous roses, partly invented by Shakespeare, who was more a writer of fiction than he was a historian. Elizabeth of York was the daughter of Edward lV and his wife, Elizabeth Wydeville and was destined to become the wife of Henry Vll and Queen of England, uniting the houses of York and Lancaster. Weir’s novel about her is the first in a trilogy.



John de la Pole did not feature in a play by Shakespeare, although his father did. But it’s not that father and son combo Schindler writes about. That was William, the duke of Suffolk who stood proxy for Henry Vl at his wedding to Margaret of Anjou. No, it is John who inherited his murdered father’s title and married another Elizabeth, not Edward iV’s daughter but his sister. Are you muddled enough yet? John de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk, became Elizabeth of York’s uncle when he married her aunt.



The titles don’t really help: Weir’s doesn’t sound like a novel, although “The Last White Rose” does. Schindler’s might have been “The de la Pole dynasty,” since it begins with William, goes on to John and ends with John Junior, who was Richard lll’s named heir. Those de la Poles continued to be a thorn in the side of Henry Tudor for many years.



But if we look at 1470, we can see how different a novel is from a work of history. In this year, the Earl of Warwick (the “kingmaker”), conspired with George, Duke of Clarence to overthrow Edward lV, with a long-term view of putting George on the throne. In the short term, they made do with releasing the previous king, Henry Vl, from the Tower of London and parading him through the streets as the true king. Edward had fled to Burgundy with his younger brother Richard and Queen Elizabeth, heavily pregnant, had sought sanctuary with her mother and daughters in Westminster. 

Elizabeth Wydeville

 
These events come 130 pages in to Schindler’s book and are described thus: “This must have been a tense time for John and Elizabeth. Since the party seeking exile in Burgundy included two of Elizabeth’s brothers, she must have been very worried about their fate…[T]hey would have learnt that Edward’s heavily pregnant wife, Elizabeth Woodville [sic], and their three daughters had fled to sanctuary in Westminster Abbey, that Elizabeth gave birth to a son shortly afterwards and that Henry Vl had been released from confinement in the Tower after five long years and reinstalled on the throne.”

This paragraph in the de la Pole book summarises twenty pages and more of the opening chapter of Weir’s novel, where the reader is thrust in medias res, as the princess Elizabeth and her sisters are bundled into a wherry and taken down the river, where they are warmly welcomed by the Abbot and given shelter. The long-awaited son and heir is born at the beginning of the second chapter.

But, since Elizabeth is only rising five, a lot of the history that has gone before can by explained to her by her grandmother and Weir can take the reader through recent events by this device, which she does very skilfully.

The elder Suffolk is barely mentioned in Weir’s novel, unsurprisingly since Schindler tells us how he kept himself out of politics and was not often at court. But there are occasional references in the novel to “Aunt Suffolk and her son Lincoln” and the younger John assumes an ever more important role. He was the Earl of Lincoln and would have inherited his father’s title if he had not come to a sticky end. 

Coat of Arms of John, 2nd Duke of Suffolk

 

One thing that emerges both from the history book and the novel is the sheer number of children born to noble and royal women and the number of babies and children lost. John Senior and his wife Elizabeth, the Duke and Duchess of Suffolk, had thirteen children. Elizabeth of York’s parents had ten together and Elizabeth Wydevile had already had two sons by her first husband, Lord Grey.

What the novelist does is show you that a factual history can’t (and mustn’t): the emotions stirred by every birth and death. Even, or perhaps especially, the loss of an older child, is a cause for great grief. Here is Weir describing the death of Elizabeth’s closest sister, Mary, at fifteen:

“Elizabeth slept in her chair that night. She woke to find Mother rocking a corpse in her arms, keening softly, her cheeks streaked with tears. She burst out wailing.

Father came running, summoned by the doctor. He folded Elizabeth in his arms and held her tightly. ‘She is with God now. You must be glad for her.’ His voice broke, and he turned to the bed. ‘Our sweet angel is at peace, Beth.’ He embraced both the Queen and his lost child, then gave way to the most piteous weeping.”

There are many such losses described in the novel - siblings, infants, young adults - and it is touching to read in the Autor’s Note that Weir herself lost a son in 2020, which must have informed her accounts of royal grief.

Back to John Junior, Earl of Lincoln, who in 1480 married Margaret FitzAlan, a union arranged by the King, Edward lV. His wife was much younger than his eighteen years and they did not live together. Indeed his marriage doesn’t seem to have affected the Earl’s life at all and his star was rising at court. He played a part in the baptism ceremony for Bridget, the youngest child of the King and Queen. 

Edward lV

 

Then came the shock of the unexpected death of the King in 1483. “The King’s eyes had closed. His face looked grey; his lips were blue. Gradually, his rasping breath slowed – and then there was silence.” Or, as Schindler succinctly puts it, “Edward’s death was sudden and shocking.” He was forty-one.

John Junior was chief mourner at the King’s funeral and soon came out in support of his uncle Richard of Gloucester as the new king. One of the new king’s closest friends, Francis Lovell, had been John’s foster brother and they were both part of the new court.

Elizabeth of York, however, was back in sanctuary at Westminster with her mother and siblings. In Weir’s novel, Richard is referred to as “the Usurper” and Elizabeth is stunned that her kindly “Uncle Gloucester” could have behaved so badly towards her family. 

 

So we come to the most crucial events in Richard’s brief reign: the disappearance of “the Princes in the Tower” and Richard’s plan to marry his niece. The princes, Edward’s heir and his younger brother, the Duke of York, were kept in the Tower of London while, in justification of his seizing the throne, Richard claimed they were bastards, as King Edward had made an earlier, secret, marriage, before wedding Elizabeth Wydeville.

Weir’s novel is divided into sections: Princess, Bastard, Queen and Matriarch, the second section set during her uncle’s reign. Her mother is convinced that Richard has had her sons murdered and is prostrate with grief. Their old life has disappeared and everything is uncertain.

In Schindler’s book, John Junior “chose to remain loyal to his uncle,” as did his parents. In Weir’s novel, Elizabeth embraces all the different theories that have been put forward about the princes’ fate, beginning by sharing her mother’s belief. Then, when she has returned to court, Richard convinces her that the boys were put to death on the orders of Buckingham and he knew nothing about it.

Later, after Richard’s death, she suspects that her husband to be, Henry Tudor, or his mother might have been responsible for removing such strong claimants to the throne, smoothing the way for his accession. Towards the end of the novel, she hears evidence from relatives of Sir James Tyrell that he commissioned two named thugs to carry out Richard’s orders.

When Richard’s heir, the Prince of Wales, dies in 1484 he makes John Junior his heir. John is heir presumptive anyway, as the oldest son of Richard’s older sister Elizabeth, Duchess of Suffolk. (He is also the eldest living grandson of Richard Duke of York).

Soon after their son died, Anne Neville, the King’s wife, also succumbed, probably to tuberculosis. But before she died, rumours were flying around that Richard planned to marry his own niece, Elizabeth of York.

This is a major plotline in Weir’s novel. Quite apart from what seems to us like incest and the need for a Papal dispensation, how could Elizabeth even consider marrying the man who usurped her young brother’s throne and probably killed him and his younger brother? And yet the historical Elizabeth did write a letter to the Duke of Norfolk to advance her marriage to the king, vowing she was “his in heart and in thoughts, in [body] and in all.” 

Elizabeth of York

 

Weir’s explanation is reasonably convincing: Richard had been a favourite uncle when he was Duke of Gloucester and Elizabeth couldn’t rid herself of the idea that he was kind and loving. He had explained away the absence of her brothers by blaming Buckingham and he implied in his proposal to her that his wife, her cousin Anne Neville, knowing she was dying, had virtually blessed the match, encouraging him to take another wife, one young and healthy, to give him more heirs. It works, more or less.

Schindler barely mentions this part of the story, dismissing it as rumour. And anyway, in January 1485, Richard let it be known he was pursuing a marriage with a Portuguese princess. Shortly after Anne’s funeral he made a public announcement that he had never intended to marry his niece. It looks remarkably as if he had flown a kite and been deterred by the negative public reaction. 

Richard 111

 

Richard was famously defeated at the Battle of Bosworth Field and Henry Tudor claimed the throne by might and right. His claim was pretty tenuous, as, with the deaths of the princes and the impossibility of the young Earl of Warwick inheriting, since his father Clarence had been attainted as a traitor, the rightful heir was Elizabeth of York. Weir is excellent on this angle, with Elizabeth wanting to reign jointly with Henry and not just to strengthen his claim by their marriage. And marry him she did, though her coronation was put off for some years.

And what of John de la Pole, Richard’s heir presumptive as long as the Yorks were excluded by the parliament ruling that they were illegitimate? Although the new king imprisoned several Yorkists, he seems, as Schindler informs us to have taken rather a shine to John Jnr and given him positions at court. His trust soon proved misplaced, as Lincoln and his foster brother Francis Lovell were fiercely loyal to the dead Richard and were plotting Henry’s overthrow.

Some embryonic rebellions fizzled out but then the opportunity came with the claims of Lambert Simnel. Simnel was a Pretender from Ireland, who claimed to be the young Earl of Warwick. The problem was that Warwick was still imprisoned in the Tower. But the boy had been so well coached that Henry suspected another Yorkist was behind the plot and his eye fell on John Junior. 

Henry Vll

 

Indeed, Weir does not buy Schindler’s notion that Henry found Lincoln trustworthy: “He means to be king, Bessy. I have suspected it all along.” Lincoln had fled to Burgundy under protection of the Duchess, Margaret, Elizabeth’s aunt, who seems to have been convinced by Simnel’s imposture. Simnel was crowned in Dublin as “King Edward” and Lincoln and Lovell’s forces joined and fought the king’s army at Stoke in June 1487.

It was to be fatal for Lincoln, who died fighting bravely, thwarting Henry of the chance to have him executed. The king took no revenge on John Senior but when he died and his son Edmund inherited the dukedom, Henry took back all John Junior’s possessions. Edmund was so short of funds that Henry demoted him from Duke to Earl and turned the whole family against him.

First Elizabeth John’s widow and then her sons Edmund and Richard fled to the Duchess of Burgundy. The unfortunate William was imprisoned in the Tower where he stayed till his death in 1539. Both his brothers continued to make attempts on the English thrones until their deaths. 

Both books are handsomely produced, especially Alison Weir’s novel and both have the family trees, which are so essential to histories and, increasingly, to Historical novels. I think there is room for both for anyone as obsessed with the Plantagenets as I am.

Scripting Hampton Court by Imogen Robertson

I wrote this:

OK - I know that statement needs a bit of unpacking. You see, what this photograph of Base Court at Hampton Court doesn’t show is a series of speakers cunningly hidden under the cobbles alongside the central path and in the wine fountain (out of the picture). It also doesn’t show what they are playing: a rich soundscape of passing carts and horses, the yapping of a lap-dog and the conversations of courtiers, ladies and servants going about their business one morning in 1536.

Eustace Chapuys is extracting gossip from Elizabeth Somerset by the fountain, and later locking horns with the Duke of Norfolk over the refusal of the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles the Fifth to recognise Anne Boleyn as Queen. Thomas Cromwell is interrogating the kitchen boys about the fancies to be served later that day, and the Lord Chamberlain is assigning rooms and chivvying the servants to get on with the unloading of their master’s goods. 

When the team at Hampton Court decided they wanted to recreate in sound the bustle and business of Base Court they turned to design agency Chomko & Rosier, who have already come up with some technologically advanced and sympathetically imagined ways of engaging the public with the context of a particular place, including work for Historic Royal Palaces. They've won awards. So Matt Rosier found a brilliant sound artist called James Bulley, and me.

Readers of this blog will know that I am not a sixteenth century specialist, at all, but before I was a full-time writer I was a TV, film and radio director working on such classics as The Shiny Show and The Numberjacks. Hang on ‘Numberjacks Seaside Adventure’ which I directed between getting the deal for Instruments of Darkness and publication has had 15 MILLION views. Please stand by while I hyperventilate for a bit. 

Just imagine if one in ten of those viewers grew up and bought one of my novels. I’d be J.K. Rowling.

....and I’m back in the room. 

Anyway, I’m still on a number of mailing lists from my TV days, so I saw Matt’s search for potential writers and sold him on my experience working in production to get myself the gig writing for the Base Court project. 

It’s been fascinating. This is a continuous loop of action where visitors might pause for a few seconds, just absorb the atmosphere as they wander by in search of an audio guide, or spend time seeking out bits of gossip and conversation. That means that any conventional ideas of storytelling are out of the window. On the other hand, it all needs to make sense as a coherent whole as invisible characters (Norfolk, Cromwell, the lap-dog) move around the space over the twenty minutes or so the piece runs. 

One of the speaker trenches. Glad I'm not involved in that bit.
Or the specifications for the speakers which I hear were very complicated.

In the end I thought of it like the staging of a ball scene in an opera on a grand stage. Lots of characters and individual members of the chorus have their own sequence of actions around the space, all happening at once, and the viewer decides which bits to focus on, or they let the whole thing wash over them.  In this case what they get to focus on will depend on where they are.

Because the scene is set at a particularly gossipy time (everyone is waiting to see if Anne will produce a son and wondering about Henry’s wandering eye), coming up with the conversations was relatively straight forward. I plunged into the notes from Hampton Court and, of course into the works of some great historians, such as the lovely Alison Weir. I also freely admit that my ideas of the personalities are deeply influenced by Hilary Mantel. Interestingly, I would find that a problem were I writing a novel about the Court, but not on this project. This project is nothing to do with what I think of the period, so it’s wonderfully ego-less compared with the business of writing novels. Also I know Mantel really, really does her research. 

I had, of course, the usual fears about accuracy, but not too badly, because everything I wrote was checked by Tracey Borman. (God, I wish I could get Amanda Vickery to go through my Crowther and Westerman novels. Or maybe not.).

The real joy of the process comes after the writing though. Working with actors again is such a pleasure, they bring so much to the text and convey with an inflection, a breath what would take you forever to get across on the page.

Then there's the edit. The sound I’ve been involved with in the past is designed to come out as a stereo mix from your TV while you sit and watch the pictures. This is a world you can walk around in, and which will sound completely different depending on where you are in the space and when.

Mixing on the move

James did most of the work of putting the piece together, and creating the underlying atmosphere, then we gathered to listen, discuss, move things about, add space, swap lines, find lute music and decide what a goblet being chucked on the cobbles sounds like. The back and forth is great. With novels, after months working in isolation, the whole process of waiting for comments, responding to them, working out the ramifications of changes through a text of 120K words is slow and painstaking. Here decisions are quick, the effects immediate, and the ownership shared. It’s…enlivening.

As with novel editing though, a lot depends on the relationships you have with the people you are working with and at the moment I’ve lucked into working with people I thoroughly like and admire. Which is nice. 

I'm sure I just said something really useful to James about the mix here.
By the way, this is a corner of Hampton Court, not James's studio which is much more comfortable.

I don’t seem to have put them off with my helpful comments yet either. Since recording Base Court, we’ve also been working on both sound and vision elements for the Tudor Kitchens. 

The research and writing has been more of a challenge this time, as it involves delving deep into the specifics and practicalities of this huge operation rather than the skim of gossip, but the same pleasures pertain - having the experts on hand to consult throughout including Richard Fitch and his team, the collaboration with Matt, James and now Kyle Waters on images, and the practical, hands on elements of filming. 

Oi!! You scum.#BoilingHouse pic.twitter.com/RPWJLPCGsE

— Richard Fitch (@tudorcook) February 15, 2018

I still love the megalomaniac’s paradise of world-building in novels, but it is a great and particular pleasure to get out into the world and be part of a team.

Oh and as I have a longstanding and almost Trumpain tendency to try and rope family members into things wherever possible, I just thought I’d point out that the cute little voice of ‘0’ and ‘1’ in that Numberjacks video is now one of the teenaged servant boys being quizzed by Cromwell in Hampton Court. Thank you, Dylan.   

If you want to see what we’ve been up to, the Base Court soundscape is now live, and the Tudor Kitchens should be ready for inspection by early May.

www.imogenrobertson.com

THE STUARTS ARE STILL THE NEW TUDORS – Elizabeth Fremantle

For some time now I've been hailing the Stuarts as the new Tudors. Last year saw a number of publications set in the seventeenth century, among others we had Linda Porter's excellent Royal Renegades on the children of Charles I, Andrew Taylor's hugely successful The Ashes of London, a thriller set during the Great Fire and my own The Girl in the Glass Tower, about Arbella Stuart who might have been England's first Stuart queen.

The trend shows no signs of abating with the publication of several more intriguing works of both fiction and non-fiction including the winner of the 2017 HWA Debut Crown, Beth Underdown's brilliant debut novel The Witchfinder's Sister, a beautifully written and chilling story woven around the Manningtree witch hunts.

Another dark offering comes in the shape of Katherine Clement's The Coffin Path, an eerie and compelling gothic ghost story set in the wilds of the Yorkshire moors. Other seventeenth century set fiction includes Jemahl Evans's This Deceitful Light, which continues his English Civil War series with great aplomb and Deborah Swift's Pleasing Mr Pepys, which shows explores the drama and intrigue of Pepys's world through the eyes of his wife.

In non-fiction Benjamin Woolley's fascinating portrait of the Duke of Buckingham, The King's Assassin: The Fatal Affair of George Villiers and James I, not only charts the rise of James I's most successful favourite but also explores the accusation made by a doctor at the King's deathbed that Buckingham had a hand in his benefactor's demise – all very juicy stuff indeed. Looking forward the immensely talented Leanda de Lisle has a new biography coming in January: The White King: Charles I, Traitor, Murderer, Martyr, which is every bit as thrilling as its title suggests. 

If you're looking for Christmas presents for friends and family who have read everything there is to read about the Tudors, then look no further.

Elizabeth Fremantle's The Girl in the Glass Tower is published by Penguin.

ARE THE STUARTS THE NEW TUDORS? Elizabeth Fremantle

I've been wondering if we have yet reached peak Tudor.

Henry VIII’s stinking, gangrenous leg has been endlessly speculated upon, every layer of Elizabeth I’s petticoats has been lifted and thoroughly searched beneath and Anne Boleyn’s execution has been read, learned and inwardly digested from all possible angles. There are even novels that speculate upon what might have been, had Anne and Henry produced a son. But still, doyenne of the period, Alison Weir, is bringing out a series of novels about each of Henry’s wives, Philippa Gregory, has returned from the Plantagenets to give us her version of Katherine Parr, I too have recently completed a Tudor Trilogy and, lest we forget, Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell novels have spawned an arts’ industry all of their own. Surely there is no stone left unturned on Henry’s marital mismanagement, but even so both the BBC and channel 5 are dishing up the six wives. It is not surprising then that Charlotte Higgins recently asked in the Guardian, Tudormania: Why can’t we get over it?

I have a hunch that when such questions begin to be asked about fads – like when people wonder
about why house prices have risen stratospherically high or why beards in Hoxton have begun to walk into rooms before their owners – it signals that their days are numbered. Interestingly two acclaimed Tudor biographers have lately turned to another equally dysfunctional family of royals: the Stuarts. Linda Porter will publish Royal Renegades, about the children of Charles I, in the autumn and Leanda de Lisle’s next book, The King’s Story, will unravel the enigma of Charles I himself. Also published this year are Andrea Zuvich’s, A year in the Life of Stuart Britain and Andrew Lacey’s, The Stuarts: A Very British Dynasty.

The Stuarts offer just as much in terms of drama as that of their Tudor cousins. The period was torn by dark sectarian troubles. The thwarted Gunpowder Plot was an event that – had it succeeded as intended, to wipe out the entire new dynasty – would have been as dramatic as the attack on the Twin Towers. It was a time of witch hunts, espionage, the exploration of the globe, a Queen who unceasingly promoted the dramatic arts and in James I, an openly homosexual king. James was a complex, flawed and unpopular individual whose son would be tried and executed in Cromwell’s revolution – a regicide that would irrevocably change the path of English history.

The 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death this year, with all the celebratory exhibitions and seasons of plays, also shines a light on the early Stuart period. We tend to think of the bard as an Elizabethan but some of his greatest and most enduring work fell in the Jacobean period. Think of Macbeth, King Lear and The Tempest. James Shapiro’s recent, and brilliant, 1606, Shakespeare and The Year of Lear, argues that this year, early in James I’s reign, was the apotheosis of the playwright’s career. Drama holds up a mirror to the culture it comes from, and so Shakespeare’s late plays, with their moral complexity and ambitious reach, suggest the society that gave rise to them must be infinitely fascinating.

Indeed, Shakespeare wasn’t alone. The Jacobean period is characterized by a thriving of the literary arts. Even The Bible had its James I makeover and poets such as John Donne and Ben Johnson remain familiar today; women were finding their voice too and publishing for the first time. In 1611 poet, Aemilia Lanyer, published Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, a brilliant defense of Eve that sought to shake up received thinking about women’s position in the world. Women stepping outside the box so publically gave rise to an anxiety about the female sex, which was articulated by tragedians like Webster and Middleton who, along with Shakespeare, were producing some of the most bloodthirsty heroines in all of English literature, with Lady Macbeth as flag bearer.

The cultural flourishing that reached its zenith with the early Stuarts was abruptly suspended when Cromwell closed the playhouses. But it returned in force with the restoration of Charles II, the most charismatic of the Stuarts, whose reign saw actresses on the stage, and in the King’s bed, for the first time. A recent exhibition at the National Maritime Museum, Samuel Pepys: Plague, Fire, Revolution thoroughly explored the events of the Restoration period as will Rebecca Rideal’s forthcoming book 1666: Plague, War and Hellfire.

The intrigue of the Stuart century is endless, so it is unsurprising that fiction writers have also had their heads turned. A couple of years ago Rose Tremain revisited the eponymous anti-hero of her 1989 Booker shortlisted novel, Restoration with Merivel, a brilliantly funny and touching rendition of debauched Restoration society. Katherine Clement’s duo of novels, The Crimson Ribbon and The Silvered Heart, tell of women leading extraordinary lives during the chaos of the Civil War. Andrew Taylor’s latest thriller,The Ashes of London, is set in the aftermath of the Great Fire and I am working on a Stuart Quartet, with the first, The Girl in the Glass Tower, about Arbella Stuart, who might have been England’s Stuart queen.

So prepare yourselves for the Stuarts: every bit as flawed, dysfunctional and fascinating as the Tudors.


Elizabeth Fremantle’s novel The Girl in the Glass Tower is published by Penguin 

From the Curtain Theatre to Llanwrst Catherine Johnson

Detail from the Wynn Family Memorial in St Gwrst Church dated 1559

I am in North Wales. While not quite the town of my fathers and mothers, this town is the one where my Mum went to school. And because it was a long time ago before school buses, she boarded during the week (even though it was a state school). And before she learned to speak English had learnt, aged eleven, how to smoke cigarettes. Still, there was a war on.

Ok, Ok, I'm backing away from family history and back into the Shakespearean track. Although I have enjoyed the plays, Macbeth, The Tempest and Dream being my favourites, I cannot admit to a deep love from birth.  He is a faultless, wonderful writer, and the plays, when done well, are peerless.

And Shakespeare was big in my old stomping ground in Hackney. Which was after all the home of the Curtain Theatre, as recreated in this charming children's opera by Jonathan Dove.

Sorry I lied about family history, here is my son Adam (left) and classmate Jimmy as Tudor actors celebrating the story of the old theatre..

So Wales. Surely I'll be talking about Shakespeare's use of Welsh in Henry IV (or is it V). Arguing whether he was slagging us off as fickle (despite his Welsh grandmother Alice Griffin). But no. Back to Llanwrst. You say it Llan roost in English but that didn't stop an ITV news item having it described as Llanworst earlier this year. It's a small ex market town in a strongly Welsh speaking area just east of Snowdonia. It's tucked so deep into the valley it seems to be always in the shade.

Of course Welshness was big in the Tudor court and the language was not unknown in London. Many of the important influential families around in Shakespeare's time were Welsh. John Salusbury (son of two powerful Welsh Families and related to those Wynns by marriage) is a dedicatee in one of Shakespeare's books of verse.

In Shakespeare's writing there is definitely a sense of a wider world beyond Tudor England. There's the Mediterranean and (if I remember rightly) North Africa as well as Middle and Western Europe.
We can so often forget that there were massive trading links between London and Antwerp and Holland, as well as Constantinople, the Levant and China. And at the same time Spaniards were cutting a swathe through South America looking for gold and English migrants were sailing west to set up new Jerusalems in America.

All those merchants travelling for months and years all across the globe. Sometimes I think we forget how much travel went on between cities and cultures and people.

In fact, after  rift and war with Spain, trade with the Ottoman Empire boomed and London was awash with Turkey carpets and textiles, Moors and merchants from Africa and the Middle East. There were so many that Elizabeth the First said famously that there were 'Too many blacks in London'. Truly nothing changes. How do the Brexiters or anyone else for that matter think they can hold back a tide of people that began at least two thousand years ago with the Romans? Or as comedian Stewart Lee reminds us, those pesky Beaker people coming here with their pesky beakers another few thousand or more years earlier.

But back to Llanwrst.  The 'big family' of the town were the Wynns, they lived in 12th century Gwydyr Castle which is still there on the far side of the river Conwy from the town. I think I've written about their private chapel with the heavenly painted roof earlier, this time I am in the town church. It's dedicated to an obscure Welsh Saint called Grwst, an ascetic who lived in a cell here close to the river apparently.

The Wynns rode high with the ascension of Henry Tudor. They had this massive alabaster memorial made in 1559, to celebrate Meredudd ap Ifan, the first of the Wynns to settle in Llanwrst, also to Sir John Wynn and his wife Sidney. It was carved and painted in London.

The Wynne Memorial

It is so totally un Welsh and un chapel. Incredibly high church and blingy - even after five hundred the colours are a little garish for modern tastes. I cannot imagine the impact of this thing all those years ago in this grey rainy little town.

They might not have had theatre but this must have been the closest thing imaginable.


Catherine

My last book, The Curious Tale of The Lady Caraboo is on the shortlist for the YA prize.

Interview with Suzannah Dunn by Katherine Clements

I first met Suzannah Dunn in 2008 when she was my tutor on an Arvon course. That week was an important turning point for me – Suzannah, an insightful and inspiring teacher, encouraged me to begin writing the novel that would eventually become my debut, The Crimson Ribbon. And she’s been there, a friend and mentor, supporting, commiserating and cheerleading ever since.

Suzannah’s own writing career began with contemporary fiction. She wrote six critically acclaimed novels and a short story collection before her first historical novel, The Queen of Subtleties – a retelling of the story of Anne Boleyn – was published in 2004. Since then she’s written five bestselling novels about the Tudors. Her latest, The Lady of Misrule, tells the story of Lady Jane Grey’s imprisonment in the Tower and is out now in paperback.

You can spot Suzannah’s grounding in contemporary fiction in her historical work. Her use of modern language is both brave and unusual, sometimes dividing opinion between readers who prefer a more traditional approach and those who enjoy the immediacy it creates. I’m definitely in the latter camp. What I like most about her writing is how she sheds new light on well-known stories. Like all the best historical writers she had the knack of making history feel fresh and relevant, showing us the inner workings of her character’s lives with deft pen strokes and stunning prose. I think she does historical fiction like no one else.

I asked her a few questions about her work and her love of history…

You’re best known for writing about the Tudors. What drew you to that period in the first place and why have you chosen to stay there? 

I wasn’t drawn to the period, I was drawn to a person:  Anne Boleyn.  At the time,  (c2000), I was wondering what/whom next to write about. I was stuck, and I remember saying to myself  (I know, I know, but it’s a lonely life, isn’t it, being a novelist),  ‘Well, what story interests you?’, which is interesting in itself, because as far as I am aware I’d never before started with the notion of ‘story’;  I’d always previously taken characters/a dynamic as my starting point.

Well, anyway, the answer that came to mind was ‘the story of Anne Boleyn’:  her rise and fall.  Which, of course, is all about character – hers, Henry’s, Catherine’s – and dynamics.  (Well, er, that and the Reformation.)

I don’t know why she came to mind, because although the Tudors are ‘always with us’ in this country, they’d been having a relatively low-key couple of decades  (this was before The Other Boleyn Girl and long before Wolf Hall); it had been quiet for a while in the Tudor Dept.

I dismissed the Anne Boleyn idea because I wasn’t a historical novelist and didn’t even read within that genre.  I hadn’t the first idea as to how to go about writing a historical novel.   But then, a day later, I thought to myself,  ‘So, don’t do it as a historical novel.’  But what did I mean by that?  I didn’t know!  Should I do an updated version, a ‘modern dress’ version?  

Well, I worked that one out, eventually, to my own satisfaction if not to everybody else’s, but, as you can see, it wasn’t that I was ‘drawn to the Tudors’; I was drawn to Anne Boleyn and, at that point, for me, she just happened to be a Tudor.

I had to do a lot of reading because I knew next to nothing about her and her world, and I loved it  (it was literally a whole new world, for me!).  So, when my agent suggested I write another novel set in that period, I set about it happily  (The Sixth Wife).  After that, my contracts didn’t specify Tudors but there was a verbal agreement that I would continue in that vein.

But what did I so love about that ‘whole new world’?  I suspect there’s a clue in the term ‘early modern’:  a period on the cusp of what we might recognise as modernity; an intriguing mix of alien and familiar  (and isn’t that what’s working for us as readers with a good piece of writing? - that mix of inevitable and surprising, that feeling of ‘Oh, yes, it IS like that, isn’t it!  That IS how that is.’)

But a big motivating factor for me is myth-busting.  I do of course recognise that it’s not a case of ‘truth’ and then, tagging along somewhere behind it, ‘myth’; I do of course know that all history is reconstruction and, as such, is a product of the age in which that history is being told.  But the Tudors - potent as they are in British popular culture - are prime prey for myth-making.  With the Anne Boleyn novel, I set out on an admittedly rather old-fashioned mission to Get It Right, and, frankly, getting it right remains important to me.  

You began your career writing contemporary fiction and short stories. Why did you make the move to writing about history?

I suppose I was trying to write the kind of novel about Anne Boleyn that I’d like to read.  And perhaps that meant Getting It ‘Literary’, too.  At the time I started writing The Queen of Subtleties, (a decade before Wolf Hall was published), the Tudors had, as far as I knew, never been anywhere but within the domain of genre historical fiction.  I don’t know how to write any differently from how I’ve always written, and prior to these so-called historical novels of mine, I’d been positioned as a writer of literary fiction.  And I was  (broadly speaking) a reader of literary fiction.  Where were the novels about Tudors that I might want to read?  I set out to write them, I suppose. 

I don’t write ‘about history’; but the people I write about have in some cases said or done things or had things done to them that are a matter of historical record.  Nor, to my mind, do I write about ‘the past’, because fiction-writing for me is made up of writing about  (re-imagining, recreating on the page) small moments, and those moments have never actually happened  (or, if they did, we can never know about it!) – the way the air smells on a particular morning, the way the shadows fall during a particular dusk, the way someone smiles at you as they enter the room.  That’s what concerns me, as a writer – that’s what I’m writing about.  Any framework of historical ‘facts’ – this happened, that happened – isn’t any different, for me, than the frameworks I had when I was writing contemporary-set novels.

In your Tudor novels you use modern language, a decision that seems to elicit divided opinion among readers. Was it a deliberate choice and have you ever felt pressure to tone it down?

This is going to be another long answer, sorry:  hold onto your hats!  (or, hold your fingertip on the PgDn key…)  It was indeed deliberate.  I do have my reasons, such as they are, the main one being that we don’t know how sixteenth century people spoke.  We know how they wrote – or how some did, those who could, and in the kinds of documents that have come to us down the centuries  (wills, court documents etc).  There are letters, too, here and there, but letter-writing has always had its own conventions and probably never more so than when writing was new to much of the population. Letters weren’t exactly dashed off.  (Actually, practically, they couldn’t be – writing with a quill was a laborious business.)  None of those written documents tell us much about how people spoke.

Even nowadays we speak very differently from how we write, which you’ll know if you’ve ever had to deal with transcripts.  Consciously and unconsciously, we do a lot of tidying up to articulate ourselves on a page, which is of course largely what the skill of writing is. So, it’s not just for historical novelists, this issue of how best to ’translate’ speech and thoughts into the written word.  Think of regional or other societal variations…  On the one hand, it can seem ridiculous for some characters or narrators to be speaking so-called Queen’s English, but, then again, is it any better to confine them to phonetic spelling?

The answer is, of course, that there’s no answer.  There are no hard and fast rules - every writer feels his or her way with each voice to a position somewhere on a spectrum, and hopes that readers will go along with it. 

And, actually, talking of variation:  there would never have been any single ‘Tudor-speak’, either.  

Still, most writers want at the very least to give an impression of people in the past speaking differently from how they might speak now.  So, how can we do that?  Well, we can make an educated guess – and some guesses, in historical fiction, are more educated than others, by which I’m not being rude, merely recognising that some writers take it as a more pressing or diverting issue than others do, and fair enough, each to his or her own.  So, in historical fiction, we’ve had everything from slightly stilted dialogue  (the avoidance of contractions, for example -  ‘do not’ rather than ‘don’t’ - which for some reason I’ve never fathomed is supposed to be old-fashioned, as if people in the past didn’t use contractions) to full-on cod-Tudor, with, along the way, sprinklings of archiac words or expressions and subtle differences in cadence and inflection.  

The academic Laura Saxton makes a distinction between ‘accuracy’ and ‘authenticity’ which I find useful.  Take the televised Wolf Hall:  the dark cloaks in which the men skulked and swished.  That felt right… right?  It was authentic, yes?  What it wasn’t, as far as historians can ascertain, is accurate.  The clothes of gentlemen of the court, at that time, were brightly coloured.  But that’s not what twenty-first century viewers expect; it would feel wrong, it’s out of step with the twenty-first century popular understanding of the Henrician court.  We’re not going to take Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell seriously if he’s dressed in pink silk.  

For me, it’s similar with vocabulary. There isn’t a writing day of mine that goes by without my having checked the origins of a handful of words or expressions to see if they were in use in the sixteenth century…  not that I won’t necessarily use them if they weren’t, but at least I’m then making a conscious decision, not a ‘mistake’.

Can I ask you:  which of these two words ‘feels right’ to you, as a Tudor word?  ‘Brat’ and ‘wrongfooted’.

Well, Brat is sixteenth century in origin, but the first recorded use of Wrongfoot was in 1928.

So much for ‘accuracy’.  As with telly-watching, though, authenticity is at least as important to the reading experience and I recognise that for some readers the dialogue that my characters speak just seems ridiculous, it jarrs and ruins that crucial suspension of belief.  I do understand that; honestly, I do; I sympathise!  So why do I push it to an extreme, then? If there’s a spectrum from cod olde English to contemporary, why do I set up camp at the far end of it?

Well, many – most? – writers of historical fiction want to stress the difference between ‘then’ and ‘now’.  That’s where the story is, the drama.  And surely the same can be said for many readers, too:  part of the pleasure lies in the strangeness.  But what draws me isn’t the difference but the similarities.  It’s not what I’d expect of myself, being a believer that each of us is largely a product of our of time and place… but, well, there you are:  I don’t see myself as writing about Tudors but about characters who just happen to be Tudor.  
 
My job as a fiction writer, as I see it, is, basically, to make things feel real  (and for ‘things’, read ‘people’, ‘relationships’,  ‘dynamics’, ‘situations’…  anything, everything).   I want to have my readers feel that they are there, in a particular situation with particular people.  The last thing I want to do is flag up differences, because that – I feel – creates distance, and the characters become curiosities.   When you are reading one of my novels, I want you to be there, I want that to be your world, your people.  

I have to admit that when I started out, when I began The Queen of Subtleties, I was following my nose.  One of the two narrative voices was to be Anne Boleyn’s and what struck me from my reading of her was that she was forthright, outspoken, uncompromising and, above all, for her time, ‘modern’.  So, how was I going to re-create her on the page?  Well, not by having her speaking mannered ‘old-fashioned language’, it seemed to me.  This was a woman who, on at least one occasion, had foreign ambassadors so disgusted by her language that in defiance of protocol they turned their backs on her and left the room.  In a situation such as that, what would I have her saying?  As I saw it, ‘Christ’s fut’ or anything like that just wouldn’t cut it.  So, in the novel, she ‘speaks’ in up-to-date language.  Because, in her time, her world, that was what she did.

When I’d finished that novel, my agent and editor each compiled a list of words which had, for them, jarred:  words that had gone too far.  I was grateful for their efforts and I did study those lists, but in the end decided to ignore them because, otherwise, I’d be writing by committee; the result would be cautious, mealy-mouthed, which was exactly what Anne Boleyn wasn’t.  I’d had a vision for that book, and I decided I had to stay true to it.

And, on the whole, I liked the result, which was why I went on to write similarly in subsequent books although not as yet as uncompromisingly because none of those subsequent characters have quite required it.  I do understand that for some readers the modern language ‘gets in the way’.  But that’s how the stilted voices of many other historical novels seem to me.   
 

In your latest novel, The Lady of Misrule, you’ve chosen to introduce a fictional character through which to tell the story of Lady Jane Grey’s imprisonment in The Tower. Mixing fictional with real life characters is a device you’ve used before and one I’ve employed in my own writing. What do you think are the benefits and drawbacks in writing about real people from history?

Depends what you mean by ‘fictional’ and ‘real’.  Historians seem to be in agreement that one of the women attending Lady Jane in the Tower was probably an Elizabeth Tilney.  So, it’s likely that she existed, even if we know nothing about her.  But, then, what do we know about Lady Jane Grey?  Very little, as it happens. And what do we know, frankly, of anyone long-dead?  Or, indeed, anyone?  It’s all reconstruction, isn’t it?  It’s just that with some people, some characters, we might claim to have more to go on.

And as for what we have to go on:  I love doing the reading, because for me it’s like hearing a load of gossip (sorry, historians! – I know full well it’s not gossip, but bear with me!) in that having heard what’s been said, I have to decide what I, myself, think.  I’m listening very carefully - weighing up the various accounts, using my own judgement, trying my utmost to get it right, to do that person justice.

We all know so much about the Tudors. One of the things you do so well is re-telling these stories in a way that keeps the reader on the edge of the seat, even though they know the ending. How do you maintain a sense of tension? Any tips?

You’re very sweet, thank you, but I’m laughing because even if it’s true – that I do keep readers on edges of seats – I have absolutely no idea how I do it!  I mean, it’s just the usual business of story-writing; it’s what we do, or try to.  If it’s working, I suspect it’s because we’re working moment by moment  (see above, re:  not writing about ‘the past’), because tension – any that there is – emerges from those moments; it’s not something that you can graft on, you can’t slap it on top of a scene.

Most of your books have female narrators and protagonists. Is representing women in history important to you?

To be entirely honest, I can’t remember how important it might have been to me back at the beginning, how much of a motivation, because now it’s become second nature, it’s become what I do.  I’d say it’s perhaps more about unheard voices in general, though, for me, than specifically women…although, actually, I wouldn’t say that women’s ‘voices’ are ‘unheard’, nowadays, in historical fiction  (quite the contrary).  (The exception, it seems to me, is Hilary Mantel’s work:  to my mind, she doesn’t really ‘do women’, in Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies.) 

Interestingly, this became something of an issue at a meeting at my publishers, last year:  there was a brief, divisive, inconclusive discussion about how much to ‘push’ the ‘women’ angle of my books – could/should I be characterised as writing about women’s lives before or above and beyond writing about sixteenth century lives?  As I say: inconclusive.

I do locate my fiction largely in the domestic sphere, which is where women have traditionally held the balance of power.  So, there’s that.

The answer’s ‘Yes’, really, isn’t it.

Do you have a favourite historical place to visit? And why?

Not a particular favourite, I don’t think, but in general I love to visit churches, most of which  (but not all) are old and in many cases very old indeed.  I love it that I’m almost always alone when I’m visiting a church, and that I can get up close to – and dare to touch, even, perhaps, in the case of carvings – craftwork that might be a thousand years old  (I’m thinking fonts, here).  I love it that these beautiful buildings and their exquisite furnishings  (I’m particularly interested in stained glass and wall paintings) are in practically every village in this country (as well as there being wonderful examples in some towns and cities, of course), and although I do realise that they are owned by the church  (I don’t want to be naïve about this!), there’s still a sense, in my view, in which they belong to us, the common people.

Are there any other periods of history that intrigue you?

Well, I love it that I currently live on the site of an Iron Age hillfort and on the boundary of the grounds of a Roman villa.  And one of my absolute favourite places in the world – I doubt I will ever tire of visiting it – is the Early People’s gallery in the National Museum of Scotland.

Can you tell us what you’re working on now?

Indeed I can, and thank you for asking!  I’m back with Mary Tudor – I just can’t leave her alone, can I  (..but in view of some of what I said above about myth-busting, perhaps you can guess why).  I’m back with her but also with her half-sister, Elizabeth:  the novel in progress focuses  (well, if it’s possible to focus with a sideways look) on the drastically difficult relationship between the two half-sisters when Mary came to the throne.  The ‘sideways look’ is more sideways than in any of my previous historical novels; this novel is about a laundress from Mary’s household who is smuggled into Elizabeth’s to act as an informer.

My thanks to Suzannah for such a thought-provoking interview.

You can find out more about her at www.suzannahdunn.net

www.facebook.com/Suzannah.Dunn.Author

@SuzannahDunn

www.katherineclements.co.uk

https://www.facebook.com/KatherineClementsBooks

@KL_Clements