(c) Immediate Media Company Limited
It seems to be Mary Tudor month, as this is the second magazine to feature an article about her.
Issue 39 of History Revealed Magazine has an article by Tracy Borman that briefly mentions Lady Jane.
‘Who was the Bloodiest Tudor?’ looks at whether ‘Bloody’ Mary really deserves the name.
(c) Immediate Media Company Limited
(c) Immediate Media Company Limited
The paperback of Elizabeth Fremantle’s wonderful ‘The Girl in the Glass Tower’ is published today.
Here is last year’s interview with Elizabeth.
The Girl in the Glass Tower Interview
Also, my article about Arbella Stuart and the Greys.
9th February 2017 – The Girl in the Glass Tower (paperback) by Elizabeth Fremantle
(c) Penguin
‘Tap. Tap. Tap on the window.
Something, someone wanting to be heard. Waiting to be free.
Tudor England. The word treason is on everyone’s lips. Arbella Stuart, niece to Mary, Queen of Scots and presumed successor to Elizabeth I, has spent her youth behind the towering windows of Hardwick Hall. As presumed successor to the throne, her isolation should mean protection – but those close to the crown are never safe.
Aemilia Lanyer – writer and poet – enjoys an independence denied to Arbella. Their paths should never cross. But when Arbella enlists Aemilia’s help in a bid for freedom, she risks more than her own future. Ensnared in another woman’s desperate schemes, Aemilia must tread carefully or share her terrible fate . . .
The Girl in the Glass Tower brilliantly explores what it means to be born a woman in a man’s world, where destiny is strictly controlled and the smallest choices may save – or destroy – us.’
Further details – Amazon.co.uk
9th February 2017 – Isabella of Castile: Europe’s First Great Queen (paperback) by Giles Tremlett
(c) Bloomsbury Publishing
’ In 1474, a twenty-three year old woman ascended the throne of Castile, the largest and strongest kingdom in Spain. Ahead of her lay the considerable challenge not only of being a young, female ruler in an overwhelmingly male-dominated world, but also of reforming a major European kingdom that was riddled with crime, corruption, and violent political factionism. Her marriage to Ferdinand of Aragon was crucial to her success, bringing together as it did two kingdoms, but it was a royal partnership in which Isabella more than held her own. Her pivotal reign was long and transformative, uniting Spain and setting the stage for its golden era of global dominance. For by the time of her death in 1504, Isabella had laid the foundations not just of modern Spain, but of one of the world’s greatest empires. Acclaimed historian Giles Tremlett chronicles the life of Isabella of Castile as she led her country out of the murky middle ages and harnessed the newest ideas and tools of the early Renaissance to turn her ill-disciplined, quarrelsome nation into a sharper, modern state with a powerful, clear-minded, and ambitious monarch at its centre. With authority, insight and flair he relates the story of this legendary, if controversial, first initiate in a small club of great European queens that includes Elizabeth I of England, Russia’s Catherine the Great, and Britain’s Queen Victoria.’
Further details – Amazon.co.uk
9th February – So Great a Prince: England and the Accession of Henry VIII (paperback) by Lauren Johnson
(c) Head of Zeus
‘The King is dead: long live the King. In 1509, Henry VII was succeeded by his son Henry VIII, second monarch of the house of Tudor. But this is not the familiar Tudor world of Protestantism and playwrights. Decades before the Reformation, ancient traditions persist: boy bishops, pilgrimage, Corpus Christi pageants, the jewel-decked shrine at Canterbury.
So Great a Prince offers a fascinating glimpse of a country and people that at first appear alien – in calendar and clothing, in counting the hours by bell toll – but which on closer examination are recognisably and understandably human. Lauren Johnson tells the story of 1509 not just from the perspective of king and court, but of merchant and ploughman; apprentice and laundress; husbandman and foreign worker. She looks at these early Tudor lives through the rhythms of the ritual year, juxtaposing political events in Westminster and the palaces of southeast England with the liturgical and agricultural events that punctuated the year for the ordinary people of England.’
