Nice costumes, says Linda Porter, can’t rescue this bizarre adaptation of Elizabeth Fremantle’s historical novel about Katherine Parr, first published as Queen’s Gambit in 2013. I should perhaps begin this review by confessing that I’m a great admirer of Liz Fremantle’s historical novels. She has covered major figures and events of the 16th and 17th […]
Writing about Margaret Tudor
Linda Porter wasn’t intending to write Margaret Tudor’s biography. She came to it in a roundabout way, as she explains here. But Margaret’s story needed to be told. My new biography of Margaret Tudor seeks to challenge the negative views so often expressed about this overlooked 16th-century queen. How I came to write it is […]
Review: Later Stuart Queens, 1660–1735
Linda Porter reviews a new and timely book about the later Stuart queens. This is an important and interesting collection of essays, she says — but how many will be able to afford to read it? Historia readers may be taken aback by a review of a book with the eye-watering price of more than […]
Catherine of Braganza, the neglected Queen
“One of the greatest and most illustrious princesses in the world.” If contemporaries thought highly of Catherine of Braganza, why has history been so condescending to Charles II’s queen? Linda Porter believes it is high time the Merry Monarch’s Portuguese wife was given her due. Catherine of Braganza is one of our most overlooked queens, […]
Charles II’s last mistress
Linda Porter, author of Mistresses: Sex and Scandal at the Court of Charles II, writes about Hortense Mancini, the beautiful but unconventional niece of Cardinal Mazarin who became the king’s last mistress. Everyone knows that Charles II was an amorous king. The Restoration court was renowned for glamorous women parading their charms in the latest […]
Escaping the Tudors
Linda Porter on why she’s happy to leave the sixteenth century behind. Last year I appeared in two programmes in the Channel Five ‘Last Days’ series, talking about Mary Queen of Scots and Charles I. Much of my contribution on Mary was eventually edited out because it did not fit the overall ‘well, she was […]
Non-Fiction Roundup
2015 is remarkable in being the anniversary of two of the most notable and evocative battles in English history – Agincourt and Waterloo. As it also eight hundred years since King John signed Magna Carta there has been a predictable flood of books covering all three of these topics. So it is a relief to […]
Linda Porter Watches Wolf Hall
I should begin with an admission. I’m not a great fan of Hilary Mantel’s Tudor novels. To me, they are tediously long and too self-consciously ‘literary’. One of the most telling remarks made about them recently was that of the eminent Tudor historian, Diarmaid MacCulloch, whose eagerly-awaited biography of Thomas Cromwell will no doubt become […]