Annie Whitehead, the historian and novelist, reviews Leanda de Lisle’s new biography of Henrietta Maria and finds it a “triumph”. Henrietta Maria, known to most with even a passing interest as the French, Catholic, wife of Charles I, has been perceived as, at best, a bad influence; at worst, “the most reviled consort to have […]
The Fairy (tale) Godfather
Where did our fairy tales come from? Nicholas Jubber set out to find the story behind the stories and found himself “bewitched” by one collector, a 17th-century poet and soldier who preserved the earliest-known versions of so many of our best-loved fables that he surely deserves the title of Fairy (tale) Godfather. These are tales […]
Henrietta Maria by Leanda de Lisle
Henrietta Maria, Charles I’s queen, is the most reviled consort to have worn the crown of Britain’s three kingdoms. Condemned as that ‘Popish brat of France’, a ‘notorious whore’ and traitor, she remains in popular memory the wife who wore the breeches and turned her husband Catholic – so causing a civil war – and […]
The King’s Cavalier by Mark Turnbull
It’s November 1647. King Charles I has been defeated and is in captivity. Captain Maxwell Walker, a veteran royalist cavalryman, is still grieving over his wife’s murder. But he has finally gone home to his beloved sons. England, however, is far from at peace. Yorkshire proves as scarred as the rest of the kingdom and […]
The Master of Measham Hall by Anna Abney
1665. It is five years since King Charles II returned from exile, the scars of the English Civil Wars are yet to heal and now the Great Plague engulfs the land. Alethea Hawthorne is safe inside the walls of the Calverton household as a lady’s companion waiting in anticipation of the day she can return […]
Plague and pandemic: how we responded then and now
The idea for Anna Abney’s debut novel came from the “wider implications” of the Plague of 1665: the responses to the disease and its social effects. Then, editing her book during Covid, she was struck by the similarities between the ways the two pandemics affected people, as she tells Historia. I was teaching Daniel Defoe’s […]
The Lying Dutchman by Graham Brack
Master Mercurius has once again been summoned to The Hague by Stadhouder William of Orange. And a letter from William is never good news. King Charles II of England has died and William, with his wife Mary, is now next in line to the throne once the current king, James II dies. But Charles II’s […]
Traitor in the Ice by KJ Maitland
Winter, 1607, and a man is struck down in the grounds of Battle Abbey, Sussex. Before dawn breaks, he is dead. Home to the Montagues, Battle has caught the paranoid eye of King James. The Catholic household is rumoured to shelter those loyal to the Pope, disguising them as servants within the abbey walls. And […]