Sometime before 1518 Edward Seymour, the brother of Queen Jane Seymour, third wife of Henry VIII, married Catherine Filliol. Catherine gained connections in the highest echelons of Tudor society and Edward the prospect of a large inheritance. It should have been a match made in heaven, but instead, within a decade, they were engulfed in […]
Spycraft by Nadine Akkerman and Pete Langman
Early modern Europe was a hotbed of espionage, where spies, spy-catchers, and conspirators pitted their wits against each other in deadly games of hide and seek. Theirs was a dangerous trade — only those who mastered the latest techniques would survive. Nadine Akkerman and Pete Langman explore the methods spies actually used in the period, including […]
How to serve a Tudor feast
Daniel Pursglove, the reluctant spy at the centre of KJ Maitland’s crime-thriller series, is back. In Traitor in the Ice he’s sent to Battle Abbey, seat of the Roman Catholic Montague family, to find a murderer in a nest of suspected priests. Karen tells Historia about the strange rituals that surrounded serving meals in this […]
Elizabethan Secret Agent: The Untold Story of William Ashby by Timothy Ashby
This is the biography of William Ashby, Elizabethan intelligence agent and diplomat who served as ambassador to Scotland during the Spanish Armada crisis. It provides a fresh social, political and foreign policy insight from the perspective of a gentleman spy who took part in some of the most important events of his time. Much of […]
People-smuggling in Tudor and Jacobean times
The Drowned City, the first in KJ Maitland’s Daniel Pursglove series of historical crime novels, is set in Bristol in 1606 – a year after the Gunpowder Plot – where a Jesuit conspirator is said to be hiding. KJ Maitland tells Historia how religious conflict caused an increase in people-smuggling in Tudor and Jacobean England. […]
The Lady of the Ravens by Joanna Hickson
Elizabeth of York, her life already tainted by dishonour and tragedy, now queen to the first Tudor king, Henry the VII. Joan Vaux, servant of the court, straining against marriage and motherhood and privy to the deepest and darkest secrets of her queen. Like the ravens, Joan must use her eyes and all her senses, […]
(Re)writing the Spanish Armada
“Everybody thinks they know the story of the Spanish Armada,” says historian and novelist JD Davies. Yet, as he tells Historia, this is a story that has been reinterpreted and embellished for over 400 years. Which made his own retelling of the Armada story in his new novel, Armada’s Wake, both an opportunity – and […]
Fortune’s Hand: The Triumph and Tragedy of Walter Raleigh by RN Morris
Adventurer, soldier, courtier, poet, prisoner – outsider. Drawn by ambition to Elizabeth’s court, Walter Raleigh soon becomes the queen’s favourite. But his meteoric rise attracts the enmity of powerful rivals. Sir Francis Walsingham, the queen’s spy master, proves a dangerous enemy. While the Earl of Oxford is an equally dangerous friend. Even Elizabeth’s favour is […]