He was born in 1761, the elder son of Frederick St.John, 2nd Viscount Bolingbroke, and his wife Lady Diana Spencer—yes, that family—daughter of the 3rd Duke of Marlborough. The marriage was, by all accounts, spectacularly unhappy, and ended by Act of Parliament in 1768. Diana left. Frederick kept the boys, as the law dictated. Lady Di, as she was known, would go on to become one of the finest needlewomen and artists of her age, but apparently had very little say in the matter. And sadly, she didn’t fare much better in her second marriage. More of that later.

Papa Frederick, who in his own right was a notorious rake and gambler, did what Frederick did best: he blew their money. He enjoyed Sèvres porcelain. Racehorses. Parties. And not necessarily in that order. He was, to his credit, an early and serious patron of the equestrian artist George Stubbs, which is perhaps about the best thing history can say about him.

George Richard, his son, inherited none of the redeeming qualities and all of the worst ones.

In 1783 he married Charlotte Collins, the daughter of his tutor—a pretty good start, if not a fashionable one. Lydiard House was let out to a tenant while the couple rattled around rented properties. They had three children: George, Mary, and Henry. A quiet domestic life, you might think. And then George’s half-sister came to visit.

Mary Beauclerk was the daughter of Lady Diana’s second marriage, to the brilliantly charismatic and chronically broke Topham Beauclerk. And as soon as she arrived on the scene, George Richard fell in love—or whatever his equivalent was. Mary Beauclerk, his half-sister, became pregnant.

Stay with me here. It doesn’t get any simpler. George’s wife Charlotte, loyal to a fault, accompanied her sister-in-law to Paris for the birth and attempted the extraordinarily difficult manoeuvre of claiming the child as her own. George Richard had a different solution. He deserted Charlotte entirely, set up home in Paris with Mary, and the pair reinvented themselves as Mr and Mrs Barton. Just pause for a moment. He was Viscount Bolingbroke. A peer of the realm living as a commoner under an assumed name. Three more sons followed. Then George Richard tired of her too.

By 1793 he was travelling through Europe—as one did, between scandals—when he encountered a seventeen-year-old baroness. Isabella Marianne Charlotte Sophia Hompesch was her name, and the ceremony George Richard performed to marry her was, by most accounts, entirely bogus. They returned to London anyway. Charlotte was still alive. Their first child was stillborn in 1794. Isabella would go on to endure ten more pregnancies.

Someone, around this time, felt compelled to put their feelings in writing. The letter survives, entered in the Lydiard Archives, and signed only with the initials RJ:

‘The misfortune of your life has been that you have always given way not only to every passion but to every fancy you ever had & that you have never been used to resist the natural violence of your temper. I now see that this disposition remains in full force & that you retain the same obstinacy & willfullness.’

A shame they didn’t speak up a bit sooner.

England was, apparently, beginning to feel heated again. In 1798 George Richard and Isabella purchased a property in New Jersey called Liberty Hall, where they lived under the alias Mr and Mrs Belasise. An aside: Liberty Hall was no ordinary bolthole. Built in 1772 by William Livingston: lawyer, Founding Father, and New Jersey’s first governor, it had welcomed George Washington and Alexander Hamilton through its doors. One wonders what those patriots would have made of the English viscount now lurking in their midst under a borrowed name.

In 1804, Charlotte, still at Lydiard House, still legally his wife, died. George Richard promptly married Isabella again, this time properly, at Trinity Church, the historic Manhattan church by Wall Street, and the family returned to Wiltshire.

He died in Pisa in 1824, travelling with his daughter. His body was brought home and buried in the St. John family vault beneath St. Mary’s Church, Lydiard Tregoze. Where he rests, I rather hope somewhat uncomfortably, to this day.

What do we make of him? He was the product of a broken home, a father who modelled only excess, a mother he was denied. Perhaps he spent his whole life looking for something he’d never been given. Or perhaps—and this does seem the simpler explanation—he was just thoroughly despicable.

The St. John family tree is full of remarkable people. George Richard is, in his own way, remarkable too. Just not in any way you’d want to be remembered.

Hmmm. I may have just found the premise for my next novel.

A committed Parliamentarian, a Puritan, Governor of Nottingham Castle during the Civil War and, most notoriously, one of the men who signed the death warrant of Charles I, John might not immediately strike you as a man with a taste for naked Venuses.

And I think it may have surprised his wife, diarist Lucy Hutchinson, a bit. After all, she was certainly appalled by “all the vices that the court held example”, ribaldry and lewdness being top of the list. Born Lucy Apsley, one of my St.John family, her Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson is an extraordinary seventeenth-century source full of Lucy’s observations. More about her reaction to John’s art in a minute.

After Charles I was executed in January 1649, the new Commonwealth had to decide what to do with the possessions of the monarchy it had just abolished. And this included one of the greatest collections of art ever assembled by an English king.

I had the great good fortune of being in London in 2018 for Charles I: King and Collector, the major exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts. It attempted to reassemble Charles I’s collection for the first time since it was broken up after his execution in 1649. Around 150 works were brought together, with loans from the Royal Collection, the Prado, and the Louvre. Spectacular, is all I can say.

Always one to look for a deal, John quickly laid claim to some of the choicest paintings.

Lucy tells us that her husband spent around £2,000 acquiring some of the “choicest pieces of painting” that had come onto the market. Many had originally belonged to the king and had subsequently been given to royal servants in lieu of unpaid wages. John, Lucy tells us, paid ready money for them and bought so shrewdly that they were worth considerably more than he had paid.

Among his purchases was Titian’s Venus with an Organist and a Dog.

Painted around 1550, it is not exactly what you might expect to find hanging in the house of a devout Puritan. For a start, Venus is naked, lying upon a couch, with her hand resting on a small dog. An elegant organist has turned from his keys to look straight at her. And apparently, according to the Prado, Titian’s original idea was that Venus would return his stare directly. A bit provocative to say the least. Later, her head was altered, and she now looks at the dog.

John paid £165 for it.

A side note here (yes, yet another rabbit hole). In 1622 Anthony van Dyck had seen the picture in Venice and sketched it in his Italian sketchbook. Not long afterwards, the painting found its way into Charles I’s collection. Coincidence? Or perhaps a recommendation from van Dyck this was something Charles should acquire.

I’ve been spending a great deal of time with van Dyck lately while writing my newest novel, The Queen’s Tears, and have become fascinated not only by his portraits, but by his studio, his working methods, and the artists around him. But that’s another rabbit hole, and another post.

Back to John and his pin-ups.

He didn’t stop at the Titian. He became one of the most enthusiastic purchasers of the king’s pictures, paying the extraordinary sum of £600 for Titian’s Pardo Venus, another monumental and decidedly sensual painting. Altogether, surviving records show him spending £1,349 in cash on around twenty pictures at the Commonwealth sales, quite apart from other works, furnishings, sculpture and tapestries he acquired.

He took his treasures home to the new house he was building in Owthorpe in Nottinghamshire, where he was planning what Lucy called a “very neat Cabinet” (ie a specific room) for them.

I think Lucy may have been happy that he had allocated a room for them, rather than hanging it up in the dining room. However, John’s eye for design kicked into overdrive – a later description of their house stated that art hung along the staircase and galleries; those same galleries could serve as an orchestra overlooking the hall and the great room above – which also functioned as a ballroom. This was no austere Puritan household as we may imagine today.

Lucy states throughout the memoirs how much John enjoyed his home, his land, and his library. After the upheaval and trauma of the Civil war, where he had been a soldier, governor, politician and regicide, he just wanted to stay at home. Now he turned his attention to his house and estate, surveying his buildings, enclosing and improving his land, collecting pictures and returning to his music and the practice of his viol.

Her account of John’s purchases is characteristically practical. She clearly understood both his pleasure in the paintings and their value. I’ll let her tell that part of the story herself in the following extracts from C.H. Firth’s 1885 edition of Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson:

I think John was a good businessman, too. Earlier in his life he’d negotiated for a spot in the Star Chamber. He certainly knew his way around the London art scene. These paintings had suddenly been thrown onto a disrupted market. England’s traditional royal and aristocratic collectors were dead, exiled or impoverished, while Continental agents were eager to snap up a deal.

As was John.

The Venus with an Organist certainly proved a remarkable purchase. He had paid £165 for it. Within only a few years it was sold on for around £600 and eventually entered the Spanish royal collection. Today it hangs in the Prado in Madrid.

So do you think John Hutchinson was an art lover or a speculator?

Possibly both. But certainly not what you would think of as a drab puritan regicide.

The St.John family married into the Villiers clan around 1612, and along with a cartel of influential friends, created the famous incident at Apethorpe House in 1614 when George Villiers was “casually” displayed before King James. Established almost immediately as a new favourite and soon knighted, George Villiers rose with astonishing speed. Within a few years, the King's favourite was dispensing offices, honours and opportunities to an ever-growing circle of relatives, friends and supporters.

Take Sir Allen Apsley. He did not attain his appointment as Lieutenant of the Tower of London on his own merit. His wife, Lucy St.John, was connected to Villiers through her sister Barbara, who had married Edward Villiers, George’s fatherless half-brother from Leicestershire. Five years after that marriage, George was made Knight of the Garter, and according to contemporary court papers, Sir Allen was given the option of securing the lucrative position of Lieutenant of the Tower because of his wife’s relationship to George Villiers, now the Earl of Buckingham. For a mere £3,000 (almost a million pounds in today’s money), the job was his, and Lucy moved into what is now known as The King’s House, overlooking Tower Green, where she would look after the prisoners and raise her children for the next thirteen years.

Sir Allen was generous, and gave her “a noble allowance of £300 for her own private use.” She spent her money wisely, paying for Sir Walter Raleigh and Mr. Ruthin, prisoners in the Tower and addicted to chemistry, to set up an alchemy lab in her henhouse. She did this partly to gain the knowledge of their experiments and accompanying medicines to help poor prisoners in the Tower who could not afford physicians.

But the close friendship that evolved between Sir Allen and the Duke did not end in harmony. Sir Allen also held the position of Victualler of the Navy, and Buckingham’s frequent forays overseas to engage in foreign wars strained the nation’s finances immensely, and placed a huge personal burden on Sir Allen as he struggled to provision a Navy that was poor on men, ships and supplies.

Despite being so favoured that he was a witness to Buckingham’s will on the night before sailing on his last expedition, poor Allen was, to put it bluntly, stiffed. At the time of Buckingham’s assassination in 1628, Sir Allen was almost £100,000 (£9,000,000 and counting - enough to ruin anyone) in crippling debt, putting his own credit and that of others on the line to support his patron. The money was never recovered, and Lucy and her children were hauled through the courts for decades after his death in 1630 in attempts to recover funds.

Barbara, the St.John sister who started the ball rolling by marrying into the Villiers family, wasn’t immune to disaster either. Along with her husband Edward Villiers, she nearly caused the downfall of the Duke of Buckingham himself through his tacit endorsement and granting of gold and silver thread monopolies. Sir Edward was involved in this scheme up to his neck, and when he forced the Attorney General to imprison several gold and silver makers for not paying fees to him, there was an immediate uproar.

The House of Commons were out for blood, and although they were told that Buckingham had given his half-brother no encouragement in the matter, the reaction was such that it was felt an example should be made of Buckingham. Monopolists such as George and Edward Villiers were “bloodsuckers of the kingdom and vipers of the commonwealth,” and the furore nearly brought down the Duke. Interestingly, Barbara maintained a secure hold on the gold and silver thread monopolies long after her husband’s death. It is quite possible that income from this lucrative opportunity could have funded the education and lifestyle of her granddaughter, another Barbara Villiers — future Countess of Castlemaine and mistress of King Charles II.

George’s gold touched others too. Katherine St.John, Lucy’s eldest sister, married a gentleman of shrewd business acumen but shaky character, Sir Giles Mompesson. He devised a scheme of licensing inns that enabled his patron (guess who - yes, the influential Duke of Buckingham) to secure thousands of pounds worth of fines to satisfy his very expensive habit of acquiring Italian artwork. Sir Giles’ method of extracting fines left a lot to be desired, and in his resulting prosecution he was forced to leave the country in a hurry. His escape was orchestrated by Katherine herself, along with her brother-in-law Sir William St.John and her half-brother Sir Edward Hungerford.

Even friendship bent under George’s influence. Sir William St.John, husband of Lucy’s sister Eleanor, was a soldier, a pirate, and a commander of the King’s Ships, and a good friend of Sir Walter Raleigh; and yet was tragically instructed by the Duke to arrest Raleigh in his final escape attempt before Raleigh’s execution. By the way, Sir William had the monopoly on black dye - extremely lucrative. I haven’t looked for the source of that one, but wouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t You Know Who.

George Villiers made and unmade fortunes with astonishing speed. For the St.John family, his favour opened doors that merit alone never could. Yet when the favourite fell, it was not Buckingham who paid the price, but those whose lives had become entangled with his. Lucy's family would still be paying his debts years after both men were dead.

After chasing George through the archives, it was evident that he had to take a role in my novel, The Lady of the Tower, if only to demonstrate the effort required to survive and prosper during the time this generation lived. They faced the continual challenge of relying on one man’s favour to secure their fortunes, and that favour, once gone, took decades to stop costing them. More than four hundred years later, we can look back and marvel at how completely one man’s rise and fall could reshape a family for generations.

They found scratches in the timber. Burns, too, made with the tip of a wax taper. Roughly eighty of them, worked into the roof frames of a building I already knew intimately, because I had spent years living inside it on the page: the Lieutenant’s Lodgings. In this house, my ancestor Lucy St.John kept her household as wife of Sir Allen Apsley, Lieutenant of the Tower from 1617 to 1630.

You may know that building by another name. It has had several over the centuries, changing with the monarch on the throne—the Queen’s House, the King’s House—and today, under Charles III, it is the King’s House once again. But it was the Queen’s House in Lucy’s day, and it is the Queen’s House in the archaeological record.

The marks were carved and scorched into the timbers above the rooms where Lucy and her husband and children lived, and where the Tower’s most dangerous prisoners were brought for questioning before their final walk to a cell or a scaffold. Guy Fawkes was interrogated there. Before him, Lady Jane Grey was held nearby. Centuries later, so briefly was Rudolf Hess.

The symbols themselves fall into a handful of recognisable types. Compass-drawn mesh patterns, so tightly interlaced they were thought to trap a demon and give it nowhere to go. Double-V shapes, invoking the protection of the Virgin Mary. Tear-shaped scorch marks, burned in one careful touch at a time. Dated by the archaeologists to somewhere between 1540 and the early eighteenth century, which means the earliest of them were made long before Lucy, and the latest were still being added during her years there, and after she left.

Whoever first made them was afraid of something specific enough to want it kept out, and whoever followed them over the years was patient enough to keep working on the marks for well over a century.

Alongside the marks, the team found something else: a small cache of objects pushed into the chimney space: animal bones from cattle, sheep and rabbit, scraps of leather, a broken blade, fragments of clay pipe. This wasn’t rubbish. This was a ritual deposit, laid there on purpose, thought to confuse the Devil should he try to come down the chimney and into the house.

Apotropaic marks have been around for centuries. Only recently have they been termed “witch marks” - perhaps to catch attention. It wasn’t the term used by the people who made them. What the evidence supports is broader and, to me, more interesting: these were marks against evil in general—demons, misfortune, the formless dread of a household that dealt daily in imprisonment and death—not a specific fear of village witches. The Tower’s marks sit inside a much wider tradition found in churches, farmhouses, and grand houses across England, wherever people felt a building’s threshold needed defending. In fact, some of the older gravestones at St. Mary’s Church in Lydiard Park, Lucy’s home, carry these marks.

I won’t say that Lucy believed a witch might come down the chimney. I will tell you she ran a household inside a highly secured building where, for a hundred and fifty years or more, people repeatedly took steps to keep something unnamed from getting in.

I had the privilege of spending time in this private space, retracing Lucy’s footsteps while I was researching The Lady of the Tower (it is still the official residence of the Governor). I had already written her moving through those rooms, tending prisoners, keeping her family close inside the most watched building in England. And then, only after the manuscript was finished, I learned that the timbers above her head were carrying eighty small, fierce acts of protection, made by unknown hands. Lucy experienced terrible times when she lived in the Tower: illness, death and crippling debts. These were dark years for her family.

I cannot prove Lucy ever looked up and saw the marks. But I couldn’t resist re-opening my manuscript, literally weeks before publication, and adding this story. For with this find, I no longer think of her house as simply a residence attached to a fortress. I think of it as a place that its own inhabitants, across generations, did not quite trust to be safe on its own, and did the best they could to protect themselves, one taper-burn and one compass-drawn circle at a time.

The Lady of the Tower is inspired by the life of my ancestress, Lady Lucy Apsley, who lived in the Tower of London from 1617-1630. Here she is, pictured on the far left, with her five sisters, in St. Mary’s Church, Lydiard Park.

Sources & Further Reading

Museum Crush, “Guy Fawkes, witch marks and a spiritual midden at the Tower of London” — the fullest account of the 2015 MOLA discovery in the Queen’s House, including detail on the ritual deposit found with the marks.

IBTimes UK, “Tower of Satan: Ritualistic markings at London’s Tower of London castle were to keep the Devil at bay” — reports MOLA’s James Wright on the discovery and the animal bone deposit.

Historic England, “What Are Witches’ Marks?” and “Public Asked to Help Hunt for Witches’ Marks” — background on apotropaic marks nationally, dating them broadly to the 16th–early 19th centuries.

Dated October 1470, it records King Henry VI ordering payment to Elysabeth for attending “Elizabeth late calling hir Quiene” during her confinement in sanctuary at Westminster Abbey. The queen, of course, was Elizabeth Woodville. Edward IV had been driven into exile, Henry VI briefly restored to the throne, and the pregnant queen had sought refuge within the Abbey, one of the few places where royal authority gave way to the protection of the Church.

Until I came across that warrant, Elysabeth had been little more than another name in the family pedigree. Suddenly, she found herself at the centre of one of the most dramatic episodes of the Wars of the Roses.

What particularly intrigued me was not simply that she was there, but why.

Elysabeth was the half-sister of Margaret Beaufort, mother of the future Henry VII, giving her close Lancastrian connections. Yet she was also attending the Yorkist queen at one of the most politically sensitive moments imaginable. Was she chosen simply because she was an experienced and trusted gentlewoman? Or did Henry VI’s restored government see an advantage in placing someone loyal within Elizabeth Woodville’s household while she remained in sanctuary? The surviving records don’t tell us. They rarely do. But it is precisely those unanswered questions that tempt a novelist to begin exploring the possibilities.

The warrant also records that Elysabeth became godmother to the child born in sanctuary, the future Edward V and the eldest “Prince in the Tower”. In medieval society, a godparent’s responsibilities extended far beyond the christening ceremony. They assumed an enduring responsibility for the child’s spiritual welfare and became, in many respects, part of the wider family. In fact, they were considered a “relative of the blood”.

To understand Elysabeth’s world, I realised I needed to stand where she herself had stood.

Walking into the private sanctuary of Westminster Abbey, I retraced the journey my ancestress made almost six hundred years ago. Her visit was under royal command; mine was considerably less dramatic. Even so, there was something extraordinary about walking through rooms that had changed remarkably little since the fifteenth century, looking from the same windows and imagining the uncertainty that surrounded the Queen’s household.

Westminster Abbey’s sanctuary is not open to the public. It is still used today, and remarkably, the Jerusalem Chamber—where Edward V was born and where Elysabeth attended Elizabeth Woodville during her confinement—survives almost unchanged. Its name has an intriguing origin. Medieval tradition held that those unable to undertake a pilgrimage to the Holy Land might spend their final hours “in Jerusalem,” and the chamber acquired its name for that reason.

As part of my research for The Godmother’s Secret, I visited three locations that became central to the novel: the Abbot’s House, or Cheyneygates; Westminster Abbey; and Westminster Hall. I was fortunate to meet the Abbey’s Almoner, who generously took me behind the scenes into the Jerusalem Chamber and the surrounding rooms where Elizabeth Woodville lived during her months in sanctuary. Seeing these spaces transformed names on a page into real places. The distances between rooms, the quiet, the sense of enclosure and protection—details that no history book can fully convey—all found their way into the novel.

As I tried to imagine what those anxious weeks in sanctuary must have been like, my reading led me into an unexpected corner of medieval life: childbirth

.One of the aspects of historical research that fascinates me most is discovering how medicine, faith and superstition were woven together. Medieval people viewed childbirth as one of life’s greatest dangers, and alongside skilled midwives and practical remedies were objects believed to offer divine protection.

Among the most remarkable are the medieval birthing girdles.

Made from fine parchment or linen, they were wrapped around an expectant mother’s body during labour and inscribed with prayers, sacred names and protective images. Because they were so fragile, almost none have survived. The only complete English example is preserved in the Wellcome Collection in London.

According to the accompanying instructions, the girdle would protect mother and child from harm. It promised that no evil spirit could approach the woman carrying it, and that if it was laid across her womb during labour she would be safely delivered, her child would receive baptism, and she herself would undergo purification. To a medieval mother, these promises offered reassurance not only for the dangers of childbirth itself, but for the eternal wellbeing of both mother and child.

It is exactly the sort of detail I love to uncover. Not because it changes the course of history, but because it helps us understand how people thought, what they feared, and where they found hope. That research informed the birth scene in The Godmother’s Secret far more profoundly than I could have imagined when I first began reading about sanctuary.

Looking back, it is remarkable to think that this journey began with a single royal warrant preserved in the National Archives. It led me into one of Westminster Abbey’s most private spaces, introduced me to the forgotten role of my ancestress during a pivotal moment in English history, and revealed the beliefs that surrounded the birth of the boy who would become one of the Missing Princes.

My novel, The Godmother’s Secret, tells the story of Elysabeth Scrope, her time in sanctuary with the Queen, and her perspective on what happened to her godson, Edward V, the eldest Prince in the Tower.

That is where this trail led me while researching The Godmother’s Secret and The King’s Intelligencer. It began with a passing reference to a seventeenth-century account of an extraordinary find beneath the White Tower in the Tower of London: the remains of ‘striplings’. It was a contemporary account of the moment workmen uncovered the bones of two small children during building works in 1674. The closer I looked, the more significant the source became; not because it solved the enduring mystery of the Princes in the Tower, but because it revealed how quickly that mystery was already being reshaped, interpreted, and given meaning by those who believed they were standing close to the truth.

The account itself comes from John Knight, Principal Surgeon to Charles II, preserved in Francis Sandford’s A Genealogical History of the Kings of England, published in 1677. Knight describes how, during the clearing and rebuilding of structures adjoining the White Tower, workmen dug down some ten feet beneath a staircase leading from the King’s lodgings towards the chapel and uncovered what appeared to be a wooden chest. Inside were the bones of two children.

He writes:

The chest was fragile with age and was broken during excavation, scattering many of the bones among the rubble. Only later, once the significance of the discovery was understood, were the labourers instructed to sift through the debris and recover what remained. Knight explains that Sir Thomas Chicheley, Master of the Ordnance, was informed and reported the matter to Charles II, who concluded that the remains were likely those of Edward V and his younger brother Richard, Duke of York. They were subsequently placed in a marble urn and re-interred in Westminster Abbey, in Henry VII’s Chapel, where they remain today.

Before turning to Knight’s testimony itself, it is worth pausing over the book that preserved it, because historical evidence is never separate from how it survives.

Francis Sandford (1630–1694) was Lancaster Herald at the College of Arms, an officer responsible for the recording of royal ceremony, genealogy, and heraldic history. His Genealogical History of the Kings of England was an ambitious folio volume tracing the English monarchy from the Norman Conquest to the reign of Charles II, combining narrative history with engraved genealogies and richly illustrated heraldic and royal imagery. It was a substantial scholarly undertaking, produced when the restored monarchy was actively reasserting its identity after decades of civil war and republican rule.

The book was printed in London by Thomas Newcomb in the Savoy precinct and notably issued for the author rather than under formal royal commission. Sandford therefore bore the cost and risk of its production himself, although he dedicated the work to Charles II. Its pages were enriched with engravings by some of the most accomplished artists of the period, including Wenceslaus Hollar, Richard Gaywood, and Francis Barlow, whose work gave the volume an extraordinary visual weight and permanence.

However, to return to the missing princes, is not only the substance of the book but its timing. Knight’s account appears in print only three years after the discovery it describes. That proximity gives it a particular evidential force: it is neither a distant recollection nor a later reconstruction, but a near-contemporary record preserved while memories of the event were still circulating among those involved.

Reading sources like this is both a blessing and a curse for a historical novelist. The blessing lies in their immediacy—the sense that one is closer to the lived reality of the past than any later interpretation can offer. The curse is that they rarely close the questions they open. Instead, they invite the writer to step forward into the gaps, where certainty ends and interpretation begins. It is precisely there that historical fiction takes shape.

And yet, that is also where its responsibility lies. Every contemporary account carries within it assumptions, silences, and perspectives shaped by its time. To read it well is not simply to extract facts, but to understand how meaning was constructed around those facts from the very beginning. And this extraordinarily ambitious book was written in a time when Britain was recovering from eleven years of civil war, parliamentary rule and an exiled monarchy. It was not just a ‘Genealogical History’; it was a celebration of kingship.

The story of the Princes in the Tower has endured, unresolved for over five centuries. Each generation returns to the surviving evidence and finds something slightly different within it. Knight’s account is one such moment in that long process of interpretation—close enough to feel immediate, yet incomplete enough to keep the question alive.

For me, Sandford’s glorious book remains one of those documents that reshaped not only my understanding of the period but also enriched my understanding of how historical fiction itself is formed. When the archives and records fade, the novelist can confidently step through the door and get to work.

And it is in that space that all storytelling begins.

Further reading: A Genealogical History of the Kings of England: Francis Sandford

I’ve been writing James into my historical fiction for the past ten years, and relied on excellent biographies such as Roger Lockyer’s Buckingham: The Life and Political Career of George Villiers, First Duke of Buckingham, 1592-1628, for research and footnotes. But Queen James takes both the king and his favourites to a whole new level of understanding.

Russell’s biography is a remarkable achievement. Intensively researched yet refreshingly direct, it resists the temptation to tell readers what to think. Instead, he presents an abundance of evidence, detail, and context, allowing us to build our own understanding of James VI and I. Reading it, I was struck by how irrelevant the perennial question of “was he gay or not?” ultimately becomes. The far more interesting question is who he was as a ruler, thinker, writer, scholar, diplomat, and human being.

What emerges is one of the most highly educated, articulate, and intellectually formidable monarchs ever to sit on the English throne. Russell brings James out from behind centuries of caricature and presents him as a complex, sophisticated figure whose influence on Britain remains profound.

This has been particularly fascinating for me because I have written about King James before, and not always sympathetically. Here on Substack, I explored Lucy Hutchinson’s scathing verdict on James and his court, while on the Friends of Lydiard Park website I wrote about his rather unfortunate visit to Lydiard, including the accident that occurred during his stay. Both pieces reflect the far less flattering views that have followed James through history.

So it has been a delight to encounter another perspective. Russell’s superb biography does not simply rehabilitate James; it challenges us to look again, to move beyond the easy judgements, and to consider the extraordinary intellect and complexity of the man behind the crown.

The documentary takes this reassessment even further. Visually, it is extraordinary, with beautiful cinematography that captures both the grandeur and intimacy of James’s world. The contributors add genuine insight and nuance, while Russell’s own commentary remains incisive and compelling throughout.

But it was James McArdle’s performance that stayed with me. His readings of James’s letters and poetry are exquisite—sensitive, intelligent, and deeply human. More than once, I found myself unexpectedly moved to tears. Through those words, spoken aloud, the king ceased to be a historical figure and became a living voice reaching across four centuries.

Both the book and the documentary remind us that history is at its best when it challenges assumptions rather than confirms them. Whether you finish Queen James admiring James, disliking him, or somewhere in between, you will certainly understand him better. And that, surely, is the historian’s highest achievement.

Released in the US as “The Six Loves of James I”, you can listen to Gareth Russell’s podcast with the Folger Library here. For more about my historical fiction novels, The Lydiard Chronicles, you can find details here. The first in the series, The Lady of the Tower, 1603-1630, is set mostly during the reign of James. I was particularly intrigued by George Villiers and his relationship with the King, since Villiers’s brother Edward married Barbara St.John of Lydiard Park. Her sister, Lucy St.John, lived in the Tower of London for thirteen years, thanks to the patronage of George Villiers.

The story began, as so many of my historical investigations do, in an archive.

While searching through records, I came across the admission of my own great-grandmother into the workhouse, accompanied by her young children. It was a surprisingly lengthy entry in an official register, the kind of record that stops you short, pulls you into reading the story behind the form. It was impossible to see it as simply a name and a date.

Behind those few words was a woman whose life had suddenly collided with the harsh realities of nineteenth-century poverty. This record did not tell me what had happened before she arrived, what choices she had exhausted, or what she felt as she approached those gates. It recorded only the moment she entered.

That silence is where the historical novelist begins.

In the winter of 1900, a woman stands at the gates of Lambeth Road Workhouse with her two children and faces the hardest decision of her life.

The Victorian workhouse was intended as a last resort: deliberately austere, designed to discourage anyone who could survive without it. For those who entered its doors, it often meant the loss of independence, the surrender of privacy, and the possibility of separation from those they loved. For a widowed mother with no wages, no family to turn to, and no other way to keep her children fed, it could become the only refuge left.

Margaret Anderson knows what awaits her. She knows that once inside, her children may be separated from her, placed into different wards, and subjected to a system governed by bells, rules, and the removal of almost every personal choice. She cannot know when she will see them again, or whether the children returned to her will still feel like the children she brought through the gate.

The Gate is fiction rooted in documented truth, inspired by the real lives preserved in surviving records. It asks a question that no archive can answer: what does it feel like when the only path forward is one that terrifies you? When the choice you make to protect your children may also be the choice that takes them from you?

The workhouse records tell the facts. They tell us who entered, when they arrived, and sometimes what became of them. Perhaps the women were trained to be placed in service. Sadly, other times this was their last destination before admission to the infirmary and a pauper’s grave.

None of these records can tell us what it meant to stand there, facing that threshold.

I was honoured when Helen Hollick invited me to contribute to Courage: Tales of History, Mystery and Hope alongside such a talented group of authors. Each story approaches courage from a different angle, but together they remind us that history is not only made by those whose names appear in great events. It is also shaped by ordinary people whose struggles and choices have left only the smallest traces behind.

For my great-grandmother, the gate was a real place she had to pass through.

For me, discovering her name in the archives became the beginning of a story.

Fear is the gate.

Courage is to step across the threshold.

I hope you enjoy reading The Gate. And find many memorable and inspiring stories within COURAGE: Tales of History, Mystery and Hope.

These were women whose lives I could research, fictionalise, and honour without it touching the bone. Yes, I had access to their diaries. Met them through their portraits. Walked the same streets they did. Visited their graves.

This story is different.

An afternoon’s idle play on Ancestry turned into a gut-wrenching discovery that blew open my family narrative and revealed a secret. These weren’t just records I was looking at, but a moment of decision that changed everything, and everyone, that came after.

In 1900, my great-grandmother took the hands of her ten-year-old daughter and seven-year-old son and walked them into the Lambeth Workhouse.

Admission papers. A transfer order moving two small children between institutions. A workhouse discharge. And a burial. Census records at ten-year intervals. And silence—long archival gaps where a family should have been.

What struck me was not only what was there, but what was missing. What hadn’t been told to me. When the secret had been omitted from our family narrative, expunged from the stories that the older generation passes on to the younger. I don’t even know who made the decision. Were the women ashamed? Or the men who chose to marry them?

And what this experience cost my grandmother to keep hidden. Or my mother to live in ignorance of. Or decide to continue the secret. For I knew nothing of this.

I found myself thinking about how courage is rarely recorded in the lives it belongs to. It is often only visible in what survives afterwards — in children, in consequences, in the silence people carry.

While researching, I travelled to a workhouse with my daughter. We walked the stone corridors, the high windows, the yards where children were made to exercise. We climbed the narrow stairs, stood in silence in the damp cellars. “You are the most resilient person I know,” my daughter said quietly. “Now we’ve discovered where it comes from.”

My great-grandmother entered my mind that day. She became one of the women I have researched and imagined and written about. Only she’s not from four hundred years ago. She is within living memory. It took me about four months to find the words to write. But they came. As did the tears. I am saddened that they lived with such a burden. Now they are gone, I can’t ask them why. But I can share my version of the truth, supported by all those documents that I discovered on that one idle afternoon.

Some stories do not stay in the past.

They wait.

And then they are told.

The Gate, a story in the forthcoming Courage anthology, is published on June 17.

According to her later recollections, every year on the 29th of May, Barbara Villiers and her family would creep down to their cellar in total darkness, pulling the door closed behind them so that no light could betray them, and raise a glass of wine to the young man they still called their king. It was his birthday, and it was the most dangerous toast in England. Charles was in exile in France, and to drink his health was to risk everything. But they did it anyway, year after year in the dark, because some loyalties do not require hope to survive.¹

In 1660, Barbara did not have to hide any more.

The king was coming home.

Before we get to the grand parade, the wine fountains, and the bells and the flowers strewn in the road, it is worth pausing to understand what England actually looked like in the years before the king returned, because the joy of the Restoration cannot be fully felt without it.

The Civil War had begun in 1642, and by the time the fighting was over England had lost, by some estimates, close to one in ten of its entire population to battle, disease and the famine that follows armies.² That is a figure that beggars comprehension when you try to make it human. These were not distant casualties but fathers and brothers and sons who had gone out one morning to fight for one side or the other and had not come back, or who had come back broken, or who had come back so changed by what they had seen that the women waiting for them barely recognised them. Every village in England had its absent men, its maimed husbands, its silent fathers. Reading the reparation records, the full extent of the tragedy really hits home, the stories living between the pleas of the widows for compensation, for a pittance, for an acknowledgement to keep their families alive.

It had been a devastating war, where England turned upon itself. It was a war between neighbours and friends. Families were divided by it, sometimes with a bitterness that outlasted the fighting itself. The woman who had sheltered a Royalist fugitive lived three fields away from the woman whose husband had ridden with Cromwell’s cavalry and come home missing an arm. The minister turned out of his church for his beliefs passed the minister installed in his place every time he walked to the market. In my own family, I write about a brother who declared for the king, and his best friend and brother-in-law, who was a Parliamentarian regicide. And still there were occasions where they saved each other’s lives. That, to me, epitomised the confusion and darkness of the Civil War more than anything.

To understand why the Restoration felt the way it did, you have to understand what England had been living through. The theatres had been closed since 1642. Christmas had been transformed from a feast day into a fast day. Dancing around a Maypole was not merely frowned upon but actively suppressed, which tells you something about how thoroughly the Puritan government had misread what ordinary people actually wanted from life. Church bells rang only for the approved occasions. The colour and noise and improvised joy of English popular culture had been pressed down, year after year, under the weight of moral legislation, until many people had quietly forgotten what it had felt like to celebrate without looking over their shoulder.

The news of Charles’s imminent return hit towns across England like a fever breaking. When Parliament formally proclaimed him king on 8 May 1660,³ the response was immediate and visceral. The contemporary writer Bulstrode Whitelocke recorded that people gave loud acclamations and shouts, that the bells rang, and that the city was filled with bonfires. At Norwich, it was estimated that ten thousand people crowded around the marketplace alone, with more lining every window. Melton Mowbray burned its bonfires for three days. Oxford was reported to be “perfectly mad.”⁴ Up and down the country, Maypoles went back up, sometimes by force: at Oxford, a university official who tried to chop one down was beaten back by the crowd.

England was remembering itself.

Charles landed at Dover on 25 May,⁵ and Samuel Pepys was there to see it, having sailed across with the fleet that brought the king home. What Pepys noticed was a dog. His eye for detail inside historical moments can always be relied upon.

The king came ashore in a barge, accompanied by General Monck, who received him with what Pepys called “all imaginable love and respect.” But Pepys himself was in a smaller boat nearby, and travelling with him was one of the king’s footmen and a dog that the king loved, which “dirted the boat, which made us laugh, and me think that a King and all that belong to him are but just as others are.”⁶ It is such a Pepys observation: the grandeur of the moment held up against the ordinary mess of a dog on a boat, and Pepys finding both equally true.

The Dover Corporation’s own records catch the official mood in their sober, civic way: the mayor, Thomas Broome, knelt to make a speech of welcome on behalf of the town.⁷ The crowd that lined the shore was what Pepys called “infinite.” He would not have been given to understatement.

Charles did not rush to London. He made his way slowly from Dover toward the capital, stopping at Canterbury and spending the night before his entry into London at Cobham Hall in Kent, as if he wanted to savour every mile of the England he had not seen for so many years. All along the road, church bells rang as he passed. The bell ringers at Dartford kept at it nearly the whole day and were given thirty shillings for their trouble, which was a considerable sum and quite rightly earned.⁸

He was met on Dartford Heath by the New Model Horse, the very same soldiers who twelve years earlier had crushed the Royalist rebellion, now assembled to escort him to his own capital. England is brilliant at overlooking this kind of magnificent awkwardness, and Charles seems to have received it with the charm of a man who had learned during years in exile, when to let irony pass without comment.

He entered London on 29 May 1660, which was also his thirtieth birthday,⁹ and John Evelyn stood in the Strand and watched the procession pass, and then he sat down and wrote about it in his diary in a great rush of astonished feeling.

He described twenty thousand horse and foot, all of them brandishing their swords and shouting with joy he could only call “inexpressible.” The streets were strewn with flowers. The bells were ringing. Tapestries and banners hung from every window. The fountains were running with wine. The Lord Mayor and Aldermen were there in their chains of gold, the livery companies in their finest dress, the nobility in cloth of silver and velvet and gold, and the windows and balconies were lined with ladies looking down, and there were trumpets and music and more people than Evelyn could count, and the procession was so long and so slow that it took seven hours to pass through the city, from two in the afternoon until nine in the evening.¹⁰

And then Evelyn wrote the sentence that stops me every time I read it: “I stood in the Strand, and beheld it, and blessed God: and all this without one drop of blood, and by that very army which rebelled against him.”¹⁰

That is the miracle he was pointing to. Not just the king’s return, but the fact that England had turned itself around without tearing itself apart again. The army that had helped bring Charles I to the scaffold had escorted Charles II to his throne. Nobody quite knew how it had happened, and nobody wanted to look too closely in case the explanation was less satisfying than the fact.

A few days later, Pepys recorded that all the world seemed to be in a merry mood.¹¹

By the time Charles rode through London on that May evening, Barbara Villiers, that young woman who had toasted him in the secrecy of her cellar, was already his lover. They had met in The Hague while she and her husband were there to assist with preparations for the Restoration, and whatever passed between them in those first days had clearly happened very quickly. She was around nineteen years old and quite remarkably beautiful, and in true form, Charles was captivated immediately. Barbara went on to have six children by Charles (five of whom he acknowledged), and remained his mistress for about a decade.¹²

Legend says that after the procession, after the crowds and the wine fountains and seven hours of being cheered through his own city on his birthday, the king ended that extraordinary day with Barbara at Whitehall.¹² Whether the legend is precisely true hardly matters; the spirit of it is right. The Restoration was not only a political event. It was a return to pleasure, to colour, to the idea that human happiness could not be legislated away.

Barbara Villiers and the women who shaped the Restoration court appear in The King’s Intelligencer and throughout The Lydiard Chronicles.

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Footnotes {#footnotes}

1. The cellar toast is drawn from Barbara Villiers’s own later recollections, as cited in Art UK’s essay on Barbara Villiers (artuk.org) and explored at length in Andrea Zuvich, Ravenous: A Life of Barbara Villiers, Charles II’s Most Infamous Mistress (Pen & Sword, 2024). As a memoir account rather than a contemporary document, it should be understood as Barbara’s own testimony about her family’s habits during the Interregnum.

2. Casualty estimates for the English Civil War vary considerably among historians. The figure of roughly one in ten of the population — accounting for battlefield deaths, disease, and famine — is drawn from broader demographic studies of the period; Charles Carlton’s Going to the Wars: The Experience of the British Civil Wars 1638–1651 (Routledge, 1992) remains the standard work on the human cost.

3. The formal parliamentary proclamation of Charles II as king took place on 8 May 1660, confirmed by the Middle Temple Archive records (middletemple.org.uk) and multiple contemporary accounts.

4. The accounts of celebrations across English towns — Norwich, Melton Mowbray, Oxford — are drawn from Dr. Edward Legon’s research published in the University of Nottingham History blog, “Celebrating the Restoration in England’s Towns” (blogs.nottingham.ac.uk, 2018), which draws on contemporary local records and newsbooks.

5. Charles II landed at Dover on 25 May 1660. Confirmed by the Dover Corporation Records, cited in dover-kent.co.uk, and by Pepys’s own diary entry for that date.

6. Samuel Pepys, Diary, 25 May 1660. The full entry is available at pepysdiary.com and in the authoritative Latham & Matthews edition: Robert Latham and William Matthews (eds.), The Diary of Samuel Pepys, 11 vols. (Bell & Hyman, 1970–83).

7. Dover Corporation Records, 25 May 1660, as cited in dover-kent.co.uk.

8. The Dartford bell-ringing account and the thirty-shilling gratuity are drawn from local records cited in “The Restoration: Charles II Meets General Monck on Dartford Heath,” crayfordhistory.org.uk.

9. Charles II entered London on 29 May 1660, confirmed by the History of Parliament Trust blog (historyofparliament.com, 2020) and by both Pepys’s and Evelyn’s diary entries for that date. 29 May was also his thirtieth birthday.

10. John Evelyn, Diary, 29 May 1660. The complete entry is available at bartleby.com and in the standard edition: E.S. de Beer (ed.), The Diary of John Evelyn, 6 vols. (Oxford University Press, 1955). The seven-hour duration of the procession (approximately 2pm to 9pm) is from Evelyn’s own account.

11. Samuel Pepys, Diary, early June 1660. Pepys’s entries from this period convey an unmistakable atmosphere of general rejoicing; the “merry mood” phrasing reflects the tone of his diary in the days following the king’s entry into London, as summarised at pepysdiary.com. The precise entry cannot be pinpointed with certainty from available sources and should be understood as a characterisation of his mood rather than a direct quotation.

12. The account of Charles and Barbara meeting at The Hague and their subsequent relationship is drawn from Andrea Zuvich, Ravenous: A Life of Barbara Villiers, Charles II’s Most Infamous Mistress (Pen & Sword, 2024), and from the Encyclopedia.com entry on Barbara Villiers. The legend of Charles spending his first night in London with Barbara at Whitehall is widely repeated in secondary sources but originates as a tradition rather than a documented fact.

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For Further Reading

John Evelyn, Diary — Evelyn’s account of the Restoration is one of the most vivid eyewitness records of the period. His full diary is available online at bartleby.com, and in the authoritative scholarly edition: E.S. de Beer (ed.), The Diary of John Evelyn, 6 vols. (Oxford University Press, 1955).

Samuel Pepys, Diary — Pepys began his diary on 1 January 1660, just in time to record the entire arc of the Restoration. His entries for May and June 1660 are essential reading. The complete diary is available online at pepysdiary.com, with annotations, and in the definitive edition: Robert Latham and William Matthews (eds.), The Diary of Samuel Pepys, 11 vols. (Bell & Hyman, 1970–83).

Andrea Zuvich, Ravenous: A Life of Barbara Villiers, Charles II’s Most Infamous Mistress (Pen & Sword, 2024) — The most thorough modern biography of Barbara Villiers, drawing on extensive archival research. Zuvich is a historian specialising in the Stuart period, and her treatment of Barbara’s life, from Royalist childhood through the height of her power at court, is both meticulous and compulsively readable.

Edward V and his younger brother Richard, Duke of York, had vanished from the Tower in 1483. Their uncle seized the throne as Richard III, and no one saw the princes in public again. Nearly two centuries later, here were two small sets of bones, and a king with every reason to make use of them.

And that’s really what this post is about. Not whether these were the princes. Not what happened in 1483. That discussion will be ongoing. But here’s what happened in 1674, how it was reported, and why. Here’s the background, and how King Charles turned the discovery to his PR advantage.

To understand why Charles II moved so quickly and so decisively when those skeletons appeared, you need to understand just how frightened he was. The year 1674 was not a comfortable one to be King of England. Charles was simultaneously juggling a secret he couldn’t afford to have discovered, a parliament turning openly hostile, a brother who had become a liability, and a nation whose Protestant paranoia against Catholicism was building steadily towards something catastrophic.

The previous year, Charles had tried to suspend all penal laws against Catholics through his Declaration of Indulgence. Parliament’s fury forced him to withdraw it, and they responded with the Test Act, requiring all public officials to receive communion in the Church of England and formally denounce the Catholic Mass as “superstitious and idolatrous.” It was a direct attack, and Charles knew that it partly targeted him, his family, and his inner circle. Charles was hiding a massive issue. Through the secret Treaty of Dover, he had promised Louis XIV of France that he would eventually convert to Catholicism in exchange for French money. He had fatally compromised himself, and though he subsequently attempted to pursue independent policies, he remained bound to Louis XIV both by inclination and by the fear of blackmail. His subjects deplored the French alliance and distrusted the whole tendency of his policies. If the full terms of Dover ever came to light, the consequences for the Stuart monarchy were unthinkable.

In my novel The King’s Intelligencer, that secret is exactly the kind of weapon that passes through the hands of agents and intelligencers, because in 1674, knowledge of the Treaty of Dover wasn’t just politically dangerous; it was potentially lethal.

During the parliamentary session of January to February 1674, members of the Commons attacked the remaining Cabal ministers as popish and dangerous, ruining their reputations. In response to the Duke of York’s recent marriage to the Catholic princess Mary of Modena, MPs moved to legislate limitations on the power of a future Catholic king, and Charles could only stop them by proroguing Parliament entirely. That’s the climate in the months immediately preceding the bones’ discovery. Charles wasn’t managing a restless public. He was shutting down Parliament to prevent it from tying his hands. Shaftesbury and his allies were steering provocative bills through the Lords, expelling Catholics from London, forcing oaths renouncing the Pope, requiring royal family members to seek parliamentary consent for marriages and the raising of their children. They were even beginning to consider bringing the Duke of York on charges of high treason. Charles prorogued the session. But he couldn’t prorogue public opinion.

His heir was his Catholic brother James, Duke of York, and James had become a problem that wouldn’t go away. Partly to assuage public fears that the royal family was too Catholic, Charles had agreed that James’s daughter Mary should marry the Protestant William of Orange. She would be a Protestant bride, visible and reassuring. But it wasn’t enough. James’s autocratic character, as much as his religion, made people fear him. Every time James appeared in public, every appointment he sought, every marriage he made, it reminded a Protestant nation exactly what came next if Charles died without a legitimate heir. And Charles’s queen, Catherine of Braganza, had suffered four pregnancies, none of them surviving. The succession question was not theoretical. It was urgent and terrifying.

The discovery of the bones predated the Popish Plot of 1678 by four years; this plot involved an explosion of anti-Catholic paranoia that resulted in the deaths of at least twenty-two innocent men. But its conditions were already fully in place. Paranoia about “papists” dominated the common consciousness. The Gunpowder Plot and the burning of Protestant martyrs under Queen Mary still served as living reference points, as did the Great Fire of London, which many widely believed French Catholic saboteurs had started. People distrusted Catholics because they assumed Catholics owed allegiance to a foreign pope, not an English king. Andrew Marvell caught the mood of the nation when he wrote in 1675 that “Popery is such a thing as cannot, but for want of a word to express it, be called a religion.” The country was a powder keg. Everyone at court knew it. Charles knew it better than anyone else .

And then the bones turned up.

Charles moved with striking speed. His principal surgeon, John Knight, examined the remains. Sir Thomas Chichley, Master of the Ordnance, reported the discovery to the king. And Charles, “graciously pleased,” as the surgeon’s report puts it with magnificent understatement, declared the bones to be those of the long-lost princes, and ordered Christopher Wren to design a marble urn for their reburial in the Chapel of King Henry VII at Westminster Abbey. (Scroll down for an extract of the report). Charles didn’t stop there. Sermons were delivered. People observed a period of mourning. Shakespeare’s Richard III, a play portraying a usurping, murdering king getting exactly what he deserves, was commissioned for a special production. The message sent could hardly have been clearer: people mourn legitimate kings. Usurpers are condemned. And I am a legitimate king. I will discover you if you challenge me.

This is the part that fascinates me most. Charles wasn’t just paying his respects to two long-dead boys. He was staging a piece of political theatre, using the poignancy of the princes’ story to draw a deliberate line between rightful monarchy and dangerous ambition. When whispers of Catholic conspiracy and royal overreach were everywhere, when Parliament was trying to legislate away his brother’s succession and his own chief ministers were being called traitors, he positioned himself as the pious, dutiful sovereign who finally gave England’s lost princes their proper rest. It was, by any measure, a masterclass in spin. His political adaptability and his instinctive ability to survive enabled him to steer his country through the convolutions of the struggle between Anglicans, Catholics, and dissenters that marked much of his reign. He activated a controllable narrative from the princes, positioning him within the tradition of rightful, mourning kingship, as his critics debated succession bills. Whether or not those bones were really Edward V and his brother almost doesn’t matter. And perhaps that was always the point.

We still don’t know whose bones those are. The remains interred in that marble urn in Westminster Abbey have never been DNA tested, despite periodic calls for it. The debate continues: historians, forensic scientists, and devoted Ricardians all have views, but the urn remains sealed. (For more about this, see my post, “The Urn in Westminster Abbey that nobody will open”).

This uncertainty is part of what drew me to write The King’s Intelligencer, set precisely in this moment of political intrigue. My family history runs through it: Sir Allen Apsley and his son Peter were on the payroll as intelligencers during this period. Allen’s cousin Nan Wilmot, Countess of Rochester, was embedded in England’s secret agent network during the Civil War. As confidante to Lady Mary Stuart, that Protestant princess heir to the throne, Allen’s daughter Franny perfectly placed herself to gather intelligence no one else could reach. Franny stumbles on a dangerous piece of her own family’s connection to the missing princes and to the secret that Charles II needed kept buried far more urgently than any bones, pulling her into a web of court politics that threatens not just the Stuart monarchy but the stability of England itself.

The bones may have given Charles II exactly the narrative he needed in 1674. But as Franny discovers, the truth underneath that narrative is far more dangerous.

The King’s Intelligencer is available on Amazon and Kindle Unlimited.

A summary of the report by King Charles’s surgeon, written in 1677

In Stuart England, a physician was a rarity, and families relied upon the women of the household to keep them healthy. Lady Anne Wilmot and Lady Johanna St.John exchanged letters and curatives that survive today.

Women were the true physicians of daily life. They diagnosed, prepared, and administered care with knowledge passed through generations, doing so long before a formal doctor crossed their threshold. Physicians were consulted not to replace their judgment, but to confirm it. Sometimes, they were sent away altogether in favour of tried-and-true family remedies that had outlasted many a learned man’s theories.

At the heart of this world was the physick garden — a patch of earth tended with as much care as any library. Here grew comfrey for poultices, willow bark for fevers, chamomile for restlessness, and a hundred other plants whose virtues were inscribed not just in reference books by physician botanists such as Matthias de L’Obel, but in handwritten recipe books, passed from mother to daughter, mistress to maid.

The 17th century was not kind. The English Civil War tore families apart, leaving the wounded to the care of whoever stood nearest. The war left England devastated, men and towns alike ruined. Plague swept through towns and villages, sparing no household. Into this hardship stepped women like Lady Johanna St.John of Lydiard Park, who compiled extensive medicinal recipes and remedies drawing from folk tradition, contemporary medical knowledge, and, when the moment called for it, a little alchemy and mysticism besides. Her work reflects a deep commitment to healing in times of crisis, a testament to the resilience of women who ministered not just to their families, but to the wider world of friends, servants and strangers who needed help.

The letters of Lucy Hutchinson reveal something of the emotional weight these women carried. She nursed her husband, the parliamentarian John Hutchinson, through illness and injury, supported him during the siege of Nottingham Castle, and balanced the roles of wife, caretaker, and political partner, all at once. Her experience was not exceptional. It was typical of so many women during and after the wars.

Seventeenth-century medicine was a curious, sometimes beautiful blend of empiricism and enchantment. The recipe books of the St.John family are a remarkable record of both. Treatments for fevers, wounds, and infections were meticulously tested over generations. Comfrey poultices and willow bark preparations — which contain salicin, a precursor to aspirin — appear alongside charms and incantations that reflect a lingering faith in the mystical properties of the natural world. Recipes contained recognisable ingredients such as lavender and rosemary alongside mystical curatives obtained from the London apothecaries, such as unicorn horn.

We might be tempted to smile at the charms. But consider: these women were working without microscopes, without germ theory, without anything we would recognise as a laboratory. What they had was careful observation, long memory, and an unwillingness to let a remedy die simply because no one could yet explain why it worked.

When I write about these women, I am drawing on a world I have come to know through their own words; letters, memoirs, and the handwritten recipe books they left behind. In The Lady of the Tower, my protagonist tends a medicinal garden within the Tower of London itself, caring for prisoners as well as family, based on the observations recorded by her daughter who grew up in the Tower, and no doubt helped her mother create the curatives. Her story is shaped by the lives of Johanna St.John, Lucy Hutchinson, and the countless unnamed women who held their households together through war and pestilence.

Their legacy is not merely one of survival. It is one of determination, ingenuity, and an enduring belief. As Lady Anne Wilmot wrote to her sister-in-law, Lady Johanna St.John: “as long as life is, there are hopes”. They were fighting together to save the life of Anne’s son, John Wilmot, the Earl of Rochester; praying that knowledge, carefully tended, could keep the ones they loved alive.

Anne Rochester, nursing her son, John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester (extracts of letters to Johanna St.John) June 1680

…He continues weak, but is sometimes better than he is others…he has a kind of hecktick fever upon him…he takes no broaths made with meat for fear of heat…he spits mightily within these two days, which some say is good for him, but I find all evacuations weaken him. I confess I cannot discern amendment in him yet, but as long as life is we have hopes.

 …I must, dear sister, give you an account of the first hopes of comfort I have of my son Rochester; who tho’ he is very weak, yet these two days has produc’d stranger alterations in him. He sleeps very well, is but little feverish, his great tortures of pain almost abated, gathers some strength, tho’ but little yet.

 …before I sealed this, I received yours, and two waters* for my son Ro. He and his lady give you thanks…

Lady Johanna’s recipe book includes that for Gilberts Water, a well-known curative. Her note on the use reads:

 “It is bad for nothing it cures wind and the colick restoreth decayed nature good for a consumption expels poison & all infection from the Hart helps digestion purifies the blood gives motion to the spirits drives out the smallpox for the grippes in young children weomen in labor bringeth the Afterbirth stops floods for sounding and faintings”

When I came to write The Lydiard Chronicles, these women were already waiting for me in family letters, in recipe books, in remedies that had kept people alive through plague and civil war. I wove their knowledge and their stories into the fiction, because the truth of their lives was already more vivid than anything I could invent.

I came to the missing princes in a roundabout way, for although I thought I knew the story, I had not spent much time in medieval England. I had grown up hearing about my great-aunt (nineteen generations ago) Margaret Beaufort, though our family’s perspective on her was rather different from that of her biographers, and poles apart from her depiction in popular historical fiction. Where most novels give us a calculating schemer in perpetual mourning-black, our family’s understanding was shaped by something more intimate: the extraordinary shower of titles, lands, and advantages that Margaret’s half-siblings in the St.John family received as a direct consequence of her Tudor connection. She was, to us, less a villain than a patron: formidable, devout, and generous to those she claimed as her own.

It was while searching for material for my next historical fiction novel that I typed my own name into Lydiard Park’s genealogical database, and the family tree delivered one of those moments every historical writer recognises as a gift. Scrolling past the Victorians and the Georgians, I almost settled on a Tudor Elizabeth St.John, until a date in the late 1400s stopped me cold. Here was an Elizabeth St.John who had lived through the final convulsions of the Wars of the Roses, who had married John Scrope, the powerful Baron Scrope of Bolton and one of Richard III’s northern lords, and who had stood as godmother to Edward V himself, the eldest of the Princes in the Tower.

Tracing her siblings confirmed what the connection already suggested: Elizabeth St.John was a half-sister to Margaret Beaufort, the mother of Henry VII and the woman whose determination drove the Tudor claim to the throne. Their shared mother was Margaret Beauchamp of Bletsoe, married three times, whose children by different husbands populated Margaret Beaufort’s extended St.John family. Elizabeth St.John had married twice; firstly to William la Zouche, later attainted for loyalty to Richard III, and then to John Scrope of Bolton Castle in Wensleydale, a stalwart Yorkist. She was, despite her Lancastrian connections, godmother to the boy who briefly became a Yorkist king.

That detail is more revealing than it might first appear. The arrangement of royal godparents was not casual; it reflected political calculation and trust. The fact that Elizabeth St.John, half-sister to the most determined and influential Lancastrian woman in England, stood godmother to the Yorkist heir speaks to the flexibility that characterised late fifteenth-century nobility. Margaret Beaufort herself was godmother to one of Edward IV’s daughters. No one foresaw that Edward IV would die young, leaving a twelve-year-old king at the mercy of the most contested succession in living memory.

What followed Edward IV’s death in April 1483 moved at extraordinary speed. Within weeks, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, had assumed control of the young Edward V, declared both boys illegitimate based on their father’s alleged pre-contract with Lady Eleanor Butler, and was crowned Richard III. Both princes were placed in the Tower, ostensibly for their own security. They were seen less and less frequently. Then they were not seen at all.

The Italian writer Dominic Mancini, in London at the time, recorded that the young king’s attendants were progressively debarred from him, and that the princes retreated into the Tower’s inner chambers until they ceased to appear at the windows altogether. After that, complete and utter silence.

Three figures have accumulated suspicion around their disappearance across the centuries: Richard III, who had the clearest structural motive and immediate means; Henry Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, Richard’s powerful ally who later turned against him; and Margaret Beaufort, whose entire political project depended on clearing the legitimate Yorkist line from Henry Tudor’s path. However, remember this. No physical evidence of their death has been scientifically verified. The bones interred in Westminster Abbey, long assumed to be those of the princes, have never been subjected to DNA testing.

The case for Margaret’s involvement has been most publicly advanced by Philippa Gregory, who argued for it in a 2013 BBC documentary series, but historians have been broadly sceptical. Access is the central problem: Richard’s men who guarded the Tower were answerable only to the king, and Richard never accused Margaret or her husband Thomas Stanley of any involvement, which, given that he moved against her in other ways after her son’s failed invasion attempt, suggests he did not believe her responsible. There is, as the historian Matt Lewis has argued, no evidence connecting Margaret to the deaths, and considerable practical argument against the possibility. I also believe that such an extremely devout woman would not have found it within herself to harm the two children.

But the absence of evidence is not the same as innocence, and equally not the same as guilt. What is certain is that Margaret Beaufort, more than almost anyone alive, would have needed to know what had happened to those boys. Her entire stratagem rested on their being gone, or removable. She was in active negotiation with Elizabeth Woodville, the boys’ mother, to marry Henry Tudor to their sister Elizabeth of York. That two women could circle the same catastrophe from opposite sides and find common ground is one of the more astonishing things about this whole strange period.

And so we return to Elizabeth St.John, Lady Scrope of Bolton, standing at the intersection of all these competing loyalties. Godmother to the boy king. Half-sister to the woman who most needed his throne empty. Wife to a powerful Yorkist lord in the north. She was not a peripheral figure in this drama. She was woven into its very centre by the accident of her birth and the obligation of her role as godmother. In those times, a godmother was considered a blood relative. That’s how connected she was to Edward. If anyone in England knew what happened to those boys, it was the woman who stood between the two worlds that consumed them, tied by blood to the Tudor claimant, and by love, or at least sacred obligation, to the child king himself.

The disappearance of the princes is described as a mystery, and so it remains. No bones confirmed. No confession authenticated. No contemporary account names a killer or even a cause of death. But mystery implies a puzzle not yet solved, and there is another possibility: that some people in 1483 knew exactly what had happened, weighed the danger of knowing it, and spent the rest of their lives keeping it secret. History is full of that kind of silence. It is, in the end, the loudest thing the past leaves us.

The story of Elysabeth Scrope and her godson, the lost king of England, is hers to tell. I have tried only to follow where she leads. Please enjoy this brief excerpt from The Godmother’s Secret, where Elysabeth Scrope delivers her godson, the young King Edward, into the custody of her sister, Margaret Beaufort, and Richard, Duke of Gloucester.

I hesitate at the threshold of the great hall, seeing this time what fear obscured on my last visit. Marble pillars soar to support huge wooden rafters, cut like ship’s joists, the ceiling’s ribs floating on a sea of air. Light dazzles through clear glazed arched windows, pooling into a lake of sunshine on the shimmering flagstones. A fanfare of trumpets echoes through the stone walls, a customary greeting for the new King of England as he takes up residence in his royal palace. Harry and Ned step towards two figures on the dais at the far end of the great hall, and I follow closely behind.

The light from the clerestory windows blinds me, and I squint to see who is standing before me. There is Gloucester, unmistakable in his form. But surely that is not my sister on his right? I quicken my pace to catch up with Ned and Harry.

Dear God, it is Margaret. And looking every inch the royal Beaufort heiress in both her gown and demeanour.

My sister sweeps a deep formal curtsey as Ned approaches. “Your Grace.”

Margaret’s headdress is pure white; a tracery of the Beaufort portcullis is embroidered into her cloak’s burgundy velvet lining. Her gown is a priceless black silk with a kirtle of silver tissue. A striking rosary of gold and rubies on a long chain hangs from her waist. She raises herself, her head bowed, ignoring my outstretched hand and half-uttered greeting.

Gloucester drops to a knee. “My nephew. My king. Welcome.”

“My Lord Gloucester,” Ned replies. “Uncle. I thank you for bringing me safely to London, to my people, and to the Tower to prepare me for my coronation.”

Gloucester gets to his feet, his eyes fixed upon the prince’s face, Margaret standing like a statue at his side. There is my sister’s enigmatic smile again, one that I last saw when she condemned me to sanctuary to be housed with our York enemies. Why is Margaret in the Tower, welcoming Ned? And why has she not told me of her plans? She has had plenty of time to write to me at the Bishop’s Palace.

“And my Lady Stanley.” Ned holds his hand out for Margaret to kiss. “What a pleasure to be able to greet you personally. My father respected your husband as one of his most loyal lords. I hope he will serve on my council too.”

“He awaits your command, Your Grace,” replies Margaret. “Our family look forward to supporting you and your protector in the coming years as you take your rightful place on England’s throne.”

I raise an eyebrow, turn my head before my expression reveals my thoughts. Margaret’s ability to negotiate these changing alliances is remarkable. Her marriage to Lord Stanley assumes today even more importance than when King Edward was alive. Now she is pledging the significant Stanley loyalty to Ned’s reign. Of course, that would also include the opportunity to ask him directly to bring her own son home. Margaret’s God has answered her prayers.

The portrait of Lucy Hungerford, Lady St. John (1560–1598), painted around 1590 and now at Lydiard House, stands as one of the earliest and most compelling images in the St. John family collection. It is not merely a likeness, but a carefully constructed statement of identity in which dress and adornment function as a sophisticated visual language. The jewels Lucy wears are not incidental embellishments; they are integral to how she chooses to be seen.

Foremost among these is the remarkable jewel suspended at her left shoulder: a mermaid formed from a baroque pearl, its irregularity lending a sense of organic vitality to the figure. The head and arms are enamelled, the hair rendered in gold, while the creature holds a comb and mirror: traditional attributes that invite interpretation. Its tail, composed of rubies, terminates in three pendant pearls, the central one anchored by a diamond. Even the chain from which it hangs, worked in gold with rubies and pearls, participates in the overall richness of the composition.

Such an object would not have been chosen lightly. The symbolism of the mermaid had evolved considerably by the late sixteenth century. In medieval moralising contexts, the mermaid, or siren, served as a warning against lust and temptation, an embodiment of dangerous allure that led the unwary to spiritual ruin. By the Renaissance, this meaning had softened and diversified. The mermaid became a fashionable motif, associated not only with beauty and seduction but also with fortune and worldly success. To wear such an image was therefore to engage with a complex and layered symbolism, one that balanced moral ambiguity with the display of cultivated taste and prosperity.

Elsewhere, Lucy’s jewellery reinforces this interplay between piety, allegiance, and status. At her waist hangs a girdle book, a small devotional text that signals her religious observance. On the opposite hip, a cameo set within a jewelled gold frame and finished with a drop pearl may plausibly represent Queen Elizabeth I, thereby asserting loyalty to the Crown. Her rings, comprising a wedding band alongside stones such as ruby and sapphire, speak both to marital status and to the period’s belief in the inherent virtues of gemstones.

The repetition of materials is striking. Pearls, in particular, appear throughout: at her neck in double strands, in the cross-shaped ornament in her hair, and in the detailing of her headdress. Gold chains at her wrists echo those at her throat, while the bodice and sleeves are enriched with gold and diamond aglets. The cumulative effect is one of deliberate cohesion, presenting Lucy as a woman of wealth, refinement, and conscious self-fashioning, aligned both with courtly taste and with the religious and political structures of her world.

It is also worth situating the portrait within its immediate historical context. Around the time this likeness was painted, Queen Elizabeth I is known to have visited Lydiard as part of her royal progresses. Such visits were occasions of considerable significance, during which hosts displayed not only hospitality but also their loyalty, status, and cultural sophistication. It is tempting to imagine that the attire recorded in this portrait reflects what Lucy herself wore to greet the Queen (especially given the cameo portrait of a woman) and that the painting served, in part, to memorialise that extraordinary honour paid to the family. We can’t prove this is the inspiration, but in my novelist’s world, I’d completely go with that story!

Given her position in society, Lucy’s jewellery assumes an even greater significance. These objects were not simply worn; they were chosen and ultimately preserved in paint as expressions of identity. Through them, Lucy Hungerford presents herself as devout, loyal, and eminently placed within the social and cultural hierarchies of late Tudor England. The portrait thus invites us to read its details closely, for it is in these details that the fullest account of her self-representation is to be found.

Writing around thirty years after the death of King James VI and I, this formidable Puritan diarist looked back at his reign and reached for language that, even today, lands with a thud. The court of James, she wrote, was “a nursery of lust and intemperance.” He had arrived from Scotland trailing “a company of poor Scots, who, coming into this plentiful kingdom, were surfeited with riot and debaucheries, and got all the riches of the land only to cast away.”

She was, to put it mildly, not a fan.

Murder. Incest. Adultery. Drunkenness. Swearing. Fornication. Ribaldry. Countenanced and normalised from the top down. Trickling down from king to courtier to country house with the unstoppable momentum of a particularly squalid waterfall.

If Lucy were alive today, she would not be just be writing in her notebook (although it makes great reading, four hundred years later). She would be posting a nineteen-part thread, pinning it to her profile, and podcasting her feelings. Her horror was real, her documentation meticulous, and her verdict, published in the Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, absolutely unsparing.

She wasn’t entirely wrong about the chaos.

Gareth Russell’s wonderfully readable Queen James gives us James in full, glorious, complicated colour. He reveals a king who was intellectually brilliant, personally affectionate, and profoundly unbothered by the dignity that his more image-conscious predecessors had considered non-negotiable. The court of James I was a place where favourites rose and fell on the strength of a glance, where the boundaries between political patronage and personal infatuation were cheerfully blurred, and where the King’s own behaviour set a tone that was, let us say, relaxed.

There is a documented undignified episode that rather captures the flavour of the man. During a stay at Lydiard Park, James managed to fall up the stairs (a feat that somehow feels very on-brand) and was forced to spend several unplanned days there while he recovered. The King of England, Scotland, and Ireland, stranded and nursing his dignity at a country house because of an encounter with a staircase.

Lydiard Park, in Wiltshire, was the ancestral seat of the St. John family. By the early seventeenth century a household well used to the proximity of power, and not always comfortably so. The house that stands today, elegant and restrained in its Palladian refacing, gives little hint of the messier Tudor and Stuart world it witnessed. When James came to stay, originally just passing through for dinner, the St.Johns would have had little choice but to smile, reorganise their entire household, and wait for their unplanned royal guest to feel well enough to leave. The King’s impromptu convalescence was, in miniature, a perfect portrait of Jacobean court life: chaotic, self-indulgent, and entirely on his own schedule.

Which brings us to a detail that must have made Lucy Hutchinson’s jaw tighten considerably.

The St.Johns of Lydiard were not strangers to Lucy. Her mother was born and raised at Lydiard Park. Her aunt, Barbara St.John, was a woman Lucy had known since childhood: she had grown up in close proximity within the Tower of London, where Lucy’s father Sir Allen Apsley served as Lieutenant; Barbara was family, and family she was fond of. But Barbara had married Edward Villiers, Master of the Mint, who lived practically next door. And Edward Villiers was the half-brother of George Villiers, the future Duke of Buckingham, the King’s magnificent, catastrophically powerful favourite, the man whose hold over James I was the talk of every court in Europe and the scandal of every pulpit in England.

Lucy, who believed the Villiers connection had helped corrupt an entire kingdom, was therefore connected by blood and affection to the very family she most associated with that corruption. You can dress it up in diplomatic language, but what it amounts to is this: Sunday lunch must have been very awkward.

Just imagine the scene: the future fierce Puritan diarist, sharpening her pen against the vices of the age, sitting across a table from her beloved aunt, whose brother-in-law was the living embodiment of everything she most despised. Did they avoid the subject? Did Barbara defend her husband’s family? Did Lucy hold her tongue, or did she not? The historical record, frustratingly, does not say. But reading between Lucy’s lines, there are some firsthand feelings. We won’t even start on the “other Barbara Villiers” – Lucy’s great niece, who became Charles II’s infamous mistress, the Duchess of Cleveland. I’ll save that for another day.

Lucy’s outrage was not purely ideological. It was intensely personal.

Gareth Russell’s Queen James is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand James in full. His book superbly covers the brilliance, the favouritism, the extraordinary contradictions of a king who wrote theology, fled spiders, and somehow held three kingdoms together for over two decades. But Lucy Hutchinson is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand what it felt like to live through his reign if you were watching from the other side of the theological fence, connected just closely enough to the scandal to feel it in your bones.

She was writing for posterity, for her children, and undoubtedly, for God himself. But she was also, unmistakably, furious. I am inspired by that fury and courage: a woman in the 1660s, surveying the wreckage of a kingdom she believed had been morally bankrupted by a king dead these thirty years, and deciding that the record needed to be set straight.

And so she did.

Further reading: Gareth Russell, Queen James; Lucy Hutchinson, Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson; my novels, The Lydiard Chronicles, based on Lucy’s memoirs.

The story is called The Gate. More on that next month.

I have spent my writing life with women who lived centuries ago: Lucy St.John within the Tower of London, Luce Hutchinson navigating civil war, Lady Elysabeth Scrope carrying a royal secret to her grave. Their stories are extraordinary, and I have felt genuinely, sometimes startlingly, close to them as I’ve written. The archives have a way of collapsing time. A letter in a four-hundred-year-old hand, a portrait that meets your eye across the centuries; the distance dissolves, and their stories become mine.

But this is different. Margaret, Julia, and Joseph are within living memory. Two generations, not fourteen. My grandmother Julia was the child in that workhouse yard. And when I sat with the admission papers, the transfer order moving two small children between institutions like items in a ledger, I found I could not maintain the historian’s composure I had relied on before. It took me several months before I could write a word.

When I visited a workhouse with my daughter, walking the stone corridors, the bleak yards, the rooms that smelled of institution long after it had closed, I tried to place my grandmother Julia there. A girl of nine, alone, without her mother. Standing in that yard, my daughter turned to me and said I was the most resilient person she had ever known. I told her: you are. We were both right, and the realisation came that neither of us invented this trait. We are simply doing what Margaret did, knowing that the only choice she had was to save her children from starvation, and what my grandmother Julia did after her, carrying something forward from them without realising it had been placed in our hands.

Margaret’s courage was never spoken of in our family. I don’t even know how much of it was understood. If it wasn’t for the archive records, I would never have known it, for the story died with Julia. But it was lived, and passed on to every woman who came after her, without anyone naming it, or perhaps even recognising it for what it was.

As I read the proofs of The Gate this week, I find myself thinking about that. Resilience rarely announces itself. It just keeps moving.

I am grateful for my grandmother and great-grandmother’s courage, with all my heart. They certainly felt fear, and shame. I hope they also recognised and drew strength from their own resilience. I am honoured to name them. Margaret and Julia deserve to be known.

That was me and The King’s Intelligencer, my fifth novel, as it happens. You would think that by now I might have some idea what I was doing.

I had stuffed Franny Apsley’s story into the bottom drawer, quite convinced that I had failed her. Writing about her world of espionage and court intrigue had felt manageable once, and then, gradually, it hadn’t. The gaps opened up around me: gaps in my knowledge, and worse, gaps in my confidence. The more I researched, the less certain I became about almost everything, and eventually I closed the drawer and told myself it was a temporary measure. It wasn’t, of course.

And then something arrived that changed everything.

Out of nowhere, a long-lost (frankly unknown) portrait of Sir Allen Apsley resurfaced. Franny’s grandfather, gazing out across the centuries with all the composure I entirely lacked. He instantly became part of my life, looking at me from my desktop, a colour print sharing a drawer with Franny. Just a few weeks later came a newly transcribed will detailing her father’s life, including a curious corner of his time at court that no source I had previously found had touched. Suddenly, I could see the inheritance Franny carried, not just materially, but in character, in temperament, in the particular kind of danger that her family name placed her in. I had been writing her as though she existed in isolation, a solitary figure navigating a hostile world. Now I began to understand the weight she carried in name and position.

I went back to the drawer.

This, I think, is what research actually does to a novel when the right discovery arrives. It doesn’t feel like adding facts to an existing framework; it feels rather more like the ground shifting beneath you. The scenes I had been unable to commit to, the passages that had resisted every attempt to make them work, I could see now why they had been so difficult. I had been asking the wrong questions because I hadn’t yet known what questions to ask. History has a way of doing this to you. You go looking for confirmation and instead find a complication, and the complication, almost always, turns out to be the better story.

I want to be honest, though, and say that I couldn’t have gone back to that manuscript on my own. The portrait and the will gave me the material I needed. But the friends, the family, the beta readers who had kept gently, persistently asking about “the book,” who had sent messages saying, in various carefully diplomatic formulations, that they wanted to read the rest of it, they gave me something harder to come by, which was the nerve to continue. They were the people who believed in this story during the months when I had entirely stopped believing in it myself, and I won’t pretend that didn’t matter enormously.

Which is perhaps why the news that The King’s Intelligencer received Book of the Year from the Coffee Pot Book Club was so unexpectedly moving. This book so nearly didn’t exist at all. That it does, and that it has found its readers, is not something I take lightly, even for a moment.

Persistence, in the end, turned out to be rather different from how I had always imagined it, less a matter of jaw-set determination than of something hesitant and more stubborn. Not shredding the manuscript. Keeping the drawer unlocked. Remaining curious about Franny as a person, not as a plot problem to be solved, but as a woman whose life seemed to me to deserve being properly understood.

Curiosity, I’ve come to think, is its own form of stubbornness. It keeps you reading and researching even during the months when you aren’t writing. It means that when a portrait surfaces from across the centuries, you are still paying attention, still ready to receive what it has to tell you.

And what I have come to believe, after five novels and one rather extended visit to the bottom drawer, is that a book often knows things its writer doesn’t yet. You cannot bully it into existence before the research, or the understanding, or simply the time, is ready. What feels in the moment like failure may turn out to be fallow ground. The stepping back that feels so much like defeat can sometimes be precisely what creates the space for the right discovery to reach you.

I find comfort in knowing I am not alone in this, and I hope perhaps you will too. I say this with no intention of placing myself in company I haven’t earned, rather the opposite, but simply because it genuinely helps me to remember it. Hilary Mantel, a writer I admire unreservedly, kept Wolf Hall in a drawer for years because she understood, with characteristic rigour, that she didn’t yet know enough. That novel won the Booker Prize. Katherine Anne Porter carried Ship of Fools for the better part of twenty years before it was finally published. Colm Tóibín, one of the most precise and quietly luminous writers I know, speaks of novels that are “not ready yet,” not novels that have failed, but novels that are still waiting for what they need. These writers are not cautionary tales. They are simply evidence, rather wonderful evidence, that the drawer is very rarely the end of the story.

So if you have a manuscript gathering its own particular silence somewhere, please don’t throw it away. It may simply be waiting for its own portrait to surface. Write what compels you, not what you think you ought to be writing. Follow the research wherever it leads. Trust that the readers who need your story will find their way to it, if you can find the courage to give it the chance to exist.

I very nearly didn’t give Franny that chance. I am very glad, in the end, that I did.

“What I feel distinguishes this outstanding novel is the writer’s personal connection to her characters, some of whom are her direct ancestors. Her knowledge of the inner workings of the period also convincingly re-creates Franny’s world and allows the reader to feel instantly transported.” — Wendy Johnson, The Richard III Society Bulletin

Burnt grass. An English heatwave. And from above, captured by a local resident with a drone who had agreed to help the Friends of Lydiard Park test a hunch: the ghost of a garden. Emerging from the parched lawns in lines of darker and lighter gold, precise and unmistakable after two and a half centuries of invisibility, was the grid of Lydiard’s lost seventeenth-century garden: the pathways, the flowerbeds, the formal layout that had once led down to a canal, all of it written back into the landscape by the language of drought.

That garden had belonged to Lady Johanna St.John. And I felt, looking at those photographs, as though she had just walked back into the room.

Johanna is one of my people; she is both a distant ancestor and a character I have lived alongside for years while writing the Lydiard Chronicles, and I know her the way you come to know someone through their letters and their household book and their meticulous instructions to Thomas Hardyman, her steward at Lydiard, about the sowing and planting and tending of her flowerbeds. What makes me smile about those gardening letters is that she wrote many of them from the St.John manor in Battersea, where she also lived, which tells you something about the quality of her attention. She could not always be at Lydiard, but the garden was never far from her mind, and Hardyman, I imagine, knew better than to let the flowerbeds slide.

The 1700 plan of the park shows the full extent of what she created: formal gardens leading down to a canal, the kind of grand ordered landscape that spoke, in the visual idiom of the seventeenth century, of a family that had survived the Civil War with its nerve intact. And it was not merely decorative. Johanna’s letters about her garden sit alongside her recipes for medicinals and her instructions for preserving fruit and her thoughts on the management of the household. All of her writings show of the same determined, practical, deeply attentive way of managing her household, her gardens, and her family. The garden was an expression of who she was, in the same way that her household book was, or her correspondence, or her four portraits that still hang at Lydiard today and tell their own stories of age and resilience.

So what happened to Johanna’s garden?

Her grandson happened to it, is the short answer, which will surprise no one who has spent any time at all with family history. John, 2nd Viscount St. John, had come into a fine inheritance and a wealthy wife—Anne Furnese, whose dowry made the remodelling of Lydiard possible—and he had the improving instincts of his generation. The old Tudor manor became the elegant Palladian mansion we see today, and the formal garden went the way of everything that Georgian taste found fussy and old-fashioned: it was levelled, grassed over, replaced with sweeping open lawns and a naturalistic lake where Johanna’s canal had been. Yep, the whole landscape was made over in the style that Capability Brown was making irresistible to landowners across England. The rather wonderful detail, which I find consoling for reasons I cannot entirely explain, is that Anne’s dowry didn’t quite stretch to a complete transformation. The garden makeover, like so much in family history, had to come within budget. Johanna’s life’s work was erased, but frugally. And the remodelling of the house fell woefully short. The front of the house is Palladian. The rear still obstinately retains its medieval character. I think Johanna would have found that amusing too.

I don’t suppose John gave it much thought. He was a man of his time, with his own ideas about what Lydiard should look like, and the notion that his grandmother’s flowerbeds might outlast him — outlast everyone, outlast the Georgian lawn laid over the top of them — would have seemed frankly absurd. We rarely consider the longevity of the things we demolish. We are too busy building what comes next.

The parch mark phenomenon is one of those things that, once you know about it, you cannot quite stop thinking about. Buried archaeology affects how grass grows in dry weather. Old path surfaces and soil disturbances create variations in the turf that are entirely invisible in normal conditions but emerge, with startling clarity, when the land is under enough stress. You need a prolonged summer for it, hot and relentlessly dry, the kind of English summer that makes everyone apologise to each other while secretly feeling that the country looks rather magnificent. The Friends of Lydiard Park had a hunch that the 2022 heatwave might be the right conditions, a neighbour took his drone up to find out, and the results, as we said as Trustees, exceeded all expectations.

I’ve tried to articulate what moved me so much about those photographs, and the nearest I can get is this: the garden didn’t need anyone to find it. It had simply been waiting, underneath the Georgian lawn, underneath two and a half centuries of fashionable landscaping, as patient and persistent as the woman who made it. Not excavated, not reconstructed, not interpreted, but just revealed, by the right conditions arriving at the right moment. The paths are still paths in the earth. The beds still hold the shape she gave them. What Johanna tended is still structurally, demonstrably present in the ground at Lydiard, and all it took to see it again was a dry enough summer and someone willing to look.

I have spent enough years researching the women of the Lydiard Chronicles to know that the past doesn’t so much disappear as go underground, and wait. Johanna’s letters survive. Her household book survives, crammed with the knowledge she thought worth keeping. Her portraits survive. And now her garden has come back too, not restored or reimagined but simply there, written in the parched grass in a language she would have understood perfectly — the language of soil and seasons and things that, planted with enough care and intention, have a way of outlasting everything that tries to bury them.

She would have been pleased, I think, though she would have been too sensible to show it. She would have said something tart about the Georgian taste that swept her garden away, made a note in her household book, and gone back to writing to Hardyman about the state of the flowerbeds.

Which, in its own way, is exactly what happened.

Lucy Hutchinson wrote memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson in the years following her husband John’s death in 1664, and it is, by any measure, a remarkable achievement: the full-length biography of a man she had loved and admired, set against the sweep of the English Civil War, drawing on her own direct experience of events that had shaken the country to its foundations. Lucy was a woman of formidable intellectual gifts. She was the first person to translate Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura into English verse, a poet and theologian in her own right, and the Memoirs reflects those gifts on every page. It is political, passionate, meticulously observed, and written with a command of English prose that places it comfortably among the finest biographical writing of its century.

But it is not the Memoirs themselves that have lodged most deeply in my imagination. It is the fragment of her own life that speaks volumes.

Tucked into the opening pages of the manuscript, before the biography of her husband begins in earnest, is a short autobiographical piece that Lucy started and never completed. She set it aside, and there are the remains of several torn pages ripped from the volume. Perhaps she felt it too personal, perhaps the larger project overtook her, and it sat in manuscript, largely unnoticed, for the better part of two centuries before editors began to take it seriously. It runs to only a few pages. And it begins with a sentence that arrested me entirely the first time I encountered it:

What is so immediately striking about this sentence is not its drama but its ordinariness. The matter-of-fact precision of the date and hour, the easy, proprietorial confidence with which the Tower of London is named as a place of residence, because for the family into which Lucy was born, it required no further explanation. She was not imprisoned there, nor visiting, nor passing through on some errand of state. She was born there because the Tower was simply where her family lived, and a four o’clock January birth in such a household was one more event in the rhythm of domestic life behind those famous walls.

That sentence, and the world it so casually implies, is the reason I came to write The Lady of the Tower. But beyond its significance to me as a novelist, it strikes me as one of those rare archival gifts that reorients our understanding of a place we thought we already knew.

The Memoirs as a whole are principally concerned with the great public drama of the Civil War, with battles and sieges and the agonising moral choices of men and women caught between conscience and loyalty. Lucy writes of those events with the authority of an eyewitness and the analytical intelligence of a historian. But the fragment pulls us back to something earlier and, in its own way, equally illuminating: the childhood world in which Lucy’s extraordinary mind was formed.

Her father, Sir Allen Apsley, held the office of Lieutenant of the Tower of London, responsible for the institution’s governance, its prisoners, and its considerable household establishment. What the fragment conveys, in its unguarded and informal register, is that for Lucy, the Tower carried none of the associations of dread it held for the wider world beyond its gates. It was home in the fullest and most unreflective sense: the particular smell of the river at different seasons, the bustle of family life shared with her brothers in a schoolroom, the sound of the guard changing in the small hours, the comings and goings of an establishment that was one of the most peculiar and socially complex households in England.

And then there is her mother. Lucy St. John, the woman whose story became the foundation of my novel The Lady of the Tower, is drawn in the fragment with an affection and a specificity that makes her leap from the page across four centuries. She managed the household with what her daughter’s account suggests was formidable competence and considerable intellectual ambition, extending medical care to prisoners who lacked the means to afford a physician, and engaging seriously with the chemistry and apothecary experiments of the Tower’s most distinguished captive. Sir Walter Raleigh, imprisoned in the Bloody Tower while Lucy lived next door in the Queen’s House, had established a small laboratory and cultivated herbs in the Lieutenant’s garden. Lady Apsley studied his preparations with enough seriousness that her daughter records it as a matter of note, as a dimension of her mother’s character, not merely a curiosity of their circumstances.

There is something almost vertiginous about that image, once one pauses to consider it: the Lieutenant’s wife and Sir Walter Raleigh in conversation over the herb beds in the Tower of London, while her children played in the courtyards and the lions in the Royal Menagerie added their voices to the general noise of the Thames, and the great machinery of English political life ground on beyond the walls.

What Lucy Hutchinson’s fragment does, in an extraordinary primary source, is remind us that the Tower of London was never simply the place of its most famous stories. At the opening of the seventeenth century, it was a functioning community of considerable social density: the Yeoman Warders and their families, the extensive staff of the Royal Mint which had operated within the walls since the thirteenth century, the keepers of the Royal Menagerie, the chaplains attached to the Chapel of St Peter ad Vincula, the surgeons and tradespeople whose services a large establishment inevitably required. The parish records of that chapel—the burial place of some of the Tower’s most famous prisoners—are full of baptisms and marriages and entirely unremarkable deaths that have nothing whatsoever to do with political disgrace. People raised their children within those walls. They buried their dead in that chapel. They went about the daily business of their lives in one of the most extraordinary addresses in England, and the great events unfolding around them were simply the weather of the place: present, inescapable, and eventually ordinary.

This is the history that the fragment preserves, and that the conventional record has done least to recover: the domestic interior of the Tower, the lives of the people who made it function, the texture of daily experience behind walls that history has associated almost exclusively with imprisonment and death. The Lieutenant’s wife managed an establishment whose inhabitants ranged from the highest nobility to common prisoners and required different registers of care and attention at every turn. The social intelligence demanded by such a position was considerable, and yet it is almost entirely invisible in the sources, recoverable only in the margins of other people’s accounts, in footnotes, in the unfinished autobiographical pages of a woman who set her pen down one day and never picked that particular thread up again.

This, I think, is where Lucy Hutchinson’s unfinished pages speak most directly to those of us who spend our working lives in the company of the past. The Memoirs survived because they were a substantial and significant document, the biography of a man who had played a genuine role in the great events of his time. The fragment survived almost by accident, tucked into the opening of a larger manuscript, easy to overlook and easier still to discount as a minor personal aside to the main business of the text.

But it is in precisely that quality of the accidental and the incomplete that the fragment’s value lies. Finished accounts are finished for a reason: they have been shaped, edited, and presented for an audience, and in that process something of the unguarded original is inevitably lost. The fragment, by contrast, was written for no audience at all. Lucy was not performing her memories of the Tower; she was simply beginning to record them, in the natural and unself-conscious way that one begins a thing one never expects anyone else to read. And that is why, four centuries later, we can still feel the cold of that January morning in 1620, and hear, somewhere in the background, the sound of a child being brought into the world at four o’clock in the morning in the Tower of London, in a household where the Lieutenant’s wife kept a medicinal garden and the most celebrated prisoner in England was growing herbs a few yards away.

That the Memoirs are still read, still taught, still argued over by historians and literary scholars, is a tribute to Lucy Hutchinson’s extraordinary gifts. That the fragment survived alongside it is simply good fortune that, as anyone who has spent time in archives will know, you learn never to take for granted, can sometimes be life-changing, and always to be grateful for when it appears.

The Lady of the Tower, By Love Divided and Written in Their Stars form The Lydiard Chronicles, my series of historical fiction novels based on Lucy Hutchinson’s autobiography and memoirs.

Edward V and his younger brother, Richard, Duke of York, disappeared from the Tower of London in the summer of 1483. After that, it’s anyone’s guess what happened.

What I want to explore here is a different question: one that sits at the heart of the whole mystery. We may have physical remains that could tell us something important, and for reasons that range from the procedural to the frankly puzzling, nobody has been permitted to properly examine them in nearly a century.

The Urn in Innocents’ Corner

In 1674, workmen carrying out building work at the Tower of London unearthed children’s bones. Charles II determined that these were the remains of Edward V and his younger brother Richard, Duke of York — the Princes in the Tower, who disappeared from historical record during their uncle Richard III’s reign in 1483. The bones were placed in an urn designed by Sir Christopher Wren and installed in Westminster Abbey’s Innocents’ Corner, where they remain today. The inscription is unambiguous in its verdict, describing the boys as having been “stifled with pillows... by the order of their perfidious uncle Richard the Usurper.”

The conclusion, in other words, was written in stone. It was, after all, the word of a king about the fate of a king.

The 1933 Investigation

The urn was opened on July 6, 1933, and the remains were examined in the Lady Chapel over the course of several days before being re-sealed on July 11. The examination did confirm the presence of two children’s remains, and in those days, this was treated as meaningful corroboration of the traditional identification.

The passage of time, however, has not been kind to those findings. Critics subsequently noted significant flaws in how the investigation was conducted; among them, the presence of animal bones, including what appeared to be chicken bones, mixed in with the human remains. The examination also lacked any of the forensic tools we would now consider essential: there was no DNA testing, no carbon dating, no analysis of the kind that has since transformed what we can learn from historical remains. By modern standards, the 1933 investigation raised more questions than it resolved, and it has never been followed up with a more rigorous scientific examination.

That was over ninety years ago. It remains the last time anyone looked.

The Requests That Were Refused

In the early 1990s, following renewed public and academic interest in the mystery, serious formal requests were made to have the bones properly examined. The Richard III Society, together with the BBC in 1993 and Channel 4 in 1995, asked for carbon dating and DNA analysis: the same category of forensic work that would, two decades later, definitively identify Richard III’s remains beneath a Leicester car park.

The Dean of Westminster at the time, the Very Rev Michael Mayne, declined both requests, despite being pressed hard to agree. He consulted historians, sought advice from an Oxford archaeology professor, and the matter was referred to Buckingham Palace and the then Home Secretary, Michael Howard. Both the Queen and the minister were recorded as being in full agreement with the church authorities that the matter should not be reopened.

The reasons given were various. The Oxford professor noted, reasonably enough, that carbon dating a late 15th-century sample would only establish a date within plus or minus fifty years — too wide a margin to distinguish between Richard III’s reign and that of his successor Henry VII. There were also institutional concerns: that permitting this examination could set a precedent leading to multiple requests for royal disinterments, and uncertainty about what the church would do with the remains if DNA testing returned a negative result — if the bones proved not to be the princes at all. Would they remain in the royal urn regardless? Would they be reburied elsewhere? The Dean acknowledged these were not comfortable questions.

What the tests could not do, it was also noted, was finally establish whether Richard III was guilty of the boys’ deaths. That is true, of course, though it somewhat misses the point. Identifying whose bones these are and determining who was responsible for their deaths are two separate questions. The first is one forensic science could plausibly answer. The second is a matter of historical interpretation that no test could ever fully resolve.

Where Things Stand Now

The bones remain in Wren’s urn. No further scientific examination — no DNA analysis, no carbon dating, no modern forensic investigation of any kind — has been permitted since the flawed 1933 study. The Richard III Society continues to express interest in testing the remains. The official position of the Church of England has not changed.

When Richard III’s remains were identified in 2012, it was a reminder of what is now possible with the application of modern science to old bones. The case for revisiting the contents of the Westminster Abbey urn feels, to many historians, stronger than ever. Whether the institutional will to permit that examination will ever materialise is another question entirely.

The urn sits in its corner. The inscription makes its confident claim. And the bones inside keep whatever secrets they hold.

The fate of the Princes in the Tower — and those who may have kept their secrets — is at the heart of my novels The Godmother’s Secret and The King’s Intelligencer.