Emily Paull

Jane Seymour: The Haunted Queen Alison Weir Headline Book, 2018 (I own a copy courtesy of the publisher.) Portrayals of Jane Seymour don't differ much in popular culture-- she is usually golden and demure, and King Henry the Eighth seemed to have genuine affection for her, which is no doubt aided by the fact that she gave him his sole male heir and then promptly died before she could disappoint him like his previous wives had. Her marriage to Henry, and her time as his mistress preceding it, have always seemed short compared to the years of his marriages to both Katharine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn, and the King's Great Matter which came between them. In this novel, the third in Weir's Six Tudor Queens series, Henry's third wife becomes the subject-- and though her time as his queen is often not given equal attention in other portrayals, here she is also given the same treatment as her predecessors, in that the book is about 500 pages long. The book begins...

Headline Review, 2017 I own a copy, courtesy the publisher. Of all of Henry the Eighth's brides, Anne Boleyn is probably the most infamous.  Mother to Elizabeth the 1st, Anne was Henry's second wife, for whom he broke with the Catholic Church and set aside his Spanish Queen, Katherine of Aragon.  Of course, she was also accused of adultery and witchcraft, and beheaded. This is the second book in her Six Tudor Queens  series, which will see a book on each of Henry's brides published one a year for six years.  Alison Weir is the one of the top-selling historians in the United Kingdom, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and Sciences, as well as an Honorary Life Patron of the Historic Royal Palaces.  She has published numerous books on the Tudors and the Wars of the Roses, both fictional and factual.  As she explains in her author's note at the end of the book, it is hard for any modern reader to really know what was going on in Anne Boleyn's head...

Katherine of Aragon- The True Queen (Six Tudor Queens Book 1) Alison Weir Headline Publishing, 2016  (I own a copy, courtesy the publisher) Ever since I read Philippa Gregory's novel The Constant Princess , Katherine of Aragon has been one of my most admired historical figures.  We all know some parts of the story of Henry the Eighth and his ill-fated six wives: divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived.  But what we also know is that there are a lot of rumours about the time period which make for really interesting but really inaccurate dramas.  If anyone has ever seen The Tudors , that would be my case in point. Tudor England was not just a haven of licentiousness and intrigue.  It was a highly political time, and also a time when religious belief was much more fervent than it is today.  Katherine of Aragon was sent to England to marry Arthur, Prince of Wales, who was the oldest son of the first Tudor King, Henry the VII and Queen El...

The King's Curse Philippa Gregory Simon and Schuster So you may remember last week I had a liiiiiittle bit of a fan moment about my favourite historian/ writer, Philippa Gregory. She seems to put out these huge, incredibly thoroughly researched novels at an astounding rate, and this year is no different (although I suppose the research would overlap a little).  2014 sees the final instalment in the Cousins War series, The King's Curse  which neatly forms a narrative bridge between this series, and Gregory's earlier novels about the court of King Henry VIII.  Margaret Pole, the Countess of Salisbury, was the only daughter of George, Duke of Clarence (brother to Edward IV) and Isabel Neville and she lived her life in constant fear of being suspected of treason simply due to the fact that her maiden name was Plantagenet.  As a girl, she saw her brother imprisoned in the Tower of London for being a viable heir to the York lines of succession, and she saw him execu...