Historical Novelist Tony Riches on Finding the 'Real' Mary Tudor

I've been impressed with the fiction of Tony Riches for quite some time. Tony writes about the early Tudors, bringing to life the exciting dramas of Owen Tudor and his sons, Edmund and Jasper Tudor. Without these men, there'd have been no dynasty at all!

The novel I just read is Mary, Tudor Princess. It's a book about the sister of Henry VIII. I liked it so much I asked Tony for an interview!


NB: I found your depiction of Mary Tudor very fresh. She seemed younger and more naive in this story than in other depictions. Did you have a strong idea of her character before you began or did it evolve as you wrote?

TR: My first encounter with Mary was her birth in book three of my Tudor trilogy. She was close to her mother and shared many of her mother’s qualities, and of course her paternal grandmother, Lady Margaret Beaufort. When I finished the trilogy, I had a wealth of information about Mary Tudor – and decided her amazing story would make the perfect ‘sequel’.


What were your main sources of information on Mary?

One of the most useful sources was Erin Sadlack’s book ‘The French Queen’s Letters: Mary Tudor Brandon and the Politics of Marriage in Sixteenth-Century Europe (Queenship and Power)’. As well as translations of all Mary’s surviving letters, this has invaluable analysis of the context. I also discovered a wonderful biography, ‘Mary Tudor the White Queen’, by Walter Richardson. This is full of fascinating details which I could research further to bring her world to life. The most intriguing research was my visit to her home at Westhorpe and to see Mary’s tomb in Bury St Edmunds (where I also saw a lock of her hair).


What surprised you the most in your research of her?

I think it was her stoical acceptance of her brother Henry’s insistence that she should marry the aging King of France. It seems she accepted his wishes as her duty – and tried to make the best of it. Mary insisted on being referred to as ‘Queen of France’ for the rest of her life.


Your depiction of Catherine of Aragon came alive in this novel. Young Catherine is so different than the woman we meet in the many Anne Boleyn novels. How did you develop this view of her?

As with Mary, I’ve ‘lived’ with Queen Catherine for the last few years, as she first appears as a fifteen-year-old in my Tudor trilogy. I recommend Giles Tremlett’s biography, ‘Catherine of Aragon, Henry’s Spanish Queen’ to anyone who would like to see beyond the more traditional treatment of Catherine. The developing friendship between Catherine and Mary was interesting to write.

What led you to this series, and specifically to Owen Tudor?


I was born in Pembroke, Wales, birthplace of Henry Tudor, and began researching his life – as like most people I barely recalled a mention of him in school history lessons, as the focus was always on Henry VIII and his wives. I eventually had so much material I realised I could write his story as a trilogy, with Henry being born in book one, ‘coming of age’ in book two and becoming King of England in book three. At the time I wrote Owen there were no books about his life, so I wanted people to appreciate how he founded the Tudor dynasty.



Does living in Wales give you a special viewpoint on the early Tudors?



Yes. Pembroke Castle is well preserved and only a few miles from where I live, as is Edmund Tudor’s tomb at St David’s Cathedral. Henry and Jasper escaped to exile from the nearby coastal town of Tenby, so it was easy for me to ‘follow in their footsteps’ all the way to the remote chateaus in Brittany which feature in my books. Last year a group of us raised the funding for a bronze statue of Henry Tudor to be placed in front of Pembroke Castle, so now no one can forget the Tudor connections to the town.

Henry Tudor statue at Pembroke Castle

I must confess I find the romanticism of Charles Brandon in many mediums trying. I think a lot of it has to do with Henry Cavill playing him in The Tudors. How did you approach such a famous figure from Henry VIII's court?


I researched Charles Brandon for my book on Mary, and realised there was much more to him than is generally known. This inspired me to write my latest book, ‘Brandon – Tudor Knight’ which follows him from his early days with Anne Browne and the young Henry, through his life with Mary, and on to his final marriage to his young ward, Catherine Willoughby. Brandon was no saint - but I’ve tried to show why he acted as he did. I also kept his story as factually accurate as possible and hope this new book will help readers understand him.



Do you think that in the end Mary made the right choice in Brandon?



Mary’s life would have been so different if King Louis XII of France had lived even a few more years, as I don’t think Brandon would have been able to wait for her. The problem she had was that Louis’ successor, King Francis, would have happily married his widowed stepmother off to whoever he wanted a favour from. I believe Mary married for love, despite the risks – and that Brandon loved her in his own way for the rest of her life.





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Tony Riches

Tony Riches is a full-time UK author of best-selling historical fiction. He lives in Pembrokeshire, West Wales and is a specialist in the history of the Wars of the Roses and the lives of the early Tudors. Tony was a finalist in the 2017 Amazon Storyteller Awards and is listed 130th in the 2018 Top 200 list of the Most Influential Authors. For more information about Tony’s books please visit his website tonyriches.com and his popular blog, The Writing Desk and find him on Facebook and Twitter @tonyriches.

Goodreads Review : "' The Blue' Is a Triumph"

I'm pleased and honored to share this review written by mystery author James Lincoln Warren. James is a frequent contributor to Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine and Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and is the author of two mystery short fiction series and several standalone short stories. The "Treviscoe of Lloyd's" series features 18th century insurance investigator Alan Treviscoe.

The review was posted on Goodreads.

By James Lincoln Warren


Crime fiction is primarily a literature of human behavior under extreme moral pressure. At its worst, it is sensationalist and emotionally shallow at one extreme, and escapist and emotionally inauthentic at the other. But at its best, it is a contemplation on the power of evil acting upon both the innocent and the culpable, the dangers and rewards of shadowy compromise on the one hand and moral inflexibility on the other, and the confused morass of human motivations and interactions.

Good historical crime fiction, by changing its cultural context to another time, compelling the reader to compare the past with the present, benefits by limning these issues against an ethical background that starkly contrasts with the familiar. In 18th century England, a pickpocket could be hanged for stealing a handkerchief, but human trafficking was perfectly lawful.

By their nature, historical mysteries provide the reader with two complementary insights.

The first is an awareness of how differently people behaved in the past than they do today, conveying how much our attitudes have evolved over time, and stimulates meditation regarding our ethical evolution our time, good and bad.

The second, and to my mind, more important, is an awareness of how much people remain very much the same, and how much their existence is governed by their essential humanity, irrespective of the wider circumstances. Crimes and sins may change, but love, hate, hunger, greed, and compassion, to name just a few characteristics, are eternal.

As are certain themes—the themes explored by Nancy Bilyeau.

In her new novel, The Blue, Bilyeau revisits several of the dominant themes she explored in her well-received earlier trilogy featuring Joanna Stafford, a displaced young nun in Henry VIII’s England, but sets the drama in 18th century England and France, during the Seven Years’ War. Like the Stafford novels, The Blue is a first-person narrative (but in present tense) told by an artistically gifted young woman frustrated by the restrictions placed upon her in the society in which she lives. Along the way, there are other similarities: discussions on the nature and abuse of power, the major and minor tragedies attending religious intolerance, the role and purpose of art, the loneliness of exile, the pitfalls of overweening ambition, the need for painstaking discretion to avoid peril, the challenges of keeping a pure conscience, the pain of imprisonment (both literal and figurative), and romantic love as a means of salvation.

It may seem on the surface that The Blue is a reiteration of the story told in The Crown, The Chalice, and The Tapestry. Even the similarity of all the titles may seem to indicate that the books are all one of a piece. But this is misleading.

Joanna Strafford was a nun who had to learn how to live out of the cloister as a layperson against her will. Genevieve Planché, the protagonist of The Blue, is a third generation English Huguenot, a staunchly anti-Catholic Calvinist, who knows exactly how to thrive in her community as far as she is allowed to do so, but dares to dream of a more fulfilling existence. Joanna lost her vocation, but Genevieve is looking for how to enter hers: she longs to be a serious painter in oils, an occupation closed to women. (The first celebrated female portraitist was still a generation away: Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun was only three years old when The Blue takes place, and was a scion of Paris salon society rather than a middle-class member of an iconoclastic sect.)

And the title has a secondary meaning from its literal one. Crowns, chalices, and tapestries, while powerful symbols, are tangible things. The color blue, however, is an abstraction, tangible only to the eye, and was at the time the most sought after tincture in the spectrum. A rich, enveloping, royal blue—although there was Prussian blue available at the time, it was not considered entirely adequate—a blue that was just beyond the reach of art. Like Genevieve’s ambition, it was an artistic goal fraught with barriers and obstacles.

Although Genevieve’s quest is directed squarely at canvas, the primary medium for this color to which Bilyeau directs our attention is fine porcelain: delicate, fragile, sublime, formed through a metamorphosis of rough clay, God’s earthly material for creating Man, into something altogether precious and celestial, the paragon of taste and elegance.

Something that leads beyond simple avarice. Something that leads to obsession.

That singular theme is something new in her work, and imbues her story with an even greater psychological depth.

Nancy Bilyeau has given us a world of industrial espionage and international intrigue, high art and low cunning, profound love and intractable hatred, rational discourse and irrational behavior, all for the love of a color, painted in deft strokes both fine and broad. The Blue is a triumph.


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[Full disclosure: this book was provided to me by the author’s publicist at the author’s request. I moderated Nancy Bilyeau’s first appearance in a panel at a mystery convention, Bouchercon XLIV in 2013 in Albany, NY. The topic was historical mysteries.]

From Sir Walter Ralegh to Samuel Pepys, the Sinister Westminster Gate-House Prison

By Nancy Bilyeau




In 1663, in the flush of the Restoration, a woman named Mary Carleton went on trial for bigamy. Born in Canterbury of humble parents, she’d married a shoemaker and given birth to two children before disappearing to Cologne. There she had a torrid affair with a nobleman, turning down his offer of marriage but keeping his rich gifts and some money besides.

Mary Carleton then returned to England, claiming to be an orphaned German princess and marrying one John Carleton. A discovered letter betrayed her first marriage and she was arrested.

Bigamist and impersonator Mary Carleton, 1663
© National Portrait Gallery, London, licensed under CCA.

Mary’s colorful life—she was acquitted of bigamy after a spirited defense and went on to marry, steal from, and abandon a string of new husbands before being transported to Jamaica and, finally, hanged for theft in 1673—is not, however, the focus of this post. It is her place of incarceration before going on trial, a strange prison within a very short distance of Westminster Abbey where men and women had been held for three centuries before Mary’s celebrated trial, captured in the book The Arraignment, Tryal and Examination of Mary Moders, Otherwise Stedman, Now Carleton, (styled, the German Princess) At the Sessions House in the Old Bayly, Being Brought Prisoner from the Gate-House Westminster, for Having Two Husbands.

The Tower of London holds claim to being the prison of greatest tragic renown, where queens were feted and beheaded and Jesuit priests screamed on the rack. But the Westminster Gate-House has many stories to tell too, holding errant clerks, religious dissidents, poets and legendary Englishmen such as Sir Walter Ralegh and Samuel Pepys before imprisoning a great many miserable, anonymous debtors.

In a description of the Gate-House Prison written in 1768, it "is situated near the west end of the abbey, entering into Tuttle Street, and the Almery...it is the chief prison for the City of Westminster liberties, not only for debt, but treason, theft and other criminal matters."

In the beginning, the prison was more connected to Westminster Abbey, which makes sense. Some say it was a powerful abbot who transformed the gatehouse into a prison, but documents point to William Warfield, the cellarer of Westminster Abbey. In 1370 he arranged for the gatehouse’s upper storey to house a jail.

But why?

By the time of the reign of Edward III, Westminster was in full medieval throttle. William Rufus' majestic Great Hall, where Parliament met and kings sat on marble thrones, was raised near the spectacular Westminster Abbey, founded by Edward the Confessor in 1065.

Westminster Abbey today.
Image by ChrisO, licensed under CCA.

In Walter Thornbury's Old and New London (1878), he speculates about the preeminence in Plantagenet times of Westminster Abbey and the importance of even the "butler," who was most probably this same William Warfield: "A magnificent apex to a royal palace, the abbey church was surrounded by its own greater and lesser sanctuaries and almonries; its bell towers (the principal one 72 feet 6 inches square, with walls 20 feet thick), chapels, gatehouses, boundary walls, and a train of other buildings, of which we can at the present day scarcely form an idea. In addition to all the land around it, extending from the Thames to Oxford Street, the Abbey possessed 97 towns and villages, 17 hamlets and 216 manors. Its officers fed hundreds of persons daily, and one of its priests (not the abbott) entertained at this pavilion the king and queen, with so large a party, that seven hundred dishes did not suffice for the first table, and even the abbey butler, in the reign of Edward III, rebuilt at his own expense the stately gatehouse which gave entrance to Tothill Street."

Tudor-era historian John Stow wrote that the eastern part of the north gate was used as the bishop of London's prison for "clarks convict." So was it originally an ecclesiastical prison? That's contradicted by another report that during the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381, rioters set the Westminster prisoners free. It's difficult to picture the peasant rebels fired up to liberate errant clerks. But in 1596, a Southwark preacher confined in the Gate-House did write an abject letter to Lord Burghley "for keeping Wednesday a fast, and transferring the observation of it unto Thursday." Hardly a violent felon.

Another Tudor troublemaker, Giles Wigginton, a Cambridge-educated clergyman, was twice confined in the Gate-House, once for refusing to swear he was not the author of The Marprelate Tracts, pamphlets attacking the kingdom's traditional Anglican leaders. While imprisoned in the 1590s, Wigginton was joined by other fiery Puritans, such as William Hacket, who claimed to be the messiah, called for the removal of Elizabeth I, and on the way to his execution insulted the clergyman determined to comfort him.

Sir Walter Ralegh

The first "celebrity" prisoner of the Westminster Gate-House was Sir Walter Ralegh. After a lengthy imprisonment in the Tower of London under James I, he was released to lead a disastrous expedition to Venezuela to find gold. But on his return to England, he was re-imprisoned in the Gate-House, perhaps because he was to be executed in the Old Palace Yard in Westminster.

Tradition has it that Ralegh wrote this poem shortly before he met his end on Oct. 29, 1618:

Verses Found in His Bible in the Gate House at Westminster 

"Even such is time, that takes in trust
Our youth, our joys, our all we have,
And pays us but with earth and dust;
Who, in the dark and silent grave,
When we have wandered all our ways,
Shuts up the story of our days;
But from this earth, this grave, this dust,
My God shall raise me up, I trust."

 On the scaffold, Ralegh was shown the ax that would soon decapitate him and said, "This is a sharp medicine, but it is a physician for all diseases and miseries." Ralegh was buried in St. Margaret's Church nearby, and never moved.

Richard Lovelace

The next poet adventurer to be held at Westminster--but not, fortunately, beheaded--was Richard Lovelace, a wealthy knight's son who at the age of 13 became a "gentleman wayter extraordinary" to King Charles I. In his twenties, Lovelace was arrested for destroying a pro-parliamentary petition. During his several months' stay in the Gate-House, he is believed to have written his most famous poem:

To Althea, From Prison 

"Stone walls do not a prison make,
Nor iron bars a cage;
Minds innocent and quiet take
That for an Hermitage.
If I have freedom in my love,
and in my soul am free,
angels alone that soar above,
enjoy such liberty."

Ruined by his undaunted support of the royalist cause, Lovelace died in poverty in 1658, two years before the restoration of the monarchy in Charles II.

In the late 17th century, the two most famous prisoners were condemned to the Gate-House.

Jeffrey Hudson and the Queen,
by Anthony van Dyck

The first was court dwarf Sir Jeffrey Hudson. He was presented to Queen Henrietta Maria as a surprise when he was a child 18 inches tall: he emerged from a pie, dressed in armor. Hudson became a cherished member of the royal household and eventually traveled with the Queen to French exile. At some point, Hudson tired of insults about his size; responding to a taunt from the queen's master of horse, he entered a duel and shot his opponent in the head. He then fled France. Sometime later, Hudson was on a boat seized by Barbary pirates and it took him many years to escape and make his way to England. But this was now the time of Titus Oates, and Hudson was arrested for being a "Roman Catholick." He died in 1682, two years after being released from the Gate-House.

The last illustrious prisoner was the erudite Samuel Pepys, jailed in 1690. A longtime civil servant, wit and bibliophile, he kept a diary that is one of the leading records of the Restoration, the Anglo-Dutch War, the Great Plague and the Great Fire. A correspondent of Newton's, he also wrote about his personal problems--bladder problems, fights with his wife, squalid extramarital affairs--and his love of wine and theater. But he too fell afoul of anti-Catholic paranoia. He was suspected of being a Jacobite in secret contact with the exiled James II; because of his poor health, he was given bail.

In the 18th century, the occupants of the Westminster Gate-House were almost all debtors. In 1769, this article was published about the grim conditions to be found in Westminster:

"The Gate-House, near Westminster Abbey, is the jail whereunto those poor wretches, who cannot pay their small debts, are committed, for forty days, unless they do what is all too often impossible; namely, pay the debt sooner. Add to this, that these prisoners have no other maintenance but what they derive from charity...for strange as it is, yet true it is, that there is no provision by law for the subsistence of prisoners in this jail..."

A rendition that could be the Gate-House in its final dreary decades.

Charity for the prisoners was obtained by way of a box hanging from a pole forty feet long, let down by a chain, to those who wished to give. Even more incredibly, "gin and other spirits" were allowed into the Westminster Gate-House as freely as at the "public houses." The prison keeper or under keeper would go to the window and shout into the street, "Jackass! Jackass!" so that an employee of a public house would come to receive orders.

In the year 1776, as the question of freedom was raging across the ocean, the Westminster Gate-House also was liberated. The prison was closed, some say after a public campaign by the author Samuel Johnson who said "a building so offensive ought to be pulled down."

Dr. Johnson died eight years later and was buried at Westminster Abbey.

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Nancy Bilyeau is the author of a trilogy of mysteries, The Crown, The Chalice, and The Tapestry, for sale in North America, the United Kingdom, Germany, Russia, and Spain.

The Crown was an Oprah pick: "The real draw of this suspenseful novel is its juicy blend of murder, lust, conspiracy and betrayal."

Nancy's new novel is The Blue, a thriller set in the art and porcelain world of 18th century France and England.

For more information, please visit Nancy's website at http://www.nancybilyeau.com/