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    I stared on in horror as the sword sliced my aunt's head from her swan-like neck. The executioner raised her severed head into the air by its long chestnut locks. The last thing I remembered before my world turned black was my own scream.Fifteen year-old Catherine Carey has been dreaming the same dream for three years, since the bloody execution of her aunt Queen Anne Boleyn. Her only comfort is that she and her family are safe in Calais, away from the intrigues of Henry VIII's court. But now Catherine has been chosen to serve Henry VIII's new wife, Queen Anne of Cleves. Just before she sets off for England, she learns the family secret: the true identity of her father, a man she considers to be a monster and a man she will shortly meet.This compelling novel tells the life story of a woman who survived being close to the crown and who became one of Queen Elizabeth I's closest confidantes.

    The clash is so significant because it marks the break between medieval and modern; yet how much do we really know about this historical landmark?Michael Jones uses archival discoveries to show that Richard III's defeat was by no means inevitable and was achieved only through extraordinary chance. He relocates the battle away from the site recognized for more than 500 years. With startling detail of Henry Tudor's reliance on French mercenaries, plus a new account of the battle itself, the author turns Shakespeare on its head, painting an entirely fresh picture of the dramatic life and death of Richard III, England's most infamous monarch.

    But on the eve of her execution Rombaud swears a vow to the ill-fated queen: to bury her six-fingered hand, symbol of her rumoured witchery, at a sacred crossroads. Yet in a Europe ravaged by religious war, the hand of this infamous Protestant icon is so powerful a relic that many will kill for it... From a battle between slave galleys to a Black Mass in a dungeon, through the hallucinations of St Anthony's Fire to the fortress of an apocalyptic Messiah, Jean seeks to honour his vow.

    The women of the royal family are the central characters; what they ate, how they dressed, the books they read, and the letters they wrote are all addressed. Yet even the greatest of these women suffered the universal legal and physiological disabilities of womanhood, and while some triumphed over them, others went under.

    As seen in her two previous, highly acclaimed books-Restoration London and Dr. Johnson's London-she has immersed herself in contemporary sources of every kind. She begins with the River Thames, the lifeblood of Elizabethan London. The city, on the north bank of the river, was still largely confined within old Roman walls. Upriver at Westminster were the royal palaces, and between them and the crowded city the mansions of the great and the good commanded the river frontage. She shows us the interior décor of the rich and the not-so-rich, and what they were likely to be growing in their gardens. Then the Londoners of the time take the stage, in all their amazing finery. Plague, small-pox, and other diseases afflicted them. But food and drink, sex and marriage and family life provided comfort, a good education was always useful, and cares could be forgotten in a playhouse or the bear-baiting rings, or watching a good cockfight. Liza Picard's wonderfully skillful and vivid evocation of the London of four hundred years ago enables us to share the delights, as well as the horrors, of the everyday lives of sixteenth century Britain.

    His more rounded view of the circumstances in which she found herself and the expectations of her society allows the historical Katherine to emerge.Katherine has long been condemned by historians for being a promiscuous and frivolous consort who partied away her days and revelled in male attention, but Byrne's reassessment conveys the mature and thoughtful ways in which Katherine approached her queenship. It was a tragedy that her life was controlled by predators seeking to advance themselves at her expense, whatever the cost.

    But few books have brought to life more vividly the exquisite texture of two women's rivalry, spurred on by the ambitions and machinations of the forceful men who surrounded them. The drama has terrific resonance even now as women continue to struggle in their bid for executive power.Against the backdrop of sixteenth-century England, Scotland, and France, Dunn paints portraits of a pair of protagonists whose formidable strengths were placed in relentless opposition. Protestant Elizabeth, the bastard daughter of Anne Boleyn, whose legitimacy had to be vouchsafed by legal means, glowed with executive ability and a visionary energy as bright as her red hair. Mary, the Catholic successor whom England's rivals wished to see on the throne, was charming, feminine, and deeply persuasive. That two such women, queens in their own right, should have been contemporaries and neighbours sets in motion a joint biography of rare spark and page-turning power.

    She witnesses from the sidelines the glittering splendour of her father's court, and the terrifying consequences of his wrath.With few she can trust, Elizabeth comes to womanhood during the reigns of her brother and sister, shrouded by a web of deceit. She lives in constant danger, yet rises above her detractors to defy her mother’s legacy, and go down in history as one of England’s most ruthless and powerful monarchs. Her life became a testament to the ambitions demonstrated of her parents. Just how much of an influence did Henry VIII’s most notorious wife have on her child? And was Elizabeth's accession Anne Boleyn's final triumph over death? A powerful and compelling tale about the tumultuous beginnings of the Virgin Queen, this is the perfect read for fans of Anne O’Brien, Elizabeth Chadwick and Alison Weir. It is the first of four newly reissued classics of historical fiction, which also include The Tudor Heritage, The White Lion of Norfolk and The Danish Queen. Lynda M. Andrews, who also writes as Lyn Andrews, is the Sunday Times Number One bestselling author of over 34 sagas, and one of the top 100 bestselling authors in the UK. She was born and raised in Liverpool, which serves as the inspiration for many of her novels. She now divides her time between Merseyside and the Isle of Man, where she has lived for several years.

    This book helps to restore full humanity to these six fascinating women by applying the insights of feminist scholarship. Here they appear not as stereotypes, not simply as victims, but as lively, intelligent noblewomen doing their best to survive in a treacherous court. Divorced, Beheaded, Survived takes a revisionist look at 16th-century English politics (domestic and otherwise), reinterpreting the historical record in perceptive new ways. For example, it shows Ann Boleyn not as a seductress, but as a sophisticate who for years politely suffered what we would now label royal sexual harassment. It presents evidence that the princess Anne of Cleves, whom Henry declared ugly and banished from his bed, was in fact a pretty woman who agreed to the king's whim as her best hope for happiness.

    Through his personal relationships with several of Henry s queens, and Henry himself, his writings were filled with colorful anecdotes, salacious gossip, and personal and insightful observations of the key players at court, thus offering the single most continuous portrait of the central decades of Henry s reign.Beginning with Chapuys arrival in England, in the middle of Henry VIII s divorce from Katherine of Aragon, this book progresses through the episodic reigns of each of Henry s queens. Chapuys tirelessly defended Katherine and later her daughter, Mary Tudor, the future Mary I. He remained as ambassador through the rise and fall of Anne Boleyn, and reported on each and every one of Henry s subsequent wives Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves, Katherine Howard, and Katherine Parr as well as that most notorious of ministers Thomas Cromwell. He retired in 1545, close to the end of Henry VIII s reign.In approaching the period through Chapuys letters, Lauren Mackay provides a fresh perspective on Henry, his court and the Tudor period in general.

    On her twelfth birthday, Bess of Hardwick receives the news that she is to be a waiting gentlewoman in the household of Lady Zouche. Armed with nothing but her razor-sharp wit and fetching looks, Bess is terrified of leaving home. But as her family has neither the money nor the connections to find her a good husband, she must go to facilitate her rise in society. When Bess arrives at the glamorous court of King Henry VIII, she is thrust into a treacherous world of politics and intrigue, a world she must quickly learn to navigate. The gruesome fates of Henry’s wives convince Bess that marrying is a dangerous business. Even so, she finds the courage to wed not once, but four times. Bess outlives one husband, then another, securing her status as a woman of property. But it is when she is widowed a third time that she is left with a large fortune and even larger decisions—discovering that, for a woman of substance, the power and the possibilities are endless . . .

    They shared an important commonality of experience — both with a parent dead on the headsman’s block, both imprisoned in the Tower just yards away. Within days of the death of her sister, Mary, he was at her side and within months, openly spoken of as her lover, even her future husband. Her relationship with her “bonnie sweet Robin” was one of the most important in the life of Elizabeth. For thirty years he loved her, advised her, understood her, sat by her bed in sickness, and represented her on state occasions. Yet, much of the fascination in their relationship comes from what is not on display: the sudden death — some said murder — of Leicester’s wife, which damaged his reputation irretrievably; and Elizabeth’s persistent refusal for ever afterwards to marry anybody at all.Not a conventional biography, Elizabeth & Leicester is, rather, an intimate portrait of an affair between two people at a crucial moment in history.

    Armed with a sharp eye, dangerous curiosity, and uncanny intelligence, Ursula pledges...To Shield the Queen Rumor has linked Queen Elizabeth I to her master of horse, Robin Dudley. As gossip would have it, only his ailing wife, Amy, prevents marriage between Dudley and the Queen. To quell the idle tongues at court, the Queen dispatches Ursula Blanchard to tend to the sick woman's needs. But not even Ursula can prevent the "accident" that takes Amy's life. Did she fall or was she pushed? Was Ursula a pawn of Dudley and the Queen?Suddenly Ursula finds herself at the center of the scandal, trying to protect Elizabeth as she loses her heart to a Frenchman who may be flirting with sedition against her Queen. She can trust no one, neither her lover nor her monarch, as she sets out to find the truth in a glittering court that conceals a wellspring of blood and lies.

    It affected his wars, his diplomacy and his many marriages. It was at the root of his fatal attraction to Anne Boleyn, the source of her power and it was the means of her destruction. In this witty, intriguing, accessible account, Nicola Shulman interweaves the bloody events of HenryOCOs reign with the story of English love poetry and the life of its first master, HenryOCOs most glamorous and enigmatic subject: Sir Thomas Wyatt. Courtier, spy, wit, diplomat, assassin, lover of Anne Boleyn, and favourite both of Henry and his sinister minister Thomas Cromwell, the brilliant Wyatt was admired and envied in equal measure. His love poetry began as an elite and risqu(r) entertainment for the group of ambitious men and women at the slippery top of the court. But when the axe began to fall among this group, and HenryOCOs laws made his subjects fall silent in terror, WyattOCOs poetic skills became a way to survive. He saw that a love poem was a place where secrets could hide. "