Tony Riches was born in Pembrokeshire, West Wales, UK, and spent part of his childhood in Kenya. He gained a BA degree in Psychology and an MBA from Cardiff University.
After writing several successful non-fiction books, Tony decided his real interest is in the history of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and now his focus is on writing historical fiction about the lives of key figures of medieval history.
His Tudor Trilogy has become an international best-seller and he is in regular demand as a guest speaker about the lives of the early Tudors. He was a finalist in the 2017 Amazon Storyteller Awards and is listed 130th in the 2018 Top 200 list of the Most Influential Authors.
Tony has now returned to Pembrokeshire, an area full of inspiration for his writing, where he lives with his wife. In his spare time he enjoys sailing and sea kayaking.
Follow Tony on Twitter
Visit his website here
Amazon Affiliate Links: Buy Owen, Book One of the Tudor Trilogy on Amazon here Buy Jasper, Book Two of the Tudor Trilogy on Amazon here Buy Henry, Book Three of the Tudor Trilogy on Amazon here Buy Mary, Tudor Princess on Amazon here Buy Brandon, Tudor Knight on Amazon here
Video Transcript:
Tony Riches
Charles Brandon, Mary Tudor, and Katherine Willoughby
Heather:
Welcome back to the Tudor Summit. The next speaker is Tony Riches, and he actually spoke at the very first Tudor Summit, so I’m super excited to have him back. So let me introduce him to you, and then we’ll get right into his interview. So Tony Riches is a full-time writer, and lives with his wife and Pembrokeshire, West Wales. After several successful non-fiction books, Tony turned to novel writing and wrote Queen’s Sacrifice, set in 10th century Wales. A specialist in the history of the early Tudors, he is best known for his Tudor Trilogy, which is fantastic. Tony’s other international bestsellers include Warwick: the Man Behind the Wars the Roses as well as The Secret Diary of Eleanor Cobham. For information more information about Tony you can visit his website at TonyRiches.com, and I’m gonna have links here on this page so click around to wherever the links are there. All right, let’s get right into the interview with Tony.
I’m so happy that you are able to talk at the Tudor Summit, and that you’re able to share… it’s the the way you’ve kind of structured this you’ve got Mary leading into Charles Brandon leading into Katherine Willoughby…
Tony:
So I can explain. There is a motive to it actually. Briefly, I think I told you before that after the success the Tudor Trilogy, which was my big work, that I really put all my energies into, there was demand for a kind of sequel to it. And I really enjoyed writing Mary’s story. Mary as a young girl. And so it seemed very logical to, rather than end it with the death of Henry, was to pick it up from Henry’s death and tell Mary’s story, which it’s a really fascinating story anyway.
And of course that got me researching Charles Brandon, and I had no intentions of writing about Brandon. And when I started I just couldn’t get out of my head this image of Henry Cavill in The Tudors. I don’t know if you watched the television series The Tudors, – Henry Cavill, he did a really compelling job of bringing that character to life, but of course it was as these things always are. It was flawed in various ways, and Mary and Margaret had been merged so that gives you an idea how it’s not totally accurate.
Heather:
And she married the King of Portugal, right instead of the King of France.
Tony:
Oh let’s not go there, that’s gonna confuse a whole generation of schoolchildren, isn’t it. Anyway I actually I think I’ve told you, I went to Westhorpe, and I went to St. George’s Chapel in Windsor Castle, and I actually stood at Charles Brandon’s tomb, and I really wanted to get a sense of who he really was when I was writing Mary. I gathered all this material together then about his father, who was one of the few people possibly killed by Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth, and I had this picture on my wall of that happening, here’s a picture done by the Richard III Society. He’s quite big actually, Richard running William Brandon through with his lance, you know, while he’s doggedly holding on to the Tudor standard rather than defend himself.
And of course that’s how Charles ended up in Henry’s court, because this is Henry VII’s court now, in that that was fairly typical that he would reward, it’s almost like an act of martyrdom isn’t it. He would reward that by taking good care of his sons. Charles Brandon effectively grew up, he was eight or nine years older, than Henry but they kind of grew up together. And I’ve got this theory that Henry VIII actually was envious of Brandon because when you think about it Brandon could do whatever he wanted, and did literally, and he could go jousting, and get drunk and whatever, whereas at the time Henry’s father ruled him, and he was terrified of anything happening to his son after what happened to Arthur, so he wouldn’t allow him hardly to ride a horse even. He kept him in a room adjacent to his own bedchamber barely letting him out. And so when Henry VII died, you can imagine that really let the brakes off didn’t it.
Yeah there was this gang, it was almost like the Rat Pack, the gang that of which Charles Brandon was a part. Even though Henry had to still be king, and he had to do all the kingly things, and he pretty much had to marry Catherine of Aragon, and Brandon could do whatever he wanted still. And it’s it was fascinating as a writer to having written the story for Mary’s point of view, to then revisit the same story from Charles’ point of view, and I gave my editor a real challenge, which was to make sure that there was some reader crossover between the two books so they both had to stand alone. If somebody just chooses to read one.
But also where there was a crossover, it had to be consistent. So the editing took ages, and I did think that was the end of it, because I decided I was going to move on to the court of Elizabeth I, and write an Elizabethan trilogy, and actually started on that. And then I woke up one morning with the idea that Katherine Willoughby was such an intriguing woman really. I’ve been writing about her of course, because she crops up at the end of of Brandon’s life, and I suddenly realized that it would provide a link. Because Katherine’s life goes from the death of Charles Brandon and the death of Henry VIII, right through. Then through Mary, and then the coronation of Elizabeth I.
So what that gives me is a continuous narrative right through from Owen Tudor, right through to Elizabeth I. So no stone is left unturned in the whole saga, really, but there are two books. I don’t know if you can get these, and come through on that, this is the one which most people know, which is amazing. Evelyn Read, she’s not really a historical fiction author. there’s a real grumpy picture of Charles Brandon, they’re looking very old. And I recommend this because it’s so beautifully written. It’s very evocative. with lots of things have hedgerows and birds tweeting and stuff like that, and the history is actually quite accurate.
And the other one, the only other book really that is brings with another dimension to Katherine’s story is this rather curious thing by David Baldwin which is all based around the proposition that Katherine could have been Henry VIII’s last, seventh wife. Yeah I’m sorry but it’s really slim see here the historical evidence, but what a nice idea isn’t it? What would have happened to Katherine Parr in order for that to have happened? There’s so many questions it raises.
I mean poor old Henry VIII was, never mind last love, last legs. he was on. Katherine was only 14 when Charles Brandon praised her with a telling her that he was actually going to marry her himself, he was 49 at the time, that gives me some interesting problems. My own editor, when she was editing Brandon, asked me to tone down the the romance a little. Picked an interesting question… what I try to do is be very honest and faithful to the history, and only use fiction to fill in the gaps, but of course the gaps occur as to what happened once the bedroom door was closed.
Well my sister said to me, you really don’t want people reading this with some kind of, for the wrong reasons. I always had in mind that I could have a varied readership, I got feedback from my books that some school children, in particular in America, used them to improve their understanding of Tudor history, which is quite a responsibility isn’t it. Compared with television, I think I’m doing quite well actually, so that’s a that’s an interesting challenge. And I found a way of dealing with it, and my wife reads each chapter as I write it with a strict brief, she’s to alert me to anything which she thinks needs to be dealt with more sensitively. And it goes to my editor who will do the same word by word, line by line so there’s several layers of censorship going on.
So I want to go back and start with Charles a little bit to understand the dynamic, because Katherine Willoughby was in his household at the time, and and so they had known each other but also the idea that in the – I think we read those things with our 21st 20th 21st century understanding of teenage years and adolescence and they didn’t really have that. You were either child or you were a grown-up. They didn’t have this modern invention.
There’s a few things to understand in that firstly Katherine’s mother was of course Maria de Salinas, who was Catherine of Aragon’s lady-in-waiting, who came across as a teenager from Spain, and had been around the court for all of Henry’s life. Then her father Lord Willoughby was a very loyal courtier and a close friend of Charles Brandon. And what I understand to have happened is Mary and Charles had a son who they named Henry. There’s lots of Henry Brandons which is very confusing. So these three that I know of, the second Henry Brandon, which was the second son of Charles and Mary Tudor, he was made Earl of Lincoln at the age of two. And Lord Willoughby was present at the time and I think a deal was struck in that both both of them could sustain the great advantage.
From the Willoughby point of view, that their sons would become the Duke of Suffolk at some point in the future, and from Brandon’s point of view, the Willoughbys were significant landowners in the north. That would cover all of his debts and everything like that. So it was agreed when…
Heather:
Brandon had a lot of debt right?
Tony:
Oh yeah I don’t get over that. He was amazing. Most of the land that he inherited, and was given and granted by the king, and even the stuff that came across after the Dissolution of the Monasteries was actually belonging to other people, so you had to normally contest it to make sure that he got any income from it at all, which costs money. Then after all that he might find that there are sitting tenants and he can’t do very much with it, and he gets a little bit. And of course what made it all doable was Mary’s dowry income as Queen of France. It was a lot of money, and that used to come across quite regularly, and so they did okay when Mary was alive. But once Mary sadly died, that income stopped almost immediately, and Charles Brandon was really wondering how he was going to cope.
In fact Westhorpe had to revert to the crown, and so he moved to Suffolk Place and became… he was really traveling on progress with the king most the time, but Suffolk Place was their base. And although Katherine Willoughby was an heiress, and she was actually one of the wealthiest young teenagers in England, she didn’t actually have a lot of income from that. Fifteen thousand ducats or something like that, and that her uncle was busily contesting that inheritance as well, so for the first couple years of their marriage, Charles Brandon was doing his best to actually get his hands on Katherine’s money. So meanwhile, because he was borrowing money not just from the king but from whoever would lend it to him, and probably had quite high interest rates as well, but it never troubled him, I don’t think. And he would have been quite amused to know that after his death people are startled at the amount of debts that he had.
Heather:
Okay so then let’s go back to their striking the deal when his son is being made Earl of Lincoln…
Tony:
And it was quite typical for children to be betrothed, because that he played the long game, and you planned ahead. And it gave everybody a bit of certainty, didn’t it. so they’d have both be very happy with it but a year later and Catherine’s father died sadly so she was only seven. She’s was home without her mother a lot of the time, because her mother would be away as lady-in-waiting to Catherine of Aragon. She would have been wherever Catherine of Aragon was.
Heather:
And what years are we talking here?
Tony:
oh well it’s this is the interesting thing, is that by chance because Katherine was born in March 1519 this is the 500th anniversary of her birth…
Heather:
It’s almost like you planned that…
Tony:
well if I can get this book finished by the 1st of June, edited end of July, and out by the autumn, that’d be good wouldn’t it? I could make something of the, what do they call it, 500 years it’s a nice round figure. Easy to remember in it, so it always means when I’m writing about Catherine I can easily remember how old she is because I just can work it out from from that.
Heather:
Okay so she was coming of age then right at the sort of height of the problems with the great matter.
Tony:
And so her mother probably would tell her about what was going on. Then, what happened was that Charles Brandon bought the wardship of Katherine Willoughby to secure her for his son, and she moved to Westhorpe with Mary, and the Mary’s job was to teach her how to become a great lady who could run a household. And of course at the same time we heard Frances and Eleanor, Mary’s daughters, Eleanor’s the exactly same age as Katharine, so that was very good. And then Frances was couple years older, and was able to guide her and help her, advise her.
Katherine would have been quite lonely there, and obviously she would have had ladies servants, so I what I normally do in this kind of situation, I have one fictional servant that represents all of the servants. And I’ve called her Alice because Alice is the confident for Katherine who is the only person she’s got really to speak to, because her mother comes storming back from wherever, spends a little while, then goes off again. That’s the way it worked in those days, and then Alice would have gone with her to Westhorpe, so you know suddenly Katherine goes from being a lonely ten-year-old, to having another ten-year-old girl who’s much more worldly with her, plus there’s young Henry who is kind of slightly spoiled, heir to the dukedom of Suffolk, and of course because Mary Tudor lost his older brother, sadly and you know she did tend to indulge him a bit, let him do whatever he wants.
So the way I’ve read it is that Katherine, although she knew she was supposed to marry Henry she felt no affection for him whatsoever. It’d be like marrying your brother and then, because Charles Brandon, cheated really, because although he bought her wardship, he did it in installments like a hire-purchase thing. He never paid it all back actually. Well that was typical of the time, and we need to remember that there wasn’t some awful thing that we should be shocked about, or think worse of him. It was actually quite a clever move because if he didn’t buy her wardship then somebody else would because Henry VIII didn’t use to just hang on to a valuable wardship. And of course Charles had first dibs on it because they were really quite close friends and you know.
I challenge you to find another relationship that Henry had with anyone at all that endured for so long. There is nobody. It’s a unique thing. They would have had a very deep understanding of each other’s motivation, and all the sort of complexity around it, and because Charles was fiercely loyal to Henry, and then when the great matter cropped up it was like taking a pack of cards and throwing them all up in the air wasn’t it. Because what a dilemma for Mary first of all, is that her brother…
We have to remember that and Catherine of Aragon and Mary Tudor Queen of France were very close. They’d been thrown together really by circumstance, and then suddenly find that her brother is being really quite horrible to Catherine of Aragon, to put it mildly, I mean you know they did in all sorts of indiscretions which people there just smiled about which again was acceptable for the time. It was the way Kings behaved. He’d gone a step further than that of course, and you’ve got all these characters. We have to remember Charles Brandon, he didn’t come from common stock, but he didn’t come from one of the great old families that came across with William the Conqueror. They used to call him the stable boy because he was Master of the Horse, and worse I should think, And to his face as well.
And I’m thinking of people like Thomas Howard Norfolk in particular. Brandon’s ancestors used to be servants for the Norfolk family, and he never let him forget it. And then of course Norfolk finds that his niece, one Anne Boleyn is certainly in the pole position, and he would really make the most of that wouldn’t he. Poor Charles he’s in a three-way split because he’s got loyalty to the king, which which overrides any other consideration including his own life, I think. Because he risked his life for the king, then he’s got his loyalty to his wife’s feelings, which is very much a secondary thing but still ,very real to deal with, and to Catherine of Aragon,because because he’d known her as long as he could remember, you know.
I don’t think they were close friends but he would have certainly felt more sympathy for her than for Anne Boleyn, and part of the reason was the Boleyn family were an old landed family. Let anybody say Anne Boleyn didn’t come from noble stock. They, the Boleyns, really saw Brandon as a potential blockage that might need to be removed at some time. So they were constantly watching out, just waiting for him to make any kind of mistake. And then they would pounce and that would be the end of him, potentially quite shocking.
In this it’s a it’s I think there’s a wonderful film to be made about all of that, you know. Tell me which would make the television like the Tudors look like a pale shadow by comparison, because we all know what happened of course, and sadly Henry VIII exploited Charles, made him do things like he sent him with Thomas Howard to tell Catherine of Aragon that she must no longer call herself Queen, and by the way can we have the Royal Crown Jewels because somebody else needs them. You imagine what that felt like for Charles Brandon to be the one to tell her, and it said that she shouted out, and she took it badly. By the way she shouted at him, and called him a traitor, and all these kinds of things, and then one step removed from that you’ve got Katherine Willoughby trying to make sense of it all.
Heather:
yeah let’s talk about that – I want to get move into Katherine’s story then too, and talk about, we’ve got this proposal… and she was quite famously a Protestant then, I mean it was hard to…nobody was really a Protestant at that point, but can we talk a little bit about how she would have perhaps seen this, and whether she was a reformer?
Tony:
Where I am at the moment, because I’m actually researching this at the moment okay, where I am is that she starts off as an absolute Catholic. Her mother is the champion of Catholicism, the Spanish model of Catholicism which is kind of extreme… interpretation of it all, and the Pope’s word is sacrosanct and everything like that, you know. So that’s where she starts. I think that in the parallel history it would have been quite nice if that was just the way that it carried on, but never mind. You imagined then that she was quite a feisty girl, and that she used to talk back to her mother, and challenge everything, and I’ve tried to… there’s quite good evidence she felt on able to argue back with Henry VIII. Not many people have felt that they could do that, and certainly poor Charles Brandon got a bit more than he bargained for because he was expecting this meek young girl that would do his bidding and basically give him a another son and things like that. And instead he’s got this, really quite a woman with her own mind, you know. I mean and a modern woman. As I read more about her I realised that would be perfectly capable of coping in today’s world, because if she can stand up for women in Tudor times, which you know other women did as well. Mary Tudor herself did quite a lot speaking out against Anne Boleyn, for example. Took a lot of courage didn’t it, although she was protected slightly by being the king’s sister.
Katherine Willoughby wasn’t in quite such a privileged position, and I suppose because of course my mother spoke out against Anne Boleyn and paid a price for that. She went into hiding, and she was banned from seeing Catherine of Aragon. Very sad time for her if you think after you know she was 13 or 14 when she first met Catherine, and now she’s sort of in her mid-40s, and it’s all going horribly wrong. But to go back to their Protestantism, what the way I did when I visited Westhorpe, I went to the church in Westhorpe Village which is a beautiful little Norman church, and it’s where the Brandon family would have gone on special occasions.
They had their own chapel in in the manor house, but it was important for them to be seen by the people, so they would have been arrived in grand procession and Katherine is looking at the blank-faced parishioners who are having to listen to this priest lectured them in Latin and repeating stuff by rote, and realizes they don’t understand a bit of it really. You know the pageantry has kind of overtaken the meaning of it, and that’s the beginning of her challenge to Catholicism. And then of course she starts to tap into some of the great thinkers who are also like-minded, and of course when the King declares himself the head of the Church of England then that’s kind of an opportunity to look fresh at it all, and it’s really interesting because then it toggles doesn’t it.
Because after Henry VIII dies then Mary comes in. Well, when Edward died. I was thinking of when Mary comes in, then poor Katherine is done for because she’s already spoken out. Then there’s persecution, and and she had everything, yes oh yes, her life was at stake. Because she was almost seen as a spokesperson in some ways for the more radical Protestantism, and you know what, I think she was encouraged before Mary came to the throne. And then perhaps she might have feared for her sons and everything like that, because it was a very dangerous time.
Heather:
Can we talk before we get to that, I want to talk about her relationship with Katherine Parr, and that incident where Steven Gardiner tried to bring her down. And she had a dog called Gardiner, right?
Tony:
And documented, because I wondered whether that was myth. Because it’s a nice story, isn’t it, and it’s documented that she used to criticize Gardiner within his earshot. And there’s that famous story that they were at a ball and they had to each choose their favorite partner, and she chose Gardiner. She said that she couldn’t see anybody else who she would choose so she thought she would choose her least favorite person as a partner. And I think, I still haven’t actually found evidence that she had a dog named Gardiner but definitely there was a feud going on, and that’s going to be fascinating to get to the bottom of. With Mary there are books of letters, so there’s all of Mary’s surviving letters, with analysis of them, plus quite a few replies.
I’ve only got a few actual letters from Katherine, but there’s enough to give a sense of the sort of person that she was.
Heather:
She sounds like she kept the feisty Spanish-ness from her mother.
Tony:
Yes and her father was quite a well-educated clever courtier went to France on behalf of having to fight battles and things like that, and could hold his own as a wealthy landowner, so she’s an interesting… she’s kind of like the new British isn’t she. Half European and a half old school British, and it’s it’s such a modern thing that whole idea isn’t it.
Heather:
And so can you tell me a little bit about that for people who don’t necessarily know what happened, and how she was involved in the Katherine Parr, the plot against Katherine?
Tony:
I mean I have a lot of sympathy for Katherine Parr because she was an author for a start so there’s a connection, and I recently read CJ Samson’s book you know the Matthew Shardlake series, yeah it’s a very evocative picture of it. I forget which one it is, I read it so long ago. I reread it because of what I’m doing, and you know it’s it’s fascinating how it’s quite hard to remember that people were risking their lives for their beliefs for those lengths, but in terms of it how the relationship between Katherine and the Queen, it’s just an intriguing one because of course it’s not properly documented, so this as historical novelist… what I’m able to do is to capture as much of the known facts as I possibly can, and then try and infer the rest of it. And I try and put that in an author’s note at the end where it’s necessary, I don’t ask you have to make very much up because like I’ve said servants and things like that are obviously not recorded or rarely recorded, but they were always present. But the hiding things, and the secrecy, and all of that, once again that has to be in third hand. You know like the conversations that they might have had between each other.
Heather:
I feel like I remember in Janet Wertman’s book The Path to Somerset, she has Charles Brandon being involved in warning Katherine Parr about this risk again… can you tell me a little bit if you imagine what it must have been like to be Charles Brandon…
Tony:
walking a tightrope sometimes isn’t it, because one slip and you could be dead basically. And although it sounds a bit extreme when I talk about a slip I’m talking about something which his enemies could touch him with, has been treasonable, you know in those days. So even talking about the possible death of the king was treason. You wouldn’t have to be very hardcore treason and you’d end up in the Tower of London waiting to be executed basically. So what he had on his plus side was he was he had his own loyal following, so he was quite well-connected he had this strange on-off relationship first of all with Wolsey and then afterwards these days with Cromwell, and you know, once again there’s the documented history of their relationship but there’s what probably happened as well, and you can imagine he’s forever getting unwanted advice is because Cromwell would have summoned him probably on a weekly basis and warned him can you you know can you tell your wife to keep quiet and all this kind of stuff you know.
And Brandon was very proud man as well, and I almost think of him as the last of the chivalric Tudor knights, but although there are other people that could have the claim to be in Tudor knights they weren’t champion jousters, and they didn’t ride against the best jousters in France and win, and so and they didn’t grow up with Henry VIII either. So I think that his values were of a different age. He wasn’t a skilled politician, he wasn’t actually terribly bright. I think sometimes because they, even Wolsey, he would come up with these brilliant schemes where you do this me and then I’ll lend you some more money without realising that he was just like going deeper and deeper, and it was his debt.
Cromwell was very different of course. Thomas Cromwell was a political animal really, and able to see the enemies caught like a game of chess, waiting several moves ahead looking at possible attacks and kind of things. So it’s the whole thing is fascinating, and it’s it’s easy to take an oversimplified view of it when in fact it’s horribly complex. Because there are so many people that have everything to gain, or everything to lose, and depending on the whim of the king. And he was constantly going back between more Catholic, and more Protestant, and all of that.
Heather:
So can we talk a little bit just continuing Katherine’s story after Brandon died, she remarried right, and then she remarried a Protestant, and a little bit about that.
Tony:
This this is where it gets really interesting, because who’d have thought that she would have ended up penniless in exile with only the clothes on her back knocking on doors asking somebody to take her in, and on the run basically because they never knew they could knock on a door of somebody that was their enemy and was an informer. You know it’s almost like the French Resistance in the second world war, in that it was a resistance movement.
I’m at the process at the moment of tracing her steps, and it’s quite well documented, but they basically went from one place in hiding to another and her second husband is quite a fascinating character because he was not of noble birth. He was basically a servant and who’d worked his way up and done quite well for himself, and then how that story actually works out is really quite fascinating. I actually read somewhere that Katherine Willoughby was a candidate for being one of the most intriguing Tudor women and that she’s got a lot of competition for that doesn’t she you know it’s when you think there are only really these two books going into any detail and she crops up all over the place. But I have yet to find anywhere where her old story told authentically and without having to you know like I said, don’t David Baldwin the way he’s done it is he’s brought in this whole idea of her being Henry VIII’s seventh wife, which is which is quite fun and his history is very good by the way, so that’s reassuring. But the other the other book the one by Evelyn Read is was written in the 60’s and has got a sixties slant on it…
Heather:
Then the other thing I know about Katherine Willoughby is how she lost her sons on the same day. This whole thing about the sweating sickness…
Tony:
I’m glad we don’t have it today. It was different to the plague, they don’t really even seem… they keep changing their mind how the plague was transmitted, to me I don’t think it was fleas and stuff like that, but they they’re not even sure of that now. But the sweating sickness used to arrive suddenly, and it would take half the population of a town. Young and old, rich and poor, didn’t matter what, and basically when she got it, it started off with cold like symptoms and then you could be dead within the day. Everything, you know, and what what happened was that Katherine’s sons were at university and they decided that’s quite a dangerous place with lots of people coming from all over the place to the University, you know you’re asking for trouble. Let’s move them to safety, move them out to the countryside, and thought they were safe. Breathe a big sigh of relief. To an area where there was no sweating sickness whatsoever.
And then it came breezing through, and they both died on the same day. Well imagine what that must have been like. The only positive that I can think of out of it all was that Charles Brandon went to his grave thinking that his succession was secure, he had an heir and a spare. Which is more than his mate Henry did. You know, he thought it was all sorted. he would have gone, he died knowing that, and of course he couldn’t have been more wrong, but I’ve still got to decide how I’m going to deal with that from Katherine’s point of view, because it’d be quite easy to be over sentimental about it, but for any mother to lose both of her young sons in the prime of their life for such a needless futile thing as the sweating sickness is horrifying, isn’t it.
Heather:
I want to give you a chance to talk about your books then and where people can get your books and everything like, that but before we do that, just what kind of note can you leave us on with Katherine Willoughby, like what’s an overall kind of impression, or words describe…
Tony:
If you think of her as a very modern woman in a Tudor world it’s almost like to travel back in time with with what we know now, because as she she had lots of nerve and courage and was not at all thrown by being married to Charles Brandon. She adjusted to it that’s what you did in those days. You didn’t yeah make a big fuss you just got on with what you could, you know. It must have been hard for her with Eleanor who was her friend certainly became a stepdaughter who was the same age, and Frances who was their friend, she was 2 years older than her. They wouldn’t have thanked her for that, would they.
They would have held her as culpable for it all but if you think of her as a woman whose story really does deserve to be told and better understood, I think that sets down the gauntlet for me doesn’t it as a writer to try and do her story justice, and that’s where I am now, is to try and really understand how all these complex events must have seemed to her. But at the end of the book we have the coronation of Elizabeth I, and you know it she must have felt she had been a bit vindicated in attempts of her beliefs, and so I decide exactly where I’m gonna finish but I’m then planning to go straight on into the Court of Elizabeth I, and by looking at Elizabeth through three of her different courtiers.