Stephen Taylor is the author of The Secrets of Elloughton Park and The Mystery of Rufford Abbey, absorbing dual timeline dramas with surprising revelations.
Here, Stephen tells us what to expect from his latest novel:
“Like most people, I learned about Lady Jane Grey — the ‘Nine Day Queen’ — at school. The problem for authors and historians is that little is known about her life before she came to the throne. Most books will tell you that there were five Tudor monarchs (Henry VII, Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I and Elizabeth I). But in fact Lady Jane Grey was named by her Protestant predecessor, Edward VI, in his will to succeed him. He was keen to avoid a return to Catholicism, and the king’s council ratified that decision. We know that Edward’s half-sister, Mary Tudor, challenged that decision and mobilised her support to take the throne. But I believe that Jane is the sixth Tudor monarch.
“When I moved to my present house some ten years ago, I found that I lived only twelve miles from Bradgate Park, Jane’s childhood home. This sparked an interest in this much-wronged woman. She is regarded as a Protestant martyr, but what do we really know about her?
“In my new novel, historian Grace Farmer — along with James Postlethwaite and Toby Wyatt, who readers will recall from The Secrets of Elloughton Park and The Mystery of Rufford Abbey — is researching a project on John Dee, the Elizabethan polymath, and specifically what happened to his lost library. This leads her to St Edmund’s Church in Holme Pierrepont, near Nottingham, where the vicar thinks he has uncovered Dee’s diaries. When she reads them, she is surprised to find a reference to Lady Jane Grey — apparently, Dee was her tutor at the time she ascended to the throne, engaged to teach her mathematics. Dee had recently returned to England after teaching in Europe.
“This gave me a fictitious route to fill in the gaps in what is known about Jane’s early life. Grace narrates, but we hear Dee’s words from his diary — it is his insights that fill in the gaps.
“This is, of course, a work of fiction. There is no evidence that Lady Jane and John Dee ever met. However, I have used this device to flesh out what was known about Jane and the other Tudor characters in her life, their intrigues, their conspiracies, their plotting, and their manoeuvres.”
Visit Stephen’s website to stay up to date with his news and latest releases.
