Secrets of the Tudor Court Boxed Set (44 page)
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Authors: Kate Emerson
3.
The Pleasure Palace
is meticulously detailed, from costumes and banquets to masques and battles. How did you go about researching the Tudor court for this novel?
I’ve been reading about Tudor times since I was in high school and I started accumulating books on the subject at about the same time. I still read everything I can get my hands on and have file folders stuffed with notes on all sorts of arcane subjects. Fortunately, since many other people have been fascinated with the era for such a long time, there is a great deal out there. Biographies are a particularly rich source of information. For anyone who is interested, there is a list of some of the sources I used for this novel at www.KateEmersonHistoricals.com.
4. Holiday celebrations, from the Twelfth Night banquet to the St. Valentine’s Eve lottery, play a big role in
The Pleasure Palace
. Which holiday traditions from the Tudor era do you wish were still in practice today?
I think it would be fun to have a Lord of Misrule or a King of the Bean at Yuletide. The only problem is that you’d also have to have a very large household. With the small families most people have these days, the tradition wouldn’t work quite so well.
5. According to your Author’s Note, Jane Popyncourt might have been French or Flemish. Why did you decide to make your heroine Breton-Flemish, a sort of combination of the two?
I wanted to account for the confusion, and also for her surname, which didn’t strike me as particularly French. As for the Breton half, Jane’s mother almost had to be from there in order to make the connection to the future Henry VII work.
6. The games and tournaments of the court punctuate the plot of the novel. What were some of the challenges in describing these spectacles on the page? Which games do you think you would have enjoyed playing or watching, if you had lived in Tudor England?
The biggest challenge (and my editor will vouch for this) was deciding what to cut. I found so much information on tennis and bowls and masques and tournaments, all of it fascinating to me, that I found it difficult to choose which details to include and which to leave out. My original manuscript contained way too much description of pageant wagons and costumes and the like. I think I would have enjoyed watching most of the spectacles, but the only one I’d have wanted to participate in would have been the dancing.
7. “Courtly love” is common throughout the novel—many affairs occur, and lovers are easily replaced. Do you see any similarities to romance today, or has the battle of the sexes changed dramatically since Henry VIII’s lifetime?
Some things never change. People fall in and out of love, suffer heartbreak, and make life-altering decisions based on physical attraction. The difference in Tudor times was that young people were more likely to give in to family and religious pressure to
marry someone chosen for them, opting for economic and social stability over romantic love.
8. Two murder mysteries remain unsolved in the novel: King Charles of France and Jane’s mother, Jeanne Popyncourt. Why did you leave these suspicious deaths open-ended?
The rumors I mention surrounding King Charles’s death really were bandied about. He died in a rather bizarre way and no one can be certain what happened. Even so, I suspect his death was an accident, caused by that blow to the head. Jeanne Popyncourt’s death, on the other hand, being fiction, gave me the chance to make sense of several odd historical facts: What happened to Jane’s parents when she came to England? Why is there a Jane Popyncourt listed in the household accounts of Elizabeth of York when Jane was sent to the nursery? Why did Sir Richard Guildford go on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land at a time when such journeys by Englishmen were extremely rare? And finally, why did Margaret Beaufort, King Henry VII’s mother, take a vow of chastity, dress like a nun, and wear a hair shirt during the last part of her life?
9. Your Author’s Note reveals that you invented the uncle-niece relationship between Sir Rowland Velville and Jane Popyncourt, two historical figures. Were there other imaginative connections you considered while planning this book?
I looked at several possibilities, including having Henry VII bring Jane to England because she was his natural daughter. For that to work, however, Jane would have had to be much older. Whoever Jane really was, there must have been some reason why she was selected, and the most likely was that there was a family connection to some prominent figure at court.
10. Have readers seen the last of Jane, or do you think you will revisit this character in another book?
I’ve said pretty much all I wanted to about Jane and left her at a good place in her life. However, since no one knows exactly when she died, it is always possible she might make a cameo appearance in a future novel.
SECRETS OF THE TUDOR COURT
Between Two Queens
Pocket Books
A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. 1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2010 by Kathy Lynn Emerson
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Pocket Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.
First Pocket Books trade paperback edition January 2010
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Manufactured in the United States of America
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Emerson, Kate.
Secrets of the Tudor court: between two queens / Kate Emerson.—1st Pocket Books
trade paperback ed.
p. cm.
1. Henry VIII, King of England, 1491–1547—Fiction. 2. Great Britain—Kings and
rulers—Paramours—Fiction. 3. Great Britain—Court and courtiers—Fiction. I. Title.
II. Title: Between two queens.
PS3555.M414S425 2009
813' .54—dc22
2009022622
ISBN 978-1-4165-8327-1
ISBN 978-1-4165-8359-2 (ebook)
To Kathy Sagan
Contents
A Who’s Who of the Tudor Court 1537–1543
