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One of the most challenging aspects of
writing historical romance is also the most fun, and that
is—the history! For a study-geek like me, it can be hard to
stop researching and start actually crafting the story. It
can also be hard to incorporate the characters who live in
my head into the historical world, but it’s also waayyy fun!
For A Sinful Alliance, I started
with a character and a setting. The character was Nicolai,
the Russian acrobat/actor/spy who was the hero’s friend in
A Notorious Woman. Like so many of those pesky
secondary characters, I didn’t intend to do a book for him,
but he really kind of insisted. I was very intrigued to
find out what his back story might be, plus he was just a
hottie. (In the April issue of RT, he was named a
KISS—Knight in Shining Silver. The first of my characters
to win his own award! I’m so proud, LOL). It took me a
while to find the right heroine for him. She had to be out
of the ordinary, and I found her in Marguerite Dumas, a
beautiful French spy with a complex, troubled past. She
needed Nicolai’s brand of magic! Problem was, she tried to
kill him once—ooops.
The setting came to me when I was reading
Allison Weir’s non-fiction book Henry VIII: The King and
His Court. I’ve long been fascinated by this time
period, ever since I was a kid and saw the old movie Anne
of the Thousand Days on TV. This book had a brief
account of a meeting in early 1527 between King Henry and a
French delegation, and I knew I had the right place for
Nicolai and Marguerite to meet again.
1527 was a big turning point in Henry’s
reign, and in English history. Henry and Katherine of
Aragon had been married for almost twenty years, and their
only living child was Princess Mary. Henry was becoming
infatuated with the beautiful, ambitious (and pro-French)
Anne Boleyn, and becoming more concerned with the lack of a
princely heir. England’s long-standing alliance with Spain
was thus on shaky ground. King Francois of France needed an
alliance with England after his humiliating defeat by
Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, at the Battle of Pavia. He
saw a chance and grabbed it—and in my book sends his best
spy, Marguerite, to deal with it all.
In February 1527, the French delegation
(led by Gabriel de Grammont, the Bishop of Tarbes) arrives
at Greenwich Palace to negotiate a treaty of alliance
between the two kings, to be cemented by the marriage of
Princess Mary (the eleven years old) to Francois’s second
son. The two would also declare war on Charles V, unless he
agreed to accede to their demands. In the end, neither of
these terms happened, but the months of negotiation was one
long, lavish party.
A new theater and banquet house had been
specially built at Richmond, decorated with an extravagant
display of silk, silverware, flowers, and gold plate. At
the welcome banquet alone, there were over 240 dishes, with
14 different meats (including a peacock dressed in its
feathers!), gingerbread iced in gold leaf, subtleties in
sugar and almond paste depicting myths and castles, wines
and ales.
The feasting lasted for hours, followed
by more hours of dancing (pavanes and galliards, as well as
the trendy passamezzo), some card playing (mumchance,
click-clack, Gleek, primero), maybe some chess or
backgammon. In the daytime, there was hunting, tennis, or
jousting tournaments, with nights of more feasting, plays
and concerts, masques, and chivalric allegories (including
one starring Princess Mary as a Roman goddess in cloth of
gold!)
A few favored guests might be invited to
the Queen’s privy chamber for a dessert buffet. These
featured suckets (fruit in heavy syrup, eaten with special
fork-like sucket spoons), marchpane, jellies, biscuits, and
kissing confits (sugar fondant). It sounds a bit too sweet,
even for a dedicated sugar-freak like me!
This was the world where Nicolai and
Marguerite had to face danger, both in the ever-shifting
factions around them and within their own hearts. A place
of splendor and luxury, but danger and deceit. (Not to
mention stinkiness—Henry had decreed that the only dogs
allowed in the palace were ladies’ lap dogs, but it still
must have smelled atrocious, with hundreds of people and
only primitive jakes for toilets!). I don’t think I’ve ever
had so much fun writing a book as this one!
Besides the Weir book, here are a few
others I found useful:
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