Linda Porter

Margaret Tudor, the elder sister of her more famous brother Henry VIII, is the single most important Tudor figure of this era that historians have consistently overlooked. Married at thirteen to the charismatic James IV of Scotland, a man more than twice her age, she would learn the skills of statecraft that would enable her to survive his early death, and to construct a powerful position in her adopted country of Scotland as she dealt with domestic issues as well as navigating international relations with England and France.Often reviled for her hasty remarriage (and therefore the loss of the regency) the book shows that Margaret was damned if she did remarry and damned if she didn’t. Her two subsequent marriages were both disastrous personally, but she never gave up. Her son attained the throne in his own right in 1528, largely through his mother’s determination.Margaret’s story is also one of fierce sibling rivalry with her younger brother, Henry VIII, a series of matrimonial mishaps, and fighting off an unearned reputation as an over-sexed whinger fixated by clothes and jewels, Margaret was a complex (not always likeable) woman who had the true Tudor attributes of self-expression and a flair for the dramatic. She knew that you had to look like a queen.Drawing on Margaret’s extensive correspondence (more of her letters survive than of all the other Tudor queens put together), and contemporary poems and literature, Linda Porter fashions a compelling story of a misunderstood and underestimated Tudor monarch, whose determination to fight for the rights of her son, James V, is at the core of her dramatic life and indeed laid the groundwork for a future British state.

Margaret Tudor, the elder sister of her more famous brother Henry VIII, is the single most important Tudor figure of this era that historians have consistently overlooked. Married at thirteen to the charismatic James IV of Scotland, a man more than twice her age, she would learn the skills of statecraft that would enable her to survive his early death, and to construct a powerful position in her adopted country of Scotland as she dealt with domestic issues as well as navigating international relations with England and France.Often reviled for her hasty remarriage (and therefore the loss of the regency) the book shows that Margaret was damned if she did remarry and damned if she didn’t. Her two subsequent marriages were both disastrous personally, but she never gave up. Her son attained the throne in his own right in 1528, largely through his mother’s determination.Margaret’s story is also one of fierce sibling rivalry with her younger brother, Henry VIII, a series of matrimonial mishaps, and fighting off an unearned reputation as an over-sexed whinger fixated by clothes and jewels, Margaret was a complex (not always likeable) woman who had the true Tudor attributes of self-expression and a flair for the dramatic. She knew that you had to look like a queen.Drawing on Margaret’s extensive correspondence (more of her letters survive than of all the other Tudor queens put together), and contemporary poems and literature, Linda Porter fashions a compelling story of a misunderstood and underestimated Tudor monarch, whose determination to fight for the rights of her son, James V, is at the core of her dramatic life and indeed laid the groundwork for a future British state.

According to the great diarist, John Evelyn, Charles II was ‘addicted to women’, and throughout his long reign a great many succumbed to his charms. Clever, urbane and handsome, Charles presided over a hedonistic court, in which licence and licentiousness prevailed.Mistresses is the story of the women who shared Charles’s bed, each of whom wielded influence on both the politics and cultural life of the country. From the young king-in-exile’s first mistress and mother to his first child, Lucy Walter, to the promiscuous and ill-tempered courtier, Barbara Villiers. From Frances Teresa Stuart, ‘the prettiest girl in the world’ to history’s most famous orange-seller, ‘pretty, witty’ Nell Gwynn and to her fellow-actress, Moll Davis, who bore the last of the king’s fifteen illegitimate children. From Louise de Kéroualle, the French aristocrat – and spy for Louis XIV – to the sexually ambiguous Hortense Mancini. Here, too, is the forlorn and humiliated Queen Catherine, the Portuguese princess who was Charles’s childless queen. Drawing on a wide variety of original sources, including material in private archives, Linda Porter paints a vivid picture of these women and of Restoration England, an era that was both glamorous and sordid.

The general perception of Katherine Parr is that she was a provincial nobody with intellectual pretensions who became queen of England because the king needed a nurse as his health declined. Yet the real Katherine Parr was attractive, passionate, ambitious, and highly intelligent. Thirty years old (younger than Anne Boleyn had been) when she married the king, she was twice widowed and held hostage by the northern rebels during the great uprising of 1536 37 known as the Pilgrimage of Grace. Her life had been dramatic even before she became queen and it would remain so after Henry's death. She hastily and secretly married her old flame, the rakish Sir Thomas Seymour, and died shortly after giving birth to her only child in September 1548. Her brief happiness was undermined by the very public flirtation of her husband and stepdaughter, Princess Elizabeth. She was one of the most influential and active queen consorts in English history, and this is her story."

It is the tragedy of Queen Mary that today, 450 years after her death, she remains the most hated, least understood monarch in English history--remembered best for burning hundreds of Protestant heretics at the stake. Linda Porter's pioneering new biography cuts through the myths to reveal the truth about the first queen to rule England in her own right. Daughter of Henry VIII and Katherine of Aragon, Mary Tudor was a cultured Renaissance princess who was brought to the throne by an audacious coup. She made a grand marriage to Philip of Spain, but her attempts to revitalize England at home and abroad were cut short by her early death at the age of forty-two. The first popular biography of Mary in thirty years, The Myth of "Bloody Mary" offers a fascinating, controversial look at this much-maligned queen.

A groundbreaking new history of the first woman to rule England in her own right.