Читать книгу Taming The Tempestuous Tudor - Juliet Landon - Страница 4
ОглавлениеEighteen years on from Betrayed, Betrothed and Bedded, Sir Jon and Lady Raemon are now the middle-aged parents of Henrietta, the lovely stepdaughter whose natural father is King Henry VIII.
His mistresses are well-documented, so I have used some artistic license to invent Henrietta’s mother, though in fact several of his offspring resembled his daughter Elizabeth quite closely. Lady Catherine Grey was one of those—a young woman who unfortunately did not share the characteristics of her brilliant older sister, Lady Jane Grey. By including some factual characters in Taming the Tempestuous Tudor I hope to create enough reality to make the fiction sound plausible: men like Lord Robert Dudley, Dr. John Dee and Lord Howard of Effingham, and Queen Elizabeth herself.
The miniaturist Levina Teerlinc actually did live at the Tudor court, working for both Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth, and her father was indeed the artist Simon Benninck. Whether she had a brother or not I have been unable to discover, so I have taken the liberty of inventing one for her. She painted Elizabeth on several occasions, and Lady Catherine Grey too. Dr John Dee did go to live in Mortlake, near the church, where he had a vast library of scientific books, and the site of Mortlake Manor, once lived in by Thomas Cromwell, was eventually demolished and built on by the brewery.
