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Historical person
1540–1596
Francis Drake was an English seafarer, privateer and naval commander of the Elizabethan age. He circumnavigated the globe, raided Spanish possessions and played a prominent role in the campaign against the Spanish Armada in 1588.
In Rory Clements’s Martyr, with Mary, Queen of Scots awaiting execution and conflict with Spain drawing closer, Francis Walsingham’s intelligencer John Shakespeare intercepts evidence of a plot to kill Francis Drake. In David Field’s Pirates and Patriots, Fifteen-year-old Francis Drake is realising his dream of sailing on the open seas. Other novels featuring Francis Drake include William Havelock’s The Dragon’s Forge, Margaret George’s Elizabeth I, William Havelock’s The Edge of the Map, Winston Graham’s The Grove of Eagles, and David Field’s The Heart of a King.
Historical context
Series
The Drake Trilogy follows Francis Drake’s emergence as an Elizabethan seafarer and privateer through the eyes of Tom Rouse, a fictional English-Spanish interpreter whose divided identity places him between Drake’s crews and the people they encounter. Beginning with the Hawkins expedition of 1567–1569 and continuing through Drake’s circumnavigation,…
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The Tudor Saga recounts the dynasty from Henry VII’s exile and victory in the Wars of the Roses to the final years of Elizabeth I. Historical rulers, ministers and royal relatives occupy the centre of the sequence, while fictional attendants and agents reveal how decisions at court affect…
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The New World Nautical Saga traces English maritime expansion from the youth of Francis Drake to the settlement voyages of the early seventeenth century. Sailors, courtiers, merchants and religious dissenters cross an Atlantic increasingly contested by European empires and shaped by private enterprise. Pirates and Patriots follows Drake…
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The John Shakespeare series follows an Elizabethan intelligencer working first for Francis Walsingham and later Robert Cecil. Murder investigations become inseparable from Catholic conspiracies, war with Spain, court faction and the developing machinery of state surveillance. Set between 1582 and the mid-1590s, the novels move through London, recusant…
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Standalone books
Non Fiction
Biographies, histories and other non-fiction are listed separately from the historical novels above.
