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Historical person
1566–1625
James VI and I was the king who united the crowns of Scotland and England in 1603. His reign involved the Gunpowder Plot, religious disputes, court patronage and repeated attempts to define royal authority within two distinct political kingdoms.
James VI and I also held the offices or ranks of monarch of Scotland, monarch of England, King of Ireland, and Duke of Rothesay. James VI and I belonged to the House of Stewart di Darnley and operated within Kingdom of Scotland; Kingdom of England; Kingdom of Ireland. James VI and I was born in Edinburgh Castle and died in Theobalds House.
In Sarah Gristwood’s Arbella, James VI and I’s accession ended Arbella’s immediate royal prospects but did not remove the danger attached to her blood. Thomas Cogswell’s James I (Penguin Monarchs) presents James VI and I as a learned and experienced Scottish king who inherited the English throne in 1603. James VI and I is treated fictionally in Philip Gooden’s An Honourable Murderer, Nigel Tranter’s Hope Endures, Elizabeth Fremantle’s The Poison Bed, Nigel Tranter’s The Unicorn Rampant, and Antonia Fraser’s The Gunpowder Plot.
Periods
Series
The King’s Witch Trilogy follows the fictional healer and secret Catholic Frances Gorges from the final days of Elizabeth I into the unstable first two decades of James VI and I’s reign. Drawn from rural Hampshire into royal service, Frances survives accusations of witchcraft, religious persecution and a…
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The Queen’s Intelligencer series fictionalises the career of Robert Poley, a real Elizabethan agent associated with the Babington Plot and the death of Christopher Marlowe. In publication order, Poley infiltrates the Essex circle, manages the 1603 succession, follows the Gunpowder conspirators, works against a poison network during the…
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The Marbeck Mysteries follow Martin Marbeck, an English intelligencer working through the last years of Elizabeth I and the first years of James I. His assignments move from the unresolved war with Spain to the succession crisis of 1603, the peace negotiations of 1604 and the Gunpowder Plot…
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The Bailiff Mountsorrel Tudor Mysteries follow county bailiff Edward Mountsorrel and town bailiff Francis Barton as they enforce the law in Nottinghamshire during the final years of Elizabeth I and the opening of James VI and I’s reign. Local murders and disappearances repeatedly lead into wider conflicts over…
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The Elizabethan series tells the later Tudor story through six real people whose ambitions and relationships brought them close to Elizabeth I. Francis Drake, Robert Devereux, Walter Raleigh, Penelope Rich, Frances Walsingham and Bess Throckmorton each occupy a different part of the queen’s world: the sea, war, exploration,…
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The Spycatcher trilogy follows Ned Savage, a fictional thief recruited into the intelligence world of Robert Cecil during the transfer from Tudor to Stuart rule. Succession centres on Elizabeth I’s death and James VI’s accession in 1603; Coronation uses the plague-stricken early Jacobean capital; and Assassination is set…
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The Tudor Trilogy follows three generations of women whose proximity to the English crown makes marriage, faith and family matters of state. Firebrand, originally published as Queen’s Gambit, centres on Katherine Parr during the final years of Henry VIII. Sisters of Treason turns to Katherine and Mary Grey…
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The Nick Revill mysteries follow a provincial actor who joins the Chamberlain’s Men near the end of Elizabeth I’s reign. Each investigation mirrors a Shakespeare play being written or performed, placing murder inside rehearsal rooms, inns, country houses, court entertainments and the commercial theatre of London. The sequence…
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The Master of Gray Trilogy follows Patrick Gray, one of the most gifted and dangerous political operators of the later sixteenth century, and the daughter who inherits both his intelligence and his capacity for intrigue. Moving between the courts of Scotland and England, Patrick becomes involved in schemes…
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The Stuart Queens Trilogy turns from the final years of the Tudors to the women who helped shape the new Stuart monarchy. Beginning with Anna of Denmark, the series approaches dynastic politics through queens whose marriages, households, children and religious choices placed them at the centre of struggles…
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Karen Haden’s Alexander Baxby Mysteries follow a fictional physician through the political, religious and intelligence conflicts of the early seventeenth century. Paying in Blood begins with the Battle of Nieuwpoort in 1600 and carries Baxby into late Elizabethan England and the succession of James VI & I; Naming…
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Standalone books
Non Fiction
Biographies, histories and other non-fiction are listed separately from the historical novels above.
