Author Elizabeth Fremantle discusses the ansgt that came with writing her lastest book - The Honey and The Sting.
I had wanted to write a companion piece to my Jacobean thriller, The Poison Bed, as books about a pair of infamous Stuart murders involving two prominent favourites of James I: the poisoning of Sir Thomas Overbury (allegedly by Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset, and his wife, Frances Howard) in 1613, and the assassination of Carr’s successor as favourite, the Duke of Buckingham, in 1628.
I had a very clear idea about how I would fictionalise the Overbury affair and its protagonists, a husband and wife both in the frame for the murder and though it had its challenges the general shape of the story was fixed from the outset. But when it came to Buckingham things became so much more complicated.
I had initially intended to focus on the fascinating testimony of a royal doctor, Eglisham, who claimed to have witnessed the murder of James I by Buckingham and had written it all into a tract designed to bring the Duke down.
It was such an outrageous notion: regicide, a secret tract, scurrilous goings on, I was determined to make it work as part of my novelistic scheme.
But I had also intended to tell the story of Buckingham’s sister-in-law, the heiress Frances Coke – forcibly married off to Buckingham’s insane brother as a way for him to grab her lands and titles. She was pursued by Buckingham on a charge of adultery which forced her into hiding with her young son. I had imagined she had the Eglisham tract and was going to use it to blackmail her ruthless brother-in-law and bring him down.
read more here @ Historia Magazine
see also my review of The King's Assassin by Benjamin Woolley
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