When launching into a new writing venture it can be galling if the subject you have been brooding for years suddenly becomes flavour of the moment and other books and articles emerge which cover the same person and period as yours. However I was lucky in that Welsh historian Sara Elin Roberts published her definitive biography Jasper, The Tudor Kingmaker a few months before my novel and was kind enough to share with me some of her insight into his life and character over a very convivial lunch in Anglesey, while I was researching in the Tudor heartland where she lives, and in subsequent exchanges of emails. So warmest thanks to her and to Nathan Amin, who writes copiously on the Tudors, in print and on his very informative online blog. Among many others, two research books I found particularly helpful were the recently revised edition of The Making of the Tudor Dynasty by Welsh academics Ralph A Griffiths and Roger S Thomas and the definitive biography of Henry VII by the late and celebrated Welsh historian, Professor Stanley B Chrimes. These are highly recommended as future reading if you are interested in taking your knowledge of Jasper and the emergence of the Tudors further. And should you wish to go back to (almost) contemporary sources you cannot do better than consult (in translation unless you speak Latin!) the history commissioned by King Henry VII from Polydore Vergil, an Italian historian who became a naturalized Englishman in 1510 and first published his Anglia Historia in print in 1534, during the reign of Henry VIII. Obviously it is biased towards its commissioner’s dynasty but nevertheless remains the account that gets nearest to the facts of what brought the Tudors to prominence.