As you will see, she was confronted with some terrible choices. A young man who claimed to be her missing brother—supported by most of the crowned heads of Europe—was captured by her husband and brought to the court. Her mother, aunt, and grandmother were in the conspiracy to support him against her husband. She never publicly spoke out for “the Boy,” nor defended her cousin, unjustly imprisoned and wrongfully executed, nor did she rescue her adored mother from house arrest. But just because we don’t have a record for something does not mean that it never happened. In my opinion, the young woman, who was the daughter of Elizabeth Woodville and the mother of Queen Margaret of Scotland, was an actor in her own life, a woman who worked for her hopes and ambitions behind the throne, who certainly knew more about ruling and more about England than her newly arrived husband ever would. She may have worked in secret, she must have struggled in private. Certainly she must have had her own strategy and plans for dealing with the king and the tyrannical expansion of Tudor power. This is her story—not his. She is the hero—not him. This is a novel of the times imagined through the eyes of a most interesting woman.

Historical fiction is a hybrid, a blending of reported reality, reasonable speculation, psychological truth, and the author’s imagination. I have loved this beautiful and inspiring form of writing for fifty years, and practiced it for thirty. Almost every working day I consider the quality of historical facts. Sometimes I find an account that is so convincing that I think it is close to reality—it can be translated directly to my page. Sometimes I find an honest error by a previous historian or a lie by a self-serving diarist that will have to be sifted and judged. Sometimes, and most excitingly, I find traces of a secret that we can only guess, or an absence which I will have to fill as a novelist. History itself is an unreliable narrator! But what I never do is willfully alter an agreed historical fact.

I never alter the facts of the known history, and I never exaggerate the drama. I have always found that the actual events themselves are dramatic enough—especially when I look at the likely actions of the women, and not the well-recorded events in the foreground. If a writer believes that women do nothing, then he will have to fantasize about their lives to make a good story. If a writer believes that women are weak, rivalrous, and moody, then she will produce an account of them in which they cannot work together, or be trusted. But I know from my reading and from my own life that women are powerful agents of change who can collaborate together, who may love each other, and I base my story on the reality.