The wonderful Tony Riches has just released the final installment in his Elizabethan Series. He came onto my YouTube channel, Too Much Tudor, to talk about it. I am embedding the video if you’d like to watch – and right below it I’m also including the cleaned-up transcript so you can enjoy it like one of my regular blog posts.
Janet Wertman: Hello, Booktube. Hello, Tudorverse. I have a guest today on the channel, Tony Riches.
If you like Tudor fiction, you have certainly read one of his books. There are a lot of them. His original Tudor Trilogy, the story of the early Tudors: Owen, Jasper, Henry. His Brandon Trilogy, Charles and his wives, so you’ve got Mary, Tudor Princess; Brandon, Tudor Knight; and Catherine, Tudor Duchess. And now his Elizabethan Series, which is actually two trilogies about the people serving Gloriana: Drake, Essex, and Raleigh, and then the ladies, Penelope Rich, Frances Walsingham, and now, finally, Bess Throckmorton, which was just released. Welcome, Tony. It is a pleasure.
Tony Riches: Thank you for inviting me. It’s nice to speak to you.
JW: Finally, after so many years!
TR: It might even be more than a decade. I was trying to work it out. It could be more than 10 years.
JW: When did you start publishing your books? I started in 2016, and you were before me.
TR: I was before you. 2012, I think.
JW: You started…I mentioned the series you did, but in 2012, you were doing – I don’t want to call them one-offs – but when did you release Warwick and The Secret Diary of Eleanor Cobham?
TR: Those early books were a part of my learning curve, I think. It was only when I began writing the Tudor Trilogy that things really took off big time, because Owen was a phenomenal success. It was a bit of luck, really, because the timing was right. You know that yourself: sometimes it just hits the right note. I’ve been lucky with Bess: she has done extremely well, and she’s only been out in the world for a week, a week tomorrow, in fact, so that’s encouraging, isn’t it?
JA: Yes, I saw the bright, shiny number one in the hot new releases.
TR: That’s always good news. There’s so many categories on Amazon. It doesn’t mean the same as it used to at one time, but it’s still encouraging, isn’t it?
JAW: It really is. It’s a lot of fun. I’m glad she’s doing well. So let me ask: Bess, Tudor Gentlewoman is the story of Bess Throckmorton secretly married to Walter Raleigh, a fascinating woman who kept her husband’s severed head and had it buried with her, but you didn’t include the severed head thing.
TR: No, I’ve got a rule which, it all goes back to a mother who wrote to me and said that her son was relying on my books to learn about history. This was way back when I was writing about Henry VII, and I felt a responsibility to be as factually accurate as I could and use historical fiction to fill in the gaps legitimately. I know that some people enjoy going off on a flight of fantasy and include magic and all, that’s fine, but not in my books. And I failed to find a reliable source. There is a source contemporary with poor old Walter’s execution that said that Bess and her ladies took away his head, but nothing that says that she kept it with her everywhere she went. And there are practical considerations, of course, but if you search for it on Amazon, you’ll find various beautiful velvet bags that claim to be the bag in which Bess kept Walter’s head. And some say that she had it buried with her, some say that she returned it so it was buried back with Walter (which would be a nice little touch, wouldn’t it?). But I couldn’t find anything to really nail that one, so I decided, like a lot of things, that it had to be just quietly left out for people to make up their own minds.
JW: Right, there was nothing like the Spanish Chronicle that you could…
TR: Not yet! The exciting thing is they still discover letters and papers that corroborate various things which have always been questioned, you know. I’m still waiting for them to find out what happened to the Princes in the Tower. And it’d be nice if it happened in our lifetimes, wouldn’t it?
JW: We may be getting close to the whole Princes thing, I don’t know. We seem to be moving forward. But so Bess got you on to… I’m supposed to wait to talk about what comes next until later in the talk, but Bess kind of bridges a couple of things because Walter Raleigh, you know, the core of his story is post-Elizabeth. So you’ve covered the whole era, starting with the early Tudors, you know, the origin of the dynasty, you took us through Henry and now all the way through Elizabeth, and now I understand you’re starting on the Stuarts.
TR: That’s right, I’ve actually started on the Stuarts now. But the idea came to me when I realised that I could tell the entire story of the Tudors because I’d started with Owen Tudor’s first meeting with Catherine of Valois. That’s the first page of the first book. And I realised then that, I think it was when I was watching the television series, Tthe Tudors, and they’d merged Mary and Margaret into one person. Why? To save confusion with Mary the Ist? I don’t know. Saved money on one actor, didn’t it? But that does confuse people, it confused me. And then Charles Brandon, I knew there was a lot more to him than what we’d seen in the television series. So I enjoyed developing the idea of the Brandon Trilogy. It lent itself perfectly to a trilogy because he had, he had several wives actually, but the main two, Mary Tudor and Catherine Willoughby, were both fascinating and very influential women who hadn’t been covered in great detail, certainly not in historical fiction. So I had a wonderful time doing that. And then, of course, at the end of that trilogy, we have Elizabeth I coming to the throne, and it seemed a great idea to explore her complex character through the eyes of three of her favourite men and three of her ladies. She was such a complex person, I don’t know if it would have been achievable in three books to cover the whole of her life. But of course, poor Bess actually saw from the end of the Tudors into the Stuarts and outlived almost all the other people that she knew. She lived until the age of 82, quite an age for an Elizabethan, I think. There were others, but that’s quite respectable.
JW: Very much so. I forget, I think Lettice Knollys also lived to a very old age.
TR: And I still find it amusing that foreign ambassadors would sometimes mistake her for the Queen. And she used to encourage that, much to Elizabeth’s annoyance, you can imagine. But it’s quite a funny sort of story, isn’t it, given the relationship between them.
JW: Now, I am fascinated by your ability to write these books and to get them out. Tell me about your writing schedule. I know that this is your full time, this is what you do.
TR: That’s right. That makes all the difference, working on it full time, because I’ve got a wonderful system now that I research now. So the ball starts rolling as soon as the weather is decent, which is perfect because I can still do all the things like go down the beach and go on holidays and stuff like that. But what I like to do is to visit actual locations in my books. And if I can, to have a bit of a special visit. So, for example, when we visited Sherbourne Castle, the owner of it, Maria, was actually kind enough to give us a personal guided tour. And we were able to go up into Walter Raleigh’s study. And she said the public aren’t normally allowed in here. And I thought it was because we were very privileged but she said, ‘No, it’s because the stairs are very dangerous.’ But what I was able to do, which you will appreciate, is to stand at the window and put my hand where Walter would have rested his hand and look out over the deer park and have an absolute sense of connection with the people I’m writing about, because the views have hardly changed, you know. It was the same with Henry VII. My wife and I went to the remote castle in Brittany, where he was in exile. And it’s a maze of falling rocks in French, but we managed to find the actual room where he was. And the way was blocked with cobwebs – my wife said, ‘Your back is covered in cobwebs.’ But it was worth it because how many people have actually stood in that room and looked out of his window, as Henry Tudor would have done while he was making his mind up about what to do about England. I think he was quite happy.
JW: Oh, that’s fantastic. Do you work on multiple projects at once?
TR: Oh yeah, sorry, to quickly finish the way I work is research in the summer. And then as soon as autumn comes, that’s my writing time. And I write every day. So I read somewhere, write every day, whether you’re in the mood or not, it’ll come. And I have a notional word target. I don’t worry about it too much. But I like to achieve a word count target. And my wife is my proofreader. So as soon as a chapter is done, it goes straight to her. And I get instant feedback then, which is great. And then when I’m happy with it, I’ve got a target to get it to my editor in February, as the winter is just starting to turn. I’ve got an excellent editor who has done my last, I think it’s my last eight books. So she cross references all of the books to each other and tells me if I’ve got something wrong, which I do sometimes get. Normally minor characters, I forget that I’ve already dealt with them somewhere else or called them something slightly different, you know, but she puts all that right. And then I try to arrange for a launch in the spring. So that’s where I am with Bess now. It was launched last Friday. So that’s, that’s quite a good system. And that’s the system I’ve used for the last 10 years now. And I have written two books in one year. But you’ll know that that is a bit of a – it starts to become a bit of a chore quite honestly. It’s do-able but why bother? I’d rather put all my effort and immerse myself in one character and their family than be diverted by several. It’s hard enough when you have got to decide who to leave out and who to include, isn’t it?
JW: So you don’t write one character while you’re researching the next book and editing a different one?
TR: No, I try and keep it, try and keep it clean and distinct. Obviously, I’m now researching my next book whilst launching the previous one. But I’m not making any changes to the previous one. It’s that’s it, it’s out in the world now.
JW: Right, once you’ve sent out the advance copies, that’s kind of it.
TR: I’m happy with that system. And, you know, it’s quite a fun way of doing it, because you don’t feel the same pressure that you might do. I did start considering doing nonfiction books. But you end up with all sorts of tight deadlines and issues about photography and heaven knows what else. So I decided that wasn’t really for me. And I wanted complete control over the process.
JW: Do you have a favourite writing spot. Do you have like your desk, and that’s the only place you can write?
TR: I’m looking at it now. Out of my early-ish royalties, I bought myself a very lovely writing desk with leather, green leather thing on it, and little cubby holes for all my bits and pieces. And I imagined that that’s where I would write. And I have never written at my writing desk. It’s become a place where I keep everything safe. Funny. I write on my MacBook Pro wherever I am. So I’ve written in the car – not while driving. I try not to write on holiday, because I try and have a break then. But even then, I’ve still found that I’m jotting down a few ideas as they occur to me. So you do the MacBook Pro? I’m so sorry. That’s all right.
[Dog barks, JW calls her back over, repeats her question]
JW: So you do the MacBook Pro? Not pen?
TR: It’s an interesting thing. I was talking to somebody the other day, and I said, ‘One of the amazing things about writing these days is you literally are creating something out of nothing.’ Because I’m not even using ink, you know. The creative process is typing it straight into the laptop. And these days, I rarely print it out unless I’ve got a good reason to do so. They do say it’s a good idea to print it out. But when you’re talking about 400 pages or something like that, it’s a lot of paper, isn’t it? It’s a whole ream of A4. And I’m quite happy to look at a Kindle version and make sure that it all works okay. I’ve also got, I don’t know if you know about Vellum, I got a wonderful tool called Vellum, which allows you to see the finished printed book all properly formatted and laid out with just a few mouse clicks. So I can actually see how it’s going to look and feel.
JW: I have…I write in a whole bunch of different places. I write with a whole bunch of different things. I’ll print out sometimes, I’ll look at it on screen, just a whole wide variety.
TR: I think it’s whatever works for you, isn’t it? Because I did a series on my blog about famous writers. And it was fascinating. Somebody like Roald Dahl would sit in a particular chair in a shed with a plank of wood and a legal notepad and he would write it in a particular pencil. And that’s how he wrote all of his books like that. So somebody then had to transcribe all of that, didn’t they? And I’ve visited various writers’ houses and they all have very different styles. But I think if they had the technology that’s available to us now, they might be tempted to make better use of it.
JW: It is, it is wild to see. I’ve been to Victor Hugo’s writing room, Balzac’s writing room, and was happy to see they make even more of a mess of their drafts than I do.
TR: I went to George Bernard Shaw’s house and he’s got a rotating writing hut. He used to call it London so that if anybody wanted to get hold of him when he was writing, his wife could honestly say that he was in London. And he could rotate it to point it so he had whatever view he felt like that day. And it’s still there and it still rotates. It’s National Trust now.
JW: There are a lot of writers’ homes that I want to go to, but there’s always so much more. There’s always so much more to visit, like the castles.
TR: At the end of this month, my wife and I are going to the Bronte Parsonage, which is a kind of bucket list thing, really. I’ve been meaning to go there for a long, long time. That’s a whole fascinating sort of time capsule there for writers, you know, to see where they wrote and how they wrote is absolutely fascinating.
JW: I love that. It’s almost like the pilgrimage to the writers’ homes is similar to the pilgrimage to castles. Do you find yourself writing after that? Do you find yourself with a sudden burst of inspiration?
TR: Oh, definitely, yeah. And the thing about visiting locations is that there’s lots of stuff that you just can’t get even from primary sources. A feel of the place, the scale of it and the context, the landscape it sits in and things like that, you know. When I was writing about Francis Drake, we went and visited the actual replica Golden Hind in London and had a private tour of it, which was fun. And it was fascinating how small it is, because it’s not a scale replica, it’s an exact replica of the ship. The only difference is it’s got a wheel, which the actual Golden Hind had just a sort of, like a kind of tiller. But apart from that, it gives you a real sense of what it must have been like to be on such a small ship for quite so long, with nothing to save you if things went wrong.
JW: So have you done much sailing, because I know that with Drake, you did an enormous amount of the description of the ship.
TR: That’s right. My wife and I both qualified yacht masters and we’ve had. I’ve actually lost track of how many yachts we’ve had over the years, but we used to do quite well. We used to live in a different part of Wales and sail down to this part, to Pembrokeshire every summer, which was something we really enjoyed. But now we live down here, we don’t need to do that. We can just stay local. It does help when you’re writing about anything to do with sailing and ships. I wish, actually, that I was a bit more of an expert on horses, because I’ve ridden horses, but I often find I’m writing about horses. And I wish that I had a bit more first-hand experience of what it’s like to ride a long distance on a horse. You know, we’ve done trekking through the olive groves in the south of France and things like that. So I have got a bit of a feel for it. But in a lot of my books, it’s a big deal. That was how poor Bess had to get down to Sherborne from London. And they had these funny wagons with very thin wheels and deeply rutted roads. So you can imagine that was quite a challenge, even riding in some kind of carriage. And you’ve still got horses, of course.
JW: How about hawking? Do you do any of that, or have you done a bunch of that?
TR: No, I’ve seen it, though. I’ve seen it firsthand. So that’s another one that there’s no substitute for actually seeing it firsthand, is there? You know, it’s not changed much since medieval times, really.
JW: They’re all right there. Now, I do want to get back, because this is so exciting, to have a new book out. Do you have each book that’s coming out, is that always your favourite, or do you have a book that’s an older book?
TR: I did an interview the other day, and it was which is your favourite character, and which is your least favourite Tudor person, which is a very clever question, actually. But it’s a little bit like saying which of your children is your favourite. It depends on so many things, and actually there’s no answer. But you’re right, because I’ve been living with Bess for the last two years, or more than that, because she obviously featured quite prominently in the book I wrote about Walter. I just find it a bit strange that I don’t have to think about her all the time now, and you’ll be able to relate to that yourself, I’m sure. But at the same time, I’m also getting into my new character. The least favourite Tudor, just in case you’re wondering, was Richard Rich, who tortured Anne Askew, which was unforgivable, and then had her burnt at the stake. But she never betrayed Catherine Willoughby, even though it might have even saved her life if she had done. So that’s something that struck me when I was going through the book, that somebody can be quite so loyal, that they’re prepared to die rather than betray somebody.
JW: Now, Richard Rich: you wrote Penelope Rich, so you would have had a lot of…
TR: It was his son, Baron Robert Rich (spoiler alert for those people that haven’t read Penelope, but she was horrified to find that, of all people, Robert Dudley, who was her stepfather at the time, because he’d married Lettice Knollys), he’d arranged a business transaction with Richard Rich’s son, Robert Rich, to have him marry Penelope. And it was a win-win as far as he was concerned, because he saw it as a good business deal. She would become a baroness, so that was quite a respectable role with the place at court and all that goes with it. Rich was a millionaire by today’s standards. He was actually a bit of a harsh landlord, so his tenants suffered under his landlord restrictions. But the worst thing was he was a Puritan, so Penelope loved singing and dancing and having a great time and fine clothes, but her husband was the complete opposite. He thought those were all the work of the devil, and in fact that the best place for his wife was to be shut away producing an heir for him. So, you can imagine, I had a bit of fun with that whole scenario, because Penelope was not somebody that was just going to take that and accept her lot, end of the story. She started doing outrageous things like having lovers and having parties behind his back, so you can imagine. I think she was a woman ahead of her time.
JW: We love when they do that.
TR: Just by the way, I’d never heard of her, I must be perfectly honest, I’d never heard. Lady Penelope to me was somebody out of the Thunderbirds, and then I was writing about her brother Robert Devereux, the Earl of Essex, who was the second of my three Elizabethan men, and I realised that his elder sister was hugely influential, and in fact he blamed her for his rebellion when he was under duress. He said, ‘It’s all my sister’s fault, she encouraged me, she put me up to this,’ which is equally outrageous, isn’t it, but I was intrigued as to who is this woman, you know, what’s her story. And it would make a great Netflix series, because it’s well-documented. Now, when I started writing the Tudor Trilogy, not very much of that was well-documented with primary sources, but Penelope’s story is extremely well-documented, and with Robert Devereux I had a two-volumes set of all of his letters and papers, with notes, so that’s a goldmine, isn’t it, as a resource.
JW: That is a wonderful thing. Your Essex book is the one issue that I have with you, because I’m coming at the whole situation from Elizabeth’s point of view, and…he’s much more sympathetic on your side than he is on mine.
TR: I don’t know whether I would blame you, but I avoided writing it from Elizabeth’s point of view specifically because it’s been done so well by others, you see, that was where I was coming from, so I thought let’s try. I didn’t particularly like Robert Devereux, I decided in the end that what he was lacking in is what we would these days call emotional intelligence, and that he was hopeless at reading people, or understanding where they were coming from. He couldn’t empathise with anybody really, including his wife or his sister, so it was quite fun to keep Elizabeth at arm’s length, and the idea that they were lovers is quite an interesting thing, because I like to think of him – this is where historical fiction can have a role, isn’t it, because there’s nothing to prove either way, unless you were there – I like to think of the Earl of Essex as the son she never had, and the way that they used to speak to each other, if you look at that from that point of view, you can see it’s like a mother with a slightly unruly, slightly out of control teenager. They used to play cards till midnight, but everybody else used to let her win, and he used to bet everything he had, his sword, his horse, his house, and if he’d lost she would have held him to it, I think.
JW: She was indulgent, but not overly so.
TR: That’s right, but once again there’s a strange dynamic here, because I think that Elizabeth was in love with Robert Dudley, and I think there’s enough evidence to back that up. Then when he married Essex’s mother, that’s like something out of some soap opera then, isn’t it, that you think, ‘What? What’s happened? How could that possibly happen?’ But that is what happened. And they had a son, so he either had to marry Lettice or she had to have an illegitimate child. And of course the poor little child died at a very young age, changing history again, but I think it’s fascinating to explore the dynamics of their whole relationship.
JW: Yes, yes, I agree. And that is one that you were probably glad that you were in third person! You’ve written all your books in third person, other than Owen, which was an amazing hook to get everything pulled into this really murky time. I mean, that was a story that we have the fewest facts surrounding, and that was intense.
TR: Do you know, I can tell you something, I had actually written two chapters, and I was reading Hillary Mantel with the first person present tense. I couldn’t work out really what was…but it was really engaging me, and then I saw her give a talk – I didn’t actually go and see her give the talk, I saw a video of her giving a talk where she explained her technique, so I really wrote the first couple of chapters in first person present tense. I’m not saying I did it as well as Hillary Mantel might have done it, but it was an interesting intellectual exercise but what started happening is they sounded like stage directions which is quite interesting because it suddenly becomes quite real. Instead of something that has happened, its something that is happening now. And that was quite interesting to do.
JW: Yeah, I can’t personally do first person. It doesn’t sound right to me.
TR: It’s hard work.
JW: But I love third person writing. We are starting to run out of time – ok, we should be talking more about this book. Well, we have talked about what’s coming next – the Stuarts. How far along are you going to go? Are you just going to keep going, or are you going to circle back?
TR: Well, I actually have the next six books planned. The next three are the Stuart Trilogy. So I’ve had quite a lot of fun choosing which of the Stuarts are going to feature in my trilogy – I’ve had a lot to choose from – and I’ve already found a narrator for the audiobook. A bit premature, isn’t it? I was doing auditions for the audiobook for Bess and one of the narrators is a Scottish actress who specializes in doing accents and I think that nobody can do a Welsh Scottish accent as well as a native speaker that has spent all of their life growing up in the area, but also what she’s able to add is all the little nuances that go along with being Scottish or being Welsh. So that’s where I’m heading – I’m trying to get a particularly authentic feeling in the next book, capturing the life of Anna of Denmark in a way that has never been done before. So much has been written about King James – including quite recently, there seems to be a whole flurry of books coming out, which is great because when I was in school, we covered King James, skipped quickly on to the execution of Charles the first and then it was the Civil War and the Restoration – and I don’t remember anything about people like Anne of Denmark at all. Perhaps I was not paying attention. Out of fairness to my history teachers I think we just straight didn’t get into it.
JW: That is wonderful. I am looking forward to all of that. It has been a pleasure reading your books over the years – we have kind of been on a very similar parallel.
TR: We have. But there’s plenty of room for us all, right?
JW: Oh yes, So many stories and I am really looking forward to seeing what you do next, and just enjoying what you are doing now.
TR: Thanks very much.
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Intrigued? Bess, Tudor Gentlewoman and his other books are available through Amazon US, Amazon UK, and other Amazon stores. And you can get more of Tony through his website (https://tonyriches.com), his The Writing Desk blog, or of course on Facebook!
And if you want more Elizabethan fun, Nothing Proved comes out on May 19. Preorder now through your favorite platform – Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, or Apple!
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