We have a wonderful new addition to the Tudorverse – Martha Jean Johnson has just released The Queen’s Musician, the story of Mark Smeaton (!). She 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 am joined today by Martha Jean Johnson, who has just published her debut novel, The Queen’s Musician, Mark Smeaton’s story. I’m…I’m trying to get the glare out of there, but oh my God, it is an amazing story with a cover to die for. Let’s talk about that cover. Did you squeal when you saw it? There’s got to be a story there. Nobody comes out with, you know, “Here you go!”

Martha Jean Johnson: I, I did have that kind of, you know, “stitch” in the heart when I saw that cover. But the publisher gave us – gives authors – a questionnaire to fill out. You know, like, “What do you want for your cover?” “Do you have any ideas?” “What do you hate?” “Send some covers that you like.” And so I’d always wanted it to be about lutes and music. I wanted – it’s Mark Smeaton’s story, he’s a musician and I wanted that on the cover. So they sent back about five or six covers and most of them were Renaissance covers. They had beautiful, gorgeous dresses and the musicians all dressed up and their lutes, and the lutes are just so luscious looking. They were, beautiful, but they were very serene. Whereas when I saw this cover…To me, this cover is passionate, you know, it’s an emotional cover and for me, this is an emotional story. It’s a tragedy. So my heart just went to it immediately, and I, I’m very happy with it.

JW: Absolutely amazing. But was this like in the very first round or did you…

MJJ: It was in the first round. It was one of the choices there. Which is not to say that some of those near and dear to me didn’t like another cover, but I thought, well, no, this is my cover. I wanted this one.

JW: Did you get any pushback from the publisher? Would, would somebody…

MJJ No, no. The publisher… it was just, you know, friends who said, “Oh, I like the red dress.” No, no, no red dress.

JW: The cover is, is truly to die for. It is, absolutely wonderful.

MJJ: Oh, thank you. It is a beautiful cover. Yeah.

JW: Ah, I’m looking at my questions, because I got distracted by this cover. Seeing it in the first place was just really what got me to desperately want to read the book. But now I want to go into the whole story that you put together. How…how did you settle on Mark?

MJJ: I wanted to write a novel about that time period. I’ve been fascinated for decades about this, back since I was watching Masterpiece Theater and the Six Wives of Henry VIII. I’ve been just in love with this era. But I always was interested in Mark and, as you know, he’s a minor character in many novels and films about it and I just think this story always haunted me. Because I mean, most people – most Americans at least – don’t know that five men were executed as lovers of Anne Boleyn, including her brother and Mark Smeaton. Mark was the youngest and the only one who didn’t have a title and status and wasn’t a privileged courtier. He was a commoner. And a musician – I’m very interested in musicians. I’ve known some very serious, gifted classical musicians and you just see their love for the music, their love for their instruments, the way they respect their teachers. There’s the kind of a life of the musician that I’ve been able to see and I thought, well, that is Mark to me. And, so I always wanted to tell his story. I felt like there should be something that told this terrible tragedy for at least six people if not more, from his point of view. So it was always about Mark, though there were changes along the way as I thought it through.

JW: When did you get the idea to add Madge to the Mark story because that really… the play between the two of them was, was the absolute…

MJ: Well, you know, it’s interesting because I did write the whole book one time just from Mark’s point of view. But at some point while I was working with it, I read Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, and The Girls on the Train by Paula Hawkins, and, you know, these are these kind of modern contemporary thrillers, but they use this technique of having different characters tell the story, switching back and forth, and I thought, well, isn’t that interesting? And, you know, I’d always wanted Mark to have a love interest. Because the novel follows him from the time he’s 17 until he’s 24. And, you know, if we have any luck in life at all, we have a love, of maybe many different kinds, but we have a love during that period. So I wanted him to have a love, and I was kind of looking at all these references to…there’s hardly anything known about Madge Shelton, just some references to her. So I picked her up. And so then I thought of reorganizing the story to tell it from the two parts. And it turned out really interesting because Mark, you know, doesn’t see things. He may be with Anne Boleyn days at a time because he’s playing, but he’s always a servant. Whereas, Madge Shelton was actually in the [Boleyn] family. She doesn’t know Anne Boleyn very well because Anne Boleyn was often in France when she was growing up. But she’s near to her. So, for example, when Anne Boleyn has her first child and it’s a girl, Madge Shelton is there to see how Anne Boleyn reacts, to help her fix her hair, to help her deal with this. Mark hears about it in the palace, it’s just something that happened to them. So it really allowed you to play with those two viewpoints.

JW: It, it allowed you to put her in the room.

MJJ: Exactly.

JW: Did you consider anyone else besides Madge?

MJJ: No I didn’t, not seriously. There’s so many little tidbits about her. One that Madge maybe was pushed into an affair with Henry VIII, or maybe it was her sister Mary. And it does seem she was betrothed to one of the other men who was executed, Henry Norris, and there are references to her being beautiful and to loving poetry. Though some historians actually think that there are no Madge and Mary, there’s just one person and we’re getting little stories about this woman. So, she was fascinating, she was the right age, she was beautiful, so I just arrived on her. And actually, one of the really fun things writing it was, you know, young people have a kind of love at first sight connection, and it’s really fun to tell that from two points of view. That was a joy to write.

JW. It’s a wonderful part of the story. I’m going to veer towards the Tudor side. You mentioned the Six wives of Henry the Eighth. Is that when you became a Tudor fan?

MJJ: It is. I mean, there was also Elizabeth R back in the day and A Man for All Seasons and Anne of the Thousand Days and I just ate all this stuff up. I always feel like I should have a better story for getting interested in the Tudors. But, you know, C.J. Sansom, a wonderful, wonderful writer who wrote a series of Tudor detective stories before he died last year, he’s actually one of my role models in terms of writing, he was so fabulous. I saw an interview with him where they asked how he got interested in the Tudors and he said, “I was watching The Six Wives of Henry VIII.” So I felt very reassured, thinking of him watching it on the BBC and of course I was here in the U.S. watching it on Masterpiece Theater, on Public Television.

JW: Channel 13!

MJJ: Channel 13, exactly. Both broadcasts! They would broadcast it twice during the week. I would watch it twice.

JW: Smeaton was not really featured in the Six Wives of Henry VIII. He is, again, he’s a minor character in so many of the stories. And yet he was the linchpin, because he was the only one who confessed to the crime.

MJJ: Yeah.

JW: I was fascinated by the rise that you gave him, I loved that because of course, yes, he was in Wolsey’s household with Cromwell. How documented was that rise? How easy or hard was it to put that together?

MJJ: Well, it’s not very documented. There are a couple of references to him getting gifts from Henry VIII and you know, people, uh, refer to him and their stories about him, often, I think, years after the fact where they tell these very lurid stories about Anne Boleyn calling for him, you know, to come to her chambers – it’s not believed by most historians as kind of, uh, uh, gossipy, uh…

JW: That’s the Spanish Chronicle.

MJJ: The Spanish Chronicle. Exactly. The Marmalade closet.

JW: They also famously switched the order of Henry’s wives. So that shows you how reliable…

MJJ: It should raise doubt, yes. Little things. But you know, there were some references to him being in Wolsey’s household and that he was a chorister. But you know, it’s very interesting. I’m a big outliner as a writer. I know other writers write more fluidly and more spontaneously, and I outline everything. I change the outline as I go scene by scene by scene. And one of the turning points in the novel is when Mark is having success at court, he’s getting gifts from the king, he’s popular, he’s beginning to kind of settle into his own life… and all of a sudden he’s questioned by Cromwell. Accused of being Anne Boleyn’s lover. It’s hard to even imagine how terrifying that would be. And then he’s, uh, most historians think he is tortured into confessing. I actually wrote the scene where Cromwell questions him first, because I thought if I could get that – I mean, it’s such a turning point scene – so I wrote that first, and then I wrote the rest of the novel, and then I went back and wrote the rise, trying to think about how that could have happened and how it would be, you know, coming from really nothing, being quite gifted and people noticing that you’re gifted. He had some breaks, you know, he got some breaks in his life as he rose up. And so that was a way to think about musicians at that time. And so I did all the research on Henry. You can say terrible things about Henry VIII – there are many, so many terrible things about Henry VIII – but he did love music and he kept a lot of musicians, and apparently he treated them quite well.

JW: Yes, he did. I love the idea of writing the ending first. That’s the Mary Stuart ‘In my end is my beginning.’

MJJ: Yes, exactly.

JW: Then go back and, and find all of that, and figure out where he would’ve been. I love that you had put him into the coronation.

MJJ: That’s my invention. I didn’t find any evidence for that, but I think it’s possible. By that time he was known in that group, they would turn to him, they needed somebody to organize all those parties that they were having to celebrate her coronation, work out what music would be there. So I did get to make up a number of things. I used to write nonfiction, about politics and public opinion of all things, and one of the joys of turning to fiction is you do have a little chance to make things up,

JW: Educated, reasonable guesses: that is the line. If it could have happened, if it likely happened, that that is fantastic and it, you know, that was really well done.

MJJ: Well, thank you. Thank you.

JW: So you, you got a little bit into how you wrote the book. I’d love to go into more about your process. What does the writing looks like? Do you use critique groups? Do you have beta readers? Do you…

MJJ: I outlined and outlined and outlined…Generally I get up in the morning and I write for a couple of hours. And then you know, my brain is tired after that. But then I found that, as I’m sure you know, you’re actually thinking about your novel all the time. I used to say I have some of my best ideas when I’m sitting on the subway. You know, you’re just going to sit there thinking about what’s going on in some scene. You’re trying to make, uh, you know, give some tension to it. So I did the draft of the novel and put it together. I had some people who were more familiar with Tudor times than I am, somebody who had spent a lot of time at Hampton Court, read the novel just to make sure you didn’t do get too far away. And then I had beta readers. I think they’re helpful because, well, when you’re writing, every single thing interests you and you’re just fascinated by all of your characters and any thought they have, anything they do. So you need somebody from the outside to see whether you are getting too much in the weeds, whether it moves, what kind of quote did you leave out, what questions they have. I had a book club read the book for me, some other people too, and got feedback. And I don’t know about you, but I was still editing when they just, when they’re going to take the book out of my hands, you do not touch it anymore. And I’m still fixing things up.

JW: That is wonderful. Yes. I love it. One of the things I noticed – I know I’m popping all over the place – was that you used first person point of view for both protagonists. You know, I’ve had beta readers and critique groups, and some people like it, some people don’t. How…talk to me about the choice to have first person for both of them.

MJJ: I never considered anything else for Mark. I mean, my idea was to give him a voice, so I wanted to give him a voice. Actually I had some fun with it in the beginning because he’s a young guy and, you know, Henry VIII is trying to get rid of his wife and he’s looking at it as somebody who knows nothing about politics, someone sort of from the outside. So that was kind of an interesting part to write and his feeling about music and his feeling and falling in love with Madge and, you know, to take it from his point of view. And then when I added the second chapter, I just felt it was balanced. And I wanted to have her have her voice. It’s very interesting because I think about women in those days, and she was betrothed to somebody who would help her family. And he wasn’t a bad guy, but he wasn’t the love of her life. And so, you know, to explore how she felt about that. And then she has this secret love for Mark who is totally inappropriate in terms of her family and her class and the way they would look at it, what she thinks of Anne Boleyn, who she admires, but she sort of, you know, doesn’t really understand why she would want to marry the king and live the life that she does. So it was, interesting to put it in to kind of think what her mind might have been.

JW: I’m still…I love the choice of the first person and I’m still fascinated by the Madge piece and your choosing her. I have to tell you, it, kind of switched things around because I always thought of Madge as Anne’s age – I think because in so many of the tales, she was much more of a central piece. And the way you presented her, I was like, how did I miss that? I love when things get flipped around.

MJJ: Yeah. You know, she’s young. I think probably all authors put a little bit of themselves in it. And I do remember when I grew up: you have all these rules and expectations in your society, but inside you have your own ideas. And so I gave her that. You know, she’s an obedient daughter, docile. I mean, she’s a lady of the court, but she’s thinking things, you know, on her own about, I don’t, you know, I don’t agree with that. I liked playing with that. And I also think her loyalty to her family and her desire to have them be proud of her and to help her family, it’s at odds with her amazing love for this young man even though they can never be together. That was interesting to kind of think through, ‘What’s that like?’ and I don’t believe that must have been an unknown feature in that time because young women of a certain class were married to people to…that would provide advantage to their families. And yet it was a romantic time. There was all these poems about love, so there must have been, you know, this kind of two tracks thinking about life.

JW: I just want to say, I think you really were able to walk the line between showing how she behaved externally and what she must have been thinking at the time. For the time and for its context.

MJJ: Yeah, I spent a lot of time thinking about that, as I’m sure you must, because it’s somewhat of a foreign way to think for us, that you would agree to marry somebody because it’s going to help your family. Most of us don’t think that way. We’re looking for our life partner and whether, you know, do we have the same ideas about family and money and hobbies and do we like to take vacations together. I think that it’s easy to think that it was a cruel situation, but I, you know, I think that that young women at the time, many of them were able to take some pride in meeting the expectations of their family and that it was seen as, you know, your duty and you want to do your duty.

JW: You didn’t really have a choice.

MJJ: Exactly. Exactly. You had to, you know, fulfill your role as her mother explained to her.

JW: And the contrast between her family and then Mark’s family and the way that was all brought up. I was interested in seeing how you made him a real part of the group surrounding George Boleyn and all of that.

MJJ: You know, there are not very many records of what happened, but there is a fairly detailed discussion of the execution and what they all said. And there is also this detail that at some point, George Boleyn gave him a book. He wrote his name in it, so you know there was some connection there. So I just thought that Anne Boleyn, George Boleyn, the other courtiers, you know, they were at the point where they admired musicians. They realized he was gifted and he was pleasant. You know, he had been brought up to serve and he knew how to, and to please his audiences. And he was taught to say the right things so he could fit in and they were respectful enough of his ability for there to be a bond there. And then of course, I think when you’re facing death, one of the little things is that he’s always beneath them but they all ended up in the same place: they all ended up on the scaffold on the same day. And so at some point the privilege that they had and his relative lack of privilege, in that kind of a cruel situation it just didn’t make any difference.

JW: It was a tear jerker. It was wonderful.

MJJ: I did have a few tears. I would go back and I would think, oh my gosh, yes. I know. To me, it’s one thing fiction writers can do because some, some people you’re…it’s a name. And yet we have the leisure to kind of think through what life was like for them and to try to have them be more than a footnote. I think one of the things that historical fiction does well is it takes people out of this kind of – people who are anonymous or apparently we just know their name and allows us to think about what their lives were like. And I’m glad that readers enjoy it, have curiosity and, and sympathy for people who were not, you know, were not just the kings and queens always.

JW: It is amazing how you manage to jump into probably the most written-about story of all time – of the entire universe – and in a totally different way.

MJJ: Thank you because I did have the fear when the book was finally published that there were so many people who are going to say, “Oh, no, not another book about Anne Boleyn.” But I actually had a very nice reaction to the book, and I think about the Anne Boleyn story – and no, this is not her story, but there is a mystery there that I think people are still very fascinated by. And you know, I think for us in our day, the fact that your fate could rest on whether you have a male or a female child, it just is not …and you know, why did he kill her? I mean, there’s just something there that is still…I’d read another story about Anne Boleyn.

JW: Five hundred years later, we’re still interested. So after this, after this pinnacle, what is next? More Tudor, more fiction? What’s next?

MJJ: Well, I think, like you, I’m really interested in historical fiction. So I do some blogging, on, uh, historical fiction from any era. But what really interests me is this kind of – you know, there are the events of history and then there’s human nature and they are often in a clash and human nature doesn’t change as quickly as we hope it might. So I write a lot about that. Now that my life has settled down a little bit, I actually have a list of your books that I am eager to delve into. You know, you’re right behind me, and I think it’s such a fascinating period. And so that’s right up on my list of things to do. And I have been thinking a little bit about some other novel possibilities. I don’t know that I’ll go right back to the Tudor era, but I do like English history and I do think there’s a lot of material.

JW: A lot of material and a lot of interest as well. I do not want to forget to ask, where can we find you? So your books are everywhere – Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Google. But tell us about your website and I will leave a link to it.

MJJ: It is Martha Jean Johnson dot com. So you can find it there and it has all the information about the book. And my blog is Historical Magic on Substack, and you can find that easily. Martha Jean Johnson Historical Magic. And, uh, I just am very grateful at the reception to the book, and I’m very glad that people are asking about Mark Smeaton: that does give me some comfort.

JW: Tell us about the magical piece.

MJJ: It’s just historical magic. It’s more just… I think there’s something about historical fiction where you open the page and within three or four or five pages if you have a good writer – maybe the first page if you have a good, really good writer – you are in another place. And to me it’s magical. It really is magical. There’s so many writers that I just so admire them and I just think that there’s so many places where you don’t have that much choice, but in terms of reading today, you just have so many choices. There are so many wonderful books out there, and so many of them historical fiction and all sorts of people that we didn’t pay much attention to maybe a hundred years ago who are getting their stories told. So, to me, that’s the magic that you can just open a book and go to the past.

JW: Love that. I agree that that is magic. And it is magic. I think that is the perfect place to stop. I want to thank you so much. This was an absolutely wonderful conversation – and again, ugh my Kindle is not – look at that cover! It is a wonderful book. Thank you again for being here.

MJJ: Thank you. Thank you. I really enjoyed talking to you. It was great.

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Intrigued? The Queen’s Musician is available through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and all the other usual suspects. And you can get more of Martha through her website or her Historical Magic Substack!

And if you want more Elizabethan fun, there’s always Nothing Proved , also available on your favorite platform – Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, or Apple!