Time for another edition of Wordly Women! I am blown away by how receptive people have been to this little series and I am thoroughly enjoying having the chance to highlight the careers and writing experiences of the best of women writers in both history and and historical fiction. Today is another ‘fan girl’ edition as I get to chat with one of my favourite writers, Gillian Bagwell, who has written a wonderful novel about one of my Tudor Heroines, Bess of Hardwick.

Sharon: Firstly, welcome Gillian, what got you into writing?

Gillian: Both of my parents were writers, among other talents and accomplishments, interests, and they both read to my sisters and me a lot when we were kids, so I guess it seemed natural to write. I think I took my first writing class in junior high school. I’d had the idea for one of my novels (not yet published) long ago, and I recently discovered a story that I’d written based on that idea for that class when I was about thirteen. I’d forgotten about it.

Sharon: Tell us about your books.

Gillian: The three books that I have published are all based on the lives of real English women, two in the seventeenth century and one in the sixteenth century. My first novel, The Darling Strumpet, is based on the life of Nell Gwynn, one of the first English actresses and a longtime mistress of Charles II. She was a poor urchin who got her big break in life when Charles reopened the theatres soon after he was restored to the throne, and she got a job selling oranges. She caught the eye of Charles Hart, one of the leading actors, and he became her lover and mentor, teaching her to act, and they became an enormously popular duo onstage, with many “gay couple” (not as we use that phrase today!) comedies written specifically for them. Her career took place during one of the most amazing and important periods in the history of English theatre, when over the space of about fifteen years, performance practices went from Elizabethan/Jacobean to what remained essentially unchanged until the end of the nineteenth century.

I learned about Jane Lane, the heroine of my second novel, when I was researching Nell Gwynn. Her story isn’t much remembered now, but she played a big part in helping Charles escape after the disastrous Battle of Worcester in 1651, saving not only his life but likely the future of the monarchy. She had a pass to travel with a manservant, so he disguised himself and travelled hundreds of miles with her. There were notices all along their way offering a reward of £1000 pounds for information leading to his capture—an enormous amount of money then—and they so narrowly escaped discovery so many times that his six-week odyssey became known as the Royal Miracle. The US title of the book is The September Queen. The UK published it as The King’s Mistress.

My third novel tells the story of Bess of Hardwick, who rose from genteel poverty to become probably the wealthiest and most powerful woman in England after Queen Elizabeth. She’s probably best known for building Hardwick Hall and the original Chatsworth, and for surviving four husbands. I didn’t think I could do justice to her very long and remarkable life in one novel, so Venus in Winter really only covers the first half of it, which included acting as keeper to Mary Queen of Scots for several years, and her granddaughter Arbella nearly succeeding Queen Elizabeth.

My fourth novel, The Tower on the Sea, not yet published, is a Gothic thriller with a heavy dose of romance set mostly on a tiny and remote Scottish island in 1901-1902. I’ve been working on a novel based on the life of Dame Flora MacLeod, who was chief of the Clan MacLeod from 1935 to her death in 1976, but as biographical fiction seems to be hard to sell these days, I’ve set it aside temporarily and am working on something completely different, which I’ll discuss below.

Sharon: What attracts you to the periods in which you write?

Gillian: I became enamoured of Shakespeare very early on, and so was interested in sixteenth-century England. Around the time I turned fourteen, my father was hired as the director of education for the non-profit educational branch of the company that invented and produced the original Renaissance Pleasure Faires, a re-creation of a country fair in Elizabethan England with food, crafts, music, dancing, shows on stage and peformers improvising in the street with each other and the patrons. I know the concept of a Renaissance fair may be unfamiliar to many British people, but that original event inspired hundreds of copycats, mostly in the US but also in other countries. I wrote an article for Smithsonian Magazine about how the first Faire came about: The Surprisingly Radical Roots of the Renaissance Fair.

My whole family became involved and I performed at the Faires from when I was fourteen to when I was twenty—six weekends each at the Renaissance Faires in Southern and Northern California, and six weekends at the Great Dickens Christmas Fair, an indoor recreation of Victorian London at Christmastime. So I spent a lot of time in the sixteenth century and the nineteenth centuries!

Sharon: Who is your favourite Tudor and why?

Gillian: I think that would have to be Elizabeth. She survived an incredibly difficult childhood and youth, with her mother dead and vilified and her own future uncertain, and also managed to come through perilous times as a young woman, especially under the reign of her sister Mary. When she finally became queen, she ushered in a time of great change, mostly in good ways, and I think in general was a great leader—not an easy thing to be, especially for a woman, in those days.

Sharon: Who is your least favourite Tudor and why?

Gillian: Henry VIII. It may be that he became the erratic tyrant he was especially later in life as the result of the injury to his leg and other medical problems, but it doesn’t erase the harm he caused to the six women who had the misfortune to marry him, his dissolution of the church and destruction not only of so many beautiful buildings but of the lives of so many people, both those who were of the church and those they helped, and much, much more.

Sharon: How do you approach researching your books?
Gillian: I read whatever I can find about my heroines, of course, as well as the period they lived in and the events that my books cover. But sometimes there isn’t much information available. The story of Jane Lane, for instance was very well known when Charles II was restored to the throne, but no one’s written a biography of her. There are several biographies of Bess of Hardwick, but they focus on her later life. One of them dispenses with her life up until her second marriage in the first twenty pages. So I have to piece together information, surmise what seems likely, and fill in the gaps with invention—of course mentioning in my author’s notes what historical facts I’ve taken liberty with. I’ve almost always gone to the UK on research trips, too, to find the places my main characters lived and where the action of their stories took place.

There’s nothing like it not only for learning new things but getting inspiration. When I was researching The September Queen/The King’s Mistress, a good friend from London joined me on a trip following in the footsteps of Charles II from Worcester to Staffordshire and Shropshire, and then the route that he and Jane Lane took together. I didn’t know it at the time, but the Monarch’s Way is a marked footpath, which the Monarch’s Way Association maintains and has published maps of. When we went to Boscobel, it was near the end of the day and almost no one else was there. I found myself alone in a closet peering down into the priest hole where Charles hid. And at Trent, the lady at Trent Manor showed us around the house, including her bedroom, with the priest hole where Charles hid there. I also visit libraries and archives to use primary sources. I’ve done research at the British Library, the Theatre Museum in Covent Garden, the National Library and the National Records of Scotland, and the office of the Lord Lyon in Edinburgh. For my current work in progress, I recently I spent eight days at the Bodleian Library doing research and spent the rest of my time exploring Oxford, visiting places where the main characters lived and knew well. I even got a private tour of St. Hugh’s College, where each was principal, from the archivist.

Sharon: Tell us your ‘favourite’ Stuart story you have come across in your research.

Gillian: I’d say that’s the story of Charles II’s six-week odyssey trying to get out of England after the Battle of Worcester. Many, many common people risked their lives to help him, and it was a formative period in his life. He was only twenty-one at the time. He told the stories of his adventures for the rest of his life. Fortunately, the diarist Samuel Pepys sat him down decades later and over the course of a couple of days, took down the story in his famous shorthand. He then gathered all the accounts people had published of their parts in the story and bound them together. It’s an amazing resource, giving us a day-by-day and sometimes hour-by-hour account of what Charles did, said, wore, and ate. In the run-up to the publication of my book about Jane Lane, I blogged the daily events of those weeks. Here’s a link to the story, beginning with the Battle of Worcester: http://theroyalmiracle.blogspot.com/2011/09/september-3-1651-battle-of-worcester.html.

Sharon: And do you have a favourite Tudor story?

Gillian: There are many great stories about the Tudors, of course, but I became fascinated with this nugget mentioned in Robert Hutchinson’s The Last Days of Henry VIII, and have thought of writing a story or play about it. In the bitter cold of early February 1547, the body of Henry VIII lay at Windsor Castle, and amid clouds of incense, requiem masses were being held night and day to waft the soul of the dead tyrant to heaven. Fierce struggles for power raged at court, as the new king, Edward VI, was a child, and who controlled him would effectively rule. Against this backdrop of intrigue, John de Vere, the sixteenth Earl of Oxford, planned a dramatic event of his own: the presentation of a play he had written on the death of the king, to be performed by his own company of players. But as the actors rehearsed for their day in the winter sun, Bishop Gardiner, though recently banned from the Palace of Westminster, intended to claw his way back to power, and he would do whatever he must to prevent Oxford’s play from coming to the stage.

I find a lot intriguing about this story, not least the fact that John de Vere was the father of Edward DeVere, the seventeenth Earl of Oxford, whom many serious people believe could have been the author of the plays attributed to William Shakespeare. He was almost seven years old at the time of this cancelled performance, and it’s interesting to think that he might have witnessed the drama offstage as well as on. The evidence for the argument for Oxford as the author includes a wealth of similarities in his life and experience and the plays; the fact that he was familiar with theatre from an early age, as his father kept a company of players; and that he was regarded as an accomplished and playwright, though none of his plays survive. Charlton Ogburn’s 600-page tome The Mysterious William Shakespeare is an exhaustive study of the evidence in favor of Oxford.

Notable authorship skeptics include included Mark Rylance, Derek Jacobi, John Gielgud, Tyrone Guthrie, David McCullough, and Supreme Court Justices Sandra Day O’Connor, John Paul Stevens, Harry A. Blackmun, and Lewis F. Powell (Declaration of Reasonable Doubt, Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship – Famous Authorship Skeptics).

Sharon: Tell us your least ‘favourite’ Tudor story you have come across in your research.

Gillian: Many of the Tudors were responsible for a lot of bloodshed and cruelty, of course. I think Henry VIII’s persecution and elimination of the Pole family, who he considered a threat to his keeping the throne, ranks high, especially the murder of Lady Margaret Pole, the Countess of Salisbury, who was sixty-seven and had spent her life serving the Tudors. The executioner botched the job terribly, and it was a gruesome death. Here’s Tracy Borman’s post on the Historic Royal Palaces’ website: The Extraordinary Life and Death of Lady Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury.

Sharon: Are there any other eras you would like to write about?

Gillian: Well, I’ve moved into the early twentieth century with The Tower on the Sea, and both Flora MacLeod’s story and my current work in progress take me further into the 1900s and has a contemporary timeline too. There are other stories I’d love to write about, including from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Sharon: What are you working on now?

Gillian: I’m working on a novel with dual timelines inspired by the true story of Eleanor Jourdain and Charlotte Anne Moberly, two Oxford academics who visited Versailles in 1901, had a very strange experience, encountering people in eighteenth-century dress who behaved oddly, and came to believe they’d walked into the eighteenth century. I learned about this story from Miss Morison’s Ghosts, a British movie made in 1981, and I’ve wanted to write about it ever since. Having gone through the seventeen boxes of their notes, correspondence, drawings, photos, maps, and other documentation of their eight or so years of research about their experience at Versailles, I can say that something extraordinary happened to them, though I don’t know exactly what and neither did they.

Sharon: And finally, what is the best thing about being a writer?

Gillian: Exploring the worlds of my characters is endlessly fascinating. I get chills when I experience or discover something that connects me viscerally with the people I’m writing about, for instance holding letters they wrote, or being in the rooms where important things took place. And much as I like adventure and travel, all my life, I’ve been something of a homebody, too, so I love being able to work at home, especially on days when I don’t have to do anything but write.

About Gillian Bagwell:

Gillian Bagwell’s historical novels have been praised for their vivid and lifelike characters and richly textured, compelling evocation of time and place. Her first career was in theatre, as an actress and later as a director and producer, and she founded the Pasadena Shakespeare Company and produced thirty-seven shows over ten years. Gillian has found her acting experience helpful to her writing, and many of the workshops and classes she’s taught at the annual Historical Novel Society Conferences in the US and the UK relate to her life in theatre, including writing effective historical dialogue, using acting tools to bring characters to life on the page, and giving effective public readings. She’s also a professional editor and provides writing coaching and manuscript evaluations. Gillian lives in Berkeley, California in the house where she grew up, her life enlivened by her five rescue cats.

*

My Books

Signed, dedicated copies of all my books are available through my online bookshop.

Out now: Scotland’s Medieval Queens

Scotland’s history is dramatic, violent and bloody. Being England’s northern neighbour has never been easy. Scotland’s queens have had to deal with war, murder, imprisonment, political rivalries and open betrayal. They have loved and lost, raised kings and queens, ruled and died for Scotland. From St Margaret, who became one of the patron saints of Scotland, to Elizabeth de Burgh and the dramatic story of the Scottish Wars of Independence, to the love story and tragedy of Joan Beaufort, to Margaret of Denmark and the dawn of the Renaissance, Scotland’s Medieval Queens have seen it all. This is the story of Scotland through their eyes.

‘Scotland’s Medieval Queens gives a thorough grounding in the history of the women who ruled Scotland at the side of its kings, often in the shadows, but just as interesting in their lives beyond the spotlight. It’s not a subject that has been widely covered, and Sharon is a pioneer in bringing that information into accessible history.’ Elizabeth Chadwick (New York Times bestselling author)

Available now from Amazon and Pen and Sword Books

Also by Sharon Bennett Connolly:

Heroines of the Tudor World tells the stories of the most remarkable women from European history in the time of the Tudor dynasty, 1485-1603. These are the women who ruled, the women who founded dynasties, the women who fought for religious freedom, their families and love. Heroines of the Tudor World is now available for pre-order from Amberley Publishing and Amazon UK. Women of the Anarchy demonstrates how Empress Matilda and Matilda of Boulogne, unable to wield a sword themselves, were prime movers in this time of conflict and lawlessness. It shows how their strengths, weaknesses, and personal ambitions swung the fortunes of war one way – and then the other. Available from Bookshop.org, Amberley Publishing and Amazon UK. King John’s Right-Hand Lady: The Story of Nicholaa de la Haye is the story of a truly remarkable lady, the hereditary constable of Lincoln Castle and the first woman in England to be appointed sheriff in her own right. Available from all good bookshops Pen & Sword Books, bookshop.org and Amazon. 

Defenders of the Norman Crown: The Rise and Fall of the Warenne Earls of Surrey tells the fascinating story of the Warenne dynasty, from its origins in Normandy, through the Conquest, Magna Carta, the wars and marriages that led to its ultimate demise in the reign of Edward III. Available from Pen & Sword Books, Amazon in the UK and US, and Bookshop.org. Ladies of Magna Carta: Women of Influence in Thirteenth Century England looks into the relationships of the various noble families of the 13th century, and how they were affected by the Barons’ Wars, Magna Carta and its aftermath; the bonds that were formed and those that were broken. It is now available in paperback and hardback from Pen & Sword, Amazon, and Bookshop.org. Heroines of the Medieval World tells the stories of some of the most remarkable women from Medieval history, from Eleanor of Aquitaine to Julian of Norwich. Available now from Amberley Publishing and Amazon, and Bookshop.org. Silk and the Sword: The Women of the Norman Conquest traces the fortunes of the women who had a significant role to play in the momentous events of 1066. Available now from Amazon,  Amberley Publishing, and Bookshop.org.

Alternate Endings: An anthology of historical fiction short stories including Long Live the King… which is my take what might have happened had King John not died in October 1216. Available in paperback and kindle from Amazon.

Podcast:

Have a listen to the A Slice of Medieval podcast, which I co-host with Historical fiction novelist Derek Birks. Derek and I welcome guests, such as Elizabeth Chadwick, Helen Castor, Ian Mortimer, Scott Mariani and Bernard Cornwell and discuss a wide range of topics in medieval history, from significant events to the personalities involved.

Every episode is also now available on YouTube.

*

Don’t forget! Signed and dedicated copies of all my books are available through my online bookshop.

For forthcoming online and in-person talks, please check out my Events Page.

You can be the first to read new articles by clicking the ‘Follow’ button, liking our Facebook page or joining me on Twitter, Threads, Bluesky and Instagram.

*

©2025 Sharon Bennett Connolly FRHistS