The Hinges of History

Game changer. Turning point. We use these terms to describe crucial, pivotal events. In my historical novels I like to call such events the hinges of history.

It's a powerful image: a swinging door. An opening, a closing. Sometimes with a joyful whoosh, sometimes an anxious creak, sometimes a furious slam.

I set my stories at these hinges of history – decisive historical events – to test my characters’ mettle as the doors of change open and close.

My Thornleigh Saga novels follow a middle-class English family's rise through three tumultuous Tudor reigns during which they must make hard choices about loyalty, duty, family, and love.

The Thornleigh family is fictional; I created them. But the dynamic historical events they're passionately involved in are solid, fascinating facts.

The Thornleigh Saga begins with The Queen’s Lady set in the nerve-jangled court of Henry VIII as he wrenches England away from the Roman Catholic church to divorce Catherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn. Honor Larke and Richard Thornleigh fight to save the church's victims. To get Anne, Henry created a national church - a hinge of history that changed the course of England.

When Henry VIII’s bitter daughter, Queen Mary, launches her reign with a vow to annihilate heretics, young Isabel Thornleigh must act quickly to save her family in The King's Daughter. Determined to rescue her father from prison, she entrusts her mission, and herself, to ruthless mercenary Carlos Valverde. But Isabel is also pledged to spy for rebel leader Thomas Wyatt who is bent on overthrowing the Queen. Isabel joins Wyatt's rebellion, a hinge of history that, amazingly, brought the rebel army to the very gates of London.

In The Queen’s Captive the hinge of history swings when Henry VIII's daughter, Queen Mary, imprisons her twenty-year-old half-sister Elizabeth in the Tower. The terrified Elizabeth fully expected to be executed. The Thornleighs make it their mission to save her, and in the ensuing national uprising against Mary, Elizabeth learns the hard lessons she will need to become a formidable leader.

The Queen’s Gamble is set during the young Queen Elizabeth's fledgling reign. Fearing invasion by the French through Scotland, she sent money to John Knox's Scottish rebels who were fighting their French overlords. Isabel Thornleigh accepts the dangerous mission to secretly take the queen's money to Knox. Eventually, Elizabeth gambled by sending an army north to face the mighty French. Her victory ushered in Knox's Protestant government, swinging a hinge of history that forever changed Scotland.

Blood Between Queens focuses on the hinge of history when Mary, Queen of Scots flees to England to escape her enemies and seeks help from her cousin, Queen Elizabeth. But Mary has set her sights on the English crown, and Elizabeth enlists her most trusted subjects, the Thornleighs, to protect it. Justine, the Thornleighs' ward, pities Mary when Elizabeth holds her royal cousin under house arrest. The crisis splits the Thornleigh family apart, mirroring the deadly rivalry between the two queens that threatened England's very survival.

In my upcoming release, The Queen's Exiles (June 2014) a ragtag band of revolutionaries calling themselves the Sea Beggars challenge the mighty global empire of Spain. Adam Thornleigh and the brave Scottish-born Fenella Doorn join forces with the Sea Beggars, who made history when they captured a port city in the Spanish-occupied Netherlands—and thus began the Dutch War of Independence.

The hinges of history tested the people who lived in those turbulent times. To this day we can hear echoes of the doors swinging open . . . and the ones slamming shut.



For more about the Thornleigh Saga books, please visit my website: http://www.barbarakyle.com/

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