Episode 272: Exploring Tudor and Elizabethan History with Tony Riches: Behind the Books and the Characters
43:22 Share

You can trust podcasts to deliver results for your business. 80% of podcast listeners say they'll consider a brand recommendation by their favorite host. Even more impressive, 88% have taken action because of a podcast ad. If you're looking to connect with highly engaged audiences, now's the time to dive in. Download Podcast Pulse 2024 for all the latest insights and see how podcast ads can drive real results for you.

Hey, friend. Welcome back to the YouTube channel for the Renaissance English History Podcast. I am your host, Heather, and I've been podcasting on Tudor England since this is an interview with the most fabulous Tony Riches. Tony has been on my show lots of times,

He is an amazing author. I always enjoy sitting down and talking about random Tudor history with him. His Tudor trilogy, which starts with Owen Tudor and goes up through Jasper and then Henry.

is amazing. Really paints a picture of the Wars of the Roses and how Henry VIII came to the throne. And then he has the Brandon series about Charles Brandon, Mary, the sister of Henry VIII, and the

Catherine Willoughby, and also the Elizabethan series, which is actually six books, three men and three women. So we talk about some of his more recent books. If you're new to Tony, he was born in Pembrokeshire in West Wales, and he spent part of his childhood in Kenya.

He has a B.A. in psychology and an M.B.A. from Cardiff University. After careers in the Royal Air Force, the NHS, and local government, he is a full-time author of historical fiction. His Tudor trilogy has become an international bestseller, and he is in regular demand as a guest speaker about the lives of the early Tudors.

So let's get right into it with our interview where we talk about how Tony chooses the particular

protagonist that he tells his stories through and these more recent books on Penelope Rich and Frances Walsingham, the daughter of Frances Walsingham, the spymaster. One has an I and one has an E. Frances the spymaster is with an I. Frances the daughter is with an E. Random fun fact. Anyway, here is Tony. I will turn it right over to him.

Okay, so Tony, I was looking back through the last time we talked, and we have not talked much during your Elizabethan series that you're on. Started with the Tudors with Owen, and then you moved on to Brandon and Charles Brandon and Henry's sister, and there was that whole story. And now you're on to this Elizabethan series. And I don't think we've talked very much at all during this time. So...

Tell me about the Elizabethan series to start with. And then I want to ask you specifically about Penelope and Francis Walsingham, because those are the two latest ones. So top Elizabethan series. So it's worked out quite well because I started off telling the story of the Tudors and I wanted to continue it through to the end of Elizabeth I. So that was the plan.

And I decided to tell the story of Elizabeth through three of her favourite men and three of her ladies, all of whom saw a very different side of her. And she's such a complex woman anyway that you get the multidimensional view then. So the three men, just to recap...

But Frances Drake, who hero worshipped her, he had a dreadful chip on his shoulder because he was not a noble. And then Robert Devereaux, Earl of Essex, who was the son she never had. So you might have read that he was her secret lover, but that's a nonsense because she was...

a mother to him, basically. And that's how the relationship between them was, really, like an annoying son and an overbearing mother. And then the third one was somebody quite different again, the captain of her guard, a chap called Walter Raleigh, who...

was, again, he wasn't a noble, he was a commoner. So we get to see both sides, really. But he worked for her. So he was, you could say he was her servant in a way, because as captain of her guard, he had privileged access, but only under certain conditions. And then the three ladies sort of emerged from it all as I was writing The Three Men.

Because the first one I did was Penelope, who I knew nothing about, by the way. I discovered her story when I was writing about her brother, Robert Devereaux. And she is his elder sister. And his mother was the mother from hell, Letiz Noles, who had nothing much to do with their children at all.

And so Penelope had to really be the mother hen and look after them all and make sure they didn't get into trouble, which she failed at spectacularly. But I got to see there was this amazing woman that I knew nothing about who completely ignored the conventions of the time and lived life on her own terms. And this was quite new to me that you could get away with that so quickly.

And she, without any spoilers, she was forced into an arranged marriage with a Puritan. And she loved dancing and singing and stuff like that. And Puritans wouldn't have any of that. And so she took herself a lover, a chap called Charles Blount, who you might have heard of.

who was a heroic figure and something of a poet and really the opposite. And they lived quite openly together and had several children. So that's quite an interesting story to tell. Then I moved on next from there. Oh, by the way, Penelope got banished from court through no fault of her own, really. It was through association with her brother. And the...

The interesting thing is she would have been banished from court anyway, I think, eventually. It was kind of inevitable. And then I picked up on Frances, who just fascinated me. You will have heard of the Queen's spymaster, Sir Francis Walsinger. And Frances is his only surviving child. And I came up with this idea that

And she nursed him through very ill health towards the end of his life. And she would have been the only person that he could have trusted completely with state secrets and secret codes and things like that. And so that's what happened. He was unable to decipher coded letters from France and Spain and things like that. But she was better educated than most men.

And as a kind of reward, he married her after Sir Philip Sidney, the warrior poet. And so the fact that she hardly knew him didn't seem to matter at all. No. And then I explore how that worked out. And...

I'll give away at risk of one spoiler. On his deathbed, I think that Philip Sidney extracted a promise from this rascally Earl of Essex, Robert Devereaux, who was his best friend, to look after his wife and daughter. And Essex interpreted that he should marry her. And that didn't work out well.

because he married her for all the wrong reasons, really. Everybody was amazed that she went along with it. And then the third book, the last book in the whole of the Tudor series, so this is quite a challenge for me, because not only is it the end of the series, but it's the end of the whole of the Tudors and leads into my next series, which is about the Stuarts, who I knew almost nothing about.

And that is, I think, 80-something percent done. So the target is to have it with my editor February, and then it'll be published in the spring. So then I will have...

Three, six, nine, twelve. Twelve books which cover the entire Tudor story from Owen Tudor's first meeting with Queen Catherine of Valois right through to the death of Elizabeth and the aftermath of that as well, which is quite interesting to explore.

And who is that woman going to be, or can you say? I can say now is that when I was writing about Walter Raleigh, I started getting really intrigued by his wife, Bess, because unlike the others, she wasn't educated other than enough to run a household. So basically, she was shown how to boss servants around and how to organize a banquet and

But she wasn't really taught to read and write. And that comes across in the few surviving letters, which are spelt phonetically. But what I was impressed by was that it didn't stop her at all. So she taught herself to read and write, which is quite an achievement, really. And she used to write to people like Robert Cecil, demanding this, that and the other, phonetically.

And they just had to go along with it because they didn't know how to cope with this. You know, probably a little bit what most of what people know about Walter Rowley and the others is probably wrong, actually. But she she was very faithful and loyal to him and is to be admired for that. And yeah.

She was the Queen's gentlewoman, so she had privileged access to Queen Elizabeth and they became quite close, actually. So that was interesting for me to play with.

How do you pick these people? Like, you want to tell this narrative story from Owen all the way up to Elizabeth. How do you decide on the people that you're going to profile and pick? I don't do it in advance. Obviously, I chose Owen because he was the start of the thing. But as I was writing Owen, I then realized just how significant Jasper Tudor was in his rise and his life. And so...

The research took me to Brittany to follow in the footsteps of Jasper and Henry Tudor. And so Jasper takes us up to the Battle of Bosworth.

And then, of course, that allows me to have Henry Tudor to be born in the first book of the trilogy, to come of age in the second book and to become king in the third book. So the book Henry, which is the third book in the Tudor trilogy, explores what it must have been like for Henry to suddenly be thrust onto the stage. Not a job he particularly wanted, quite honestly, but his mother did.

Margaret Beaufort really wanted him to be king. And then he was nursed in his last days by his daughter, Mary, who is Henry VIII's younger sister. And when he dies, Henry VIII promptly marries Mary after the really quite old King of France death.

And I was intrigued by how all that works. And of course, I was aware of this character, Charles Brandon, through the Tudors, the series, the Tudors and Henry Cavill and stuff like that. But it was really interesting to dig deeper. And we actually went to St. George's Chapel in Windsor Castle and visited and paid our respects where his tomb was and saw his tomb.

garter stall in the stalls there and things like that. But most interesting, we went to his house at Westhorpe in Suffolk and there's quite a lot to see there. So I felt a real connection to him then. And he was loyal to Henry to the end. So I was able to explore the character of Henry through that.

And of course, after Mary died, he then married Catherine Willoughby, who interestingly, her mother, Maria de Salinas, was the best friend, really, not so much the servant of Catherine of Aragon. So there's a kind of

Nice completion of a circle there, isn't there? And Catherine Willoughby was fascinating to write about because she had to escape the country when Mary took the throne. But she knew every one of Henry Gapes' wives and his children because her children were educated with his children.

So there's all these little connections that were fascinating to do. And then she married for love similarly to Catherine of Albois, though it also pulled it together. Yes, another one. And because Frances ends up marrying for love, I shan't say to who. I'll leave something for the readers to... But I must admit, I really enjoyed writing Frances. It was something quite different because...

Um, I didn't know anything about her quite honestly, when I started. Um, I wouldn't, I couldn't have even told you that, uh, Sir Francis Walsingham, um, you know, had a daughter that might've been quite so important on the world stage because you think of all the big events like the Spanish Armada. Um, he was right there in the middle of it and, um, Mary Queen of Scots, of course, things like that. And then, um,

It was quite fun to move on from there to, because I introduced Elizabeth coming to the throne in the end of Catherine. So there's a kind of nice bridge between the last book of the Brandon series, as I called it, of three books, and then on to the Elizabethan series. And

This chap, Francis Drake, all I knew really about him was that he played bowls when the Armada was sighted. And all of that was nonsense, of course. And I never realized that he had quite such a chip on his shoulder or that his father was a preacher. So he had this kind of tension and he gathers the men on board his ship and reads them the prayer of the day and things like that. I put all that in the book.

So he was quite devout, but his poor wife had quite a hard time because he was always away at sea. And then when she died, he married the daughter of a noble who was much younger than him. And, you know, there's a whole intriguing side to his character that comes out through that. And then Robert Devereaux...

I've always thought that he was lacking in what they call emotional intelligence and that he couldn't read, couldn't judge people's character. So he chose his friends rashly, quite honestly, and got it all horribly wrong with Queen. He didn't know how to play the Queen at all, other than at cards.

And then he would not let her win, which everybody else lets her win. He would try and beat her all of the time. So you can imagine there's some good arguments around that. And, of course, that all ends in tears. And we went to the Tower of London and we went to the Devereux Tower. And that's when I started. We went inside Walter Raleigh's tower, which is now called the Bloody Tower, but was called the Garden Tower when he was there.

Sounds like a vacation spot. He had a garden. He had a garden. He had a herb garden and he used to make herbal potions. More than a hobby, he was experimenting like a scientist, trying different combinations of things. And he grew his own tobacco plants in the Tower of London and cured them in front of a fire.

So there's all sorts of little things like that I started discovering. But it was fun to write his story, but it was even more fun to write it from his wife's point of view. What did his wife think when...

He's like puffing away at his pipe and filling the room with smoke, oblivious to the fact that she wasn't particularly enjoying it, you know. And it's just been quite interesting to get through all of that and to think about how they raised their children under really quite challenging circumstances. But the interesting thing with them was Sherbourne Castle is still open to the public and they were aware of it.

Maria Digby gave us a personal guided tour and we were allowed up into Walter Raleigh's study, which the public aren't generally allowed to go to. And when we were actually in there, she said the reason the public aren't allowed is because the stairs look a bit creaky, you know. But what I was able to do is stand in the window and look out over the deer park and actually see

put my arm where Walter Raleigh would have stood, do you know what I mean? And look out at the view he would have seen and you get a connection to them then. So when you write about it, it has a very special kind of authenticity because you're talking from your own experience as well. When you think it's like four or five hundred years and some of these events have passed, to be able to have that connection is quite special.

Yeah. Yeah, that's quite magical. And you almost, if you want to get really deep about it, the only thing that separates you then is time. You're in the same place. Absolutely. And we all know time is like elastic anyway. So maybe you were there with him. Maybe you were communing with him. Who knows? It's like time travel. And I actually saw one of Walter's pipes is there on display. And it's

You're not allowed to touch your 20, but it's behind glass. But you do get a sense of connection to the person, which some authors never have that opportunity. You know, that's one of the nice things of living where I do, really, is that it's not too hard to do all of that.

Right. What, tell me a little bit about your research for some of these. Like I'm thinking like for Penelope, there's not a whole, the primary sources on her kind of, yeah, tell me about how that comes together. I love primary sources. And I was so lucky that when I was researching her brother, I managed to find the two volume set.

of all of his letters and papers. And when he'd be writing in French or Latin or something, it was all translated with annotations. I think he meant this. I think he meant to say that and things like that. And you get a sense of his voice. But there are also letters to Penelope as well. So you get a sense of how he talked to his sister, what he asked of her.

And then with Penelope herself, each, when I started off with Owen, there was almost nothing to go on. We went to Windsor Castle, we explored where he would have been, so we got a sense of the geography and stuff, but there are certainly no letters surviving. To have two volumes of letters is amazing, you know, and there are letters that Penelope wrote herself, which I've incorporated into the book. What I like to do

is to put little excerpts in italics. And that validates what I've been saying about somebody because these are the actual words. And you can see that an event that I've been exploring actually happened. This is what she actually said about it and who to and how she said it. And so that is quite powerful. The other thing is to visit the actual locations.

So I mentioned about Westhorpe. I also went to Grimsthorpe Castle, which was Catherine Willoughby's home. And that was just fascinating because you can sense her presence there. I stood in the room where she died and the guide there told me that Lady Astor died in the same room, which is really interesting that all the generations apart

And then we arranged with the local vicar to go and visit her tomb in the church, just not far away, a couple of miles. And I don't know if it was a misunderstanding, but we ended up with the whole church to ourselves, my wife and I. So we literally were alone with Catherine Willoughby for as long as we wanted. And I could lay my hand on her. There's a strange effigy of her in a

later days actually uh with with um richard bertie as well and i just found a connection to her then which i was able to sort of weave into the book as well you know that's that's the sort of research that i like to do and if i can find um something which is not generally known about such as um

You can trust podcasts to deliver results for your business. 80% of podcast listeners say they'll consider a brand recommendation by their favorite host. Even more impressive, 88% have taken action because of a podcast ad. If you're looking to connect with highly engaged audiences, now's the time to dive in. Download Podcast Pulse 2024 for all the latest insights and see how podcast ads can drive real results for you. Uh...

Catherine Power in Lamentation of a Sinner dedicated it to...

William Cecil and Catherine Willoughby. So it's there on the dedication page if you have the time to read it. So then that's a particular kind of relationship, isn't it, which you can then dig deeper into and you can think about. It's like my wife is the first one to read anything I write, and I wondered whether Catherine Willoughby would have been the first one to read anything Catherine Parr wrote.

because they were very close friends. I don't think she would have passed it to her husband to read in a hurry, do you? Oh, my God. I heard there was a book a couple of, maybe 10 years ago, that was talking about how Catherine Willoughby might have been Henry's, like Henry might have been plotting to leave Catherine Parr to Mary. Do you think there's any truth to that? She was on the brink of marrying Richard Bertie at the time.

and had already seen what happened previously. Imagine her being interested in that marriage. Kathleen was her best friend as well, and she was very devout and very loyal to Richard Bertie as well. So put all of that together and then add into the mix a decrepit old Henry with his ulcered leg raised on a stool.

trying to chat her up. That scene is actually in the book. I did enjoy writing that scene because she has to try to find a line between not upsetting him. So she has to obviously play along with it, but not encouraging him either, particularly. That could backfire, couldn't it? So that was a... I like those sort of scenes. I call them scenes. I like those sort of things.

because you can really place yourself in the room like a fly on the wall and imagine, well, how would you have prepared for it, you know? And of course...

It's easy enough to think how she would have prepared for it because she'd known Elizabeth, she'd known Mary, she'd known all of the wives at different times. So, you know, she thought of Catherine of Aragon like an auntie. And, you know, what she thought of Anne Boleyn, it can be debated. But she obviously had a bit of resentment which her mother would have felt

told her all these stories about Anne Boleyn, wouldn't she? And then we go through each of the wives and each of the children and looking at them from Catherine Willoughby's point of view. So however wonderful Anne Boleyn was, she would have always been the woman that left Catherine of Aragon alone. You see, so that's the...

That's the sort of thing. And it was a deliberate thing not to write a book from Henry VIII's point of view. It's much more fun to write it from Charles Brandon's point of view. Charles Brandon accidentally rammed the tip of his wooden lance under Henry's visor in a joust and thought he'd killed him. And I think that Henry was never quite the same since after that accident. If you look at the...

The records, you know what I mean? It seems that was a pivotal moment. That's not the famous 1536 accident. That was one, when was that, 1517 or something? Yeah, I forget the year, but it was basically a jousting accident, which stunned him. But he nearly lost an eye with a splinter of wood.

And, but he didn't blame Charles Brandon at all because that was all part of the game with jousting. That was, you know, if you lost a finger or something, then that was just like luck of the draw, really.

It was quite interesting to explore that and it's quite well documented. Yeah, I was going to ask, you have Henry VII writing a book, I say it like Henry VII wrote it, but then you don't have any of the other monarchs, it's just Henry VII. Why did you choose to have Henry? There was a reason for that because I was born in Pembroke, which is where Henry VII was born. So that's how the whole thing started.

And there was a lot of confusion about Henry VII's connection with Pembroke Castle. And my wife and I were part of a community group that got the statue erected in front of the castle. And that means that anybody going to Pembroke now cannot fail to notice that it's the birthplace of Henry VII. And I gathered together the material for a book on Henry VII.

And I had so much material, I realized I should write a trilogy because you can't adequately explain his life without talking about Jasper Tudor in some depth. And you can't talk about Jasper without talking about his father. So it's Edmund Tudor, of course, who's a neighbor of mine because he's buried in St. David's Cathedral, which is half an hour's drive from my house.

Okay. Now, since we're on him, I have a question for you that sometimes is a debated thing. And you mentioned earlier about how Margaret Beaufort wanted her son to be king. I know some historians say that she didn't necessarily want him to be king up until the very end when it became clear that Richard had taken over and that there was no other option. But when do you think for Margaret Beaufort that it flipped and she did want Henry VII, that she did want her son Henry to be Henry VII?

I think it was later in her life and it was when she realized it was possible. Until it was possible, nobody even seems to have discussed it or talked about it. But when it did become possible, it's like if you had a son and your son could possibly become king, then you'd start thinking, you'd have to think about it, wouldn't you? And what the ramifications of that would be. And...

People were generally ready for a change, I believe. So be careful with the Richard III supporters. But basically, they were ready, particularly in Wales, of course, because they'd always been the...

the idea of the son of prophecy, that somebody would come forward from Wales and represent the Welsh. And so when somebody does emerge, then that's quite exciting. And it's people are rallying to his flag and people like...

The Welsh warlords hardly hesitate to back him, even if it means that they might as well be annihilated. It's their one chance they've been waiting all their lives for, you know.

Yeah. Okay. I want to be respectful of your time here. I said we do half an hour. So I just, I want to ask you another question about just how you set up when we spoke one of the first times years and years ago, you made a set, a lovely quote about how you find historical fiction fills in the pieces where like the sources leave off. It was something like that, that you said it was so poetic. It was so beautiful. And I've remembered that. And I just, I guess I wonder like,

How do you, if we can just revisit for a second, people who might say, oh, I don't know about reading historical fiction because it's not true or, you know, it's all a bit like, tell me that make your case for historical fiction in general and your books specifically. Well, I could pick any of them, but I'll use Francis. Soon as I've got Francis here, say hello to everybody, Francis, that I

I didn't know anything about Frances. I certainly wasn't taught anything about her at school. I do remember being taught about the Queen's spymaster, but he was a two-dimensional cardboard cut-out figure. He was never mentioned of him having a wife and a daughter and a dog and all the normal things that you might expect. And of course they did, they had real lives and they lived through things like

various waves of bubonic plague which wiped out half of the population. And they thought that the Spanish Armada might be a catastrophe for England and that they would basically take over and we'd all be speaking Spanish. Wouldn't that be dreadful? You speak Spanish. Yeah, but I've moved back. I've lost a lot of it. Oh, there we are. No, so...

Where historical fiction comes in is to begin to put some flesh on the bones of these people and to explore not just...

them in the context of a massive event like the Spanish Armada, for example. But the rest of their lives, what did they eat? How did they think? What mattered to them? What did they worry about? How did they get their money? How did they lose their money? I find all of that fascinating. And as I've progressed through the story of the Tudors, there's been more and more and more information. So with the Elizabethans, for example, the

If you Google Elizabethan court day by day, then you'll get Volgapedia. And you can literally, you can look at today's date and see where was Elizabeth today?

on a particular year. What was she doing? Who was she talking to? Et cetera, et cetera. Was she looking forward to Christmas? What presents did she get for Christmas and New Year's? Who gave them to her? Why did, for example, Robert Devereux gave her a gold flower with a naked man inside it?

And for Christmas. And you can think, well, hang on a minute. What is he trying to tell me about? But that's documented. All of those tiny details are documented. So that's where historical fiction makes all the difference because it makes these people memorable. And so many people have said to me, I'd never heard of Penelope Rich, but now I feel I know her.

It's official. Podcast advertising is transcending audio. Marketers can now tap into audiences across all of a creator's channels, from social media to video, live events and beyond. And ACAST's new report proves it works, with 84% of podcast listeners having taken action after seeing brands promoted in a podcast-first omnichannel campaign. Get these insights and more by downloading the full report at podcastpulse2024.acast.com.

Yeah. And that's quite something, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah. Now it's really magical. I love how the way you speak about your connection with them, too. Robin, if you have any questions, just type it in the chat, too, if you want to ask Tony anything.

Yeah. And I love the way you speak about your connection because I kind of read some of that like woo woo stuff. And like I saw Microsoft just said they have a computer that they think proves that there's a multiverse now all of a sudden. And like like like it was just in the news like three days ago. And I'm just kind of like, yeah, maybe we are all together in the same room. And maybe it's like time is just all. What did Einstein have a theory that it was like all happening at the same time and stuff? So maybe you were in the room with her and maybe you were there with it with Walter Raleigh and you actually bonded with it. Who knows? Right. Yeah.

I tell you, one of the things that really intrigues me, which I can't explain, is that many times I've gone to sleep and I've woken up with whole passages of dialogue in my head between two characters that I'm writing about. So it might be, I don't know, Charles Brown. And it's all there in my head and I have to have a laptop in bed and quickly write it all down. And it's

survives everything. My wife reads it, then my editor goes through it with a tooth comb and it survives. And it is like almost a stream of consciousness, you know? And that's how you get the more believable dialogue. So long ago, I decided that I couldn't have like

he said, she said, and with adjectives on the end of every sentence, which is perfectly valid in a lot of, and readers don't even notice it, of course. And then the other thing I did, I'm a great fan of Hilary Mantel and greatly mourn her passing, but I'd written about three chapters of Owen and I was reading the first edition of Wolf Hall and I couldn't

I couldn't understand the sense of immediacy that she'd managed to achieve. And it was because it's written in first-person present tense. And I'd been writing in third-person past tense. So, like, he walked into the room and it's like, now it's, as I enter the room, the tobacco smoke makes me wretch. You know, that's the kind of...

that you get, and it's become something that I really quite enjoy doing now. But I've yet to have anybody say, oh, I really don't like that present tense stuff that you do. They don't even notice it, unless you take the time to explain what the game is. But if you think about it, that's how Hilary Mantel gets that

sense of immediacy and built around really quite careful research of the times and the events and the people.

Yeah, yeah. It's interesting you say that because I've been watching, I'm sure, have you been watching The Mirror in the Light? Yes, of course, yeah. And I've been thinking about like how there is that also that sense of immediacy with the way the filming is and the pacing. And I think like, but some of the scenes are so slow too. And it's like just him walking into a room and it's just like they draw it out for a minute of like this walking into a room. But yet it feels so like, and I think it's that same thing because you're seeing it from their perspective. That's right.

Yeah, yeah. I love it when, I mean, it's taken me a long time to get used to this version of Cromwell because I had a picture in my mind of what Cromwell was like. But once again, this is what historical fiction can do. It can make you rethink, still using the same facts, but rethink your preconceived ideas of somebody.

And, you know, he had a hard childhood and he was thrown into the spotlight. And how did he cope with all of that? And imagine having Henry VIII as a boss.

I've had some type offers, but not like that. When he's pleased, he's so pleased, he gives you a knighthood and things. And when he's not pleased, then your life's on the line, literally. But I really like it when somebody makes a long speech to him and he just turns his back and walks off and doesn't say anything.

Doesn't even argue with them. He just walks off. And you think that's quite masterful, really. I've tried to do a little bit of that, but not too much in that sometimes I cut the dialogue down to really what we would do in real life is that we don't give huge long speech. Well, I seem to be doing it.

But, you know, there's briefer exchanges and some readers might have to read it a second time to understand what actually is going on. But other readers enjoy the subtext then and can read between the lines. And it's quite interesting that when I look at any analysis of my readership, so on

various things like on Facebook, you can get an analysis of your audience. My audience is 70% middle-aged ladies in America. And you think I did start off thinking of them as a target audience, but that's my target audience. And it is because I'm generalizing awfully now, but lots of them have got the time

to actually read a book properly. They're really quite interested in the interpersonal relationships and they also understand the subtext more than somebody that's just a casual reader that picks it up to read on the train or something.

So I find that quite interesting as well. And on Goodreads, I can see that that applies to historical fiction generally. If you look at the books on Goodreads, you can start to, without any hard work, you can see that it's generally ladies and it's generally, there's a huge interest in the U.S. Yeah.

Less so in the rest of Europe, but also in the UK, there's a lot of interest as well. So anyway, now we're digressing.

I really appreciate your time. I'm going to put in a link for everybody to get your books, which they definitely should get your books. Robin, I don't see any questions from you here. So let me just check. Nope. So hopefully people enjoyed listening to Tony, which it's always good to catch up with you and see what you're doing. You're just so passionate about your subjects. And I just love how you get in people's heads and just bring it so to life. It's just

It's just marvelous speaking to you. Thank you for inviting me back again. And people that want, if anybody does want a bit more depth, I've got a podcast series, Stories of the Tudors, which I talk a bit more about my research generally, book by book. And when I finish the Elizabethan series, I'm going to catch up with that.

on the stories of the Tudors. So at the moment, Stories of the Tudors goes up to the end of the Brandon Trilogy. And really, that's going to be a way of people reaching deeper into the factual history if they want to. Awesome. I will put all the links in because you have a very popular blog as well, and you're popular on Twitter, X, whatever it's called these days. So I'll... It's well known.

Oh, you're on Blue Sky as well. Okay, perfect. Yeah. And this month I'm enjoying my blog because what I did was a history writer's advent calendar. So I invited 24 history writers to contribute a blog post, one for every day in December. And it's going really well, but it means that my visitor numbers are quadrupling.

And I'm able to support all of these 24 authors in the run-up to Christmas, which is nice.

Awesome. So cool. So cool. Well, thank you, Tony, for taking the time. And hopefully we get you some, you sell a whole bunch of books out of this interview. Hopefully this interview goes viral. Eight million books. That would be awesome. So buy Tony's books and I'll put in the links to everything. You have a nice Christmas. Happy Christmas to you too. And we'll catch up in another year or something. You can talk about your new book. Yeah.

All right. Thank you, Tony. Thank you so much to Tony. I hope you enjoyed that interview. To learn more about him, you can go to TonyRiches.com, where you can get links to buy all of his books. They're all so good. Like, I don't just have a favorite because they're all really good, and they just really bring the stories to life in ways that you don't get through nonfiction books as much. So big fan of Tony Riches. So TonyRiches.com.

Thank you so much for watching. Make sure you like and subscribe wherever you're watching or listening to this. It really helps to feed those algorithms and get our content to more people. Thank you for your listenership. Thank you for being here. I hope you're having a fantastic day and I will speak with you again very, very soon. Bye-bye.

Get these insights and more by downloading the full report at podcastpulse2024.acast.com