 Thank you so much for joining us today. Hello to everyone watching at home and hi to everyone in the audience. So first I want to introduce Dr Sophie Nicholls. She is an early modern historian specialising in the history of ideas in the French Wars of religion. She read ancient and modern history at Oxford and holds an M-fill and PhD in political and intellectual history from Cambridge, where she became a Junior Research Fellow and is now a lecturer in early modern history. Yn ystafell yw Kate Moss, OBE. Kate is the author of nine novels and short story collections, including the number one best-selling The Burning Chambers series, The Burning Chambers and the City of Tears, as well as the multi-million selling, and I hope I pronounce this right, Langdok Trilogy. Langdok. Langdok Trilogy, Labyrinth Sepulchur and Citadel, and the number one best-selling gothic fiction, including The Winter Ghosts, The Taxidermist's Daughter, which she is currently adapting for the stage for this year. Her books have been translated into 38 different languages and published in more than 40 countries. She's also written four works of non-fiction, including an extra pair of hands, four books of non-fiction, four plays, contributed essays and introductions to classic novels and collections as well. Her novel for Quick Reads, The Black Mountain, will be published this month, I think, April? Thursday. Thursday, this Thursday, and she's also one of 12 writers contributing a story to a new Miss Marple collection of short stories, which will be published in September this year. A little bit more. This is the longest pie I've ever... There's a lot of... I'm very old, you see. I've been around a long time. There's a lot to cover. So Kate is a champion of women's creativity. She is the founder-director of the Women's Prize for Fiction, which is the largest annual celebration of women's writing in the world. And she sits on the Executive Committee of Women of the World Festival. She's the founder of the global campaign, hashtag Women in History, which launched in January 2021 to honour, celebrate and promote women's achievements throughout history from every corner of the world. So we're really, really excited that Sophie and Kate are joining us today, and I will hand over to you. Thank you so much. Thanks very much. Good afternoon. I'm delighted to be here to talk to Kate about her fabulous new book, and especially those parts of it that are set in the French Wars of Religion. The wars between Catholics and Protestants, which tore the country apart for more than half a century as it felt the full effects of the Reformation and Counter Reformation. Part 1 opens in the Longer Dock in the 1570s, which was a crisis point in the ongoing wars as attempts at peaceful coexistence and political reform had failed. It was also a time when the monarchy was especially weak and vulnerable to manipulation by the great French noble houses, and especially that of the House of Gies that we hear a bit about in the book. When Henry II died unexpectedly in a jousting accident in 1559, he left the throne in the hands of his young, sickly sons. His widow, Catherine de Medici, who also features in the book, increasingly took charge in the years when France was formerly ruled by children, but effectively ruled by the Queen Mother. In 1572, when the story begins, Charles IX was on the throne, and the French Protestants were once more under threat as recent edicts of toleration had been revoked, and the French noble houses were warring for political influence and dominance as much as for religious reasons. Catherine de Medici and Jean d'Albray, Queen of Nevar, and an enormously influential figurehead for French Protestants had, after months of negotiations, agreed on a union between their children, Henry and Marguerite, which was set to bring peace to the kingdom. But we know, however, that it was not successful in doing so. So, I thought I'd start by asking you, Kate, what drew you to this era of history in the first place? Well, firstly, that is the best introduction to this very complicated period of history. So, if you could please come on tour with me for the rest of time, that would be very helpful. Well, the whole series, which started with the Burning Chambers, which begins in 1562 on the eve of the wars of religion breaking out as a formal period of war, the whole series that came to me oddly on the other side of the world when I was in a place called France in South Africa, and I was on a book tour. I can't now oddly remember which book it was for, but I didn't know anything about the French history of the Cape at all, and I'd arrived there, and we had been driving through the wine lands of South Africa from Cape Town, going to France, in the Western Cape, and as we went along the road, I suddenly saw this sign at the side of the road that said Longa Dock, and I thought that's really strange, you know, that's the region of France that I write about. And then we got a bit further down into the valleys, and I saw that all of the wineries had French names, not English or Afrikaans or Cosa, but French. And then finally we got into Franschuk itself, and I saw the main street, and it was called Huguenot Street, at which moment I smelt a rat, and went to the Huguenot Museum, the wonderful Huguenot Memorial Museum at the end of the road, and discovered that Franschuk means the French corner in Afrikaans, and that a group of Huguenot refugees had come across after the revocation of the Edict of Nont, the very famous revocation in 1688, and had in part been responsible for the South African wine industry. And so it was just one of those moments I thought there might be a story for me here, and the trigger moment was going and standing in the graveyard of the memorial museum and looking up at the beautiful Franschuk mountains that ring the town, and thinking, you know, this looks like South West France. And what would it have felt like if you were a woman who had grown up here and your mother and your grandmother and her great-grandmother going all the way back 300 years to the land you were forced to flee as a refugee? You were a Huguenot and you had to leave for your own life. But then you found yourself on the other side of the world and it looked like the home that had been taken from you. And at that moment I thought, I know how to tell this story of the Huguenot diaspora. And then of course I thought, well, where will it begin? And of course it was always going to begin in my beloved cockasong with a Catholic girl on the day that the massacre happens at Vassie, which is the trigger for the First War of Religion. And she is just going to work in her father's bookshop as normal, not knowing that the whole of their life and actually the whole of France is about to be changed forever. Absolutely. Wow. Well, I have to say it makes you very trendy as well, Kate, from the point of view of historians because your story is so transnational that you move from France to the Netherlands to South Africa. It's what historians are all trying to do at the moment is try and put European British history into a more international and global perspective. So well done from that point of view. I was also very struck, I mean, as a historian of this era that you chose the St Bartholomew's Day massacre for this book as your sort of your point, the backdrop against which the lives of your central characters experienced dramatic change. And historians, again, I think we agree with you that St Bartholomew's Day is a watershed moment in history. So this is when after the marriage of Henry and Marguerite that I alluded to you earlier, there's an attempt on the life of the Huguenot leader of the armies, Gaspar de Coligny, which fails, but then kicks off, in fact, an entire crisis where the Queen Catherine, the Queen Mother Catherine de Medici meets in a royal council at night. And we don't know exactly what was decided, but there is an attack on the Huguenot leadership and there's some decision that's made to get rid of the leaders and to get rid of Coligny for all because he's been a real thorn in the side of the Catholic monarchy, so he is assassinated. But what is really unexpected and difficult for historians to explain is just quite why then the whole city erupts into an explosion of mad violence and there's a real grizzly bloodbath of Protestants. Thousands of Protestants die in Paris over the next couple of days and nights and they're killed not by soldiers but by their own neighbours. And trying to explain that as historians is a very difficult thing to do because we don't have that much evidence to work with. So I wondered, Kate, why St Bartholomew in particular, why the grizzliest period of French history before the revolution? Well, I think one of the things that I can do, which you real historians can't do, is that historical fiction is about slipping between the gap of what we know and what we can imagine. And that is why I love writing historical fiction. And the other part of it is that if you want to know about the St Bartholomew's Day massacre, go and read a book of proper history by a historian who was a specialist in that period. My job is to create characters that readers adore and it's their personal tragedy and story that is happening against the backdrop of this massacre. Because as we know, within real history as it is lived, and Lord knows, we are now, we know we're living through history now. When I was first a writer, publicising labr, my first historical novel 15 years ago, I would say, well, we don't really, we never feel we're living through history. It's only hindsight that helps us. But now we know we are living through history. But all the things that happen to us as individuals on a day-to-day personal level are still there. And that is where historical fiction is so popular. Because it's that. It's like, what does a real person feel? We know the facts of St Bartholomew's Day up to a point. But what do my family feel? And so I wasn't going to write about it because it has been hugely written about. And there have been many attempts to put it on the page and the stage. Though the famous, may I be an opera, Marlowe, the massacre of the Huguenots, Prosper Merrimay, Jean Plady, the great, great Jean Plady. The history is a little bit ropey. But it's nonetheless a fantastic read. Ken Follett. There are many, many physical representations in the arts of the St Bartholomew's Day massacre. So I had to say, OK, what can I bring to this? And actually you put your finger on it, is that we are witnessing some terrible things at the moment. When I first started dreaming of this series, the idea that there would be a refugee crisis, that the idea that we would have war again, the fact that we would have huge upheavals in political systems in the way that we're doing, it wasn't not in my mind. But of course this is the point. St Bartholomew's Day massacre, we will never know whether the intention was simply, as you said, to take out colony and what they called the war Huguenots, the leading Huguenots, or whether there was an active attempt to create a riot, which is what happened. But what we do know is that it went completely out of hand, that chains were being dragged across the streets, that many people in that period couldn't swim, that many people were being hacked down in the streets, they were drowning in mass numbers in the Sen, and that interested me as a historical writer. How could it be that neighbour could turn on neighbour so easily, that the mob, if you like, could be manipulated so easily? And of course it's years of being told that the Huguenots are the enemy. You wind people up, you tell them that that person doesn't count, they don't think the same as you, they don't worship the same as you, they don't look the same as you, and then you like the touch paper. And so it was a very sobering thing to write, but obviously my job was to make it super exciting. And at the heart of it is my family, the Jube family, one of their children goes missing. So they don't feel that their witness is to history, and all they care about is where is their child. And I wasn't expecting that to be the emotional critical moment, that it was going to be a lost child story. But of course again, that's always at the heart of refugee stories, how parents often are separated from children, and they might never know what happened to their child. It's the not knowing that is so, so painful, I think, in this story. You describe Paris at the time so brilliantly, and you really capture that very feebrile atmosphere of the city that is on the brink of exploding, and has been for months, if not years really. So it does take the kind of smallest thing to set off riot and violence in this era, but obviously the assassination of colonies is quite important. But I also like the fact that you talk about the preachers on street corners whipping up that kind of frenzy and these feelings of animosity amongst Catholics towards all these Huguenots who've suddenly flooded into the city. And there's a social gap as well, I think you capture that really nicely between the kind of well-dressed, usually quite wealthy Huguenots, and poorer Catholics in the city as well. Well, thank you. And of course that's one of the things that's so interesting about the tensions. As you said, wars of religion, and these wars in particular, they were about doctrine and faith, but truly all wars of religion are about power. They are about who has got power, how they're going to keep it, how they will demonise the other side in order to make sure that they are weak. And one of the things that's extraordinary, of course we wouldn't use the phrase middle class, that's not a phrase that would be in any way mean anything in this period of history. But you do have in France this extraordinary thing that the nobility and the working class people, the peasantry, as they would have called themselves at the time, and the urban poor were Catholic. And the Huguenots were essentially this upper middle class, not exclusively, but it was a very middle class, very modern religion in a way, because it was about skill and it was about trade and it was about having power over your own environment. And so that is what is also extraordinary. Paris was an ultra-Catholic city and remains there right to the end of the wars of religion. And the famous words Henry of Navarre will convert to Catholicism after the Saint Bartholomew Day Massacre. He will then change his mind as soon as he's escaped, but he will finally become a Catholic with the famous words Paris is well worth a mass. Because until Paris can be won over, then he is technically King of France, but he's not been accepted. He's crowned in Chartres, not in the usual way. So all of these things, I'm delighted that you felt that because trying to capture that class antagonism that was also live in Paris as well as the faith antagonism felt very important to me because I think that is part of the explanation of why the mob happened, why people just turned on... Normal people picked up the nearest thing to hand and battered women and children and men to death. And there's always got to be an answer about how that is made up at that moment. Even when it's within families as well. Your family at the heart of your book are very tolerant and they're a kind of relief actually to meet your characters because they seem quite sensible compared to a lot of the craziness that's going on. But I do believe Sophie, just sorry to interrupt before you ask Vanessa's question, that's something that I think a lot about as a human, but also as a novelist, is that I still believe, despite evidence to the contrary, that is all around us on our television screens and our phones and all of this, I still believe that the majority of people are decent and they want to live in harmony with their neighbours and they don't want to hate people who don't look like them or think differently from them. But the extremists on every side, in every period of history, are very good at manipulating. So if you like they eat away at the edges. So the people who are slightly unhappy about the Huguenots being in Paris can easily be made to believe that that attack over there last night, you heard a Catholic girl was attacked by a group of people who was the Huguenots that did that. Propaganda has always existed. So for me it's that interest about how people hold on to their humanity when everything around them is encouraging them to let it go. And we are seeing this obviously right now and we saw it during the Second World War and we saw it in Bosnia in the 18th. We know these things happen. So Bartholomews Day massacre is an extraordinary political microcosm of how an ordinary person can be turned into a monster for a few hours even. I think a lot of the Catholics in Paris really think they are cleansing the city. There's this very strong theme in the sermons that are being delivered at the time that this is a kind of crusade against heresy and it's a kind of holy war and the Old Testament is full of calls to war. So there's a lot of rationale actually behind what looks to us like total madness as well. But I wondered if I could bring you back actually to you mentioned we were talking a little bit about the literature and the fact that writers and poets and artists are so interested in this era and I think in your historical note you mentioned Alexandre Dumas and his play. I wondered if that had been a particular inspiration for you. Funnily enough, no. Only because I, as you know at the heart of all of my fiction except for Winter Ghosts maybe but at the heart of all of my fiction is telling stories under heard or unheard stories of women. And so almost all of the very famous works of art around the St Barbara and St Bascar have been written by men and from a male gaze into that whereas my interest in historical fiction is yes but the women were there too. What about us? So although obviously I read all of these things and I've seen the operas and read poetry and plays and all of that mostly for me that's about my interest in seeing how this particular event was perceived either at the time or subsequently. And of course what we have with the St Barbara Gormins Day Massacre is that people have no idea really about a lot of these things and our interpretations of it in art in particular, in painting in particular are quite stylised and they are quite a long time afterwards. The closest to the actual event actually is Marlowe who is a relative contemporary. He wasn't there. I don't actually have any art from the day and the very, very famous painting that is always, you know, which is completely out of perspective because you can see Conningey being thrown out of the window and you can see Catherine de Medici down in the, you know, she wouldn't have been wandering around at that moment. No, she's staring at a pile of bodies, isn't she, in the background? She's staring at a pile of bodies which hasn't started when Conningey's thrown out of the window. But that is, you know, a lot of things that do interest me as a reader myself as well as as a writer that I'm very interested in how seminal moments of history are interpreted and often misinterpreted by later artists and then what that means. So what I was trying to do was go back to, okay, let's use some common sense. So if I am looking at this through the eyes of my lead characters, my lead characters, Joubert, her husband Pierre, who is half Dutch, half French, they are wealthy Huguenots, they are in the city, they have their entourage with them and they have their children with them. So what would they be saying? So trying to bring it right down to the streets they're in because they won't be seeing this big epic looking down as you would from a film or a piece of theatre. What Pete sees is hang on a second, this is very strange, these soldiers have arrived and these are people who belong to the Duke of Gies and hang on a second, they are armed, they seem to be breaking in to the house where Coliny is trying to recover from having been shot at by an assassin and they're being let in. So that's if you like my inspiration is trying to take it right down to what one person is saying not the epic scope it's only when they escape and they realise they're going to have to leave one of their children behind to save everybody else, the Sophie's Choice moment and it's only when they go into the street they see that the terrible stuff they're seeing outside their window is happening in the next street too and the street after that. So that's my inspiration is trying to put myself in the eyes of women who were there. Wonderful. You mentioned Marlowe and you have Marlowe and Milton and T.S. Eliot in your epigraph and I wondered if you might tell us about your choices there. Well it's vexing for me because part of that is my big new nonfiction book, history book which is called Warrior, Queens and Quiet Revolutionaries comes out in October and it is absolutely a book about how history is made and how women are actively left out of the history books. It's a celebration of women rather than a moan but one of the things therefore I always try to do is have women's voices in the epigraphs and all of these things but firstly T.S. Eliot I would never have anything quite so childish I suppose as a favourite poet but he is absolutely one of my favourite poets and I think that he is one of the people that writes so beautifully about faith I think Four Quartets is an amazing meditation on the nature of faith and it just seemed appropriate Marlowe, that was the most contemporaneous piece of writing about the St Bartholomys Day Massacre in terms of a piece of art and I felt it earned its place and Milton I Paradise Lost is still I think one of the great works of art in any language in any period of history and again at the heart of Paradise Lost is the battle between good and evil and what we are seeing at St Bartholomys Day Massacre is precisely that we are seeing a battle between good and evil and how good people can be manipulated to do evil things and again I just felt you know you can't beat Milton you just can't beat those things so I'm afraid on this occasion there are no women question but I've made it up for you Very good choices Well I liked the quotation from Elliot in particular about looking back the back would look behind the assurance of recorded history the sort of instability and the primitive terror that certainly captures the St Bartholomys Day Massacre very very well Well I mean it is interesting actually if you think about Marlowe and Milton and if we sort of move to France and some of your evocations Kate of the cultural achievements that are being being gained in this era particularly the construction of the Louvre I love that you brought in those sort of architectural points as well because France has a digital crisis but it's also experiencing like every other European country a renaissance in culture and art and actually at this point in time shaking off some of the Italian influence and trying to establish a very distinctly French culture and embrace aspects of the French vernacular and things but the construction of the Louvre which was just a crumbly or cold hunting lodge effectively in the centre of Paris capital until the beginning of the century to start to construct that as a palace and a symbol of power is really quite important so what sorts of research were you doing when you were preparing for this book and why did you select those sorts of architectural bits that you did Well I think that one of the great disservices all of us has and I think we're living through that absolutely at the moment the idea that things are you're either 100% on this team or 100% on that team that everything's black and white there's no nuance it's very straightforward you can always spot the goodies and the baddies and all of that kind of thing and it was really important to me firstly I know from the kindness of people on social media or sending letters or emails I know that one of the things that people enjoy in my books is the texture as it feels at the time particularly landscape and in this case the cityscape of Paris and so painting that world for the reader so that she or he can feel that they can absolutely know that if they were walking down this particular street the kinds of buildings they would be seeing and Paris at this moment is still as you say essentially it's old medieval self lots of narrow streets you know we have to strip away housemen we have to strip away all the boulevards all of the things that we think of as Parisian and very distinctive about Paris and go back I wanted to capture that that it was actually a very confined overcrowded medieval city essentially and therefore how dazzling the new building would be that extraordinary thing the Louvre was like this crumbling old muck really and then there it was suddenly being transformed into something else and it was the artists that were doing this the sculptors lots of white building happening at the moment not like it is now in Paris obviously the 19th century Paris but there was a lot of that building happening and the way that I research is being there I haven't lived in Paris for many years and it's a city that I know well it's not my city I don't have an affection for it like I do for Cacassonne or for Toulouse but I do very much enjoy being in Paris so my first job in research was to go there and think okay so in this period of history my period I'm writing about now starting in 1572 Paris is tiny because in fact the walls are just where between the gardens were being built for Catherine de Medici right to the Bastille at the other end now there's a big huge road the rude rivoli that you can kind of walk the whole thing but you know what if you walk fast you can do that walk from one side to the other on the right bank in 20 minutes so that immediately changes the way that I write that city and then I walk north where the walls were and then I walk south and I go into the island and off so I look at the Saint Chapelle and I look at Notre Dame and I walk across to the left bank and do exactly the same thing and suddenly then I know how to write those scenes because actually the idea that you could chuck the whole city down seems impossible when you look at Paris today but the minute you've captured that claustrophobic tiny tiny amount of space of course you just shovel the gates it's quite easy to trap everybody inside it's like a gigantic ambush so I do one of that I visit every possible place that is still intact from that time much of it is gone because of the massive rebuilding of Paris of the 19th century but there are lots of places that are there I look about in places like the Saint Chapelle looking at the amazing extraordinary light in the buildings and I always go interestingly enough I always go first as a tourist I buy a ticket at the gate and I go in like everybody else because what I've learnt is that when I because people are very kind when I ask a real historian to show me round or touch and do it like that they tell me all the things that they know with their huge knowledge and expertise but what I need to do to start with when I'm trying to write for a general reader is to experience going into Saint Chapelle for example and just going this is incredible because my characters will be doing that they won't have been given a guided tour by the person who runs the Saint Chapelle and then afterwards I go and get that help from historians in asking so for me I always try to research two things it's here so it's reading all the books reading the history going into the archives going to the museums but then it is walking the pavements and as I walk I am stripping away what I can see back and back and back until what I'm seeing is 1572 and then putting my characters there so the physical research is an essential part of research for me I couldn't do it on Google Maps well I think that explains how you evoke the place so well I love how easy it is to get lost in your 16th century Paris it is confusing, it's a busy place as well because it is pretty crowded and smelly you can really evoke the smell of the slaughterhouses and things and also all the things that we live in a very in London and in Paris we live in a very sanitised world in terms of smell but there is no drainage system there is no sewage system the abattoirs are there the leather makers are there all you need to do in France in particular more than England I would say although it does absolutely exist you go to York and you go to the shambles where all the meat was but when you're walking around Paris all you need to do is look up and see the names of the streets and then immediately you start to get what would have been the smell of that part of Paris and it's obviously it's a big no-no in historical fiction people who lived in a period of time don't step outside their door and go oh it's really smelly because they know that kind of I'm very interested you know I'm in previous for my first play at the moment and it's a joy to have a lightscape and a soundscape but when you're a novelist that's my job to put that on the page too as well as if you like the smellscape so because then the reader is in charge of her or his experience you know it's a very active business reading a novel in the way is active in theatre but television film is different because they have already made those choices for you the camera shows you where you have to look but in a novel I need to give the reader enough to create the 360 degree world and then they can manage their own experience if you like of the reader and that's why research matters so much well I was going to ask you as well about fashion because you talk about the fashions of the court it's the figure of the aunt isn't it who's sort of obsessed with what they're all wearing and again in contrast to the sober dress of the Huguenots Yes and of course that's part of the propaganda it's like look at them they're really drab they're all in black they don't have any fun there is all of that but again the point of research is twofold one is obviously to respect the history because these were real people who died so I have as much responsibility as you as a practicing historian has to try to get as much right as I possibly can because we know what happens when history is distorted we are seeing it right today you know the idea that what's going on in Ukraine we know what happens when history is distorted it happens in every period of history it's a cliche to say that history is written by the victors but it's true but it's also written with an agenda and we need to know the reality of it if we possibly can as much as we possibly can because it tells us who we are and how we got here and it can solve the problems often so for me the research isn't just about proving that I've done it my homework it's about a responsibility for history and that's why of course I feel so passionately about if you would be forgiven often for thinking there were no women in the past at all but women were always there but the books were not written to acknowledge women's presence so with things like fashion it's not just so that you know I know what they look like or that it gives more colour to know but it's also very crucial to writing a story so if Minu, my lead character is if she's got to run away from the soldier I need to know what she's got on her feet can she run will all those shoes come off if she's got to climb out of a window to escape the somebody that's coming in and is going to slaughter everybody how big is her skirts how big are the petticoats time a bit further on when we get to the times of bodysing and corseting could women breathe all of these things so for me the research is one I love it and it gives colour to my world and is something that I know that readers really really enjoy but actually it's part of plotting as well and we do get a distorted view as you will know Sophie because of course everybody who was painted we haven't yet got to the Flemish school we haven't yet got to the lowlands where ordinary people were being put routinely into painting at this moment most of the portraiture is of wealthy people and of course they get painted and they're best they don't say oh just pop round take me as you find me they're not in their zoom outfit so therefore people often have in their minds that Elizabeth the first I'll use her around in those massive skirts all of the time and those huge head verses we know she did all the time there's formal dress and there's relaxed dress and we know that Catherine Ducadici was in her later life we know that she was very big we know that she had very odd kind of complexion she wore black from the second hour we know some of those things but my descriptions of Marguerite de Valois's wedding dress are her own descriptions of her dress I recognise them and that's just a joy because she wrote about so then I just think oh my god that's incredible I can use her own words to describe what she would have looked like on the gliding on the gold platform that led from the Louvre to Notre Dame and I do love all of that detail you know I love that detail and that it was incredibly hot on the day she got married as well and she was wearing this thick airline cloak and you could imagine the poor girl sweating away being forced into this marriage to this man who wasn't particularly excited about marrying her I don't think either no and who everybody it's one of those constant things that people always talked about the fact that his breath smelled because he chewed raw garlic all the time and that will do it so not only does he not wear his clothes fancily he's got his hair in a slightly he looks provincial to her eyes and her former lover is in the crowd if indeed that's all true and did she actually consent there's a description of her brother pushing her neck down so it looked like she had said yes I do and then of course they all go into mass and Henry and his just kick their heels and it is everything about it is deliciously complicated and theatrical as well a real challenge to her conscience because the Pope hasn't signed off on this marriage so it's not sanctioned for her and for her family formally so there are all sorts of complications going on but the idea that this is supposed to be about a peace and then kind of everything collapses into tragedy it couldn't be more theatrical really it couldn't be more theatrical and also that there's just before this that as you said these two great women of the 16th century Jean d'Algré and Catherine de Medici I've been trying to say Medici like you do because I'm sure you're right but I've said it wrong for so long now I can't help it but this marriage has been broken between these two great queens and in the April and then in the June Jean d'Algré is in Paris and she dies and there have always been rumours and they were being actively put about then that she was poisoned by the queen mother now that's one of those things where you've got to say is that likely because it was it could easily have meant the marriage didn't happen and Catherine wanted the marriage done as well so everything about it would it even go ahead and this is what's so painful when you're writing this kind of history because I think everybody on the 18th of August when the marriage happened I'm sure everybody let their guard down that they breathed a sigh of relief this wedding has actually happened well then there were days of celebrations and jousting and feasts and festivals and it looked like it was all going to be okay but I suppose we shouldn't forget that there were 4,000 euganas armed outside of the city so there's this sort of there's all this celebration going on but there's this incredibly tense and the other thing is that I always find I know alcohol was a lot weaker but one of the things that quite often it always really amuses children and students particularly is that people of course didn't drink water water was dangerous often in the way that you drink from a stream or something but you wouldn't have taps in your house and coffee is yet to take over the world so actually people drank alcohol all day long it was watered down and it wasn't strong that's not like drinking whisker all the time but that I always have in my mind that by the evening everybody's half cut everybody's drunk and again the minute you start to put all these details into it you can think that's less surprising all of these things and they had been basically everybody on a three day bender and it's a wedding it's a wedding and everybody's really hot there's too many people in the city there will be people who can smell great food being cooked elsewhere but can't afford it and there will also be a lot of unscrupulous people because we know there will be it's quite likely an awful lot of people will be eating bract when it's supposed to be chicken you know that's the other thing just think of all the possibility of those things and it's just like you like layer on layer and in a way it's no surprise that the city erupted well you mentioned the rumours surrounding the death of Jean Del Ré she's sent a poisoned glove isn't she that's supposed to be how she meets her end but she was very ill so it's quite likely she probably just died of natural causes but the fact that the rumour exists in itself is very important for historians and I think for novelists as well and again you evoke that all the kind of the atmosphere of rumour and gossip and hearsay and that sort of everybody kind of encouraging each other to fantasise and maybe put explanations in where they don't exist and that's sort of part of the story isn't it of how it all erupts yeah absolutely and it is I mean of course it's not one has to be careful when you say it's an incredibly exciting period of time because we must never forget that thousands of people died and not just in Paris there were copycat massacres throughout all of France and historians can't agree of how many people died but it could be 20,000 it could be more we just don't know but we do know that it happened and so that's the thing that I'm always very conscious of that it was not fun for the people at the time as a novelist evoking this kind of extraordinary period of you could just imagine somebody on street corners and you mentioned Sophie the preachers that were standing there essentially saying if you go and kill this person you will have God's blessing sort of its armed assassins being sanctified actually this is sanctified violence but as you say at the same time there are 30,000 hugos who are armed outside the walls and people will have known that they will have seen them a lot of warfare was still essentially siege warfare when we haven't yet got to the big pitch battles in history in quite the same sort of way and so it's just I can imagine that every morning there would just be that level of tension and the only time I've experienced it is I got trapped with my wonderful mother-in-law with the Ash Cow in Venice and everybody rushing to the railway stations and trying to find out and trying to get out many people I'm sure I was in London on one of the football days when a huge number of people had come down Scottish fans were in London and English fans and I remember walking down a street that I walked down a million, million, million times and thinking oh I feel frightened because there were suddenly hordes of people shouting and screaming and throwing things so that again is a novelist it's the way that you kind of capture how how you capture atmosphere is putting yourself in the shoes of people who you're writing about what would I feel as a small middle aged woman in this environment because you know the thing is people in the past weren't different from us you know they had different expectations of course had different attitudes of course faith was something that just was you know God was everywhere like air it wasn't a choice in quite the same way that it is maybe in some places in the world certainly now so you have to take all of those things and what people expected and men's and women's roles you can't muck with those things but I still believe that fear is fear and that if your child goes missing your heart breaks and I don't think that because life expectancy was less in those days that a parent doesn't feel the same so that's also part of it for me is putting myself in because I think the human heart doesn't change that much not really No I tend to agree with you I love that everybody escapes on a boat in your novel as well because that really was pretty much the only way to get out of your house because as Kate says all the gates of the city were locked and it was impossible to escape the idea of the city gates being locked we know whether that was a trap to keep the Protestants in Paris or if it was to keep the Huguenot soldiers out of Paris it's just impossible to decide really on what the sort of rationale was there but it was a relief to see your family safely off on their boat It was a relief and do you know when I started writing the story the thing is that I do a huge amount of research and I know the sort of story it's going to be and I know the trajectory of the story what I don't know is actually what's going to happen I know the real history but I don't know what's going to happen to my family so I knew that they were going to be in Paris for the wedding but I didn't know who was going to make it out not till I was writing it and that's very weird the worst experience I've had for this is my novel Citadel which is inspired by the history of the resistance in Cacassonne and the fact that there is a monument in Cacassonne which lists the name of all the men who died on the 19th of August 1944 and at the bottom a sentence that still brings tears to my eyes and two unknown women and I thought history will never know who they are but I can write a story of the sort of women they might have been and I think that in terms of the attesting of stories from history it's incredibly important but when I was writing the final scene of the death of those two women when I realised who the second woman was he made me cry because I didn't want it to be her but it had to be her the story had led to that moment and there are some people who die in this book of course you know my body count in a moss novel is always quite high and often characters I really love go but it's about the story it sounds a dark thing to say but you'd say well it's your novel you can decide what happened but if you're writing your novel properly the story in the plot tells you what it needs so good characters get the chop well I think you remained remarkably faithful to the historical narrative as it stands the historical record as it stands you say at the beginning you're taking lots of artistic licence but I don't think you took huge amounts of licence where do you think you maybe took the biggest leaps in your book well I'm really glad you feel that because I do feel very strongly about respecting the record I think well for me obviously lots of novelists do these things differently and I'm an enormous admirer of Hilary Mantell I really like putting my made-up words in real people's mouths I don't feel comfortable with that so for me though we really did need a scene between Catherine de Medici and her daughter Marguerite I felt that without it we lost that this is actually the reality of a woman's life in the end she's going to be sold off for the good of the country that's what's happening and the fact that she's one of the richest and most beautiful women allegedly in France and many different she has no power we know this but again that's what fiction does is make you feel what it would have been like to be that girl and I think that she was probably very scared of her mother so I've written the scene in that way but that is my imagination to say that I wanted to put her on the page just a bit because I think they are such extraordinary women these women ruling for so long to be such great leaders to have lived the lives that they lived I kind of wanted to honour that and put that on the page you know I loved writing the escape from Paris scene it was a really exciting scene to write I've taken, not liberties there but would they have got out they have to get out but they probably it's quite a stretch that just because she's a very wealthy Dutch woman the soldiers will go ok love off you go but I felt it was near enough to make it possible so that's what I mean by taking liberties I really tried to never take liberties with the historical record when some novelists say to me yeah but it's a novel so it doesn't matter I say but you've moved the date of this key historical happening somebody said I've moved the death of Amberman by six months because it doesn't fit with my story you can't do that it seems to me and I don't do that but what I mean is therefore that there are things that are about writing an exciting adventure novel with jeopardy and momentum and forward pace that occasionally you'll have to just go just gonna give them spend the rules a little bit spend the rules a little bit thank you well thank you so much Kate it's been wonderful talking to you I'm sure we can pick up on some of the themes we've been discussing with questions from the audience and we've got some questions coming in online as well which I will keep an eye on on this on this iPad shall I start Rebecca yeah sorry I'm taking advantage here by asking a question I just wondered if there's anything so feed that historians can take from historical fiction well I think lots of the points that Kate's been making here are excellent about the social side of of history and evoking and bringing to life aspects of the historical record that we don't do but I also think there is probably more common ground than you might imagine between novelists and historians that as I'm suggesting in the record there are so many gaps and there are so many archives that we've lost not least during all the destructions of the revolution in the Second World War so there are moments when historians have to make a couple of leaps of interpretation and fill in the gaps a little bit too so we have to work with what's plausible what's reasonable but we carry on debating and arguing on the various interpretations of Syntbar following you for example and we probably will do forever and ever and ever so I think the interesting thing for me is that there is I think a finer line between literature and history than we often like to recognise anyone else in the room I'll go to the screen but have some thoughts don't be scared we've only got four minutes it's quite good I have a question here from another Kate she says I'm a huge fan of yours and like many readers of a certain generation my introduction to historical fiction was Gene Plady do you have a favourite historical fiction author that you'd recommend or a favourite time period that you return to and read about again and again that's a lovely question I am a really big fan of Gene Plady it is very important that some of those earlier historical novels were not terribly good history there's quite a lot of really very ropey things that appear in those but I would say I love Mary Renault I very much enjoy Robert Graves so I suppose that my introduction tended to be that way round and for a much more ancient classical world which is not my particular taste I came into historical fiction however with Walter Scott and again a lot of that history is super dodgy but I still think that in terms of excitement and the sense of how history is a beautiful story you cannot beat Ivanhoe I mean almost everything about the actual historical stuff in Ivanhoe is a little bit off I do know that and of course there are attitudes that are really very uncomfortable for modern readers in all sorts of areas but I think my period of history that I really like I like me 13th and 14th century and then the fancieta actually I really enjoy that tipping point in the years just before at the end of the 1890s and then before the first world war so that is kind of I like periods of history where a country or even a continent is in crisis rather than we have another question from online from Bandit Queen excellent name I just wanted to ask how do you separate yourself from the emotions which one cannot but help feel the horror of such a terrible massacre in 1572 or is that just not possible that is a really excellent question it's by the time I'm writing it's all about the material and the story when I first start researching something so when I first started burning chambers which is the first of this series of what would be four books spanning the next one is will be out next year and then the fourth one will finish up in France in the Cape when I first started researching and I would discover the numbers of people who died all of that terrible record it is about a massive information the time that it becomes emotional for me is when, as I said, I start to put myself in the shoes of my characters and I start to imagine it through their eyes so if you like, when it's the outside in gathering all the information that I need it isn't terrible because I'm not finding new information I am finding snippets of new information but it's not, as for example many of you will read the wonderful historian Anthony Beaver and I remember having conversation with him when he had very recently been allowed into the archives and the extent of the rape that has happened as the Russians came in to Germany was becoming clear and I remember this was it's not new information who anybody knew but it was kind of new information as it had all been documented and he said that that had been unbearable with me almost all the research I'm doing it's not that I've discovered something that nobody's known before so I go into the archive knowing that thousands of people died that day so I'm slightly enured from it but it becomes emotional when I put myself in my character's shoes that's the moment that sometimes it can be a bit overwhelming but you have to tell the truth you can't decide to pull away because when we pull away then the horror history is too often made glamorous and beautiful and the actual consequence on real human bodies is forgotten and I think again that's part of the responsibility you have to put a little bit of that on the page so that people know that war is terrible it's not a movie It's not so much a question but just to add on to that last piece what I think is so marvellous about your books and this one in particular is although I know a bit about not like you about the history you're writing about and about the particular day what your book this particular book has an amazing aptitude to do is to draw me the reader into it in such a way with the emotion of the story that I not only am I much more knowledgeable in the end about the actual event but through your story I now sort of become an expert about the event and with this marvellous story about it I cannot when I read your books do anything except read your book to the point where I find that I'm giving an excuse of having something either slightly ill for work or needing a duvet day or whatever we call it they are absolutely not puttable downable so all I would like to say is that I just is very kind of you thank you so much Sophie I'm sorry to be completely ludicrous but I am due in the theatre in now two minutes so I am really going to have to jump say that's the alarm bell I'm so sorry is the alarm well it's been lovely talking to you thank you so much for being here with everybody thank you so much