Great News

Firstly, a few days ago this blog recorded its millionth visitor!  Yes, the blog about that most disastrous of kings, Edward II, has had a million visitors.  A million.  As in, the entire population of Birmingham, and twice the number of residents of Manchester.  I'm thrilled and delighted.  Thank you, all of you, for your support and for reading!

Secondly, my book Edward II: The Unconventional King has now had eighteen reviews on Amazon UK, of which thirteen are five stars and four are four stars.  On Amazon US and Amazon India, it currently has an average five-star rating, and on Goodreads, an average of 4.67 out of five stars.

Thirdly, my next project is well underway, and I'm hard at work on it.  It's a biography of Edward II's queen and is provisionally titled Isabella of France: The Rebel Queen, and should be published in about April or May next year.  It focuses on the years 1308 to 1330, the most dramatic of Isabella's life; as in my book about her husband, I'm not really interested in exploring her childhood, or the obscure last twenty-eight years of her life, but want to write all about the real meat of the story, her marriage to Edward, how she moved into a position of opposition to him, and what happened afterwards.  There are lots of inventions told about Isabella - Edward giving her jewels to Piers Gaveston in 1308 (invented by Agnes Strickland in the nineteenth century), abandoning her while pregnant at Tynemouth in 1312 (a chronicler writing many years later getting confused with Isabella being at Tynemouth in 1322), punitively removing her children from her in 1324 (invented in a doctoral thesis in the late 1970s), and so on - and I want to tell her real story.  More info as and when!