Special Guest Post by Clemmie Bennett, Researching The Apple and the Tree

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London, 2020. Grief-stricken Ella inherits a ring from her late grandmother, only for it to accidentally send her to the court of a young King Henry VIII. In a world where voicing the wrong opinion about church or state comes with a price, her priority is to survive until the opportunity to travel back to her own time emerges.

A very honest, straight-forward fact is that I am not a qualified historian. This does not mean that I am happy to twist history and historical characters into making them what I need them to be. I wanted to be as accurate as possible. Of course, since it is a time-travelling story, as soon as my main character changes details of the past we dive into an alternate history. But the setting remains the same: England, early sixteenth century.

I consider myself very lucky to have been able to access the informations I needed so easily: I have an Internet connection, a library at the end of the road, and several bookshops near my house. I started carrying with me a pink and gold notebook, even to work – I am a nanny. 

When the children in my care would take their nap, I would read websites and articles about the sweating sickness. I ended up googling quite a few odd bits, like how sixteenth-century people coped with constipation. Internet has proved to be as useful as unreliable, so I would always try to find at least two sources telling me the same thing about a given topic.

 
I had divided my notebook in different categories: male and female fashion, food and drink, hygiene, medicine and diseases, religion and beliefs, royal palaces, court life, royal households organisation... I did really try to cover everything. To see more clearly, I also wrote down a timeline of Henry VIII’s reign, year per year – only the years relevant to the story, 1510 to 1522. 

From Queen Katherine’s pregnancies to King Henry’s military campaigns, from outbreaks of the plague to any relevant death that I could use in the story (Sir Thomas Knyvett on the battlefield, but also the beheadings of the Earl of Suffolk and the Duke of Buckingham), treaty signatures, pope elections, or King Henry’s personal health scare with smallpox. On the side, I also drew a timeline of Thomas Wolsey’s rise to power, as he gradually becomes an important character in the story, and a timeline of Martin Luther’s works.

 
Only a handful of the characters in the story are fictionnal. The others are historical figures, with documented appearance and personnality. I also had to respect this aspect of history, especially for King Henry VIII, Katherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn. 

It was important to me to be faithful and fair to who they were at a given moment of their lives: King Henry from 1510 and King Henry from 1546 are two very different people, as is Anne Boleyn from 1521 and Anne Boleyn from 1535.

 
It took me several months to be confident that I had enough material. In fact, I had to force myself to stop researching and start writing. The research phase was comfortable. Jumping into the actual writing of the story was, in comparison, slightly terrifying.

Clemmie Bennett

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About the Author

Clemmie Bennett has been working on her debut novel for over three years, but writing a book has been on her bucket list for as long as she can remember. When she is not writing or reading, she can be found wandering about ancient royal palaces or abbey ruins, most likely despairing that time travel is not a reality - like it is for her main character. Originally from France, Clemmie is now based in London, where she works as a professional nanny. You can follow Clemmie on Twitter @ClemmieBennett_