#HistFicThursdays - Guest Post - Karen Heenan - The Inspiration Behind Songbird

Today's #HistFicThursdays post comes from another fabulous member of the Historical Writers Forum, Karen Heenan. Welcome to the world of Songbird her fantastic Tudor book. Here's how it all began...

The Inspiration Behind Songbird
(and The Tudor Court Series)

Henry VIII, by Hans Holbein

I discovered the Tudors at a young age. My mom was watching the BBC’s Six Wives of Henry VIII (the 1970 series, which the US got in 1972) and I ended up getting sucked into the program. Mom only wanted to watch through the Anne Boleyn episode, because she always had sympathy for the “other woman” in stories, but I insisted, at the age of seven, that we watch the whole thing.

And that was it. Tudors for life.

Although I’d always written, it never occurred to me to write historical fiction, much less in the era I was most passionate about. This was possibly because there were so many books about Henry and Anne and the rest that I didn’t feel I had anything new to say on the topic. It also didn’t occur to me to look at Henry’s court from another perspective.

The book that started me on the journey to Songbird was Carrolly Erickson’s Great Harry. Erickson went on to write fiction about the Tudor period, but at the time she’d only written non-fiction. It read like fiction, though—fast-paced, interesting, and full of facts that set my brain on fire, like this one:

“When Henry bought children, as he did in December of 1516, paying a stranger forty pounds for a child, it is tempting to think that he purchased them for their musical gifts.” 
[Carrolly Erickson, Great Harry, ch. 14. Quoted source: Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII. ]

Dropped tantalizingly into a discussion of Henry’s love of music and the children of the Chapel Royal, that sentence wouldn’t leave me alone. I finished reading and went on to other things, but it nagged at me. Forty pounds was an unimaginable amount of money for an ordinary person in 1516. You would have to need money very badly, I thought, to sell a child who had survived to an age where they might be of help to you and your family. 

What would it be like, to be sold to the king? Would you feel better about having been sold, knowing that you brought security to the family you might never see again? And who would you be, if you were no longer a member of that family? How would you know where you belonged—who to love—who to trust—when that is your past?

Further research told me that royal choristers were exclusively male. I wanted to write about a girl, so I made her a member of the King’s Music—Henry’s private minstrels, who traveled with him and performed at his beck and call—although I kept the date of December, 1516, and the purchase price, which would be over $50,000 in 2021 dollars. [Nye, Eric W., Pounds Sterling to Dollars: Historical Conversion of Currency, https://www.uwyo.numimage/currency.htm ]

I took my girl, just before her tenth birthday, and dropped her into an unfamiliar world, with no one to rely upon but herself, and the voice that made the king buy her in the first place. Found family is one of my favorite themes, and Bess surrounded herself with people she loved, always suspecting that her real family wasn’t that sorry to see her go. Because of the vagaries of sixteenth century life and evil author intent, she doesn’t get to keep all that found family, which just adds to her inability to trust the world to keep her safe.

Minstrels at Hever Castle, Nikki Piggott

There’s also guilt. Once she’d been at court for a little while, warm and properly fed for the first time in her life, able to sing as much as she wants, Bess realized she was happy. She doesn’t want to go back to cold and hunger and being punished for wasting time with music. That’s not an easy realization for anyone, much less a child.

She grows up in the court system, progressing from the child singer who Henry calls his “songbird” to a valued member of the royal minstrels, being in the background of the tapestry of the early Tudor Court and all its excitements and intrigues. 

But the question always remains: Who can you trust when the people who are supposed to love you are willing to give you up?

That, for me, is the best part of research: when you stumble upon something that hooks you, and won’t let you go until you’ve turned it into a book. And then another. And another.

You can find Karen's books here: Songbird - A Wider World - Lady, in Waiting 
- Tudor Court Omnibus (all 3 books, bonus content)

 Now let's meet the author!

As an only child, Karen Heenan learned young that boredom was the ultimate enemy. Since discovering books, she has rarely been without one in her hand and several more in her head. Her first series, The Tudor Court, stemmed from a lifelong interest in British history, but she's now turned her gaze closer to home and is writing stories set in her hometown of Philadelphia.

Karen lives in Lansdowne, PA, just outside Philadelphia, where she grows much of her own food and makes her own clothes. She is accompanied on her quest for self-sufficiency by a very patient husband and an ever-changing number of cats.

One constant: she is always writing her next book. 

Keep up with Karen via: Website - Facebook - Twitter - Instagram - Books2Read