This is the story of Queen Caroline’s favourite ghostwriter, the infamous Captain Thomas Ashe, who was also an adventurer and sometime blackmailer. His unpublished novel, The Claustral Palace: or Memoirs of The Family, carried out Caroline’s threat to ‘blow the roof off the Nunnery’, revealing the secret lives and loves of the daughters of King George III in their unmarried confinement at Frogmore, the UK marital home of Harry and Meghan (for a short time). A blackmailing synopsis was circ...

The Gunpowder Plot is perhaps the most famous and well-documented event in British Early Modern history. This means the story can be told through original dialogue recorded at the time to a greater extent than any other of the period. James Travers’ new account exploits this potential for dramatic first-hand history by drawing on those original sources, at The National Archives and elsewhere. The book includes material from the official investigation and new evidence relating to the tortur...