Imagine a girl,

13 years old, arriving in the court of the Netherlands.

And she was lucky, of course she was lucky. She was coming to this

amazing place of culture and luxury where the pictures on the wall had names like the Arnold

Feeney portrait, even. But at the same time, maybe no journey in her life, even the last one, would be more

scary than this. Because she was just 13 years old. She'd been taken away from her home

in the wheeled of Kent and handed to a stranger to make the rare journey across the sea.

And of course, she'd been taken from Heber Castle because the girl's name was Anne

Berlin.

And the lessons that she would learn in her European education would change the course of British

history. She'd come to the court of Margaret of Austria,

who was ruling the Netherlands as regent on behalf of her young, her underage nephew,

the future Charles V.

And the point for me about this book was that the 16th century saw an absolute explosion of female rule.

Large tracts of Europe at one time or another were in the hands of either a female regent ruling on behalf of someone else or actually a queen regent, ruling on behalf of someone else, or actually a queen regnant.

I mean, it's odd, it's interesting. The title of my book, Game of Queens,

well, of course, any resemblance to a certain well-known television series is not remotely

coincidental. Sorry.

But it also refers to the fact that it was in the realm and during the reign of the most

famous of the first of these women, in Isabella of Castile, that the Queen in the Game

of Chess took on the powers we know today.

Before this, the Queen had been a piece pretty much like today's pawn, able only to move

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