Mary of Carisbrooke (34 page)

Allan Fea.
Memoirs of the Martyr King
. John Lane, The Bodley Head.

Burchell.
The Prisoner of Carisbrooke
. Macmillan.

Burton.
England’s Eden
. Littlebury.

C. Aspinall-Oglander.
Nunwell Symphony
. Constable & Co. Ltd.

C. W. Firebrace.
Honest Harry
. John Murray.

Carola Oman.
Henrietta Maria
. Hodder & Stoughton.

Davenport Adams.
History and Antiquities of the Isle of Wight
. Nelson & Sons.

David Mathew.
The Age of Charles I
. Eyre & Spottiswoode.

Dorothy Hartley.
Food in England
. Macdonald.

Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon.
The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England
. Oxford University Press.

Esme Wingfield Stratfield.
King Charles the Martyr
. Hollis & Carter.

Eva Scott.
The Travels of the King
. Constable.

G. W. Nichol.
Herbert’s Memoirs
. W. Bulmer.

George Hillier.
Charles I in the Isle of Wight
. Richard Bentley.

George Macaulay Trevelyan.
England under the Stuarts
. Methuen.

Hugh Ross Williamson.
Charles and Cromwell
. Duckworth.

Jesse.
Memoirs of the Stuarts
. Nimmo.

Letters of Dorothy Osborne
. Dent & Sons Ltd.

P. G. Stone, F.R.I.B.A.
Architectural Antiquities of the Isle of Wight
. The Author.

Philip Lindsay.
For King and Parliament
. Evans Bros.

Sir John Oglander.
A Royalist’s Notebook
. Hogarth Press.

Margaret Campbell Barnes lived from 1891 to 1962. She was the youngest of ten children born into a happy, loving family in Victorian England. She grew up in the Sussex countryside and was educated at small private schools in London and Paris.

Margaret was already a published writer when she married Peter, a furniture salesman, in 1917. Over the next twenty years, a steady stream of short stories and verse appeared under her name (and several noms de plume) in leading English periodicals of the time, including
Windsor
,
London
,
Quiver
, and others. Later, Margaret’s agents, Curtis Brown Ltd., encouraged her to try her hand at historical novels. Between 1944 and 1962, Margaret wrote ten historical novels. Many of these were bestsellers, book club selections, and translated into foreign editions.

Between World Wars I and II, Margaret and Peter brought up two sons, Michael and John. In August 1944, Michael, a lieutenant in the Royal Armoured Corps, was killed in his tank in the Allied advance from Caen to Falaise in Normandy. Margaret and Peter grieved terribly the rest of their lives. Glimpses of Michael shine through in each of Margaret’s later novels.

In 1945 Margaret bought a small thatched cottage on the Isle of Wight, off England’s south coast. It had at one time been a smuggler’s cottage, but to Margaret it was a special place in which to recover the spirit and carry on writing. And write she did. All together, over two million copies of Margaret Campbell Barnes’s historical novels have been sold worldwide.