Ella March Chase
When Ella March Chase was in third grade, she informed her teacher she didn't need to learn multiplication tables because she was going to be a famous writer when she grew up. At twenty-five, she combined her passion for researching history and spinning stories. Her daughter Kate claims even the family dogs were discovered while researching King Charles II-- Cavalier King Charles Spaniels.
When traveling to England she fell under the spell of the Tower of London—the infamous Traitor’s Gate, the chapel where beheaded queens lay buried, the story of the two princes allegedly murdered by Richard III. Ella began unearthing the obscure historical details that make larger than life figures painfully human. While reading biographies of Elizabeth Tudor, she kept stumbling across references to rumors that the 'Virgin Queen' secretly bore a child. Fascinated by the possibility, she delved deeper, discovering that a midwife actually claimed to have delivered a baby to 'a very fair lady' she vowed was Elizabeth.
Ella began to imagine-- what if the midwife, now nurse to a fiercely intellectual red-haired girl-- claimed the child was Elizabeth's daughter? The queen was constantly beleaguered by those who labeled her 'Anne Boleyn's bastard' with no right to the throne. The existence of 'the Virgin Queen's daughter'-- even in rumor-- could mean disaster. If the child were real it would be a weapon that could topple her from her throne. Elizabeth Tudor claimed in her famous speech at the crisis of the Spanish Armada "I have the heart and stomach of a king." Would she have the ruthlessness of her own father, Henry VIII, to save her crown from such a threat?
“Ramblings of a madwoman might be deadly. The same words, spoken in sanity: treason. This truth I have discovered to my woe. Yet, imprisoned within my cell, I find it hard to discern the difference. What is truth? What is lie? God alone knows, for by my soul, I do not. Still, death silences all. And death waits for me beyond this vaulted chamber, its walls etched with the words of prisoners who came before me. Their names haunt me; their pleas for mercy mock me, letters chipped into stone during endless hours.”
“Edward was dead. The magnitude of the news reverberated through me, thickening the air. His suffering was over. Yet what had he left behind? An England torn between Catholic and Protestant.”