Tag: historic castles

Who doesn’t love the idea of historic castles? Though I fantasize about living in one, I’m not sure I could handle the intimidation of the scale.

But that doesn’t keep me from immersing myself in the idea of them for literary design adventures. For instance, I’ve featured the built environments that Henry VIII achieved a number of times here on the blog because he was instrumental in the preservation of a number of historic castles. One of these is Hampton Court Palace, which served as a hotbed of activity for his court once he had wrested the property from Cardinal Wolsey.

Though the architecture is on a truly grand scale, the furniture—as was the custom of the day—is lacking so I took myself on a bit of a literary design adventure and furnished it with antiques I found on the Lorford’s Antiques site. I use Nicola Shulman’s book Graven with Diamonds as my muse for the settings required to allow the King to romance his chosen one, Anne Boleyn, while rumors were flying that she was also romancing Sir Thomas Wyatt.

Far smarter and better-informed people than I have peered back into history to ascertain if these two were in fact lovers without gaining conclusive answers, Shulman among these, so I leave that debate in their hands. What I concentrate on is using the chosen courtiers as characters in a little dramatization being played out with and upon a few pieces of fabulous furniture. I have a number of literary design adventures under this tag so I if you enjoy stories about or set within historic castles, I hope you’ll stop by.