The Rose and the Thorn · the Lives of Mary and Margaret Tudor

From the dust jacket:

The dramatic, extravagant, always fascinating lives of Mary and Margaret Tudor--sisters and queens of the Renaissance, pawns in the power struggle for English supremacy--are here vividly re-created through their hitherto unpublished letters to each other and to their brother Henry VIII and through contemporary accounts--eyewitness reports, folk songs, and court poetry. These, skilfully interwoven with the narrative, reveal the whims, excesses, and hasty schemes that caused Queen Mary to lose France and Queen Margaret to lose Scotland, and impart to the story of the Tudor sisters an immediacy that no conventional historical recounting could ever provide.