I am inexpressibly grateful to many individuals for their encouragement and assistance.
My late mother, the artist Louise Herman Donahue, nurtured me with creativity, encouraged my curiosity, and bequeathed to me unforgettable love and laughter. She gave me the priceless gift of dreaming, a gift that forever remains with me although she does not.
My father, journalist Walter Focke Herman, proud of his medieval royal ancestors, inspired me in my earliest years to love history. Sitting at his knee I first heard the screams of battle, smelled the smoke of burning castles, saw the pageantry of royal processions. To him I am also grateful for his hawkeyed editing of the manuscript.
My sister, Christine Merrill, an artist of rare talents successfully living her dream, prodded me constantly—often to my great annoyance—to live mine. I don’t believe I would have completed this project without her stubborn but loving insistence that I do so.
Many thanks to Susanne Becerril, Karen Griswold, and Helena Hoogterp for their unceasing encouragement and support of this project and its author.
I am particularly grateful to my good friend Leslie Harris, proprietor and designer of Noblesse Oblige Renaissance costumes, for getting me into the spirit, and the corset, of a royal mistress. Wearing one of their gorgeous but restricting gowns has sharpened my understanding of their gorgeous but restricted lives.
I am astonished at the patience of my wonderful husband, Michael Dyment, who listens to my nonstop chatter of kings and queens, of mistresses and royal bastards, and tolerates my elaborate court costumes at countless events without showing a shred of embarrassment.
Clearly this book would not have been possible without the diaries, letters, dispatches, and memoirs of the past, nor indeed without the dozens of biographies and histories written by modern authors reporting and interpreting the original sources. To all writers—past and present—upon whose work I have heavily relied, and who are listed in the bibliography, I am deeply grateful.
And lastly, to make sense out of the chaotic events of the past, the historian must view them through a particular philosophical prism. For this I am immeasurably indebted to A Course in Miracles, a work of keen psychological insight and great spiritual power.