The Queen’s Tears
A Julia Darke Novel
by Elizabeth St.John
A stolen crown jewel and an enigmatic portrait force two women to confront the devastating choices they made for love—and summon the courage to live with the truth.
1619: Barbara, Lady Villiers, at the bidding of her brother-in-law, the Duke of Buckingham, has stolen the dying Queen Anna’s jewels—and kept the greatest prize for herself. The Queen’s Tears, a brooch of extraordinary value, torments her: too dangerous to sell, too priceless to discard, and possibly her only means of securing her children’s future. When the family fortunes are shattered, Barbara faces an impossible choice: remain loyal to Buckingham—or betray him by confessing the theft to King Charles.
Present Day: Julia Darke opens her Cotswolds bookshop to start life over peacefully. Instead, she stumbles across a Van Dyck portrait of Barbara’s daughter, with tantalising signs of the missing Queen’s Tears hidden in plain sight. The discovery also brings her face-to-face with the last person she wants to see again. Oliver Villiers, the Oxford art conservator she once loved and walked away from, holds the cipher to the painting—and to Julia’s own unresolved history.
Reluctantly drawn together by a shared obsession to uncover Barbara’s secret, Julia and Oliver follow the trail of the Queen’s Tears—and the closer Julia comes to Barbara’s truth, the harder it becomes to hide from her own.
Inspired by the true stories of Queen Anna of Denmark’s stolen jewels and a missing Van Dyck painting, The Queen’s Tears weaves history, fiction, and family research across the centuries. Readers of The Lady of the Tower will find old favourites—and a new heroine following in their footsteps.
Meeting My Ancestors
How they look different, now that I’ve written their stories.
by Elizabeth St.John
My first novel started with discovering a baby born in the Tower of London. I was reading Lucy Hutchinson’s memoir notebooks, archived in Nottingham, many years ago, when I came across her account of her own birth. The daughter of Lucy St.John was born in the early hours of a January morning in 1620, in the Tower itself. I was elated. I had been hunting for a thread in my ancestry research, and here was a woman who not only belonged to my family but had been born in one of the most famous prisons in England. Amazing!
The more I read, the more excited I became, and when I reached her description of her mother, Lucy St.John of Lydiard Park, an orphan who was brought up by a relative with a jealous and ill-natured wife whose cruelty to the child apparently outdid any stepmother in a fairy tale, I was truly hooked.
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| Lydiard House. (c) Friends of Lydiard Park. |
And so began my journey, researching and reconstructing the characters for my first novel, The Lady of the Tower, which tells the story of that same Lucy St.John. As an amateur historian, I committed to using primary sources for the evidence of their lives and then weaving the facts together with fiction. But as so often happens, it was Lucy’s sister who wouldn’t leave me alone.
Barbara St.John Villiers had often been called the woman everyone loved to hate in that novel, and I have to admit, I did rather blacken her name. After all, I needed a good antagonist, and from the research I did at the time, she fit the bill. This was pretty much pre-digitisation of archives, and certainly pre-AI, and so my views on her character were limited to the papers that were accessible. However, the more I learned about the court she lived in, the more I wondered whether that was the whole story, which is how, years later, she became the heroine of The Queen’s Tears.
Barbara’s story took me somewhere quite different from her sister’s. Lucy’s life was bound up with the Tower and a husband who loved her dearly, while Barbara served at the court of Queen Anna of Denmark and, as the sister-in-law of the incredibly powerful Duke of Buckingham, was at the heart of the Stuart Court’s nest of politics and patronage.
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| The six St.John sisters. (c) Friends of Lydiard Park. All rights reserved. |
Painted standing together in the extraordinary polyptych in the church at Lydiard, with its unique portrait of all six sisters, helped me put faces to my words as I followed the paper trail from one story to the other. And I had the advantage of a portrait of Barbara to examine. What looks like a rather arrogant early Stuart courtier transforms into a knowing woman with a slightly mischievous smile on her lips. Are you playing games, even in your portrait, Barbara?
The research was a long and meandering journey, with visits to the National Archives and countless hours transcribing wills, court documents and letters, but the recent find that really changed me was Barbara’s own will, and a record from the Calendar of State Papers of the inquisition of her daughter Eleanor. I sat reading the provisions Barbara had made for her children, and it was as if her entire character fell into place. She may have been ambitious, conniving, even seemingly heartless, but she did it all for the love of her children, eager to protect them in a world that offered very little in the way of security. The woman everyone loved to hate looked completely different to me after that, and I think it’s the moment I stopped researching Barbara and started to understand her.
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| Barbara St.John Villiers. (c) Friends of Lydiard Park. All rights reserved. |
Which brings me to a question I’ve been asked: how do I view my ancestors now, and how do I present them fairly, warts and all, when they’re my own bloodline? Years of letters and wills and court papers have turned them from distant names and dates into people with debts and quarrels and fierce loyalties. Sometimes there is a temptation to polish them until they gleam, or to be so determined not to be biased that you end up harder on them than anyone else would be. My guardrail has always been the evidence. I let what they actually did, and what friends and enemies said about them (or perhaps even more importantly, when they didn’t defend them) set the limits of what I write. Only then do I use my imagination to ask why, and I would always rather explain Barbara than excuse her.
When I wrote them as characters, rather than simply researching their lives, they came alive for me. Once I had to decide what Barbara would say across a table, or what she’d feel standing in a room I’d walked through myself, she became a woman I knew, based on the scaffold of fact. Imagination found its way into the spaces between the documents. After writing their stories, I feel closer to them now than I ever could have from the archives alone. And, Barbara, I hope I’ve now given you the redemption in The Queen’s Tears that The Lydiard Chronicles never did.
This title is available to read on #Kindle+.
Elizabeth St. John
Elizabeth St.John's acclaimed historical fiction brings to life her ancestors—remarkable women linked to England's royalty—offering unique insights into Medieval, Tudor, and Stuart times. Her novels unfold not just as traditional series, but as an interlocking web of lives: The Lydiard Chronicles—including the celebrated The Lady of the Tower—The Godmother's Secret, and The King's Intelligencer explore everything from the English Civil War to the mystery of the Princes in the Tower. Her newest novel, The Queen’s Tears, a dual timeline pursuing a stolen crown jewel, reunites favourite characters from the seventeenth-century with a present-day bookstore owner heroine.
At the heart of her writing is the transformation of real ancestral histories into narratives of historical continuity. She follows threads of legacy through generations, guided as much by wills, letters, portraits, country churches, ruined castles, manor houses, and lost gardens as by imagination.
Locations become constant companions through time, while characters whisper across centuries—their decisions resonating in the lives of their descendants to reveal how choices shape legacies. Grounded in historic sites like Lydiard Park and the Tower of London, her work creates a living archival flow that continues to flourish as the past yields its secrets.
Elizabeth divides her time between California, England, and the past, surrounded by books, gardens, and animals, with a slightly bewildered, ever-supportive husband beside her.
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