That led quite naturally to that determined seductress, Anne Boleyn, who gets her own story told in the next Young Royal, DOOMED QUEEN ANNE. In BEWARE, PRINCESS ELIZABETH, those roles are reversed. In MARY, BLOODY MARY, little Elizabeth is the rival. The challenge for me as a writer was to switch sides and to take my reader's sympathies with me. To say that the two step-sisters were never close is putting it mildly. Mary was seventeen when Elizabeth was born. Anne Boleyn got the job as Wife #2, but she too failed in her royal duty Elizabeth was her only child. When Mary's mother, Catherine of Aragon, failed to produce a male heir, Henry decided he needed a new wife. Both were the daughters of King Henry VIII, and if ever there was a sibling rivalry, it was this one. Writing a novel about Elizabeth was a no-brainer for me, once I had written about her half-sister, Mary. We call her Elizabeth I, to distinguish her from England's present queen, although of course she didn't think of herself as "the First" because she had no way of knowing if and when there would be another with the same name. Elizabeth is probably England's best-known queen.
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