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, a Van Dyck portrait of Barbara’s daughter, with tantalising signs of the missing Queen’s Tears hidden in plain sight, brings her face-to-face with Oliver Villiers, the Oxford art conservator she once loved and walked away from.
Reluctantly drawn together 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 Lydiard Chronicles will find old favourites—and a new heroine following in their footsteps.
Genre: Dual-Timeline Historical Fiction
How a mislabelled portrait led me to a Queen’s stolen jewels
Inspiration, as always, came when I least expected it. I was idly looking for some background on Barbara St.John Villiers when a search turned up a portrait that a Victorian book had named as her. I couldn’t quite believe it. Only one other portrait of Barbara has ever been registered, and this one was a Van Dyck. Quite unheard of.
So, I started digging. It took a lot of searching (the sort that keeps a historian up well past midnight), but in the end I could show that the sitter was not Barbara at all. She was her daughter, Anne, Lady Dalkeith, later Countess of Morton, and a celebrated heroine of the English Civil War in her own right. Cool.
I kept going back to the portrait, though, because I was struck by Anne’s dress and her jewellery. That sent me off to do some serious reading on early seventeenth-century jewels, and that’s how I came across the extraordinary collection belonging to Queen Anna of Denmark, James I’s consort. And then, tucked into a footnote, was an even better story. When Anna died, her trusted servant, Pierre Hugon, helped himself to her jewels from the deathbed, and he was later caught and clapped in the Tower of London before being released to the care of King Louis XIII of France. I found a three-page inventory of everything that had been taken, along with what was recovered from a mansion in Paris.
I had a portrait, jewels, and I had a theft. What I needed was something to tie them together.
George Villiers, the Duke of Buckingham, kept turning up. He was Barbara’s brother-in-law and Anne’s uncle, and he seemed to be connected to the jewels, the theft, the French court, and what happened to Queen Anna’s possessions afterwards. Well, that was my family. I could place Barbara Villiers right in the middle of the intrigue, and she belonged there. From my earlier novel, The Lady of the Tower, Barbara had often been called the woman that everyone loved to hate. Now I could not only give her a leading role, I could perhaps rehabilitate her reputation. Or at least explain it.
At the same time, I’d been playing with the idea of a present-day protagonist of a certain age. Julia Darke has just turned fifty. I wanted her to return to England in search of herself and reconcile with her past, and I wanted it to be somewhere in the Cotswolds, one of my favourite places, with a bookstore. And I wanted a really strong reason why her peaceful life would be completely upset, which is where a lost love from her Oxford days comes in.
Although all of these characters are fictitious, they were inspired by the world I wanted to put them in, and then shaped by the actions and circumstances of fate, destiny and the impact of decisions made over time. I could pick the places I loved, and they grew up around them.
So the dual timeline ended up being two things at once. The historical story is based in fact, the modern one in fiction, and the blend of the two is seasoned with a healthy dose of imagination. And all because one morning I found a portrait I didn’t know existed.
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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