France, 1549 to 1565. A tailor burns for insulting the king’s mistress, and sixteen years later the woman he insulted is an old lady in a bed at Limours with nothing left but her letters. Between the two, Franck Ferrand tracks the destruction of one invented Picard family through the wars of religion, and the…

France, 1533. A pope marries his niece to the king’s second son, and stays three weeks to check she is pregnant. Fourteen years later the king is dead and the court has torn itself in half between two women: the young favourite Anne de Pisseleu and the widow Diane de Poitiers, each with a prince,…

France, 1521. The king hunts, jousts and dreams of Milan; his mother governs. When Louise de Savoie sets out to strip the constable of France of the lands he holds only through his dead wife, she begins a chain that runs through treason, the catastrophe of Pavia, her son’s imprisonment in Madrid and four years…