It gives me great pleasure once again to be hosting ELIZABETH ST.JOHN on a Coffee Pot Book Club blog tour, this time to showcase her new book, The Queen’s Tears, a dual timeline novel featuring present-day bookseller, Julia Darke, but inspired by true stories of seventeenth century intrigue amongst the nobility. And I believe this is the first of a new series from Elizabeth with Julia Darke at its centre…
Here you can find out more about The Queen’s Tears and read an intriguing article from Elizabeth about aspects of the research that went into writing this novel.
What is the book about?
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.
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Research Happens in the Strangest Places
by Elizabeth St.John
How a reversed photograph, a footnote and a vanished jewel built the scaffolding for The Queen’s Tears
Research, in my experience, never starts where you expect it to, and the digging behind The Queen’s Tears began with a black and white print in an old book, a reproduction of a reversed photograph of a painting, which someone had labelled as a portrait of Barbara St.John Villiers. I was idly looking for background on her at the time, so naturally I stopped to stare. Only one other portrait of Barbara has ever been registered, and this new one turned out to be attributed to the studio of Van Dyck, which is the sort of thing that makes a historian’s pulse quicken.
It took a good deal of searching (and one or two very late nights) and an artist friend’s examination to show that the sitter was not Barbara at all but her daughter, Anne, later Countess of Morton and a celebrated heroine of the English Civil War in her own right. It was a reversed image of a Van Dyck, the original of which has disappeared. So, Barbara mystery solved. And yet, I kept going back to the picture, because what caught my eye was the jewel on her dress, and I found myself wondering where it had come from and who might have commissioned it.
That question led me, as these things do, to ask where Barbara herself had been at the time, and whether she had ever served at the court of Queen Anna of Denmark. She had, and what is more she was there when Anna died, which I hadn’t expected at all. Then, in a footnote (they are always in footnotes), I found that the queen had died intestate, and that her jewels and possessions had simply disappeared. Her faithful servants were accused of the theft and were captured and clapped in the Tower of London. Don’t be concerned – no spoiler alert needed, for all of this, extraordinary as it is, goes into just the first chapter of The Queen’s Tears. As far as I could tell, nobody had told the story before.
So I dug deeper, and found George Villiers, then Marquess of Buckingham, entertaining the French Ambassador, and eventually discovered that the jewels made their way to a mansion in Paris, where they were… but no, I won’t say, because now we are into the meat of the story. What I can tell you is that picking apart those seemingly separate incidents and threading them together gave me the outline for a fictionalised version of the historical story of my dual timeline.
Research happens in the strangest places, though. Online, of course, and I am now aided by AI that can turn up papers and documents so deeply buried that I would never have found them myself, and that translates seventeenth-century French and produces maps of streets that disappeared long ago. Of course, I validate and scrutinise everything against reliable sources before it goes anywhere near the page. Then there are the colleagues who send me snippets of information because they know my story and happen to have come across something, and those little gifts have been invaluable. And there are the visits to places that become characters in their own right, a Cotswold village and a French chateau among them, along with archives around the world where a single page can change everything.
As with the inception of all my books, it’s the shortest of sentences or the murkiest of portraits on a seemingly unrelated research journey that can trigger a story. The Queen’s Tears emerged from that mislabelled print in an old book, and grew into the novel it is today.
Book details
The Queen’s Tears was published on October 15th 2026 by Falcon Historical and is available as an eBook and in paperback.
It is also available to read in Kindle+ (KindleUnlimited).
Universal buy link:
https://geni.us/TheQueensTears
Launch price is just 99c / 99p until October 31st!
About the author
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.
You can connect with Elizabeth on social media:
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Book Bub • Amazon Author Page • Goodreads
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