Historical Fact and the Alternative

June 16, 2026

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This week Jude Knight brings us historical facts about Arthur, King of England and a big “What if…”

The facts…

Catherine, a princess of Spain, was betrothed to Arthur of England from when she was a small child. She grew up knowing she would be Queen of England, and in 1501, she and Arthur were married. He was fifteen. She had just turned sixteen. A few months later, they both contracted an illness—possibly either malaria or tuberculosis. Catherine recovered. Arthur died.

Catherine and Arthur

Henry VII, Arthur’s father, proposed that Catherine marry his second son, Henry. There were two problems. Henry was only eleven, and the legal age for boys to marry was fourteen. Time would solve that. However, Catherine had been married to Henry’s brother, which—according to Church law—made her Henry’s sister.

Catherine, however, claimed that the marriage had never been consummated. Both kingdoms, England and Spain, backed a request for a Papal dispensation—a ruling that the first marriage had not existed and the second could go ahead. Pope Julius II issued the dispensation.

Henry married Catherine when he ascended the throne as Henry VIII in 1509. She bore him five children, four of whom died in infancy. And when Henry wanted to marry again twenty years later, he claimed that his first marriage had been incestuous and appealed to Pope Clement VII for an annulment. He didn’t get it, so he broke from Rome, and had his Archbishop annul the marriage and his Parliament declare him head of the Church of England.

And the rest is history

But what if…

For my new series, my background is an alternative history—Regency England, but not entirely as we know it. In Many Kinds of Magic, the magic we read about in folk tales and even early histories is real and has never faded out of the world.

To get to the Regency world I envisaged, I needed a lynch-pin moment in history. One small change that shifted England from the trajectory our world followed.

I chose the death of Arthur, eldest son of Henry VII. If he had not died young, if his brother Henry had never become king, if Catherine of Aragon had had children who lived, but to Arthur, not Henry, the dissolution of the monasteries might never have happened.

If Mary Queen of Scots had married Arthur’s grandson, becoming Queen of Scotland and England, there might have been no Stuart line, no Civil War, no Hanoverian kings.

My King of England descends from Good King Arthur. His son has become Regent because some enemy—perhaps a mage working for Emperor Napoleon, or perhaps a Welsh separatist—has placed a curse of madness on the king.

And in one small manor house in Cheshire, an ordinary girl is going to wake up one morning to a most unexpected day.

About the Book: Unexpected Magic

In a Regency world where magical gifts mean power and status, they struggle to find a place…

Cordelia Nettleford is a disappointment to her family. With no mage gift, she cannot improve their status or even attract a decent suitor. But at least she can run the house for her mother and the estate for her father.

Until the morning a dragon hatches out in the chicken house, the stable girl turns out to be a witch, and a newborn unicorn selects Delia as his maiden.

Jasper Thornton is a disappointment to his uncle. His mage gift is huge but erratic, and years of effort have not led to any control. At least he is useful as his uncle’s errand boy, and his latest errand is a trip to Cheshire to bring back the Queen’s latest unicorn and its maiden.

When Jasper discovers that Delia has the rarest mage gift of all, the errand changes. Napoleon and other enemy war mages will sacrifice much to get their hands on her, but Jasper will do anything to protect her, especially when he comes fully into his power.

In a world at war, they find peace in one another’s arms. And no magic on earth will be allowed to part them.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0H22TKCXK

An excerpt

Jasper Thornton, nephew of the Duke of Findlater—and his probable heir if an unreliable magical gift ever amounted to anything—had one of those annoying premonitions that told him nothing. Something was happening. Something that would, at some undisclosed time in the future, have an unknown impact on him.

That was it. No specifics.

Could it be the war with France? On the continent, the battle mage Napoleon continued to conquer territory after territory, and everyone knew he had his eye on Great Britain. There were even rumors that the man was a dragon lord, or that he had a dragon lord in his court—and if that were true, Britain was doomed.

Everyone Jasper knew was desperately hoping it was just French propaganda and would come to nothing, as the rumors several years ago about a Welsh dragon lord had also come to nothing. It was probably untrue. Dragon lords were vanishingly rare, though the Welsh did have a very powerful mage who had taken the name Emrys, after the dragon lord the English called Merlin.

In fact, the only reason there was more than one in the entire world was that they lived for hundreds of years. None of the six currently alive was a European, and the one in Ethiopia, the youngest of the six, had already passed his first century mark.

If it were not for the war, Jasper would visit one of them. Perhaps they had lived long enough to know someone like him, with a powerful gift and no control. But here in Europe, the war dominated everything, although in Findlater’s London mansion, life went on as usual. Jasper had been begging to be allowed to go and fight. Even if his magic was unpredictable and near useless, he could still swing a sword and shoot a gun.

But the duke refused permission, so here Jasper remained, useless gift and all.

He had still been in the nursery when he first worked magic—usually the sign of a strong gift. However, it had never amounted to much. His ability to work a spell changed more frequently than the English weather. His tutors used to complain that he was lazy, undisciplined, just not trying. The duke ordered them to whip him, and that made it worse.

Thank goodness for Mr. Fellowes, the tutor who stayed. The tutor who realized that Jasper was trying as hard as he could to follow magical rules and practices that just didn’t fit his type of magic.

“It is not that Master Thornton does not know the spells, your grace,” Mr. Fellowes had told the duke. “I have observed him closely. His words, his actions, his tone of voice—he does everything precisely as he has been taught, and the results are—at best—unpredictable. Your grace, the young master is strongly thaumadiversus, as those who tested him in childhood discovered. But he has a type of magic that does not work by any rules we have yet discovered. For example, a weather spell for a gentle rain might, in Master Thornton’s hands, give us a day of sunny weather or a thunderstorm, and we can have no idea which.”

The duke had grumbled that such a gift was more like a curse, and Jasper was inclined to agree with him. But Mr. Fellowes was confident there must be patterns and rules to be discovered, even with unexpected magic like Jasper’s. “With further study and practice, my boy,” he had said, “I am hopeful you will learn to control your magic.”

Ten years later, Jasper was still trying.

He could reliably manage to start a fire now. He could levitate long enough to walk over a puddle dry shod, provided it was not too wide. He could cast a truth spell, at least well enough to know whether someone was being honest with him. Though sometimes even that backfired, and the person he was questioning wanted to share their sins all the way back to the cradle.

Still, these were skills most mages acquired in the first year after their magic initially manifested, after which they focused on their particular strengths. Jasper did not appear to have any particular strengths. Or, on different days, for unpredictable periods of time and with frequently undesirable results, he was good at a whole range of different gifts.

Weather working. Invisibility. Levitation. Elemental mastery. Magical beast handling. Scrying. Precognition. Translocation (of objects, sounds, and even himself—though he had given up on shifting living things when pieces of a pigeon he tried to translocate ended up in three different places. He could only be grateful it hadn’t happened the time he translocated himself.) You name it, Jasper could do it. Sometimes.

About Jude Knight

Jude always wanted to be a novelist. She started in her teens, but life kept getting in the way. Years passed, and with them dozens of unfinished manuscripts. She had a successful career in commercial writing, but the fear grew. What if she tried, failed, and lost the dream forever? The years since 2014 have seen 30 novels, more than 40 novellas, and 5 volumes of short stories. Add to that 3 awards, and thousands of positive reviews. The dream is alive.