The Flowers of the Forest — Elizabeth Byrd

SCOTLAND IN 1513....

Edinburgh before Flodden--a steaming stew of violent color, narrow, reeking winds set cheek-by-jowl with the magnificence of the Tudor-Stuart court: thieves, peddlers, and prostitutes cast together with the nobility in a teeming hodgepodge of humanity--soon to be riven from castle to gutter in the bloodbath that would decimate the flower of Scotland's manhood.

Here lives Bess Andersen, originally a country girl from Kirkcudbrightshire, now enduring the harsh life of a common whore: Bess with her strange innocence, fatalistic courage and desperate love for her beautiful, half-witted Hugh. Here also lives Margaret Tudor, sister to Henry VIII, wife to James Stuart of Scotland--a royal lady whose private hell of frantic jealousy for her sovereign lord is hidden beneath the public facade of pageantry.

Here live witches, watchmen, priests, and beggars; common folk, cutthroats, lawyers, hawkers, lairds, apothecaries, lords and ladies--every variety of human in every degree of richness and poverty. Here is a whole world boiling with life--a worlds that was to change practically overnight. Here is Edinburgh before Flodden.