The Seventh Wife of Henry VIII

Tom Arrowsmith is an ordinary fifteen-year-old schoolboy who has a way with computer technology. Little of this is helpful to him, however, as he is sucked into the past from a history lesson in his school by the mysterious Guardians of Time to correct Earth’s own history during the time of Henry VIII. The problem has occurred because of the coming together of two parallel universes and Tom’s task is to prevent the murder of Henry’s sixth wife, Queen Katherine Parr. In his new life in the sixteenth century, Tom becomes part of a family and is a stableboy at Hampton Court Palace. However, unprepared for the task given him by the Guardians, he soon finds that he cannot change history on his own but finds a willing ally in Rose, a young servant girl in the palace. Rose is the same age as Tom but is not all that Tom initially believes her to be. At first, however, their intervention in Earth’s history results in an escalation of events beyond their control and they find themselves having to prevent the murder of the future King Edward VI as well as that of Katherine Parr. In unravelling the complexities of histories that should not be happening, Tom and Rose’s adventures take them from Hampton Court to other royal palaces at Westminster, Greenwich and Hatfield as they battle to make sense of the chaos caused by the overlapping of events in the two universes. Along the way they interact with many notable historical characters including Henry’s daughters Mary and Elizabeth, Thomas and Edward Seymour, Edward’s tutor John Cheke and Sir Michael Stanhope as well, of course, as Katherine Parr and Prince Edward. Eventually successful in getting Earth’s history back on track in their own universe, they then come up against the final challenge of returning to their rightful places in that universe, which in Tom’s case is the exact point in the history lesson he started out from.