It begins next week.

After years spent buried in letters, chronicles, and the shadowed corners of early sixteenth-century Florence, On the Fickleness of Loyalty, my first novel in the Becoming Thomas Cromwell series will be released next week.

This is not the Cromwell most readers think they know.

Before he stood at the centre of power in England, before the court of Henry VIII, there was another world entirely—one shaped by merchants, diplomats, and dangerous alliances. A world where men like Niccolò Machiavelli navigated shifting loyalties, and where wealth, not birth, could determine survival.

Florence, in the early 1500s, was a republic balanced on a knife’s edge. Trade routes stretched across Europe, fortunes were made in silence, and the Church watched everything.

Into this world steps a young Thomas Cromwell. Taken into the household of the powerful Frescobaldi banking family in 1503, he is drawn into a network of commerce and politics that reaches far beyond Italy, into the courts of kings, into the ambitions of emperors, and into the quiet, dangerous trade in alum that could reshape alliances across Europe.

Everything in this novel is grounded in historical evidence. The people, the tensions, the systems of power—they are real. What I have done is step into the spaces between the records, and imagine the man who moved through them.

If you enjoy historical fiction rooted in primary sources, political intrigue, and the realities of Renaissance life, I hope this is a world you’ll want to step into.

I’d love to hear from you.

If you have questions—about the book, the research behind it, or the world of early sixteenth-century Florence, you can leave them in the box just below this post.

You might be curious about:
– Thomas Cromwell before England
– the role of the Frescobaldi family
– how trade networks like the alum trade actually worked
– the politics of Florence and figures like Machiavelli
– what is historical fact, and what has been imagined

I’ll be answering reader questions here on the site over the coming weeks.

The book releases next week on kindle, handy carry-size paperback, and full size hardback with extra features.

More details and how to get your copy just click here

— Caroline