Welcome to the website of Queens-Haven Publications.
It is hoped the information to be found here will be of interest to all who have a love of British history and the history of the Royal Family, or have a fascination with the complexities of British Royal and Noble genealogy.
Books and articles by author Marilyn Roberts cover the periods from the Norman Conquest to the Tudor era, as well as Queen Victoria and her descendants and the Battenberg/ Mountbatten family, but her main area of interest is the life and times of the medieval Mowbray family, including Thomas Mowbray, 1st Duke of Norfolk, and his great-great granddaughter, Lady Anne Mowbray, the last of the Mowbray line, whose lead-encased remains were discovered on an east London building site in 1964. The death of the 8-year-old in 1481, who had been married at the age of five to Prince Richard of York, the younger of the Princes in the Tower, when he was four, eventually brought the Mowbray inheritance and the dukedom of Norfolk into the hands of her nearest relative, the elderly Lord John Howard, whose mother, Lady Margaret Mowbray was a sister of John Mowbray, 2nd Duke of Norfolk, Lady Anne’s great-grandfather.
The author’s latest book, Queen Katherine and the Howards: a Tudor family on the brink of disaster, published by Pen and Sword Books in hardback in January 2025, places Katherine Howard, Henry VIII’s fifth wife, in the context of her wider family, examining the part played in her development and eventual downfall by her close relatives. Using primary sources, including contemporary documents and correspondence, it questions whether the current public perception of Katherine’s life before her marriage is a true picture, or is in part based on speculation and hearsay perpetuated, sometimes centuries, after her death.
Her paternal uncle, Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke of Norfolk, continues to be blamed for pushing his young niece into the ailing and elderly king’s path in order to gain power over him, while the duke’s step-mother Agnes Tilney, Dowager Duchess of Norfolk, Katherine’s step-grandmother who brought her up, is accused of neglect and indifference towards her. But is it a fair or realistic assessment of their actions, or to some extent the result of Victorian authors embellishing their accounts for maximum effect? The life of Agnes Tilney, Dowager Duchess of Norfolk is examined in detail, and there is also a full chapter devoted to Katherine’s father, Lord Edmund Howard, a man usually overlooked in the telling of the story of his daughter Queen Katherine’s short life, and who lived until 1539, the year before her marriage.
Marilyn’s other books include profiles and family trees of the descendants of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert as far as the accession of Queen Elizabeth II in 1952, while the history of the Battenberg/ Mountbatten family from the original Princess of Battenberg, Julie Hauke, to the assassination in 1979 of her grandson, Earl Mountbatten of Burma, is covered in a short book commissioned by Romsey Abbey, Earl Mountbatten’s place of burial.
Please respect copyright conditions throughout this website. Some pictures here appear through the author’s arrangement with and payment to a particular owner for a one-off specific use only and are not in the Public Domain. Photographs and charts on any part of the Queens-Haven Publications website are subject to copyright and should not be reproduced without permission in writing from the copyright holder(s).If in doubt concerning copyright restrictions please contact info@queens-haven.co.uk
The Author
Marilyn Roberts was educated at Didsbury College, Manchester, and the University of Hull, from where she was awarded a Master’s Degree in the History and Politics of the Administration of Education in England and Wales.
After having worked in Education for a number of years, in the late 1990’s she embarked upon a new career as a writer and has also been a Collections Care Co-ordinator at Epworth Old Rectory Museum, the childhood home of John and Charles Wesley, the founders of Methodism. For many years she has given talks and lectures in various parts of the country, and in 2015 was a member of the Epworth Town Magna Carta Celebrations Committee.
Outlets where the books have been sold include The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and the Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon, Whippingham Church on the Isle of Wight associated with Queen Victoria and her family, Westminster Abbey, Romsey Abbey, Sandringham House Bookshop, Lincoln Castle and the Richard III Visitor Centre in Leicester.
We are aware that certain online businesses are selling used copies of some of these books, particularly of The Mowbray Legacy, at ridiculously inflated prices, claiming they are rare books. This is not true, the books are plentiful and if they cannot be found on Amazon we can always provide copies from info@queens-haven.co.uk