Because I already used George III in a previous book, it felt a bit greedy to seize on another afflicted monarch, but Queen Maria I’s condition made a perfect premise for a novel set at the outbreak of the Peninsular War. Like her counterpart, George III, Queen Maria descended into a form of dementia that some speculate may have been caused by porphyria, although other theories have also been mooted. (One of the details that surprised me most in my researches was the amount of inbreeding in the Braganza family tree. Maria herself was married to her uncle; one of her sons was married to his own aunt, Maria’s sister.) Mental instability ran in the family. Maria’s grandfather King Philip V of Spain believed that he was being consumed by fire in retribution for his sins; her uncle Ferdinand VI zigzagged between depression and mania, assaulting his servants and banging his head against the wall. Queen Maria went with the “all of the above” approach: by 1790, her behavior, in the words of her biographer, “swung between extreme lassitude . . .
What do You think about The Lure Of The Moonflower?
