Will Coe’s STUART SET

Will Coe is the pen name of John Wilkinson. John graduated MA in History from Edinburgh before embarking on a career in advertising.

In his fifties, with youth breathing down his neck in a young man’s game, he switched to being Head of Marketing for the Open University Business School. Now retired with his wife and no dogs to the Big Skies of Norfolk, John has returned to his original love, writing. His preferred genre is historical fiction and his approach to it is a little different than many of the big players. Rather than place new characters in an historical context, he uses real figures from the past to give them exposure the history books have denied them or to highlight aspects of their career or character which have gone unremarked.

He is about to complete his Stuart trilogy. The first, ‘A Body in the Barn’, imagines Oliver Cromwell in his self-confessed ‘ungodly days’. The second, ‘Don’t Blame Oliver,’ rescues Secretary of State John Thurloe from the bin of history. The third, ‘The Two Masqueteers’, (due for publication in 2027) focuses on the complementary role of two women in the 17th century English and French civil wars: the Countess of Carlisle and the Duchesse de Chevreuse.