First, some background. I read a lot. My personal library, both printed and ebooks, is over 7600 books. When I read fiction, I read about 100 pages an hour. When I was younger and before I had my daughter, I usually read a book a day. Now it might take two days, depending on the book of course.
These days I read urban fantasy, suspense, humorous chick lit, and a variety of things from my fellow authors at MuseITUp. Back then, I will confess that I read a lot of romances - mostly historical romances. I also had less information stuffed in my brain those days so I generally remembered trivia from what I read. And I trusted that an author writing an historical romance was giving me facts amidst the romance.
Now in high school I took many AP classes. Those were advanced placement. They allowed you to take a test for each class towards the end of high school and your score on the test translated to college credit if you scored high enough. The AP European History test is really the only one I remember. The essay question asked about William of Orange. I remembered nothing about him from my school. I had however, fairly recently, read a historical romance set in that period with the political struggles of William and his wife Mary as a backdrop. I took a leap of faith and answered that essay based on what the author had used in the romance.
I don't remember your name, or the name of the book, author from my past, but thanks to you and your diligent research, I never had to take a history class in college. Huzzah!
I guess my point, in as much as I have one, is that if you are going to write historical fiction, please do your research. Someday, unbeknownst to you, someone's academic career may depend on you.
And just for a point of trivia, this was one of my all time favorite romances. You can get a rerelease on Amazon. This is the original cover and the one on my copy (which I still have from its original release).
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