Leaping back to the Middle Ages Williamson suggests that William Rufus, the notorious redheaded king of England who was slain while hunting, was actually a sacrificial victim to his religion - ritually executed by his fellow heretics and maligned by Churchmen from that day to this. The actual conspirators were high-ranking court officials including Robert Cecil who concocted the ""plot"" as an excuse to launch repressive anti-Catholic measures. A bit more convincing is his review of the infamous Gunpowder Hot to blow up Parliament: Guy Fawkes was framed. Williamson establishes, at least to his own satisfaction, that the father of Queen Elizabeth I was not Henry VII but one Mark Smeaton, a court musician and sometime lover of Anne Boleyn. The results of his historical sleuthing are sometimes astounding even though his painstaking modus operandi gets a trifle tiresome. The appeal of these whodunits will be limited by the fact that Williamson confines himself almost exclusively to 16th and 17th century English history, some of it quite obscure.
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