'When people ask me, 'Don't you wish you had lived back then?', I tell them they must be crazy'

Her reply was Guy Fawkes. Quizzed on her favourite spot in Yorkshire, her adopted home, there was a similar lack of hesitation. When friends come to visit the sprawling North Yorkshire farm, Gregory bought with her husband Anthony Mason, near Stokesley, they often find themselves being taken on a tour of Bolton Castle where Mary Queen of Scots was imprisoned when she first fled to England.

Her responses should perhaps come as little surprise. Ever since she swapped a degree in English literature to study history, Gregory has been immersed in the past and the success of her novels suggest she's not alone.

The Other Boleyn Girl was given both the small and big screen treatment, with Scarlett Johansson and Natalie Portman lending the latter more than a touch of Hollywood glamour. Her psychological thriller, The Little House, is being made into a two-part drama for ITV1, starring Francesca Annis and Tim Piggott-Smith, and she's already had calls from television producers interested in adapting her latest novel, The Red Queen.

"It didn't change my life but it meant that I sold many more books because of the film," says Gregory of The Other Boleyn Girl's success. "It meant that I could carry on doing what I was doing.

"The film was an enormous machine, it was like a huge circus travelling around the country. You had these incredibly beautiful stars, who command staggering sums of money, getting out of their trailers and trudging across the mud, working in the rain and cold. It's a world of very great contrasts.

"Scarlett and Natalie were really endearing. They're about the age of my daughters so I had a sense of affection towards them from the start. Scarlett had her copy of my book in her hand practically all the time she was on set and kept saying to the director: 'We don't seem to have this scene, but it's a key scene...'."

The resulting film wasn't necessarily how she would have written it, but 56-year-old Gregory says she enjoyed it anyway.

"The film wanted much more to tell a story about female rivalry. As a film, it was very successful."

The Red Queen, the second in The Cousins' War series, tells the story of Tudor matriarch Margaret Beaufort, determined to advance the cause of her son, who would later become Henry VII. Marrying three times, but never for love, Margaret's story has all the elements of great fiction, from the plot twists to the large helping of love and betrayal.

However, it also refuses to shy away from the realities of life in Tudor times, painting a grim picture of women's lives and detailing the suffering they endured and the young age at which they married. If they didn't die in childbirth, they would almost certainly be abused by their husbands.

"I think the story of a woman struggling against the most likely

outcomes, death and failure, is very powerful," says Gregory. "And nobody knows much about Margaret. As a woman, getting married was really a delayed death sentence as there was no contraception and the chances of dying in childbirth were very high. Women were probably going to have 10 pregnancies so it was a very high-risk life."

Indeed, Margaret was married at 12 and having had her only child at 13, it is believed the difficult birth rendered her infertile.

"That is shocking," says Gregory. "By and large you got married and stayed with the husband's parents, but the marriage was not consummated until you were 14 or 15.

"However, Margaret was married to a king in desperate need of an heir. Securing a son mattered more than her safety, happiness or her life."

Gregory's star has risen largely due to her ability to blow the dust off history books, seamlessly weaving fact and fiction together.

"I read tons of primary and secondary material on a subject and the absolute facts become the bones of the story," she says. "I have to make up the bits we don't know because of conspiracies and secrets. Feelings are also fiction, but it's often a fairly likely construction."

Gregory, who was born in Kenya but moved to Bristol with her family when she was two, seemed destined to become a writer. On leaving school, she joined the Portsmouth News as a reporter before going to Sussex University to read English literature. While there, she took a taster course in history and fell in love with the subject, eventually changing her degree option.

She later attended Edinburgh University to take a Phd in 18th-century literature and while there wrote her debut novel, Wideacre, for which she reportedly received the highest ever advance for a first novel.

"I thought I'd write a couple of novels and then go back to journalism, but I've just never stopped," says Gregory, who now writes in her study, looking out over her 97-acre farm on the North York Moors where she lives with Mason, her third husband.

Although reluctant to talk about her private life, it's known that Gregory first met Mason, who is also her agent, more than 25 years ago. When they were reintroduced some years later, Gregory, who has admitted it was love at first sight, was single and the couple finally got together.

These days they lead a fairly quiet life on the farm they share with their hens, ducks and five horses. In between writing, Gregory runs a charity called Gardens For The Gambia, raising funds for wells in primary schools in the African country.

It's an idyllic kind of existence and, having already identified a number of likely heroines for future novels, one unlikely to be punctured by the dreaded writer's block.

"I keep discovering interesting women who lived during the War of the Roses, so I'm honestly not sure how many books there will be in the series, but there could be more than six," she says. "The next one is a fantastic woman, the mother of Elizabeth Woodville (Edward IV's wife), Jacquetta, who was the Duchess of Bedford, aunt-in-law to Henry VI, but every book makes me realise how lucky I am to be living now.

"When people say to me, 'Don't you wish you lived then?', I tell them they must be crazy. Having said that, all the questions I've ever asked about anything could be answered by looking at the historical roots of things. I live in a world which is constantly referring to the past."

n The Red Queen, by Philippa Gregory, is published by Simon & Schuster, priced 18.99. To order a copy from the Yorkshire Post Bookshop call 0800 0153232 or online at www.yorkshirepostbookshop.co.uk. Postage and packing is 2.75.