The Player's Boy

The Player's Boy and The Players and the Rebels are the two halves of a historical story set in Elizabethan England. These link slightly with the Marlow series because the main character is a Marlow ancestor.

[I] consider them two of the best children's historicals ever. ... [The story] covers much of the same ground as Geoffrey Trease's Cue for Treason but much less melodramatically.
Nicky Smith, girlsown email archive
... the two Elizabethan books evoke an earlier England with all the success of Barbara Willard's Mantlemass series and humour as a bonus.
Heazlewood, 1991