Lymond Chronicles

The Lymond Chronicles are a series of six novels, written by Dorothy Dunnett, which were first published between 1961 and 1975. The series is set in mid-sixteenth-century Europe and the Mediterranean and tells the story of a young Scottish nobleman, Francis Crawford of Lymond, from 1547 through 1558. ... " You all know that each title in the Chronicles has a chess theme; that's partly because of the overall design of the Chronicles themselves - the game of chess as an analogue of the game of life."... Dorothy Dunnett