Recently, I've become fascinated by certain periods of European history, especially the Tudor era in England (and contemporary time periods in France, Spain, and Italy). Various individuals, famous and overlooked alike, have particularly attracted my attention and these range from rulers to assorted members of the royal courts (ladies-in-waiting, spies, court fools). The lives of important women interest me greatly as well (an influence of my leanings toward Women Studies).
For example, examining the stream of women in King Henry VIII's life is quite telling of the period. He was the second son born to Elizabeth of York, the only English queen to have been a daughter, sister, niece, wife, mother, and grandmother of English kings; her marriage to Henry VII united the rival Houses of Lancaster and York, creating the House of Tudor. Henry VIII was the younger brother of Margaret Tudor, Queen of Scots (the mother of James V and grandmother of Mary, Queen of Scots as well as Mary's consort Lord Darnley through her second marriage) and older brother to Mary Tudor, Queen of France (the widow of King Louis XII and later the second wife of Charles Brandon, 1st Duke of Suffolk and consequently the grandmother of Lady Jane Grey).
In addition to infamously having six wives (remember the rhyme "divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived"?), Henry had several notable mistresses. The most famous of these included Anne Hastings, Elizabeth Blount (the mother of his illegitimate son Henry FitzRoy), Mary Boleyn, and either Margaret or Mary Shelton (cousins to the Boleyn sisters). Through his wives (Katherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves, Katheryn Howard, and Catherine Parr) and the aforementioned mistresses, Henry cut a swath through some of the premier noble families in England and Europe alike. (Keep in mind that the Boleyn sisters, the Shelton sisters, Katheryn Howard, Jane Seymour, and Mary Howard, the widow of Henry Fitzroy and candidate to be King Henry's seventh wife, were all related in some way or another, and Anne Hastings had Henry's mother Elizabeth among her first cousins. And I thought the family trees in Greek mythology were confusing!)
With that said, it's not surprising that historical novelists like Philippa Gregory and Margaret Campbell Barnes chose this era for narrative material. There's more than plenty available, and historians continue to debate whether or not certain events happened (such as the consummation of the marriage of Prince Arthur, Henry's older brother, with Katherine of Aragon) and the parentage of children (i.e. the paternity of Mary Boleyn's children). Also considering Henry's powerful personality, infamy, and womanizing, it's only fair that HBO developed "The Tudors" and created a historical drama mixed with smut. (While it may irritate critics, smut certainly makes history entertaining.) Of course the tricky part in dealing with either historical novels or dramas is to sort out the historical truth from the narrative fiction and that can be both daunting and confusing.
Philippa Gregory became known for her Tudor series thanks to the success of The Other Boleyn Girl. Although published first, The Other Boleyn Girl (which focuses on Mary Boleyn's affair with Henry prior to the rise of her sister Anne as Queen of England) is second in the series' chronology. The book follows The Constant Princess (which details the marriages of Katherine of Aragon to Prince Arthur and King Henry). Third comes The Boleyn Inheritance (Anne of Cleves, Katheryn Howard, and Jane Boleyn). The Queen's Fool covers the courts of Henry's three children King Edward VI, Queen Mary I, and Queen Elizabeth I as seen through the eyes of a fictional Jewish girl named Hannah Green (the titular fool). The Virgin's Lover focuses on the love triangle between Queen Elizabeth, Robert Dudley, and Amy Robsart but also includes the perspective of William Cecil, Elizabeth's main adviser. The Other Queen deals with Elizabeth's contemporary and rival Mary, Queen of Scots along with her guardians George Talbot and his wife Bess of Hardwick.
I must note that somewhat disappointingly, Gregory failed to include two of Henry's wives: Jane Seymour and Catherine Parr. Queen Jane, although never crowned, gave Henry what he longed for most: a son, the future King Edward VI.; she also pushed to restore Henry's daughter Mary to the line of succession. Catherine Parr was the only wife to outlive the notorious king and during her reign she was known as the beloved stepmother of Henry's children (and helped reconcile them with their father and convinced the king to restore his children to the line of succession), a progressive religious reformer, an effective regent, who ruled during Henry's French campaign, and a positive role model for her stepdaughter Elizabeth.
I give Gregory credit for writing about less known historical figures (e.g. the character of Mary Boleyn and her personal life, for example, are still debated by historians). She uses multiple view points in her novels (such as The Boleyn Inheritance) to allow her characters to speak in their own voices, although simultaneously this can be confusing and choppy at times; for the sake of clarity, I think it would have served her better if she had decided on one narrator, even if she focused on more than one protagonist. It also appears that with each book, Gregory's writing style seems to improve in some ways but also becomes more complicated. Since I'm currently reading The Boleyn Inheritance, I'm going to discuss the characters and review the preceding book in the Tudor series, since this gives a historical context and introduces some characters (and events) that contribute to and appear later in The Boleyn Inheritance.
In The Other Boleyn Girl, I found Gregory's portrayal of Anne Boleyn to be a bit one-dimensional and tending towards vilification while Mary was described as an innocent, sentimental, and idealistic romantic pushed around by her scheming family. Successfully incorporating the effects of the actions of multiple political characters seems to be a struggle for Gregory, since she heavily emphasizes the emotional lives of her protagonists rather than balancing their personal lives with political events and the court at large. As a consequence, some pivotal characters and significant events are overlooked while the roles of other characters are heavily dramatized, causing the narrative to appear somewhat lopsided. Some characters appear briefly with little introduction and promptly disappear, although their roles and actions affect the story greatly. While HBO's "The Tudors" also fails to be wholly historically accurate and also dramatizes events to a certain extent, the ensemble of characters is handled more deftly and both political events and personal dramas are on a more even keel.
Somewhat dissatisfied with The Other Boleyn Girl, I nevertheless found the history of the Boleyn family quite fascinating and wondered why Gregory left out or glossed over various facts. For this reason, I like the portrayal of the Boleyn family as seen in "The Tudors". Most notably, Natalie Dormer as Anne Boleyn is superb--she showed that Anne was a complex individual with a powerful personality living in a turbulent time. (Unfortunately, I was less than impressed by the show's portrayal of Mary Boleyn and the film version of The Other Boleyn Girl. With the former, Mary seems childish and appears to have little intelligence, ambition, goals, or clear motivation other than sleeping with handsome men; because of this, she is immediately eclipsed by her more deliberate and self-possessed sister Anne. In the latter case, this is largely due to the sloppy script and several weak male characters, including Eric Bana's Henry VII, rather than specific qualms with Natalie Portman or Scarlett Johansson's interpretations of the Boleyn sisters.)
As previously mentioned, Gregory has an occasional problem with one-dimensional characters. In both The Other Boleyn Girl and The Boleyn Inheritance, she quickly casts several members of the Boleyn and Howard families as unscrupulous, conniving courtiers who pimp out female relatives in exchange for titles, land, and other swag. I find this a bit trite; certainly they were ambitious and powerful but there is more to the story than that. It is too easy to have a bevy of seemingly evil, heartless, and needlessly spiteful family members when the plot hinges on intrigues. In The Boleyn Inheritance, Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke of Norfolk, and Anne of Cleves' mother and brother are made out to be the villains but I wasn't entirely convinced that the motivations for their cruelty were actually realistic, whether or not they were based on historical fact.
The Boleyn family were not simply power-hungry social climbers. It is seldom mentioned that Thomas Boleyn was a very influential and adept ambassador, and his posts in the Netherlands and France enabled him to give his daughters a rather progressive education and opportunities to travel abroad. Historically, Mary and Anne spent time abroad (Mary in France and Anne in both France and the Netherlands) as ladies in waiting to the French queens Margaret Tudor (Henry's older sister) and Claude, the wife of King Francis I. Anne had previously attended Archduchess Margaret of Austria in the Habsburg Netherlands, was a dear companion to Claude's sister Renee, and acted as the official English translator for Claude at court. Another of Claude's ladies-in-waiting was Diane de Poitiers, who became the famous mistress of Henry II, Claude's son. While in France, Mary was believed to be promiscuous and became the mistress of King Francis I from 1515 until 1519. She was legendarily called "the English Mare" and "una grandissima ribalda, infame sopra tutti" ("a great prostitute, infamous above all") by Francis. So she was not the ingenue as depicted by Gregory and I think the author missed out on great material, smutty and otherwise, by not going into Mary's colorful history in France.
Upon returning to England, she became a lady-in-waiting to Queen Katherine and married William Carey. At some point, she became Henry's mistress but was not one of his famous, acknowledged lovers. She gave birth to two children, Catherine and Henry Carey, although in the book these children were fathered by the king rather than her husband; historically her affair with the king had ended prior to the birth of her children. (Interestingly, the king later needed a papal dispensation in order to marry Anne due to the affinity created when he slept with Mary; this mirrored what happened to Katherine, who had been married first to Henry's brother Arthur.) In the book, Mary idolizes Katherine yet betrays her by falling in love with the king and allows her family to capitalize on her feelings (but later whimpers and whines about it). Although Mary and Anne were involved with the same man, historically they were not believed to be close and moved in different circles; to contrast, the book depicts a complex relationship alternating between affection and rivalry between the sisters. When Mary's husband died, Anne ensured her nephew's education and secured for her sister a small pension; later Mary accompanied Anne to Calais on a state visit. Later Anne became Queen of England and completely eclipsed her sister.
In 1534, Mary secretly married the soldier William Stafford out of love, although because she married without royal permission and beneath her station, she was disowned by her family and banished from court. Ironically, this seemed to serve Mary well since, like her uncle Thomas Howard (3rd Duke of Norfolk), she sufficiently distanced herself from her disgraced relatives when Anne and their brother George were imprisoned in the Tower of London and later executed. It is unknown whether Mary visited or had any correspondence with her siblings between 1534-36 as it appears that she was quite estranged from the entire Boleyn family. There is no historical evidence to support what Mary thought of Jane Boleyn (George's wife) or vice versa, although Gregory makes a point to have Jane be clearly opinionated about her sister-in-law's habit of steering clear of court intrigues and keeping her daughter safe when tensions erupted. While Mary and her second husband were court outcasts, they did not fall prey to the scandals and intrigues involving the Howard family and in fact, Mary outlived her parents and siblings. Her daughter Catherine Carey was a lady-in-waiting to both Anne of Cleves and Katheryn Howard as a young woman, and later, she became the Chief Lady of the Bedchamber to her cousin, Queen Elizabeth I. (Interestingly, Elizabeth likely never met her aunt Mary.) Henry Carey was ennobled by Elizabeth and made a Knight of the Garter. It seems that despite everything, Mary and her children were clearly survivors.
I found Gregory's sentimentalized version of Mary and her revised past to be less interesting than the emotionally mysterious and evasive historical figure. While Anne was believed to be the ambitious one by historians, I have my own questions: what motivated Mary to become the mistress to two kings and later marry a commoner, knowing how her family would react? Making her a romantic idealist (in terms of her affair with Henry) seems to be a paltry and contrived excuse for a motivation. At the same time, looking at her life from a historical perspective, Mary wasn't exactly a femme fatale either. She was more complex than that, and more mysterious than her infamous sister. I find that more intriguing than Gregory's end result with The Other Boleyn Girl. However, it set the stage for The Boleyn Inheritance, and I'll review that book as well when I finish reading it.
