Sunday Salon: A Touch of the Tudors

There be money in historical fiction.  A lorra lorra money.  When I heard her speak at the Glasgow Aye Write Festival some 3 years ago, Philippa Gregory said that she had a contemporary novel stashed in the bottom drawer of her desk waiting for the day when the fascination for all things historical waned.  Obviously that day has not come for she is about to publish her 6th Tudor novel, The Other Queen, while her first, The Other Boleyn Girl,  is currently generating revenue at the box office.

Now I’m not enough of an historian to say whether Philippa Gregory’s interpretation of the Mary-Henry-Anne triangle sticks to the facts.  There is sufficient controversy in historical circles regarding the paternity of Mary’s son  and Anne’s alleged incest with her brother to suggest that Gregory has added a goodly portion of sensationalism here and there.  Regardless, The Other Boleyn Girl, is a page-turning read with more intrigue per page than the most lurid British Sunday paper.   But I have to say I was expecting more of the film.  Exquisite costumes, A-list actresses, Eric Dana, a handsome Henry in his prime.  Main point of how both sisters were sacrificed to the ambition of their father and uncle made well.  But it did suffer because there was just too much material for two hours - many of the scenes reduced to vignettes as a consequence.  I now find myself craving  a rewatch of Anne of A Thousand Days and the classic BBC series The Six Wives of Henry VIII. 

Alison Weir, respected historian, has also turned her pen to historical fiction.  Innocent Traitor focuses in on the tragedy of Lady Jane Grey, another pawn in the power struggles and religious foment of Tudor Times.  I’ve enjoyed a couple of her non-fiction titles in the past.  How does her debut novel stack up?  

With no need to invent a plot or an ending - the facts are as Alison Weir herself says in the afterword astonishing and horrifying - Weir cleverly writes most of the novel from a sucession of feminine viewpoints:  Frances Brandon, Duchess of Suffolk,  Jane’s mother, who gives not a toss about her daughter; Catherine Parr, Henry VIII’s sixth wife, a kindly women who becomes Jane’s surrogate mother and mentor; Mrs Ellen, Jane’s nurse, the one point of unfortunately helpless stability in her life, and Jane Grey, herself.  Jane’s voice matures from that of an obedient but abused child to that of her obedient but abused - I hesitate to use the word - adulthood, as her life is cruelly cut short at 16.  There are only two males voices:   John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, the machiavellian mind behind the plot to put Jane on the throne and Jane’s nameless executioner. 

Each voice is distinctive and grounded in the mindset of its time and sex.  With such a variety of narrators we get the full picture of the danger which surrounded Jane and a kaleidoscopic view of the character herself; Jane, who found her consolation in books and learning as she discovered she would never be forgiven for being female.  This education made her one of the finest minds of the times.  But with the men in her life as abhorrent and uncaring as her mother, she never stood a chance, apart from one.  Mary Tudor had offered her a reprieve on condition of her renouncing her Protestant faith.  But Jane was stauchly Protestant and the end result was never in doubt.  The ultimate irony is that the only decision of her own she was ever allowed to stick by,  forfeited her life.

Jane wasn’t the only victim of the times.  Edward VI, crown notwithstanding, suffered agonies at the hand of Dudley as he lay on his deathbed.   The kindly Catherine Parr very nearly lost her head.  It was only the fortuitous finding of a signed death warrant that allowed her time to avert disaster - although disaster struck soon enough after Henry died.

In Children of England, Alison Weir had already published a non-fictional account of these same events.  Now she has used the freedom of a novelist to inhabit the minds of her characters, to give them flesh and blood and breath.  She plays a little with details but not the facts per se and she’s honest about exactly what she’s done in her afterword.   In doing so she has penned a fine historical novel.