‘You make everything
into your own tragedy.’
I was at an academic conference last year called
Marginalised Mainstream which had a really interesting paper on the books and
perceptions of the books of Philippa Gregory.
I had to confess that I had never read any of her work though I am of
course interested in historical fiction and occasionally read the kind with the
more “feminine” slant. I also had to
confess that one reason I had been put off had to do with the covers—shallow, I
know, but it happens that the “headless woman” covers of Gregory’s earlier
work, The Boleyn Girl included, are a
bone of contention due to the way they depict their heroines.
I will say this book, which does not deal so much with the
Tudors as with the generation before, the War of the Roses, a subject I confess
I don’t know that much about (my main source is Shakespeare), is quite
different than Wolf Hall. I preferred Wolf Hall, yet I did find it entertaining and worthwhile. I did learn quite a bit about Margaret
Beaufort, Henry VII’s mother, who, like Mary Tudor, is perhaps a bit difficult
to love. It feels a bit fan fiction-like
in places (though it’s difficult for me to explain why and how).
The book started slowly, and its use of point of view and
time foreshadowing took some getting used to.
Nevertheless, what seemed a handicap actually became one of the book’s
virtues when it allowed it to show Margaret’s character change over time. Personally, as a reader and as a writer, I
love flashing about and revelling in period and sensual detail. This is a problem in my own writing as I try
to tell the reader too much and hit them over the head with the history. Gregory certainly doesn’t do that in this
book, though at times the insistence on Margaret’s singular, first-person-present
narration makes things deceptively simplistic.
In one sense, it’s a good device for getting to know Margaret, while at
the same time being aware of the depth of her self-delusion, which grows over
time. The eponymous Catherine, Called Birdy was able to bring in ample period detail
through the voice of a beset teenaged girl, but there is not this sense of
effusion from Gregory in this book. For
me, therefore, the start was slow, a little ponderous, and a little too
visible.
I didn’t start to get lost in the thread of the plot until
the last third, which, admittedly, flew by and kept my interest. Perhaps that’s due to the fact that Richard,
Duke of York, had a major role, and I love Richard III, historical,
Shakespearean or otherwise. Gregory’s
characterization—not that we get much of Richard directly, and she pointedly
refuses to weigh in on the spine—interestingly supposes that Richard and
Princess Elizabeth were genuinely in love, despite the difference in ages, and
despite Richard’s extant, youthful, and affectionate marriage to Anne
Neville. What is frustrating is to have
the Battle of Bosworth Field told from a
bizarre halfway omniscient POV which has nothing to do with Margaret.
Margaret is especially memorable in her holy rages,
galvanizing her two most powerful emotional states, her religion and her
righteous anger. She invests a great
deal emotionally in her son, of course, but her towering, somewhat repetitious
treatments of Elizabeth Woodville, Princess Elizabeth, and all the Yorks, make
her an unusual female character.
Margaret tastes the realities of war far too late, and they do not make
her any less determined to put her son on the throne of England, no matter the
cost. I found the final few pages to be
the most riveting, and did not know—why should I, given I’m familiar only with
Shakespeare’s Tudor propaganda?—that it was no certain thing that Richard III
should lose on the battlefield, that he was beloved by the people, that Henry
was nearly friendless and quite inexperienced, and it was only his importation
of Swiss mercenary pike techniques that turned the tide (with, so it is
assumed, the participation of the Stanleys).
The transformation from Margaret, particularly devout child
through whom godliness was one way of expressing her individualism and
superiority, to a woman who could contemplate murdering the Princes in the
Tower was the strongest point of the book.
Gregory feels certain that Margaret would have been happiest as an
abbess in her own nunnery with access to knowledge and power, but her
circumscribed life allowed her to express her desire for ascendancy in marriage
alliances and through spy networks. Margaret
learns the hard way—which is yet illustrative for all of us 21st
century gals who may have forgotten how restricted a woman’s role was in the 15th
century—that her early marriage into darkest Wales, her loss of innocence, and
her difficult pregnancy are just a foretaste of the difficulties foisted upon
her sex and class in her era. I found myself
somewhat surprised that Gregory did not dwell upon Margaret’s shock on the
wedding night—surely these books purport to connect “us” more deeply with the
emotions of women of the historical/literary past—but perhaps she has had to
describe that aspect of marriage too many times in her previous books.
Gregory presents Margaret as having had only one romantic
relationship despite three marriages, that with her son’s uncle Jasper Tudor,
which appears to finally have some hope of consummation or at least
legitimization in 1485, when Margaret is 42 (positively ancient!). (Meaning there are some repressed love scenes
which are enjoyable but not smoldering.)
She has what in material/emotional terms is a reprieve in her second
husband, Sir Henry Stafford, yet it is a mark of her character that she finds
Stafford weak and foolish rather than kind and level-headed. In many ways she is more matched in her third
marriage, which Gregory thinks she arranged herself, to Lord Thomas Stanley (a
character represented, at least, in Shakespeare). Stanley is, like Cousin Bette, one of those
characters you love to read about but whom you would never want to meet.
I am interested to read The
White Queen, which looks at the very different fortunes of Elizabeth
Woodville, Margaret’s great rival.
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