This took me a couple of false starts, but I’m so glad I stuck with it… even though it’s not a happy story, it was fascinating.
I felt terribly sorry for Katherine (Kate, as Henry called her) for most of the story–nearly all of it, really. She had a very brief interlude of happiness in her marriage, as Henry’s first wife. But we see Henry VIII through her eyes, so even though the story could certainly have been spun such that I’d have found him eminently hatable, through Katherine’s, I saw him as a petulant, spoiled child who never grew up. She adored him throughout (at least in this version), even as she watched the intrigues in court steal him away from her, followed by her one time lady-in-waiting, Anne Boleyn. Even though Katherine was portrayed as saintly, and never said anything against Anne even in private, the way the story depicted Anne made her the most loathsome creature I could possibly imagine. I was eagerly awaiting the moment when Katherine would learn that Henry had turned on Anne, only to find that Katherine died before Anne’s downfall. She essentially died because Henry more or less imprisoned her for refusing to acknowledge that her marriage to him had been illegitimate all along, and she wasted away as a result. Henry was almost as culpable for Katherine’s death as he was for Anne’s later, or for another wife named Catherine whom he also had executed for adultery.
I also felt terribly sorry for Katherine and Henry’s one surviving daughter, Mary. Now I understand far better why she became “Bloody Mary,” and where her hatred for Protestants came from. At least as depicted in this story, Katherine was a devout Catholic, and truly believed she was serving God as best she knew how–she was even willing to die a martyr’s death for her beliefs, if it came to that. Henry, on the other hand, had such obvious ulterior motives for the church split that his hypocrisy was evident to all, even if he himself could not see it–and this was why all the people adored Katherine and despised Anne. They could see it too. Mary was caught in the middle of all of this, forced to watch her father banish her mother, separate mother from daughter, and declare Mary illegitimate, while parading the smug other woman in court. And he called all of this God’s will.
I don’t know if I want to keep reading about all the rest of the Tudor intrigues, as the whole thing is so sordid, but I did look up the Wikipedia summaries of Henry’s life and Anne’s, and found that when I read the latter, I didn’t hate her nearly so much as I did while reading this novel. Anne was a much more nuanced character, depending upon which historian handles her, I guess.
My rating: ****
Language: none
Violence: it was there but handled well
Sexual content: present and goes into more detail than I cared for
Political content: historical only
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