Mary, Bloody Mary

Review also includes:

Beware, Princess Elizabeth, 978-0007150304

Mary, Bloody Mary seems initially an ill-chosen title until one is reminded in the Afterword of Mary I’s persecution of heretics during her five-year rule. For in this book, which charts the events that precede her reign, the quiet but steely Mary presents herself as heroine, a girl whose cosy court life is destroyed by her father Henry VIII’s abandonment of her mother, Catherine of Arragon, for Anne Boleyn in order to secure a (legitimate) male heir.

Colourful characters abound. The court is a knot of knee-crooking knaves. Tubby Cardinal Wolsey lurks, a shadowy spin doctor to the monarch, who is later supplanted by the wily Cromwell. Lady Margaret, Mary’s lady-in-waiting, is a droll but dutiful confidante. Firmly at the centre of the novel, though, is a powerful sense of the enmity between ‘Bloody’ Mary and ‘Bewitching’ Boleyn who, in Mary’s eyes, is a ‘birthmark-blotted, flat-chested, goggle-eyed whore’ that has bamboozled her beloved father.

Memorably melodramatic is the King’s impromptu audience with Mary, in which the idea of ditching Mary’s mother for Boleyn is first mooted. It ends with the egocentric and irascible king storming out with a rattled ‘Good day, madam’ to his unimpressed daughter. Memorably moving, given her poisonous influence on Henry and her ruthless fervour to be queen, is the description of Anne Boleyn’s execution. Suddenly a pitiful figure, she stumbles up the steps of the scaffold, defiantly sweeping her raven black hair away to expose a marble-skinned neck to her executioner.

Although the Mary/Anne conflict powers the narrative, Henry VIII looms large through the novel and the change in Henry VIII from the athletic hunt-aholic young man of the start to the club-footed bloated-bodied wreck of the end is striking. Indeed, Henry is more metaphor than monarch at the end, his physical deterioration symbolic both of personal corruption and England’s declining fortunes, too.

Beware, Princess Elizabeth is set in the messy aftermath of Henry VIII’s death where the boy king Edward VII – a puppet of his privy councillors – struggles to maintain any authority. Like Mary, Bloody Mary it too is told from the eponymous heroine’s point of view, but all too soon Edward is dead and, with monstrous Mary as queen and Catholicism now ascendant, Elizabeth finds herself at the mercy of scheming sycophants and spies. Defiance is dangerous and the pragmatic protestant is forced to submit to her sovereign’s will – in outward appearance at least.

With deft use of historical detail and narratives driven by plots and power struggles, these are eminently readable accounts of exceptional lives. Both books present a compelling insight into the insecurities of Tudor times, where marriage was for political needs not pleasure and where apparently pious rulers maintained their power and privileges not by Faith but by fear.