Keeping Up With the Tudors
Sisters of TreasonBy Elizabeth FremantleSimon & Schuster, 2014 Elizabeth Fremantle’s substantial debut novel Queen’s Gambit dealt with Katherine Parr, the sixth and final wife of King Henry VIII and was suffused with the peril of the old king’s Court, where religious tensions and the fact that the heir apparent was a little boy combined to create a toxic environment of suspicion and ambition. Fremantle’s new book, richer and more sure of itself than the first, is Sisters of Treason, and it moves her Tudor story forward one generation and takes readers straight into the chaotic aftermath of those dynastic tensions.Because little Prince Edward did indeed succeed King Henry, but he didn’t live to enjoy his throne very long, and during his protracted final illness, he was surrounded by ambitious men with their eyes on the ultimate prize.One of those men, John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, managed to inveigh out of Edward a Succession Device that settled the line on Frances Grey, the Duchess of Suffolk, who was the daughter of Henry VIII’s younger sister Mary, and the Device stipulated Frances’s heirs as well – which meant that when Edward died and Lady Frances stepped aside, her daughter Jane (who’d been strategically married to Northumberland’s son Guildford Dudley) became Queen of England, bypassing both Mary Queen of Scots (the granddaughter of Henry VIII’s older sister Margaret) and Henry’s two daughters, Mary and Elizabeth.It was a colossal blunder even for John Dudley, that captain of colossal blunders. The people of England didn’t know Jane Grey from a hole in the wall; they wanted their darling Princess Mary, Tudor to her fingertips, only daughter of their much-beloved Queen Catherine of Aragon – and Mary justified their faith by fighting for her throne, reclaiming London, and, in short order, executing John Dudley, Guildford Dudley, and young Queen Jane.To understate, this left the Grey family in a delicate position, distrusted by everybody, too exalted by half for their own good. This applied especially to Queen Jane’s two sisters, Katherine and Mary, whose narrative viewpoint governs Sisters of Treason, showing us the reigns of first Mary and then Elizabeth through the eyes of two very different teenage girls – of whom vivacious Katherine is perhaps the more typical flushed and florid specimen of the type, remembering her dead sister with a well-realized combination of envy and melodrama:
I remember, with a pang of guilt, how jealous I used to feel of Jane. Your sister is a marvel, people would say, a paragon, such intelligence, such grace. It made me so jealous I felt my head would spin right off my neck. But now I miss her to the core and I cannot think of her for fear that I will drown in grief. I must keep my mind on other things.
The two sisters survive Mary’s turbulent reign and come to maturity in the reign of Elizabeth, always with a ring-side seat for the antics of all the other glittering creatures at Court – especially the equally-explosive Dudley clan, whose risen star in 1559 was the Queen’s favorite:
I can just about see the top of the canopied litter in which she sits. Behind her Robert Dudley, who is my brother-in-law, for what it’s worth, swings onto his horse. Once mounted, his chiseled face and curled dark locks are easily visible above the heads. He had a look of triumph about him, an arrogance, as if he is party to something of which no one else is aware, but then all the Dudleys are like that … They all look as if the world is theirs for the taking.
“There is always someone who would like to take my place,” Queen Elizabeth caustically admits to Katherine a bit later in the book, and it’s this unhappy vigilance that animates the book, never alleviating because no Tudor monarch ever had a month completely free of insurrection-fear. In Katherine and Mary Grey – otherwise fairly shadowy figures in history – Fremantle has hit upon a perfect device to bring to life the multi-layered paranoia of late Tudor days. Fans of historical fiction will love it.
