Queen's Gambit

By Elizabeth FremantleSimon & Schuster, 2013One of the advance-blurbs accompanying the appearance of Elizabeth Fremantle's debut historical novel Queen's Gambit comes from The Bookseller, and it's the kind of pithy ad-speak that's as sure to gladden a book's publicist as it is to sadden a book's author: “What Hilary Mantel fans should read while waiting for the final part of her trilogy.”The Mantel trilogy in question is of course her novels starring Henry VIII's conniving Master Secretary Thomas Cromwell: Wolf Hall, in which Cromwell facilitates the downfall of Henry's first wife, Queen Catherine of Aragon, Bring Up the Bodies, in which Cromwell facilitates the downfall of Henry's second wife, Anne Boleyn, and the upcoming conclusion, in which, presumably, Cromwell facilitates his own downfall by championing Henry's abortive and deeply embarrassing marriage to his fourth wife, Anne of Cleves. Although maybe not – maybe Cromwell deals with mousy little Jane Seymour, Henry's third wife, for the whole of the book and readers leave him hale and hopeful at the end. Either way, Cromwell's rotting head ends up spiked on London Bridge (by Henry's orders facing away from the city) long before the central matter of Fremantle’s book, the reign of Henry's sixth and last wife, Katherine Parr.The Bookseller's crass advice assumes those Mantel fans will gobble up any Tudor fiction equally, which might do a disservice to Mantel and certainly does one to Fremantle, who's created a convincingly atmospheric fictional Tudor world all her own in Queen's Gambit.Not that there aren't some structural similarities between her work and Mantel's – probably unavoidable, considering the extent to which Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies have succeeded in revamping the very molecular composition of historical fiction for the 21st century. Like Mantel's books, Queen’s Gambit is told in the present tense, and it keeps its focus so squarely on Katherine Parr that the effect is often the same.And like Mantel's books, Queen's Gambit employs so modern a sensibility that anachronisms practically spawn automatically. “Pull yourself together,” a distracted Katherine Parr thinks, and we're told the new heliocentric schema of Copernicus doesn't “fully compute” with her, and she feels unread letters are “burning a hole" in her gown, and so on.Some recurrent tics in Mantel's books didn't originate with her by a long shot, especially when it comes to fictional accounts of the last years of Henry VIII. They're even in the more fiction-flavored histories, going back almost a century to Francis Hackett's 1929 biography of the King, in which Henry's twilight marriage has notes of the nursery:

Still it was not in her [Katherine] to think any one evil. He was not a happy man. He had been much opposed by women, crossed, balked, wronged, misled. It was his plaintive art to convey that he was infantile – despotic like a baby but bewildered and helpless – and his empty life seemed pitiable. A woman with compassion, in whom pity linked with humility and kindness with the incomplete man who has missed the secret of happiness. She could not give it to him. But she could nurse him. She could, by his very incapacity to go outside the limits of his egoism, give him much without losing all that he could never find. He could never need the core of her being, which was Thomas Seymour's. And she could give him what he needed, and what his tormented country needed, a climate of goodwill.

Flash forward to 2013 and we find that despotic baby alive and well in Fremantle's telling, when at one point he's talking with Katherine, feels a draft, gets up to close a window, and accidentally pulls the latch off:

“This cursed thing,” he shouts, rapping it hard against the sill over and over, gouging holes in the wood – thud, thud, thud, splinters flying.His face is purple like a bruise and beads of sweat have broken out on his forehead. He is utterly at the mercy of his frustration – like a vast toddler.

When Henry isn't throwing temper tantrums in Queen's Gambit, he's bubbling and seething with malice; when the baby recedes, the despot takes over for a while. In her fantastic 2007 novel about Katherine Parr, The Sixth Wife, Suzannah Dunn's narrator confirms the reader's expectations that Henry has become a sclerotic mess late in life:

Four years, they'd been married. Kate had known him fairly well when he was gorgeous and big-hearted, but those days were long gone by the time she'd been persuaded to stand at the altar and think of England. During their marriage, he'd been a cantankerous, backward-looking monstrosity. No sense in pretending otherwise.

No use pretending otherwise, and no history of doing so. Half a century before Dunn, the great, indefatigable doyenne of historical fiction, Jean Plaidy, was already laying out the standard catechism on the subject in her 1953 Katherine Parr novel (also called The Sixth Wife):

The king lifted his stick and rapped the floor with it. Katherine drew away from him, flinching."We like not contradictions," he growled. "Your husband was a traitor. Why did I not have him in chains? Do you know?" He laughed and she detected the return of that indulgence which disturbed her more than his anger. "No, you do not know, Kate. You're too modest a woman to know the reason for that. Latimer deserved to go to the block, and I pardoned him. And why, think you?" He slapped his healthy thigh. "Because I liked his wife. That's the answer. By God, that's the answer. I said to myself, 'Latimer's wife ... she's a good wife to Latimer. Would to God there were more like her in our kingdom!' That's what I said, Kate. Here. Come Nearer. Look at me. Don't be afraid of me. Look at your King."

Since it's an express order, she does indeed turn up her eyes to look at him – and we're off to the races:

She obeyed him and looked into his face, noting the cruel little mouth, the pouchy cheeks that had once been ruddy and were now purple; she saw the knotted veins at his temples, and those eyes which suggested shrewdness and a certain refusal to face the truth. She read there, mingling sensuality and primness; she saw the hypocrisy, the refusal to see himself except as he wished to be ... [she saw] the man who had sent thousands to their death, the murderer who saw himself as a saint.

That hypocritical murderer has waddled out of Plaidy's fiction and straight into Fremantle's, where a reliable character assures us that “He is like two different men – one lecherous and one raging – and both of them would strike fear into the hearts of most people.”Most people, including Henry himself, who can go from asking Katherine Parr if she'll give him a son “like a small boy asking for a sweetmeat” to trembling in the aftermath of a fit of rage, wondering if perhaps he might secretly be Jack the Ripper, or some such:

“I am afraid of myself sometimes, Kit.” He looks collapsed and forlorn, eyes drooping, “These rages come upon me. It is as if I am someone else. As if I am possessed … I feel sometimes as if I'm losing my mind. The weight of England bears down on me…”

Those fits of rage will be familiar to readers of Hilary Mantel's books, where the only one-dimensional character she allows herself is Henry. A squinting, scheming trimmer like Cromwell is given an inner nobility of Albert Schweitzer proportions, but Henry is a frothing lunatic from the very first scene in which we make his acquaintance in Wolf Hall:

“You said I was not to lead my troops [Henry says] You said if I was taken, the country couldn't put up the ransom. So what do you want? You want a king who doesn't fight? You want me to huddle indoors like a sick girl?”“That would be ideal, for fiscal purposes.” [Cromwell responds]The king takes a deep ragged breath. He's been shouting. Now – and it's a narrow thing – he decides to laugh.

Such a casual thing, that ‘He's been shouting' – the reader, well prepared by the long indoctrination of Tudor fiction, scarcely pauses over how irretrievably odd it is. He hasn't been shouting – he and Cromwell have been having a private conversation while Henry's courtiers wait just out of earshot. He hasn't been shouting, because nobody but a certifiable loon would suddenly just matter-of-factly start shouting in such a circumstance. But Mantel casually informs us such was the case – not because she believes it to be reliably-portrayed human behavior, but because she knows readers won't have any problem swallowing it.That monstrous, insane Henry VIII is the one we get in Queen's Gambit, only if anything he's even more odious than in previous fictional incarnations (leaving aside Hackett's nonfiction work here, since it's doubtful anybody since the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V – or perhaps Catherine of Aragon – has ever hated Henry as thoroughly as Hackett ended up hating him). Gone is the Christian prince; gone is the baseline human being; instead we get a fifty-something king who spends a great deal of his time either purple with pointless rage or else prepping for the Tudor road-show of Tinto Brass' Caligula:

"Your leg pains you?” [Katherine asks, the sap]"What do you think?” he spits."Can I do something to take your mind off it?”"Now that's more like it.” He grabs at her partlet, pulling it open and shoving a paw in, as a bear might look for honey in a hole in a tree, kneading her breast, half tugging it out, so it is painfully trapped by the tight edge of her bodies like a squelch of white clay. “Not the paps of a bitch in whelp are they, Wife?”

Readers who want a Henry who isn't quite such a buffoonish cartoon will have to look elsewhere than Fremantle's book – or anybody else's book, for that matter. The strutting, screaming Henry (and his Freudian counterpart, who dreams of his poor dead brother Arthur and spends more time worrying about his own sanity than Woody Allen) is just too attractive a foil for novelists to resist. It's perhaps the, as it were, crowning irony of Tudor historical fiction that every court creature in the breviary – from the insignificant ladies-in-waiting to the oily Cromwell to the loathsome Jane Rochfort – has at one point or another merited a sympathetic novel, but not the man in the center seat.It's a pity, especially for Queen's Gambit, since nine-tenths of the weird allure in Katherine Parr's story comes from the fact that she walked willingly into the world of that complex and problematic man and managed to survive when four of her five predecessors hadn't (the fifth, Anne of Cleves, publicly commented that in marrying Henry Katherine was taking a great burden onto herself – a typically crude allusion to Henry's weight in the marriage bed). Reduce the man to a monster, and you reduce the remarkable reality of the only woman who ever managed to safely love him.Fremantle has carefully researched that woman. Her Katherine Parr is more multi-layered than Plaidy's and more stately than Dunn's, and more convincingly flawed than any other fictional version of the character, with the possible exception of the John Prebble’s wonderful evocation in the “Katherine Parr” chapter of the 1970 BBC production of “The Six Wives of Henry VIII” (where Katherine is played with mesmerizing human intensity by Rosalie Crutchley). All her complexity is here, all her humanity, and a good deal of her tribulations.Her tribulations in life read like the stuff of fiction. She was born in 1512 to Sir Thomas Parr, a prosperous north country lord and trusted servant of Henry VIII, just as her mother was lady-in-waiting to Henry's Queen Catherine. In 1529, when young Katherine was still in her teens, she was married to Sir Edward Borough, the sickly scion of an old Lincolnshire family. He died in 1533, and the following year Katherine married Sir John Neville, baron Latimer, a staunch Catholic whom Henry suspected of complicit sympathy with the northern rebels who raised the so-called Pilgrimage of Grace in 1536 against the dissolution of the monasteries and the enclosing of monastery lands. Latimer's conflicted loyalties led to some tense moments at his Yorkshire stronghold of Snape Castle, and Fremantle's novel is the first to sketch so dramatically how those tensions might have affected Katherine, both then and later.Latimer, who was much older than Katherine, died in 1543, leaving her a wealthy, landed widow at age 31. Her steady demeanor and her winning affection for the children of the court brought her to the attention of Henry, who'd been alone for over a year since he'd had Catherine Howard executed. Fremantle has one of her characters claim Katherine's physical allures attracted the king's eye: “Those flashing hazel eyes and ebullient laugh could draw the moon from the sky,” and so forth, although Henry himself sees other qualities too: “You do not humor me, Kit. You are the only one with the courage to speak the truth. I noticed you first for that.” They were married in July of 1543 at Hampton Court, and Katherine set about uniting Henry's scattered children in one household and encouraging them in intellectual and spiritual pursuits – writing, translating – that flattered their typical Tudor linguistic precocity.She was in every way a daring, unusual, almost unbelievable choice for Henry to make – but only the real Henry, the intelligent, passionate, complicated human being, not the pap-snapping half-witted lecher toying with his latest plaything before inventing a trap in which to catch her. That Henry, growing more spiritually conservative with every stiffening year, would not have married a woman of such reformist, Erasmian zeal as Katherine; that Henry, with a middle-aged man's touchy personal pride, would hardly have married a woman who'd been married twice before; that Henry would not have written her the hurried but affectionate notes from the brief season of warfare he inflicted on France in 1544; that Henry would not have named Katherine as his Regent in his absence, and yet Regent she was, governing the country with the dispatch and efficiency she'd learned in managing the Latimer land-holdings, as Fremantle captures quite well:

The atmosphere has warmed a little. She has to prove herself fit to rule in each and every meeting – has to stand firm, divest herself entirely of her femininity, no chinks. Not a man at this table believes a woman capable of ruling.

In Queen's Gambit, she often confesses a longing for those days as a powerful widow – and her confessor is often Robert Huicke, a mere name in history whom Fremantle invests with scene-stealing three dimensionality (by contrast, Katherine's maidservant, Dorothy “Dot” Fownten, gets as much page-time as Huicke but stubbornly remains something of an upstairs/downstairs stereotype). Katherine can confide in Huicke because she knows he remembers the same earlier time – although in scene after scene, it seems like she’s worried he won't remember his own name:

"This poor man," she said, "he was crushed when a wall collapsed on my land. It pains me, Huicke, that I have to be here and cannot offer comfort to his widow. I should be there but I am compelled to stay. Think, Huicke, I could be pickling and bottling in the kitchens, preserving summer fruits, drying herbs, making remedies, riding out to visit my tenants, looking after things, but I am here surrounded by all this." She spread out her arms with a pained look.“The Queen's rooms, Huicke.”

The novel's climax turns on the familiar story of Katherine's narrow escape from the fate that claimed so many of her predecessors. The story - which Tudor historian John Guy is far from the only person to suspect is largely composed of staged theatrics designed to keep the court in line - goes that Henry, incensed at Katherine's pedantic ways regarding religious reform, authorized the Queen's enemies to draw up a warrant for her arrest, but that she got to Henry first and pleaded her case so winningly that when the arrest party showed up minutes later, Henry roundly abused them and sent them packing. In reality, Katherine showed icy self-collection in the very teeth of her probable doom; in Queen's Gambit, she and Huicke concoct a plan that literally would not have occurred to to their historical counterparts in a month of Sundays.Far more realistic is Fremantle's recurrent portrayal of Katherine's awkward feelings about being at court, indeed being its pinnacle. She frequently sighs over her vast royal authority and sees no end to its obligations:

The King has always feared that the Howards might become too powerful. She can see her Henry is looking death in the face, for she knows only too well a dying man's demeanor. He fears for the aftermath with the Prince still so young. It is she who will be Regent until Edward reaches his majority, or so the will says. She imagines rising to it, pushing through the reforms, becoming a great Queen remembered for bringing England firmly into the true faith. But a part of her would like nothing more than to live out her life in some small palace such as this, in obscurity – to be rid of the crushing weight of queenship.

In the end it didn't matter: Henry died at the beginning of 1547, and half a year later Katherine married Thomas Seymour, the turbulent and high-spirited uncle of the new king, Edward VI. She died a week after giving birth to her very first child, a daughter, in 1548 (the daughter soon disappears from the history), and although a great many things distinguished her - the most intelligent of Henry's wives, the first widow among them, the first to reconcile him with his own children, the first woman to publish a book under her own name in English, one of the few people to argue with Henry and yet remain friends with him - she's chiefly remembered today as the last part of the familiar Henry VIII jingle: 'Divorced, beheaded, survived, divorced, beheaded, survived.'Elizabeth Fremantle's novel does more than any previous one on the subject to demonstrate how much more there was to Katherine Parr than a simple 'survived.' It succeeds in almost every way - except for the inconveniencing little subject of the lady's third husband, the hulking, shambling, scabrous, grabby-handed, spittle-spewing, ham-chewing, semi-demented old man who couldn't have played intricate diplomatic games with kings, emperors, and popes to save his life; that squint-eyed tantrum-throwing despotic baby. Him again.____Steve Donoghue is a writer and reader living in Boston with his dogs. He’s recently reviewed books for The Washington Post, The National, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, Historical Novel Review Online, and The Quarterly Conversation. He is the Managing Editor of Open Letters Monthly, and hosts one of its blogs, Stevereads.