The World in Her Image
Touchstone, 2017 Amidst the excesses of new state religions, deflected armadas, burned heretics, and decapitated wives, it's often easy to lose sight of the Tudor dynasty's less showy but no less fundamental excesses. For example, it largely created the impersonal, imperishable mechanism of state control – and state tyranny – over virtually every aspect of the lives of its subjects. It sharpened the art of censorship until the point was fine enough to penetrate the pulpit, the playhouse, and the public tavern – indeed, until ordinary people turned that point on each other without even being instructed to. It took the long history of English military adventurism on foreign soils and infused it with a brittle cynicism that effected a near-complete divorce from nationalism. It changed the nature of monarchy.Even odder than these things in many respects were the Tudor personal eccentricities, what might be called the collective Tudor psychosis. This touched on all aspects of rule – hence the popularity of Tudor fiction and biography ever since – but it's most glaring in connection with the most fundamental aspect of them all, the very heart of monarchy: securing an orderly succession.Perhaps that heart was faulty from the beginning – a predictable outcome in a royal house built on usurpation. Nevertheless, the founder of the dynasty, Henry VII, knew perfectly well the central importance of cementing his royal legitimacy with a solid line of succession (since his reign was plagued with Yorkist pretenders to his throne, he was constantly reminded of this importance even if he were ever tempted to forget it) – and yet, there he was near the end of his reign, publicly contemplating marriage to his dead heir's young Spanish widow, presenting his people with the appalling prospect of a 52-year-old king trying to father heirs who would certainly be children when they came to power (the psychological effects this possibility had on Henry's second son would play out to gruesome effect over the next half-century).Such a plan came to nothing, but Henry's heir, the young man who became Henry VIII, was famously obsessed with his succession, divorcing his rightful queen in part because their marriage produced no healthy male heirs, marrying his second wife in part because she promised she could, and paying a lifetime of sentiment to his third wife because she did and died of it. That healthy male heir, King Edward VI, fatally ill in his 15th year, threw his own succession into easily-foreseeable chaos by hastily drafting an
ad hoc “Instrument” designed to cut his half-sisters out of the line and put forward instead his cousin Jane Grey – a manifestly lunatic policy, considering that the two actual daughters of Henry VIII, Mary and Elizabeth, each possessed wills of iron and substantial numbers of armed domestic supporters. For her part, although Mary has lodged in the popular conception as a mad zealot tyrant, she was the only Tudor who played no risky games with the succession; she contracted a powerful alliance through foreign marriage, but when she realized she wasn't going to conceive an heir to that marriage, she muffled her personal animosities and favored the half-sister she hated as her heir, for the security of the realm.In that half-sister, the great Elizabeth I, the manic Tudor irresponsibility with the line of succession reached its peak and terminus. Elizabeth ruled for decades, constantly pivoting between feints of marriage possibilities and declarations of marriage's impossibility. She styled herself as wed to her nation, to her people; her council gradually grew too timid to remind her that such an arrangement would only be viable if she were immortal – otherwise, once this faithful bride died, her people would be left as her unprovided widower, vulnerable and floundering.Like all megalomaniacs throughout history, Elizabeth viscerally hated this idea, that she would one day die. For psychological reasons perhaps best left unexamined, this hatred almost always takes predictable forms: an increasingly artificialized physical appearance (with special attention paid to ever-more-preposterous hairdos), the
fetishing of games and pastimes that brought pleasure in youth, an absolutely crazed fixation with secrecy, a tendency to infantilize sycophants (and a compulsive need to hear their praise), and, most crucially in terms of hereditary rule, a stubborn unwillingness to make provisions for who'll sit in your chair once you've vacated it. By allowing herself to act like – and be declared – the Virgin Queen, Elizabeth was deliberately and very publicly announcing her intention to rule forever.In tandem with this, she worried and ripped at potential heirs like a terrier with a rat. The most high-profile and elaborately deceptive example was of course that of her kinswoman Mary Queen of Scots, but even despite the paranoia of earlier Tudors, there were always other candidates than Mary – and Elizabeth watched them unblinkingly. This, and not her loudly-professed virginity, was the reason she was so brutal with high-born courtiers who dared to marry without her permission, and it meant exile, house arrest, or Tower imprisonment for most of her closest cousins at some point or other during her long reign. The Lady Margaret Douglas, Henry VIII's niece, was only one such unfortunate schemer.One rival claimant Elizabeth's half-sister Queen Mary had had to deal with was the notorious Jane Grey, the daughter and granddaughter of traitors, who was briefly put on the throne by that “Device” of Edward's, thereby turning virulent the ambitions of her entire family. That family had close connections to royalty; Jane's mother was Frances Brandon, the oldest daughter of King Henry VIII's sister Mary, and in 1553 Henry's seriously ill young son and successor, Edward VI, made Jane his heir so as to prevent his kingdom from backsliding into Catholicism – with Jane's two sisters following her if she should die childless.The Grey girls are the narrators of
The Last Tudor, the new historical novel from Philippa Gregory, whose 2001 novel
The Other Boleyn Girl sparked the wave of modern-day Tudor-mania that has engulfed the entertainment industry and the publishing world ever since. Gregory has written half a dozen Tudor historical novels since then, remarkably without ever once succumbing to the kind of corner-rounding window-tinted sentimentalizing that tempts so many of the authors who've followed in her wake. The women in her novels – and these are all novels about the women of the Tudor world – have no illusions about how hard and coarse their world is; the struggle of a typical Gregory heroine is always for exactly the kind of normal domesticity most contemporary fictional heroines are struggling against. And in Gregory's novels, these women always face two obstacles: the unthinking brutish momentum of society at large, and the machinations of specifically dehumanized other women. In The Other Boleyn Girl, that latter obstacle is unforgettably embodied in Anne Boleyn, the brittle and black-souled monster who makes her sister Mary's life a protracted hell while simultaneously expecting sisterly devotion and never for an instant seeing the contradiction.
The Last Tudor is divided into three sections – one narrated by the eldest Grey sister, Jane, the next by the second girl, Katherine, and the last by the youngest of the family, Mary. And in counterpoint to the syrupy twaddle so often concocted about My Lady Jane, Gregory goes out of her way to give readers an extra-dehumanized version of this plaster-cast young saint. Since all three have royal blood in their veins, all three sisters live under a constant cloud of royal suspicion, first from their cousin Queen Mary and then from their cousin Queen Elizabeth, and as Jane realizes clearly from the start, the part their father plays in Wyatt's rebellion only increases this distrust. “This conspiracy means that our cousin Queen Mary must regard all her kinswomen as a threat,” he observes. “Elizabeth, me, Katherine, even little Mary, could be named Queen of England in preference to her. We all have an equally good claim; we are all suspect.”Jane reacts to this suspicion by fanatically embracing her own dehumanization, espousing a martyrdom to the Queen's Benedictine catspaw John Feckenam that distances her completely from her own sisters. When Katherine comes to visit her in the Tower in 1554, fresh from seeing their likewise imprisoned father, Jane strains to see it as a bothersome interruption:
She does not know what to say to me, and I have nothing to say to her. We sit in awkward silence. She cries a little, stifling her sobs in the sleeve of her gown. While she is sitting so close, gazing at me with her tear-filled eyes, I cannot study, write or pray. I cannot even hear my own thoughts. I am just gripped in a whirl of her regrets and fear and grief. It is like being churned in a butter-tub; I feel myself going rancid. I don't want to spend my last days like this. I want to write an account of John Feckenham's discussion with me, of my triumph over his wrong-thinking. I want to prepare my speech for the scaffold. I want to think; I don't want to feel.
She's adamant that her martyrdom will be on her own terms: “I won't listen to anyone who wants me to see this as a muddle by a fool, which leads to the death of his daughter, a pawn.”So too when it comes to Katherine's own section, much the book's most heartfelt. In 1560 she secretly marries Edward Seymour, flouting the dictate of Queen Elizabeth that nobody with royal blood marry without her consent. By the time of her adulthood, Katherine is a tough, experienced creature of the Court, and yet even she is stunned by the Virgin Queen's extravagant vindictiveness once Elizabeth learns of the marriage:
This is no longer a matter of politics, of strategy. This is not a queen avoiding an heir that she fears would draw the attention of the court away from the throne, this is a woman going to the ends of the earth to spite a rival. She is ready to lose the love of her life and nominate the enemy of her country as her heir, in order to keep me from a chance at the throne, and to prevent me living happily with Ned and our children. How she must hate me to go to these lengths! How she must hate the idea of a happy marriage with beloved children, if she would ruin herself to spoil my life. And how far might she go, to take vengeance on me for being younger, prettier, happier, and a better heir than she was?
The third Grey sister, Mary, seems to have been very short of stature and may have been born slightly deformed, and in Gregory's affectionate handling, she has no religious or royal ambitions at all – she's by far the most intelligent and interesting of the sisters, and her stubborn spirit in the face of her physical shortcomings is strengthened early on by her father (Gregory very enjoyably has each daughter remember subtly different parents) when he encourages her to ride a full-sized horse:
“You can't let something like being born small and a bit twisty stand in your way,” my father would say to me. “We're none of us perfect, and you're marred no worse than King Richard III, and he rode out in half a dozen battles and was killed in a cavalry charge – nobody ever told him he couldn't ride.”“But he was a very bad man,” I observe with the stern judgement of a seven-year-old.“Very bad,” my father agrees. “But that was his soul, not his body.”
Mary wants what Katherine wanted but never got (and what Jane refused to admit wanting at all): that elusive normal domesticity, a happy marriage to a man she loves, the freedom to raise and love her own children – precisely the things most often denied to royalty. Like that first Tudor Mary Gregory wrote about nearly 20 years ago, Mary 
Grey has no ambition to be a power at Court; she's not unassuming – Gregory never insults her readers by giving them characters who are rich and influential but not vain – but her main focus is on her husband and her own private life.Elizabeth hated the very thought of her kinswomen having such things, and that hatred drove her to a madness of disenfranchisement. She hounded Katherine through years and years of disfavor and house-confinement, kept her from a life with her husband even though the match was perfectly reputable, consistently denied her access to her child, even though the thought of such a child should have been intensely joyful to an old and childless monarch. Likewise Mary, who was hounded and harried through all the years of her life by her cousin the queen, who would strip her of everything and banish her from the sun, wait for years, then bring her back, then hold her off again – all with an urgent spite and smallness that even Gregory's dramatic scenery can do little to amplify. These were Elizabeth's rightful heirs; Jane's rigid dogmatism (and the not-inconsequential fact that she'd allowed the Tudor crown to be placed on her head knowing perfectly well the treason she committed by doing so) might have made her an unattractive choice, but Katherine, smart and capable, married to the late Queen's brother, would have made a fine queen in her own right. Mary would likely have made a fine queen. Either would have been an enormous improvement over the slobbering moron James, heir to a hostile kingdom, son of Elizabeth's most hated rival Mary Queen of Scots, settled on by Elizabeth in large part because he didn't excite her insane jealousies. The Tudor dynasty ended because of those insane jealousies, rather than because of anybody's theatrical virginity.Another line of succession also ends with this book: in a brief Author's Note, Gregory announces that this will likely be her final Tudor novel – she's moving on to other stories, leaving all remaining Tudor tales (including that of the actual last Tudor, Margaret Stanley, granddaughter of Henry VIII's sister Mary) to be told by others. In The Last Tudor, she gives readers the dregs of the dynasty whose strong beginnings she chronicled in The Constant Princess and The Other Boleyn Girl. This in itself marks an impressive reign – with no shortage of eager successors.____Steve Donoghue is a writer and reader living in Boston. He reviews for The National, The American Conservative, The Washington Post, and The Christian Science Monitor. He is the Managing Editor of Open Letters Monthly and hosts one of its blogs, Stevereads.