Women’s lives do not matter to anyone at this court. Before every queen stands her pretty successor, behind her a ghost.
Rating: 4/5
Trigger Warnings: physical abuse, some violence
Spoiler Alert! If you haven’t read the book, this review will contain spoilers so it’s up to you if you continue…
I’ve seen a lot of hype around Philippa Gregory novels lately and became vaguely interested in reading one of her many books just to see what made them so damn popular. Fortuitously, my sister found three in a charity shop and bought them just before we went on holiday, meaning I managed to steal The Taming of the Queen from her for just over a week.
The Taming of the Queen follows Henry VIII’s last wife, Katherine Parr, from the moment of his proposal to her, through her time as queen in a court where everyone seems to be baying for blood. In love with another man, caught between religious factions, and desperately trying to outlive a man who kills wives he tires of, we see a woman with incredible wit making her way through the royal court.
I gotta say, mixed feelings about this one. I really liked it, don’t get me wrong, but it took me a while to get into. I think this is largely because within the first couple of pages we had the line “swive me all night” (I understood the situation in which it was said, but I really wasn’t aware enough of the passion between Kateryn and Thomas for Kateryn to just come out and tell him to fuck her when I’d only just started the book), and the cliché of the male love interest telling the female she looked beautiful when she cried (I had a long conversation with my boyfriend about the many problematic features of that sentence - I won’t bore you with the details but the sentence pissed me off).
So not really a great start for such a much-loved book. As it went on, however, I really grew to love the book, and Kateryn in particular. Obviously we can’t know much about daily life in the Tudor court, but I imagine the day to day changing of who was in favour was pretty accurate to Henry VIII. To understand the powerful members of the court, I probably shouldn’t have started with the book about the last queen, but the family ties and religious loyalties became apparent throughout and didn’t hinder my understanding too much.
There was clearly a skew in Gregory’s writing, towards powerful women and the authority and intelligence they can hold. Some of my favourite moments were when Princess Elizabeth was observing the women surrounding Kateryn or the way Kateryn spoken to Henry, and you could see the seedlings of her queenship in the questions she asked. There was a beautiful bond between the women of court, one that is easy to relate to and delightful to believe was possible then as it is now. Kateryn was a firm believer that a woman can think just as much as a man can. One of my favourite quotes was from Kateryn reading a book about Mass which had been approved by the Privy Council: ‘I close it, and wonder how it is that men, even thoughtful men, can sound as if they never consider anything but always simply know’. To me it summed up her experience at court; those with authority would say one thing and swap to the next within a night’s sleep, but both times would claim to be completely certain. The men surrounding her would say anything to maintain their position, caring for policy only where it aided them, whilst Kateryn and her women seemed always willing to learn and explore options. I greatly admire her as a character and hope to learn from her resilience.
The end of the book was therefore incredibly frustrating. Henry forced Kateryn to submit, and whilst I really enjoyed the way this was brought about - I truly believed the privacy of the bedchamber to be the only place he could truly break her - it really upset me to see a once powerful woman who could use her words to wound the unquestioned men around her reduced to agreeing with everything her husband asked of her.
Whilst it was clearly coming, the ending still felt abrupt. I knew the book could end nowhere but Henry’s death, but I was waiting for it for half the book. I thought, maybe even hoped, that we’d be able to see something of Thomas after Henry’s death. The author’s note cleared up what happened historically, but I wanted to see some kind of fictional reunion for Kateryn and Thomas, some flicker of happiness between them, but there is maybe a page between Henry’s death and the end of the book. It’s a long enough book, I’m not hoping to add another 50 pages to it, but I did feel it should have come full circle; we started with Thomas and Kateryn putting their passion aside and parting as lovers, I wanted now to see them reunite - even just a smile across the court - and to know they would find happiness in Kateryn’s freedom.
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