Although I always enjoy a historical monarchical novel, it seemed especially fitting in the week the latest heir to the British throne was born. A pretty tenuous link but it meant I could post a completely gratuitous photo from the many I've enjoyed over the last week:
It was only after I'd bought this book that I realised it was not one of those five-a-penny Philippa Gregory copycats that I usually end up reading, but a novel which pre-dated Gregory by quite a way. This was first published in 1944, and even the film of it was made and released before Gregory was even born. This therefore was a bit of a find.
This is set later than the other Tudor court novels I've read this year and is the first in a trilogy. This first part explores the young Elizabeth I's life before her battle for the throne began in earnest. It therefore covers similar ground to The Lady Elizabeth by Alison Weir which I read almost exactly four years ago. There are several fundamental differences to the stories the two writers weave, but they are both grounded in quite a lot of fact.
Young Bess was hard-going at first and I found the first couple of chapters a bit of a chore. However, once the story kicked off properly (basically once Henry VIII was dead and buried) it became far more enjoyable. I was really rooting for Thomas Seymour even though I knew it was never going to end well for him. I always think the sign of a good historical novel is that you still hope for the best even when you know the real story, and Irwin has done that in spades here.
There were some distractions. The focaliser kept shifting, so whilst this was supposed to be about Young Bess, at times were in Edward Seymour's office and miles away from the young princess. Also a distraction, though almost certainly only for me, was that Anne Boleyn was constantly referred to as 'Nan Bullen'. What was better here than in Dunn's The Queen of Subtleties was that Irwin avoided having to rely on diminutives of people's names in order to differentiate between the many Henrys, Annes, Catherines and Edwards. It was just sort of a case of having to suck it up and realise that everybody in Tudor England had the same name.
Which brings me back around to the Royal Baby, in a way. There has been so much media hype around the birth, hype I've willingly bought into because I have a complete couple-crush on the Cambridges. For a whole 30 seconds my hair looked Kate-esque today - then it got out of control again. I looked positively polished.
Anyway, aside from my obsessions, reading all these Tudor novels and comparing them to how the media and general public deal with the monarchy now is fascinating, not least in some of the online posts I've seen about where Prince Philip is at the moment. I've read countless opinions about how he must be more sick than we know and they're keeping us in the dark (not as crazy as it may seem - Irwin claims that Henry VIII was dead for three days before it was announced). These opinions tend to then drift onto 'when the Queen dies' which highlights just how far we've come from the times Gregory, Irwin, Weir and co write about. One of Anne Boleyn's crimes was treason, a charge which could be laid at her door due to the suspicion that Elizabeth was not Henry's daughter, but also because she'd allegedly been heard to talk about 'when the King dies'. To suggest the monarch would die, at some point, in the far distant future, was treason. This seems utterly bonkers to us in the 21st century but was a real crime in Henry VIII's day.
So whilst people may moan about the birth of another generation of the Royal family, at least we can comfort ourselves with the fact that any speculation over the monarch's health won't land our heads on the block anymore.
Another gratuitous picture for good measure:
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