Having plucked almost all the low-hanging female fruit from the tree of English history, Philippa Gregory has had to stretch high into the branches for the subject of her latest novel. But she has come down with a peach. The Taming Of The Queen is set in the 1540s, and takes as its heroine and narrator Katherine Parr, the sixth and surviving wife of Henry VIII.
A pious soul with a scholarly bent, she was the first woman to publish original work written in English under her own name (The Lamentation of a Sinner, 1547); she acted as regent in England while Henry was in France; she brought the King's various children together in one household; and she acted as a steadying influence when the soul of the country was in the balance. In addition, she is generally thought to have been a deciding influence on the future Elizabeth I.
All in all, she is a good egg. But good eggs are notoriously hard to make compelling in fiction, particularly if they are housebound women. So it is a mark of Gregory's skill as a storyteller that she manages to make this novel almost indecently exciting, and brings Parr plausibly alive with a strong voice and identity of her own. For a start she gives her a racy Thomas Seymour (brother of Jane) as a lover whom she must forswear when the king proposes, and her thwarted lust for Thomas balances all the needlework she must do. But it is her relationship with the king that is so engrossing.
The Henrician court is familiar from other novels, but here the king Is already monstrously unattractive, crippled by his stinking leg ulcer, possibly also by gout, and so obese he is able to move only with assistance. Gregory has identified Henry's style of ruling as that of a dogmaster, setting his advisers against one another, so they are too distracted to turn on him, and there may be some truth in that, since it explains the stop-start nature of his governance which is unlikely to have been mere indecision. His relationship with his wives was similar.
He torments Parr, one moment encouraging her to speak as she likes, only to turn on her and require absolute submission the next. His disapproval is not expressed with a hard stare over the breakfast table: it is a one-way trip to the Tower, and Gregory shows how terrifying it must have been to live in a world where the law could be changed overnight on the whim of a paranoid, maudlin and bitter drunk.
