The Queen's Fool

The Queen's Fool
By Philippa Gregory


If you want Maggie to remember history. Just put it all into a nice story with some memorable characters and she'll have it all wrapped up.

For example. By reading The Queen's Fool, I am now clear on the succession of English royalty following Henry VIII (a character himself in The Other Boleyn Girl the book that made that little period of history clearer) all the way through to Elizabeth I.

This story starts after Henry is dead and his son Edward VI is on the throne (in name only, he's a child, so the country is being ruled by a regency council.) The narrator of the novel is Hannah Verde, a Jewish girl, who with her father has fled Spain to hide (and fake Christianity) in England after her mother was burned at the stake in the Spanish Inquisition. Hannah also happens to be able to occasionally see the future, a useful skill at a time like this.

She meets Robert Dudley (central character of The Virgin's Lover the other Gregory novel that taught Maggie history) and he takes Hannah to court to be a holy fool to the king, who is young and clearly ill. After a short while, she is sent, basically as a spy for the Dudleys, to the Princess Mary. Hannah spends the rest of the novel as friend and confidant to Mary both as princess and as Queen and later also to Princess Elizabeth.

What's great about this book is not only the history. (Edward VI to Jane Grey (8 days) to Mary I (aka Bloody Mary) to Elizabeth I... better than I knew it for AP European History.) But the complexity of the characters. Hannah is a brilliantly created, and genuine seeming person. A young woman who is forced to reconcile herself with conflicting feelings and web of complicated loyalties. The story takes her from a young girl who questions the value of her Jewish faith in the face of what it has already cost her, to a grown woman who agrees wholeheartedly to commit to a life as "One of the Children is Israel." She is loyal to Robert Dudley from the beginning, and for a time also in love with him. But she also has a deep and undying love for Mary, even in the face of the religious persecution that she inflicts upon England in a quest to return it to the Catholic Church. Hannah even shows affection, loyalty, a sense of duty and a deep admiration for the Princess Elizabeth, even as she plots to overthrow the Queen that she so loves.

But that fits. It's a complicated character for a complicated time. A character faced with a deep religious challenge at a time when nobody in England really knew what they were allowed to believe, or if they were safe in their practice. A character faced with conflicting loyalties in a time of political turmoil. It works. I loved it.

Gregory paints all the characters, even the royalty, as human, flawed but likable. Perhaps none more so than Mary. It's an interesting choice for a Queen who is known for executing large numbers of her own people. Yet, in this novel at least, Mary is sincere. She wishes nothing but happiness for England, and her devotion to the Church and returning England to her faith comes from a devout belief that her view of God is the true one. She is a woman tortured by the complications of court from her youngest days, when Henry VIII tossed her mother aside for Anne Boleyn. The story makes it clear how she has progressed from a girl forced to swear the oath calling herself a bastard to a woman who can rally the troops to her cause as Queen not once, but twice. But the novel also shows how her strength is tested, and how she is changed from someone so loved by her people that she can easily put down a rebellion to a queen that was so feared. How she moves from someone so merciful that she initially refused to execute Jane Grey, who was put on the throne before her, to someone who would so willingly bring down a brutal inquisition on her own people. The strength that she shows when she is ready to fight for her throne is contrasted sharply to the broken sobbing woman that we see before she dies. It's a compelling portrait.

The side plot to all the royal activity is the love story between Hannah and the young Jewish man that she is betrothed to. It's a nice story, and while it certainly serves to help us see how Hannah grows, to me it did not ring with the same intensity as her times at court. Still charming though.

In short, I liked this as much as the other two Gregory novels, both books that I could not put down. Reading this makes me want to go through and read all the books in this unofficial series in order, to see how the continuity flows. It seems now that Gregory has made the English royalty into complicated and beautiful characters spanning from young Catherine of Aragon to Elizabeth in what's now five books. We'll see when I get around to that, I'm certainly not allowed to buy the ones that I haven't read yet right now. ;-)

One book down, nine more to go before I can make my triumphant return to Barnes and Noble.

P.S. I'm going to try this label thing and see if it works. We'll sort by genre I think.

The First Step...

They say that the first step is admitting that you have a problem.

I have a book problem. Really. I spend money that I really shouldn't on books, and I LOVE every single minute of it. Really.

I also love Andrew, but he is a bad influence on me. On Sunday, at the Barnes and Noble in Nashville, I bought SIX books (admittedly, one was free, but the plan had been not to buy ANY books, and instead, I bought SIX).

So now, no more, I have made a solemn oath to myself and my wallet, with Andrew and all my blog readers (all three of you) as my witness, that

I WILL NOT BUY ANOTHER BOOK UNTIL I HAVE READ AND BLOGGED TEN BOOKS.

I have even selected the ten, and they are (in no special order)

The Queen's Fool
By Philippa Gregory
500 pages

The Female Brian
By Louann Birzendine, M.D.
187 pages (excluding notes and references)

Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found
By Suketu Mehta
542 pages

The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death
By John Kelly
303 pages (excluding notes and references)

The Third Chimpanzee
By Jared Diamond
368 pages (excluding notes and references)

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
By Robert A. Heinlein
382 pages

The Princes of Ireland
By Edward Rutherfurd
770 pages

The Rebels of Ireland
By Edward Rutherfurd
863 pages

Saving Fish From Drowning
By Amy Tan
474 pages

Quicksilver
By Neal Stephenson
916 pages

That's ten books. 5,305 pages. Ten complete blog entries before I am allowed to visit Barnes and Noble again. I swear to it. (Although, I do have to admit that I am almost done with The Queen's Fool, but I still have to blog it, and updating the blog is something that I have been rather bad at... so that's a start.)

Right.

I really really really love to read.