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211 of 240 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Good story, but remeber, this isn't a work of history, it's a work of fiction, December 24, 2005
This review is from: The Constant Princess (Hardcover)
Since Katherine of Aragon is vastly underrepresented in fiction about Henry VIII (people tend to focus of Anne Boleyn and Katherine Howard) it's nice to see a book just from her point of view.
This is the story of Katherine of Aragon, born to parents constantly on crusade against the moors (Muslims, Jews and other none Christians) in Spain, with a comparatively feminist mother for the time period. From the age of three she was betrothed to Henry Tudor's eldest son, Arthur. She was married, after great haggling by the royal parents, to Arthur when she was 16 and he was 15. There was a language gap, she spoke Spanish and French and Latin, and he spoke English, French and Welsh. But they got along. In this book the story of Katherine's first marriage is highly romantic and very sweetly written. This book is her life story, with a major gap between Princess Mary's (Later Queen Bloody Mary) birth and the time of the separation of Katherine from Henry so Anne Boleyn could be queen, told in third person and quite a lot of first person seeming journal entry type sections also from Katherine's view point (those parts can be quite boring.) This is a good book written about a largely ignored time period in the time of one of Henry's greatest queens and truest loves.
That said, I have some major issues with this book.
Philippa Gregory is a good writer, there's no question about that. But she made some very large historical presumptions in writing this book that I have problems with. I could understand if the book was supposed to be purely from a fictional standpoint, or had an author's note saying that pretty much all serious historians believe that Katherine and Arthur Tudor's marriage was never consummated, but this book doesn't ever say that. So, while this book is well written and a great story it's important for people to remember that it is fiction, and the facts in real life were quite different from what was represented in this book. No historian I can think of belives that Katherine and Arthur's marriage was consumated.
Henry's portrayal as hugely selfish I found a little offensive, considering that his goal in life of a male heir wasn't strange at all for the time period (he was the king and the last of his direct line) and wasn't brought up a total brat, he was royal yes, but that does not equel spoiled brat. Quite the opposit if you know your history. His parents were very careful royals (royal by right of conquest remember) with great people skills (they had to be charismatic to rule) who loved each other (probably) and loved order. He just wouldn't have been allowed to run wild in his childhood like he is shown to do in this book. Also the way Henry VII lusted after Katherine was odd, since there is absolutely no evidence that he ever cheated on his wife, or had a sexual relationship before he met her or after she died (the man was a prude and that is a fact.) Henry VII probably really did love his wife Elizabeth and while he did offer the princess of Spain his hand, it was mostly because he was a money lover who lusted after her dowry, not her.
Katherine has some very forward thinking tolerance ideas in this book, which are kind of strange and completly inaccurate considering her background and major Catholic belief system. In this book she seeks medical advice from a moor which is something that the real Katherine never EVER would have done. Her early life poisoned her gainst Islamic people and Jews to a total extent. That also makes it extremly unlikely that her people and family took on moorish customs while living in the captured moorish palace in Granada. Katherine was Catholic, and this was Catholic before Matrin Luther. If you were Catholic then even thinking about the moorish way of life with some tolerence was a sin. Also, the way Katherine lied in this book about the consumation of her first marriage would have-to the real Katherine-been a major sin, and thus not even a thing to contemplate.
If you want more, and very well researched info, about Katherine's early life check out The Six Wives of Henry VIII by Alison Weir, which includes a very long section on Katherine's life before she married Henry and quite a lot about the consummation issue with Arthur. It is an extendedly researched book by THE expert in the feild and concludes that the marriage was never consumated. This conclusion is based partly on the fact that Katherine was pregnant almost all the time she was married to Henry and clearly fertile. So, if the marriage with Arthur was really consumated (and if it was more than once as in this book) she probably would have gotton pregnant. No baby, probably no sex.
Also, just because I'm a hopeless romantic I like to imagine that until he met Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII really did love Katherine of Aragon, and she him. So while this book does have some of that, I would have liked to see that love story further developed. And if you're a romantic like me check out The Autobiography of Henry VIII : With Notes by His Fool, Will Somers by Margaret George, which has a very sweet Henry/Katherine early relationship.
So, while I have some major historical issues with this book, it is another good book by Philippa Gregory. Four stars for the story and the writing, but just remember, she's a novelist, not a historian, and this is not a true work of history, or even an accurate work of historical fiction.
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102 of 119 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A Disappointment, December 4, 2005
This review is from: The Constant Princess (Hardcover)
I'm a big fan of Philippa Gregory's novels, but it seems she's writing them too quickly. This one's subject -- Katherine of Aragon's girlhood and marriages to Prince Arthur and Henry VIII -- is potentially fascinating, as is the underestimated Katherine, or Catalina as she is known here. And without spoiling the novel's secret, it is bold of Gregory to make certain assumptions about Katherine's marriages. However, none of the characters is as well developed as in her better novels, such as Earthly Joys and Virgin Earth. The historical events are also presented superficially, with no real sense of the complexity of court intrigue at this time. Henry VII is sketched as a mere dirty old man lusting after his son's fiancee, and Henry as a spoiled adolescent. This novel also lacks the subtle supernatural touches that enliven Wise Woman, the Wideacre trilogy, and The Queen's Fool.
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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
More Fantasy Than History, July 13, 2008
I really, really wanted to like this book. When I saw it on the shelf and read its back cover, and I was very interested and immediately set about reading it. The idea of a romantic fiction story involving Queen Catherine and set against the backdrop of pre-Reformation England was quite intriguing. Further, I saw that its end date was in 1529 (five years before the break between Henry VIII and Rome), so it promised to be free from the controversy surrounding the 1534 Act of Supremacy.
In many ways, the book delivered. Its characters were well-developed and the dialog well written. I especially savored the depiction of the final reconquista of Spanish Granada, despite the fact that Ms. Gregory seems unaware that Moslems do revere Jesus and Mary (although they do not respectively acknowledge them as Son of God and Mother of God), and therefore would in all likelihood not knowingly have defiled an Ave Maria prayer in the manner depicted in the first chapter of the book (Granada, 1491).
Unfortunately, this book proved very problematic from that point onward. As the sincerely devout daughter of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabel (the Catholic) - under whose rule Catholic Spain completed its 800-year fight for liberation from the Moors - the Infanta would not have been prone to the repeatedly expressed sense of hyper-predestination that Ms. Gregory's writing ascribes to her. This stood out as a major anachronism pasted onto someone who in reality would have been unable to embrace such a mentality so alien to the Catholic and Apostolic Faith she professed.
Similarly, Ms. Gregory's hamfisted attempt near the end of the book to put the concept of peaceful coexistence between Christians and Moslems into the mind of Queen Catherine is just plain risible. Unlike our era, the 16th Century world believed in (and fought over, and died for) doctrinal and objective truth - hence all those wars of religion from 1517 to 1648. So that sort of secular Enlightenment thinking is as blatantly out of place in Imperial Spain and Tudor England as atomic warfare. (I would assume this is an example of the author simply projecting her personal ideology into the past.) Nor, I suspect, would the Infanta have harbored much in the way of positive inclinations toward the Moorish civilization that had subjugated her people from 711 to 1492, for that matter. (Moorish Spain was not a tolerant place, Ms. Gregory. That's why the Spaniards fought for 800 years to recover their liberty and independence.)
But the biggest sin that this book commits against the historical record (as an earlier reviewer correctly noted) is its unambiguous depiction of the consummation of the marriage between Prince Arthur and Princess Catherine. This is not some minor detail; it is **the** linchpin of what would become the single biggest issue in separating the English realm from loyalty to the Bishop of Rome. While betrothal and even marriage between minors were common among royals in that era (even by children younger than Arthur and Catherine's 15 years), the consummation would not be performed until the husband and wife had both reached the age of consent. Only then would the marriage be recognized by the Church as sacramental (and thus indissoluble). The sole reason that siblings-in-law Henry and Catherine were able to obtain a papal dispensation from Canon Law to marry one another is because Catherine solemnly vowed that the marriage between her and Arthur had never been consummated. And at no time in his subsequent conflict with the Church did Henry VIII ever attempt to contradict or deny her claim.
So if I am to accept the premise of this book, then I am to assume (against prevailing moral and legal customs, all of recorded history, and evidence to the contrary) that Catherine made an illicit vow with her dying husband Prince Arthur in 1502 to effectively deny their marriage (by which early consummation they would have jeopardized the sacramental integrity of the marriage - thus defeating its secular aim of cementing a permanent alliance between Spain and England), then continuously lied to her confessors (that's a mortal sin in Catholicism, Ms. Gregory), including Bishop St. John Fisher, for three decades (and to the womanizing Henry VIII, who in any case would have certainly discovered the real truth on their wedding night, and been most displeased) - and then, come 1534, when merely admitting the truth would have guaranteed Catherine an annulment and spared England and Rome the chaos of the Reformation (not to mention smoothed relations between England and the powerful German Empire, led at the time by Catherine's nephew Kaiser Charles V), she still chose to cling to falsehood - apparently to an unrepentant deathbed in 1536, although the book doesn't go far enough for us to find out.
Please, Ms. Gregory, considering the well-documented disparity between the pious personal life and moral conduct of Catherine compared to that of the wife-beheading Henry VIII, this idea defies credibility. Once upon a time, it was fighting words to malign a woman's reputation in such manner. (The aforemoentioned St. John Fisher, by the way, was the lone English bishop that openly defied Henry's Act of Supremacy - and he paid for that defiance with his head. So the one man most familiar with Catherine's spiritual state proved to be quite willing to die for the Queen's honor.) I recognize that this is a work of fiction, but historical accuracy is still supposed to count for something. Even in her grave, the saintly Queen Catherine of Aragon deserves better than such shabby treatment.
One unfortunately comes away from this book with a sense that Ms. Gregory is forcing her own 21st Century beliefs and social mores onto 16th Century characters and settings that are constitutionally incapable of supporting them. She betrays a blissful lack of comprehension of the larger religious issues present in the time period and on which the entire prevailing culture of pre-Reformation Western European Christendom was based. (This would seem to pose something of a problem for an author that has written several such titles covering this time period.)
This is a well-written, stylized work of fiction. But please do not look to it for historical truth or accuracy, which are entirely absent within its pages.
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