BOOK REVIEW: Katherine of Aragon: The True Queen by Alison Weir

Just finished the first of Alison Weir’s Six Tudor Queens series, Katherine of Aragon: The True Queen. 

Most know little of Katherine’s life before Anne entered the picture – only that she was the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella, that she was Arthur’s wife first, that she defeated the Scots (eyyy) and that she had lost many children during her long marriage to the King, so this book was a really important read for me to get to know Katherine beyond her role as the discarded queen and wife. I wish more was made of as that Queen, the pregnant regent riding on horseback to defeat the Scots, the Katherine travelling from her homeland at the tender age of 15 but never questioning her duty. The intelligent and highly educated scholar. The Katherine who acted as the first female Spanish ambassador in England, and stood up to a king that even the fine lords of the land were afraid of. The loyal friend, patron, mistress. The Katherine who had to say goodbye to six beloved children, and yet never faltered in her faith in God and the Church, despite their repeated failure to protect her.

I have always admired Katherine of Aragon’s faith, her loyalty, her dignity, her kindness, her composure, her sense of duty, her love, her bravery, her strength.

However, I confess I was always a little confused by her stubborn rejection of the King’s wishes, mostly because it came at great cost to her and her daughter. I always imagined that if I had been in her position, I would have taken the offer of a nunnery and lived a happy life with my friends and daughters, forgetting the disgusting excuse for a husband who had cast me aside in favour of a younger bride. Or, I would have seized my nephew, the Emperor’s, offer to wage war in my name, and would have burnt Henry’s kingdom to the ground in vengeance for his ill treatment of me. A big part of me still wishes that Katherine had taken either or both of those courses, and in my head that is the ending I have written for her. Maybe that says a lot more about me than her though!

However, Weir has so skilfully opened the reader’s eyes to Katherine’s world that it all makes much more sense to me now. While it appears that she abandoned her daughter for the sake of her pride, she really saw standing firm as the only way to protect her daughter’s legitimacy, and thus her right as heir to the Kingdom. Her refusal to lie and say that her first marriage was consummated (and I do believe that it was not) should not be seen as a reluctance to admit fault or to maintain her dignity, but should be sign in the light of her sincere belief that to lie would come at the cost of the eternal damnation of her soul. Her dedication to the King, despite his despicable cruelty to her, was a result not only of the personal affection she had for a man to whom she had been happily married for a quarter of a century, but also the result of her upbringing in a world where a husband’s power was absolute and in which wifely devotion was seen as a religious obligation. That she believed this, and still denied him his annulment in order to protect her soul is thus all the more commendable. Her unwavering faith in the Pope and the Church despite their being the cause of so many of her troubles came from the true belief that God worked through the Pope and that His will was reflected in the Pope’s. 

Weir’s writing is so great that she had me constantly rooting for Katherine for all 598 pages – despite knowing that the story would never have a happy ending. I wept over the last pages as if I was reading the biography of a dear friend. I think it would cheer her to know that not only did she have the support of the common people during her life time, but that even 485 years later ordinary women are touched by her plight and sympathetic to her cause.

I am intrigued and nervous to move onto the second novel, Anne Boleyn: A King’s Obsession. Not only will it be weird to be thrust from the mind of one hero of mine immediately into the mind of her enemy, but I am also nervous to see how Weir portrays her. Although Weir is my favourite Tudor historian, I have always found her a little unsympathetic to Anne. While she is unsurprisingly the enemy in this book, I believe that Weir’s (and even Katherine’s) tendency to portray Anne as the manipulative seductress and Henry as the manipulated and bewitched victim is a symptom of the patriarchal tendency to blame women for the poor behaviour of men, and fails to take into account Anne’s own victimhood at the hands of Henry and the other men in her life. I’m intrigued to see what balance Weir strikes in this next chapter, but for now I am sad to be finished that of Katherine of Aragon. Despite my love of Anne and Henry’s subsequent four wives, to me Katherine of Aragon really will always be the True Queen.