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.
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