MM#26: The Tudors
Mabel reflects on historical romances
Before I dive in, I just wanted to say that WE HAVE TWO BOOKS COMING OUT ON 3/18/25!!! The Morgesons by Elizabeth Stoddard is a moving tale of sisterhood set in coastal Massachusetts. One or Two by H.D. Everett is a metaphysical thriller about a woman desperate to lose weight. We are also thrilled to announce that we are being distributed by Artbook/DAP now, so our books will be available basically everywhere books are sold. Life is amazing and sweet. We will have more to say later! HEART <3
When I was in the seventh grade, my beloved history teacher asked the class where the state of Virginia got its name. I fearlessly raised my hand and answered that it was named for its “virgin land.” I expected the teasing to be immediate, since I had uttered the word “virgin” aloud, but I was protected by their relative naivete and my relative perversion. (Another middle school classroom memory consists of defining words found in a poem with my classmate, a boy named Christian. One of the words was “bawd.” We discovered that it meant “a woman in charge of a brothel,” to which Christian responded: “Oh, so she serves soup.”)
I expected to be embarrassed because I had used the word “virgin” in front of a bunch of twelve year olds, but instead I faced the much more profound horror of being told by an idol-teacher that I was wrong. She explained that Virginia was actually named for Queen Elizabeth I of England aka the “Virgin Queen.” I turned bright red. My forehead grew sweaty. I clenched my fists under my desk, Arthur-style. How could I have messed this up? I berated myself so intensely that I have shared and analyzed this memory with not one, not two, but upwards of four separate therapists.
Though the Virginia/virgin incident remains an infamous monument upon my psychological landscape, I feel that I was docked for a technicality. Yes, Elizabeth was the Virgin Queen, whose alleged sexual purity and unrivalled devotion to her country paved the way for her forty-five year reign. But historians suggest that Sir Walter Raleigh, one of Elizabeth’s “Sea Dogs” (the informal name for her privateers and explorers), likely saw the symmetry between his Queen’s reputation and the land he conquered in her name. In 1584, Raleigh received a royal charter “to discover, search, finde out, and view such remote, heathen and barbarous lands, countries, and territories, not actually possessed of any Christian Prince, nor inhabited by Christian People.” When Raleigh’s expedition arrived in North America, they encountered Algonquin people, to whom the land was hardly virgin, but to the Englishmen it seemed pure and uncorrupted—ready to ravish.
Ravish, indeed.
By the seventh grade, I was thoroughly corrupted, thanks to a woman named Philippa Gregory. At some point in elementary school, I picked up a copy of The Constant Princess (2005), the fourth of Gregory’s Plantagenet and Tudor novel series. Maybe my parents let me read this book because it had the word “princess” in the title—my version of my dad’s favorite childhood story about a neighbor boy whose grandmother gave him a subscription to Playboy, thinking it was a magazine for boys who liked to play. The Playboy incident stuck with my dad. To this day, when people ask him the secret to parenting, he has a one-word answer: negligence.
Of all my parents’ negligent acts, I am most grateful for the freedom to devour The Constant Princess, followed quickly by The Other Boleyn Girl (2001), and at least half a dozen others of the fifteen-book series. Though these books were undeniably smut, they fed my nascent love for history. I was riveted learning about Catherine of Aragon’s predicament: deny that her marriage to Arthur, Prince of Wales was consummated, so as to secure an engagement to his younger brother, the future King Henry VIII, or remain constant to her husband of six months? My mental picture of Catherine and Arthur’s wedding night is still vivid. Red velvet bedspread. A white nightgown. The crowd of ladies-in-waiting leaning against the bed curtains, trying to discern if the fifteen year old boy had sex with the fifteen year old girl. My memories of The Other Boleyn Girl are filtered through the 2008 film adaptation starring Natalie Portman as Anne Boleyn and Scarlett Johansson as Mary Boleyn, Anne’s older sister. Natalie and Scarlett vie for Henry VIII’s affections, traipsing around the palace in low-cut dresses whispering in some of the worst English accents of all time. Reading Philippa Gregory—named by AudioFile magazine “the queen of British historical fiction”—I felt the first flutters of horniness, and historical curiosity.
Gregory served as my guide through Tudor England, a place she made seem utterly beguiling. I fantasized about falling into a rip in the space-time continuum and ending up a maid in Henry VIII’s court. I made careful plans to pack a large supply of contacts before heading out on my Excellent Adventure. If I was going to live in the sixteenth century, I wanted to be able to see. (This reminds me of a great moment in historical-time-travel drama television series Outlander, where Claire Randall, a WWII nurse, is transported to eighteenth-century Scotland. In an early scene, a maid undresses Claire and marvels at her blemish-free skin. On the Scottish Highland in the time of the Jacobite risings, escaping a smallpox affliction and the consequent scarring of the skin was a rare privilege.)
I wouldn’t describe my childhood understanding of Henry VIII, his wives, and their offspring as particularly founded in fact. I still catch myself conflating the Gregory version of events with the actual history. But my empathy for his six wives—Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves, Catherine Howard and Katherine Parr—and their mixed fates, “Divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived,” as the mnemonic goes—feels valuable. I learned from a young age to see historical figures as real humans with complex urges, and that enriches my work to this day.
A few years ago, I returned to my roots as a historical fiction fanatic when I read Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy. Over the course of Wolf Hall (2009) and its two sequels, Bring Up The Bodies (2012) and The Mirror and the Light (2020), Mantel tells her own version of the events I first learned of reading Gregory. Mantel spends less time fantasizing about Henry VIII’s bedroom activities, and more describing the machinations of his chief minister, Thomas Cromwell, who orchestrated Henry’s divorce from Catherine and the creation of the Church of England (Henry had to break from the Catholic Church to annul the marriage). Mantel paints a vivid picture of Henry VIII’s court from the perspective of Cromwell, who rose rapidly through the ranks of English society. The son of a Putney blacksmith, Cromwell accumulated vast powers as a merchant, lawyer, and adviser to Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, whom he ultimately turned from to execute Henry’s marital and religious schemes.
Mantel’s magisterial research and writing transform Cromwell, an often overlooked and maligned historical character, into a complex yet sympathetic person, someone easy to admire who you’d love to meet. I think about Cromwell all of the time, and have even taken professional advice from him. In the Wolf Hall series, Mantel’s Cromwell meticulously tracks everything that Henry does and keeps a journal called something like Cromwell’s guide to the king, and getting and keeping power. I don’t remember the exact details, but I like the idea of Cromwell reflecting after a long day at court and charting out how to rule again the next day. I’ve done my own version at my job, lol. Now that I think about it, it’s kind of reminding me of Elizabeth Holmes’s leaked guide to successful living:
But despite the potential similarities between Cromwell and Holmes, I far prefer the sixteenth-century politician, and recommend Wolf Hall to anyone who will listen. Hilary Mantel died in 2022, a death mourned worldwide by the literary community. In 2012, she told The Guardian,
“The essence of the thing is not to judge with hindsight, not to pass judgment from the lofty perch of the 21st century when we know what happened. It's to be there with them in that hunting party at Wolf Hall, moving forward with imperfect information and perhaps wrong expectations, but in any case moving forward into a future that is not predetermined, but where chance and hazard will play a terrific role.”
I think this is meaningful guidance for those of us over at Mandylion HQ. If we can avoid passing judgement “from the lofty perch of the 21st century,” and can encourage our readers to do the same, then I think we will have succeeded! The future is not predetermined!
Love,
Mabel
i didn’t neglect to read this masterpiece