The machine in the god.

I’ve long been fascinated with Tudor England.

Me and a zillion other people, duh. There have been a hundred billion books and films and tv shows based on the hundred+ years that mark the Tudor period (c.1485-1600+), so somebody cares, obv. In addition to the films The Other Boleyn Girl and Anne of the Thousand Days and the TV series The Tudors, I’ve read (in audiobook form) a bunch of historical fiction novels by Philippa Gregory and Alison Weir. The whole business is a stranger-than-fiction chapter in human history.

These actual stories are all cheating in a way, I know, since they involve emotions and words—and in some cases actual deeds—which simply cannot be known. The authors have wide leeway to make characters; the blankness of the canvas allows space for creation. At least in the case of these authors (Gregory and Weir), though, I feel their use of artistic license is limited and carefully restrained—and after all something very like these events MUST have taken place in order to get from point A to B.

Most stories revolve around Henry VIII and his six wives. That central thread, which needs no summary from me, is just history at its most lurid and stupefying. Different and fascinating social norms and the pernicious insipidity of religion and the vast gulf between rich and poor and the ghastliness of a world without science—the telling of it puts all this center stage. But even those several individuals are not the whole of the chapter. The book I’ve just finished is Alison Weir’s The Innocent Traitor, about the Lady Jane Grey, also known as The Nine Days’ Queen. She was the great-granddaughter of Henry VIII, yet even she managed to get caught up in the quagmire he stirred up.

And always it’s the religious angle of these stories that grabs me, mostly because there’s simply nothing more lurid—nor, sadly, more commonplace—than people killing each other over arcane points of invented mythological hooey. Henry VIII had initiated a traumatic break from the Catholic Church in order to effect his divorce from Catherine of Aragon, and this to enable his marriage to the bewitching Anne Boleyn—all supposedly motivated by the need for a male heir to cement his young dynasty. Well, viewed through the lens of the moment (which these authors are trying to show us) these ARE rather pressing needs. His dynasty IS vulnerable if he cannot consolidate it with a strong male heir, and the Catholic Church IS standing in his way. He decides to remove the church as a rival to his authority, and his very Catholic wife sees heresy afoot—rightly, if we take the nonsense seriously.

But national matters do not settle with a decree, no matter what a sovereign might say. The newly formed Church of England, though declared to be the only legitimate faith of the land, was still doing battle with the much longer-established Catholic Church. And while the next king Edward VI (Son of Henry VIII and Jane Seymour) was Protestant and sought to keep his father’s religious reforms in place, when he died at age 16 without an heir the expected bloodline reverted to Henry VIII’s eldest daughter, the staunch Catholic Mary—daughter of Henry VIII and the aforementioned very Catholic Catherine of Aragon.

But there’s a problem. A couple of them. First, in order for Henry VIII to remarry and attempt to beget a male heir, each of his preceding marriages was declared null and void—which then illegitimized the offspring of those marriages. So Mary (mother: Catherine of Aragon) and Elizabeth (mother: Anne Boleyn) are bastards, and thus ineligible to inherit the throne. Henry VIII said so, and his son Edward VI reiterated it. This mechanism might be perfect for keeping Catholic Mary from the levers of power, but it works to keep the equally Protestant Elizabeth away as well. Good for the goose... (And it sows confusion in the average citizen whose sense of loyalty follows blood.) Second, if Mary’s ascension to the throne would surely bring about a Catholic Reversion—and the resumption of the Pope’s influence as a competitor to the King’s—the prospect of it opened a larger social wound that had not really healed. The church being a conduit for political power, the disposition of the official Church of England was something that very powerful people cared about rather emphatically. For each unyielding Protestant there was an unyielding Catholic. This is the stuff that wars are made of. What to do?

Henry VI’s solution before his death was a reversion to the bloodline of a previous generation. (There’s some dispute as to whose actual idea this was.) This line of succession led (after her mother demurred) to Jane Grey being declared the legitimate heir. Jane was the daughter of Frances Brandon, who was the daughter of Mary Tudor, Henry VIII’s sister. So the bloodline WAS there. But even after the garishly fascinating lives of Henry VIII’s two daughters are set aside, the details of Jane Grey’s story are too sadly delicious. None of this was HER idea; she had no such ambition—except to see the Catholic Church kept in abeyance. But her parents...  Pathologically ambitious parents schemed and plotted with their daughter’s life, hoping for personal gain—and the father, having escaped being beheaded for treason the first time, waded into the greedy morass AGAIN. The lure of power and wealth is like a disease.

He did not survive the second attempt. Nor, sadly, did she. She was brought to the Tower of London for her coronation and she never left the place. The official coronation never took place, and forces favoring Mary began to prevail. And thus the victors in this scheme were quickly made traitors and heads began to roll. Mary had sympathy for young Jane Grey (though not for her heretical faith), and was determined to spare her life. But after her father attempted a SECOND coup to put his daughter on the throne instead it was clear she was a focus for Protestant zeal and would remain a thorn in the queen’s side—even though none of this was her idea nor did she seems to want any of it. So she had to go.

You think as people are being led to the block that common sense will prevail and the slaughter of, say, a 16-year-old girl for failing to believe that the wafer and the wine *actually become the flesh and blood* of the mythological character will be averted. And over and over and over again you will find that instinct thwarted. And that’s why we read on and on. It’s much of human foibles and heroism, of the vagaries of human culture mixed with our base and animal natures, and all of it just close enough to ourselves that we can relate.

This was an 18 hour listen, and I found myself finished in a couple days—I looked for excuses to put on the headphones and go out for a walk. So, highly recommended. Next: Philippa Gregory’s tale of Eleanor of Aquitaine.