Daughter of Henry VIII

by Rosemary Churchill

Book by Churchill, Rosemary

Genres: Historical Fiction, Fiction, Historical

Paperback

First published January 1, 1971

Reviews

[Carolina Casas · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best historical fiction about Mary Tudor without a doubt! I bought this a week before my birthday in one used bookstore and I was wary at first on reading it, but I was happy that I bought it. The author does a magnificent job bringing Mary Tudor to life. She is more than just a cartoon character, she is a hurt, emotionally abused woman who has to watch her world torn apart when her father leaves her mother for another woman, and when he tells her that he will have his way and nothing, not her or her mother, can stop him. And Mary isn't the only focus of the book. Anne Boleyn, Thomas More, Elizabeth Tudor, George Boleyn are all present here and they are more than just fillers, but they offer their own side of the story and at the beginning, when you think you are going to hate Thomas for being so stubborn, or even Cromwell for being so scheming, or the Boleyns for taking her mother's place, you realize they are stuck in the same boat as Mary. Even if Mary can't understand their position, they are victims of their own times and their own and the king's ambitions. So there really isn't anybody you can call a villain here. It was a refreshment from the modern fiction I read at the time, where the title characters were too good or too evil and everyone else was the opposite. Mary is a very multi-faceted woman who does what she can, as the rest of Henry's court, to survive. She signs the oath of supremacy which claims she is a bastard, a product of incest between her mother and her father, and acknowledges that her parents were never married. This has unintended consequence son her mental health, because her conscience keeps remind her of what she had to do to be survive. Chapuys becomes her one true friend, a man who is an opportunist, pragmatic just as the next man, but who genuinely grows fond of the lady Mary and the former Princess. It looks like a Cinderella story but it is not. Unlike the fairy tale, you know Mary is never going to have a happy ending and towards the end of the novel, when her father is dying, she realizes this when he justifies himself to her, telling her he was never going to marry her because she was too dangerous. As if Mary has not suffered enough, by this point she and Bessie have become somewhat bitter rival. Mary still sees her as her sister in every sense of the word, but Bessie doesn't see Mary as a sister or as a companion anymore. She is outdated to her, a rival and snaps at her to prove her points. The worst part is, that Mary acknowledges this and starts seeing Bess as her rival, even Chapuys and his successor tell her she will be her greatest obstacle but a part of Mary still holds on to the past, when she was just a child and Mary was still full of hope. And that is the point of the novel. Mary is not only her father's prisoner but she is a prisoner of her past. Like so many of us, she holds on to the memory of 'better times', when things were not so complicated and these memories, these hopes are what keeps her going.

[Dearbhla · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book a lot more than i had suspected I would when I picked it up. But it only cost me .25 cents so it really was a win win situation. It tells the story of Mary Tudor, who, as you may have guessed from the title, was Henry VIII’s daughter. The book begins her story after henry has already taken with that Anne Boleyn one. And this version certainly doesn’t take her side. It’s all pro Mary and her mother, Katherine of Aragon. And while it did bother me a little at the start the way everyone seemed to blame Anne for Henry’s failings the book actually does a pretty good job of seeming fair to all the characters.

Full review: http://www.susanhatedliterature.net/2...

[Gabe]

More of another account of Henry VIII's wives than that of Mary's life but given from her perspective.