by As cousin to Henry’s second wife, the ill-fated Anne Boleyn, Kathryn Howard knows better than most the danger of being favored by the king. Yet she is a Howard, and ambition is as natural to her as breathing. So she assumes the role that Henry assigns her–his rose without a thorn; his young, untouched child bride; his adored, and adoring fifth wife.
But it is all untrue. Passion runs as deep as ambition in the Howards, and Kathryn is no stranger to a lover’s embrace. It is only the first of many lies that she will have to tell to gain the throne and keep it. Yet the path that she will tread to do so is one fraught with the same dangers that cost Queen Anne her head.
Of all the wives of King Henry VIII of England, Kathryn Howard, his fifth wife, is least known and very poorly understood. She came into the king’s life and into his bed at a time when he was more worried about his aging and flagging virility, and after playing husband to four other women. History has portrayed her as a flighty hussy that saw her chance to advance her family and she grabbed it.
Not all of that is untrue, but Sarah Hoyt has brought us a marvelous novel that begins at a time when Kathryn’s cousin, Anne Boleyn, was about to be crowned queen. Kathryn was only about 10 or 12 years old. (Her father couldn’t remember how old she was.) She was beautiful even as a child and as she grew her beauty continued to astound. She attracted the attention of her tutors–and I don’t mean academic attention necessarily–as well as becoming an object of interest by her family as their greed and ambition saw Kathryn as a pawn in their plans for family advancement. Even though they were impoverished, the Howards were still aristocrats and as such had access to the royal court. Kathryn was not far into her teen years when she took her first lover, a man who truly desired her almost to the point of obsession, but whose attentions would in no way advance the family politically. There was talk of her betrothal to a gentleman named Thomas Culpepper and Kathryn was completely accepting of such a match. It was only after she was chosen to be a lady-in-waiting to Henry’s fourth queen, Queen Anne of Cleves, that she came to the attention of the king. He saw her as untouched, modest, quiet, unambitious, caring, and gentle. While not completely accurate a picture of her, in some sense she was all those things. Yet little did the king recognize that the insidious political hand of the Howards would cuckhold him and bring Kathryn’s life to an end.
I think of all Henry’s wives Kathryn is the saddest of all. There was about her a simplicity mixed in with a sense of the clever, a desire for power but at the same time, wanting to be loved for who she was. In some respects she projected that same sense of personal caring to Henry and that is probably what was so winsome about her. She was also probably his last hope for additonal male heirs and even though her marital relationship became a disappointment to her early on, I happen to think that she was of a mind to make her marriage a happy and satisfying one. Yet she was young and vital and was one of those persons who forgot that satisfying her personal needs didn’t necessarily square with the political realities of her life. At her life’s end, as she stood next to the executioner and the block where she would soon lay her head, she looked for a long time toward those gathered around the scaffold and finally said: “I want you to know that though today I die a queen of England, I would much rather have lived the wife of Thomas Culpepper.”
This story is chock full of historical information so it is an education in and of itself. All the main characters that moved across the historical stage of Henry’s life and reign are here, and Hoyt has given us a wonderfully full back story that includes so many personalities and historical characters many of us little know. Add in the characters she has created and this story literally flows over the brim of the literary cup. Hoyt has also portrayed Henry as he surely was in those latter days of his life. His health was beginning to fail under the burden of his eating and drinking excesses; his worries over his legacy ate into his good moods more and more; his sense of never being able to “pull it all together” made him not only old in body but old in spirit. Perhaps that, as much as anything, drew him to Kathryn as possibly his last hope for feeling young again. He really didn’t live too many years after Kathryn’s death–only one final wife–a widow, Catherine Parr, who became more of a nurse than a wife. They were married only a very few years. And the truly sad fact about Henry was that he was probably one of the brightest monarchs to rule England. He was tall, well-built in physique, spoke Latin and several other languages, was a prolific religious writer (the pope granted him the title “Defender of the Faith”), a first class diplomat, and a true lover of his people. In spite of all his shenanigans maritally, his people adored him. Would that he could have valued that more as a true legacy of sons.
This is one of those historical novels that doesn’t come along very often: well-written, well-researched, written by an author that knows and uses well the language and who has that particular knack of drawing word pictures for the reader’s imagination. It is engaging for the mind as well as entertaining. There are times when the overwhelming cast of characters seemed to cloud the main story, but that was the was things were then. Monarchs may have had money and power and the say over life and death, but they seldom had any privacy. So when all is said and done, this is a beautifully written book that should be read with enthusiasm by all historical romance lovers.
I give it a 4.75 out 5.
You can read more from Judith at Dr. J’s Book Place