Review: The Other Queen

It's a novel. It's historical fiction. I'd definitely have to put more belief in the fiction than the history, as Philippa Gregory gives us a new slant on Mary Queen of Scots in this novel published last year. Told through the eyes of Mary, and the couple chosen to be her 'host and hostess', George Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, and his wife Bess of Hardwick, the Countess Shrewsbury, we are given a good look at Mary's life in the early days of her forced stay in England. As the imprisonment drags on, we learn as much about the Shrewsbury duo as we do about Mary. Bess is portrayed as a penny-pinching, money grabbing spy for Elizabeth's chief advisor (and Mary's chief protagonist) Lord Cecil. George is Bess's husband #4, and she's heretofore managed to better herself from each previous arrangement, somehow getting hubbies #1,2,3 to deed everything they owned to her, and not the children of any of these unions. In fact the book opens:

Every woman should marry for her own advantage since her husband will represent her, as visible as her front door, for the rest of her life...She can be pious, she can be learned, she can be witty and wise and beautiful, but if she is married to a fool she will be "that poor Mrs. Fool" until the day he dies.

She evidently signed it all over to George when she married him, because she wanted to be a Countess. Now however, she sees her fortune going out the window as the Shrewsburys must foot the extravagant bill for Mary (up to 30 dishes a night for dinner! and a staff of over 100 to be housed and fed, royal linens to be washed, etc etc etc). George on the other hand, being the great honorable Galahad wannebe he was raised to be, finds himself tumbling head over heels in love with Mary, but bound by honor to do Elizabeth's bidding. Until the end , he is duped by Mary, and finds it inconceivable that she would ever participate in any kind of plot against her cousin Elizabeth. Bess recognizes almost immediately what is going on and reports it all faithfully to Cecil. By a careful 'managment of the books' she arranges to have her husbands expenses paid for by 'loans' from her money, and when he is practically forced into bankruptcy, she gets him to sign the houses and lands back over to her. Clever woman our Bess... It is possible to judge Mary Queen of Scots from a number of different perspectives. Gregory's take that she was a conniving wench who used whoever she could to get what she wanted (a throne perhaps???) is probably close to being, as we say here in Maine, spot on. A good listen--well done by the three narrators. It's a great 'read' if for nothing else than to hear Bess of Hartwick expound the feminist views more appropos to the 21st century. Good on her if she was really able to pull them off. The book even ends with Bess' remarks the day Mary is beheaded:

And nobody in this world will ever call me Mrs. Fool.

Review: The Lady Elizabeth

i Historian Alison Weir makes some bold assumptions in this fictional account of the early life of Elizabeth I. In her notes at the end of the book, she indicates that while there is no absolute verifiable evidence that Elizabeth became pregnant by Thomas Seymour, there were enough historically recorded rumors to allow for the possibility. She takes these and other "possibilities" to provide us with a different slant on historical events in the life of the young 'Virgin Queen'. The story takes us up only to the day she becomes Queen upon the death of her half-sister Mary. It begins with a precocious not quite 3 year old and takes us through the 2 decades of emotional peaks and valleys that Elizabeth endured before assuming the throne at the age of 25: the death of her mother, the ensuing musical chairs list of step-mothers, her imprisonment in the Tower, her house arrest, the on again/off again availability of tutors to help her keep her very keen mind engaged, her numerous illnesses, the plots in which she (or her servants) may or may not have been involved, the constant moving from one house to another, her early teenage crush on Tom Seymour, the death of her brother Edward VI after 6 short years on the throne, her feigned re-conversion to Catholicism to please her sister Mary, the list seems endless. I both read and listened to this work--the audio is well done and easy to follow the different characters. I highly recommend this for fans of the era, although I'm not sure if I'd say this is the best place to start if you've never read anything else about Elizabeth. There certainly are no lack of other volumes on the subject.