Philippa Gregory 3-Book Tudor Collection 1 Read online

  I will own a cat and not fear being called a witch, I will dance and not fear being named a whore. I shall ride my horse and go where I please. I shall soar like a gyrfalcon. I shall live my own life and please myself. I shall be a free woman.

  It is no small thing, this, for a woman: freedom.

  Author’s Note

  Anne of Cleves and Katherine Howard are the two wives of Henry VIII that we know least; as is so often the case, we think we know them well. In this fictional account of the real facts I have tried to get past the convention that one wife was ugly and the other stupid, to consider the lives and circumstances of these two very young women who were, so briefly, the most important women of England, successive wives to a man on the brink of madness.

  The main historical facts of the characters are as I describe them here. I could discover little detail about Anne of Cleves’ childhood; but I thought the illness of her father and the dominance of her brother were interesting in the light of her later decision to take her chance on staying in England. Her prettiness and her charm were widely reported at the time and are shown in the painting by Holbein. I believe it was the disastrous meeting at Rochester that caused Henry to reject her out of grievously wounded vanity. The conspiracy to accuse her of witchcraft, or treason, as an alternative to divorce is well documented, especially by the historian Retha Warnicke, and was clearly as much of a lie as other evidence about her marriage given to the inquiry.

  Katherine Howard’s childhood is better known, but drawn almost wholly from evidence given against her. My fictional account explores the historical facts and my bias is towards understanding Katherine as a young girl at a court of far older and more sophisticated people. Her surviving letter to Thomas Culpepper shows, I believe, a very young girl sincerely in love.

  The character of Jane Boleyn, Lady Rochford, is drawn from history – few novelists would dare to invent such a horror as she seems to have been. She did indeed give the crucial evidence that led to the beheading of her husband and sister-in-law, and there seems to be no explanation for this but jealousy and a determination to preserve her inheritance. She was at the deathbed of Jane Seymour, and gave evidence that could have been used to send Anne of Cleves to the scaffold (as I describe). The evidence against her and her own confession clearly show that she encouraged Katherine Howard’s adultery, fully understanding the fatal danger to the young queen. The suggestion that she did this with the purpose of getting the queen pregnant is my own. I suggest that she pretended madness in the hope of escaping the scaffold, but I hope I show, both in this book and in The Other Boleyn Girl, that Jane Boleyn was never wholly sane.

  On my website philippagregory.com there is a family tree and more background information about the writing of this novel.

  The following works have been invaluable in the research for this book:

  Baldwin Smith, Lacey, A Tudor Tragedy, The Life and Times of Catherine Howard, Jonathan Cape, 1961

  Bindoff, S. T., Pelican History of England: Tudor England, Penguin, 1993

  Bruce, Marie Louise, Anne Boleyn, Collins, 1972

  Cressy, David, Birth, Marriage and Death: Ritual Religions and the Life-cycle in Tudor and Stuart England, OUP, 1977

  Darby, H. C., A New Historical Geography of England before 1600, CUP, 1976

  Denny, Joanna, Katherine Howard, A Tudor Conspiracy, Portrait, 2005

  Elton, G. R., England under the Tudors, Methuen, 1955

  Fletcher, Anthony, Tudor Rebellions, Longman, 1968

  Guy, John, Tudor England, OUP, 1988

  Haynes, Alan, Sex in Elizabethan England, Sutton, 1997

  Hutchinson, Robert, The Last Days of Henry VIII, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2005

  Lindsey, Karen, Divorced, Beheaded, Survived, A Feminist Reinterpretation of the Wives of Henry VIII, Perseus Publishing, 1995

  Loades, David, The Tudor Court, Batsford, 1986

  Loades, David, Henry VIII and His Queens, Sutton, 2000

  Mackie, J. D., Oxford History of England: The Earlier Tudors, OUP, 1952

  Mumby, Frank Arthur, The Youth of Henry VIII, Constable and Co., 1913

  Plowden, Alison, The House of Tudor, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1976

  Plowden, Alison, Tudor Women: Queens and Commoners, Sutton, 1998

  Randall, Keith, Henry VIII and the Reformation in England, Hodder, 1993

  Robinson, John Martin, The Dukes of Norfolk, OUP, 1982

  Routh, C.R.N., Who’s Who in Tudor England, Shepheard-Walwyn, 1990

  Scarisbrick, J. J., Yale English Monarchs: Henry VIII, YUP, 1997

  Starkey, David, Henry VIII: A European Court in England, Collins & Brown, 1991

  Starkey, David, The Reign of Henry VIII: Personalities and Politics, G. Philip, 1985

  Starkey, David, Six Wives: The Queens of Henry VIII, Vintage, 2003

  Tillyard, E. M. W., The Elizabethan World Picture, Pimlico, 1943

  Turner, Robert, Elizabethan Magic, Element, 1989

  Warnicke, Retha M., The Marrying of Anne of Cleves, CUP, 2000

  Warnicke, Retha M., The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn, CUP, 1991

  Weir, Alison, Henry VIII: King and Court, Pimlico, 2002

  Weir, Alison, The Six Wives of Henry VIII, Pimlico, 1997

  Youings, Joyce, Sixteenth-Century England, Penguin, 1991

  About the Author

  Philippa Gregory is an internationally renowned author of historical novels. She holds a PhD in eighteenth-century literature from the University of Edinburgh. Works that have been adapted for television include A Respectable Trade, The Other Boleyn Girl and The Queen’s Fool. The Other Boleyn Girl is now a major film, starring Scarlett Johansson, Natalie Portman and Eric Bana. Philippa Gregory lives in the North of England with her family.

  Also by Philippa Gregory

  The Tudor Court Series

  The Constant Princess

  The Other Boleyn Girl

  The Boleyn Inheritance

  The Queen’s Fool

  The Virgin’s Lover

  The Other Queen

  The Wideacre Trilogy

  Wideacre

  The Favoured Child

  Meridon

  Earthly Joys

  Earthly Joys

  Virgin Earth

  The Cousins’ War

  The Lady of the Rivers

  The White Queen

  The Red Queen

  The Kingmaker’s Daughter

  The White Princess

  Standalones

  Perfectly Correct

  Alice Hartley’s Happiness

  A Respectable Trade

  The Wise Woman

  Fallen Skies

  The Little House

  Zelda’s Cut

  Short Stories

  Bread and Chocolate

  Copyright

  HarperCollinsPublishers

  77-85 Fulham Palace Road,

  Hammersmith, London W6 8JB

  www.harpercollins.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins 2001, 2005, 2006

  Copyright © Philippa Gregory Ltd 2001, 2005, 2006

  Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

  Philippa Gregory asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it, while based on historical events, are the work of the author’s imagination.

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