BOOK OF THE DAY: FIONA McCANNreviews The White QueenBy Philippa Gregory Simon Schuster 417pp, £12.99
LIFE IN 15th-century England was tough for a queen.
First you had to snag a king, which involved, at least in the case of Elizabeth Woodville, standing by the side of the road in the hopes that your radiant beauty would persuade him off his goodly steed. Then you had to mix a little of your mother’s magic with a lashings of heaving bosoms, while refusing to besmirch your honour by allowing him his royal way with you until he popped the question.
It didn’t end with marriage either. Once installed as queen, you had to bear him an army of heirs, while engaging in all manner of political machinations to ensure you and yours were nicely set up, all the while ready to flee at any sign of your husband being deposed.
Thus it went for the eponymous White Queen, widow of a loyal Lancastrian who, according to Philippa Gregory’s version of events, fell hook, line and sinker for her dead husband’s enemy, the Yorkist Edward IV.
Such misfortune landed her the top job as Elizabeth Regina, but she worked hard to stay there: placating political enemies, arranging marriages for her relatives, and training her eye on turncoats as she went about consolidating her family’s power, all the while bearing children at a rate of knots.
Yet all her work came to nought on the death of her husband, when his power-hungry younger brother took a shine to the crown. Cue further battles, alliances, captures and evasions, culminating in the famous imprisonment of two young princes, believed to have been Elizabeth’s two sons, in the Tower of London.
But this is historical fiction, and while the least credible elements of this rip-roaring tale are the ones based on historical fact, Gregory is deliberately tilting perspective, writing a “herstory” that rescues the female voices erased over time in favour of the patrilineage.
No doubt some historians will disapprove of Gregory's reinterpretation of events, much as they did of her bestselling The Other Boleyn Girl, and there are indeed some liberties taken in favour of a good yarn.
Yet given that so much of what has been handed down as history is equally subjective, Gregory does no disservice to the past by looking through the eyes of one of the women at the centre of the War of the Roses, arguably a war where as many of the key battles were fought in the boudoir as on the field.
Gregory’s Elizabeth is not the most reliable narrator, nor is she even likable in her vanity and naked ambition, yet it is her own subjective narration that allows her creator a delicious freedom with her interpretation of events.
Less forgivable, from this reader’s perspective, is how much Gregory makes of the accusations of witchcraft levelled against Elizabeth’s mother, Jacquetta of Luxembourg, and the family’s ancestral link to the water goddess Melusina. Rather than reveal such accusations for their misogyny, Gregory bequeaths her protagonist special powers allowing her to perform feats of magic that she uses to influence historical events.
Elizabeth is also irritatingly prescient, constantly visited by premonitions, a courtesy presumably afforded by the genre. The trouble with history, however, is that it doesn’t exactly leave you guessing about what happens next.
To Gregory’s credit, she turns this to her advantage: it is this foreknowledge of the fate of Elizabeth’s two sons and of the outcome of the War of the Roses that has the reader constantly craning like an emotional voyeur, our eagerness to see how these public events play out in the personal lives of those depicted making this rollicking and bloody tale of Plantagenet perfidy and passion such a breathless, if slightly shameful, read.
Fiona McCann is a freelance journalist