Book Review: "The Passionate Tudor: A Novel of Queen Mary I"

Talented and prolific historical novelist Alison Weir at last turns her attention to one of England's most maligned, and deeply tragic, monarchs.

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Few English monarchs are quite as infamous as Mary I, known to history as Bloody Mary. The tragic daughter of the doomed marriage between Henry VIII and Katherine of Aragon, her youth was blighted by her father’s split with Rome, Mary had the misfortune to grow up in one of the most tumultuous periods in English history. Once she finally did ascend to the throne–after an ill-fated rebellion which saw Jane Grey briefly assume it–she soon wasted the goodwill of her people. Her persecution of Protestants earned her the somber sobriquet which would come to be associated with her in subsequent years, and it’s no doubt the thing that most people associate with her, for better and for worse.

It would take a particularly gifted historical novelist to paint a portrait of this very sad queen that doesn’t lean into the more negative aspects of her reputation. Fortunately for Mary (and for us), Alison Weir is just such a novelist. Having finished a series about the six wives of Henry and having written a novel about his mother, Elizabeth of York and even one from his own point of view, she now turns her considerable gifts to teasing out the complexities of Mary’s personality and reign. 

It’s clear from the very beginning of The Passionate Tudor that Mary is a very precocious and special child, and it’s likewise clear that she has a strong bond with her mother. It’s their mutual misfortune that Katherine didn’t produce a male heir, leading to her estrangement from Henry and their eventual acrimonious divorce. It’s this tragedy that will mar the rest of Mary’s relatively short life. Even though she always gives her father the respect that he deserves, one gets the sense that she also bears him a lot of anger and resentment that he essentially hounded her mother to death, punishing her for her refusal to accept either the dissolution of the marriage or Henry’s place as Supreme Head of the Church of England. Thanks to Weir we come to appreciate Mary’s steadfastness, even though her stubbornness often gets her into trouble.

At the same time, it’s precisely this redoubtable spirit that allows her to persevere and survive when many others would have faltered. Not only does she outlive both her brother and her father; she also manages to overcome a rebellion that sought to displace her. Weir gives us a front-row seat as Mary finally comes into her own and is at last able to order the kingdom according to her own liking. We get to see her in the meetings of the Privy Council, where she has to contend with the voices of men who (sometimes rightly) think that she doesn’t have the fortitude to make the difficult choices that any queen must make if she wants to be successful and to prove herself to her people. For all that she has a noble and strong spirit, when it comes right down to it Mary just doesn’t have what it takes to be a good queen, and in Weir’s telling he tends to lash out at those she perceives as her enemies. 

Of these, it’s her younger sister Elizabeth who proves to be the most persistent thorn in Mary’s side. Not only is she the product of the union between Henry and Anne Boleyn; she is also a Protestant and Mary’s only heir. Weir capably captures the complex relationship between the two women, allowing us to see how Mary loved her sister, even if she could never quite bring herself to accept her completely. Among other things, she holds firmly to the belief that Elizabeth is Mark Smeaton’s son rather than her father’s, just one of the many things that she believes despite all evidence to the contrary. 

It’s when she marries Philip of Spain, however, that Mary begins to lose what little credibility she’d managed to attain. From the moment that their match seems a certainty she abandons any pretense of being an independent woman and instead becomes in thrall to his needs and wants, even though it’s clear to everyone–except to her–that he sees her as little more than a broodmare and a resource for him to exploit in his wars on the continent. As with her belief in Elizabeth’s illicit paternity and her persecution of the heretics in the mistaken belief that this will get them to convert, Mary insists on living in the world as she would have it be rather than the way it is, which leads to her tragic and pathetic phantom pregnancy. It’s all quite tragic, and Weir ably captures this element of Mary’s story.

As with most of her other historical novels, Weir takes us right up to the moment when Mary breathes her last and is free at last of the burden that life has become. There’s something quite poignant about her death, since both Mary herself and the reader knows that her greatest fear–that Elizabeth will return England to Protestantism and undo all that Mary sought to accomplish–will come true. When it comes right down to it, Mary’s reign would go down in history as being a remarkably unsuccessful one, one that saw the loss of Calais and the draining of the treasury and the brutalization of Protestants, and all for nothing. 

Weir has a knack for immersing the reader in the midst of a world that is both like and unlike our own. Given her rigorous training as a historian she knows how to capture the material details of Renaissance England, and so you feel as if you are right there with the characters as they live in this world that contains both great beauty and unspeakable barbarity and slaughter. She also allows us to understand how Mary’s reign–and her personality–were shaped not just by her tumultuous family but also by the religious upheaval sweeping across the Europe of the time.  

In short, I really enjoyed The Passionate Tudor, a novel that gives us the many different sides to a deeply contradictory monarch and woman, one who was never quite able to transcend the tragedies of her life to become the queen she might have been.