The Queen's Bed: An Intimate History of Elizabeth's Court by Anna Whitelock

I have frequently written about my fondness for the Tudor Dynasty, which lasted from 1485 to 1603.  The period featured scads of colorful and interesting characters, drama, espionage, treachery, love, hate, corruption, and nearly any other positive or negative activity from tennis to mass executions one can imagine.   

Anna Whitelock’s recently published volume, The Queen’s Bed: An Intimate History of Elizabeth [I]’s Court peers into the most closely guarded secrets of the Court of the Virgin Queen.  These secrets involve the women closest to her.  This platoon of servants were with her from dawn to dusk; from the moment she opened her eyes in the morning through her several-hour ordeal of dressing, primping, and applying makeup, until she is disassembled and readied for a night’s sleep.  The most favored women share her bed chamber through the night, and sometimes even her bed.

Elizabeth I

Rumors of scandals quickly began swirling around Elizabeth almost from the moment she received the crown of England.  The rumors largely revolved around her single status.  Whitelock’s meticulously researched and documented work stuns the reader with its depth and breadth of detail.  Eight pages of color pictures – including well-known portraits of Elizabeth and those of her Ladies-in-Waiting and Maids of the Chamber -- are a treasure trove of insights into one of the most powerful women in history. 

Among a series of epigrams, Whitelock quotes the queen, “We princes, I tell you, are set on stages in the sight and view of all the world duly observed; the eyes of many behold our actions, a spot is soon spied in our garments; a blemish noted quickly in our doings.”  This was in the days long before cameras, paparazzi, and gossip columns. 

Anna Whitelock

Whitelock writes, “The Queen’s Bedchamber was at once a private and public space.  The Queen’s body was more than its fleshly parts; her body natural represented the body politic, the very state itself.  The health and sanctity of Elizabeth’s body determined the strength and stability of the realm” (8).  As pressure grew on England from without – the excommunication by the pope, plots by her cousin Mary, Queen of Scots, and Spanish supporters of Mary I, her deceased half-sister, and from within that she should marry and produce an heir, Elizabeth maintained her kingdom.  William Cecil, Lord Burghley, her most trusted advisor said, “The state of this crown depends only on the breath of one person, our sovereign lady.”

We also learn some astounding statistics.  “The court [included] more than a thousand servants and attendants, ranging from brewers and bakers, cooks, tailors and stable hands to courtiers and ambassadors” (17). Whitelock notes, when Elizabeth moved between her homes, three hundred carts of personal possessions moved with her (17).  146 yeoman of the Guard accompanied the queen wherever she happened to be (18).

Anna Whitelock’s, The Queen’s Bed, provides endless fascination for readers of history and biography of significant women on the world’s stage.  5 stars 

--Chiron, 3/4/14

Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel

 Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel won the 2009 Man Booker Prize.  The novel tells a fictionalized account of the rise to power of Thomas Cromwell in 16^th-century England.  Every single page of this interesting novel carries the story forward and causes an imperceptible and complete immersion into the lives of these characters.  Mantel became the first woman to win two Man Booker Prizes, when the committee awarded her the 2012 prize for the sequel, Bring Up the Bodies.  I am now awaiting the final volume in this trilogy The Mirror and the Light.

Bring Up the Bodies seamlessly picks up the story where Wolf Hall ended.  Thomas Cromwell is garnering wealth and power while maneuvering amid the complicated and difficult maze that was Tudor England and the Court of Henry VIII.  Anne Boleyn has a daughter Elizabeth and has suffered several miscarriages.  Henry begins to lose patience with Anne, and his eyes have fallen upon Jane Seymour.  Meanwhile, Thomas plays a thrilling, complicated, and enormous chess match with his life, his fortune, and his family at stake.

Hilary Mantel

I have long been fascinated with the Tudor period, and I have a collection of biographies for every major figure of the family and the court, from Henry VII, Henry VIII, Edward VI, Lady Jane Gray, Mary I, and Elizabeth I.  Mantel vividly captures the intrigue, the treachery, the spies, the volatile moods of Henry, as well as the passion, the loves, and she paints wonderfully interesting portraits.  The chess game Cromwell plays extends far beyond England to Spain, Italy, France, Germany, the Low Countries, and all the little nooks and crannies in between.

Henry VIII

Mantel mesmerized me again from the first page of Bring Up the Bodies.  Thomas visits Wolf Hall, his estate, and Mantel writes, “You may find a bride in the forest, old Seymour had said.  When he closes his eyes she slides behind them, veiled in cobwebs and splashed with dew.  Her feet are bare, entwined in roots, her feather hair flies into the branches; her finger, beckoning, is a curled leaf.  She points to him, as sleep overtakes him.  His inner voice mocks him now: you thought you were going to get a holiday at Wolf Hall.  You thought there would be nothing to do here except the usual business, war and peace, famine, traitorous connivance; a failing harvest, a stubborn populace, plague ravaging London and the king losing his shirt at cards.  You were prepared for that” (25-26).  This passage brilliantly illuminates the Tudor period.

Thomas Cromwell

As in Wolf Hall, Mantel provides a detailed list of characters and their individual domains, as well as a family tree.  This information greatly aids the reader unfamiliar with the time period.  Mantel’s novels are a stunning and outstanding introduction to an important and pivotal period in world history.  I will be sorely disappointed if the trilogy does not win a third Booker Prize for The Mirror and the Light.  But start with Wolf Hall, go on to Bring Up the Bodies, and you will find yourself anxiously awaiting the final volume of the trilogy.  5 platinum stars.

--Chiron, 12/14/13