AUTHOR’S NOTE
This novel is the story of a long life lived at the center of events—one which, since it was a woman’s life, has been largely ignored by chroniclers at the time and historians since. Margaret Pole’s greatest claim to fame was that she was Henry VIII’s oldest victim on the scaffold—she was sixty-seven when she was brutally killed on Tower Green—but her life, as I have tried to show here, was lived at the heart of the Tudor court and at the center of the former royal family.
Indeed, the more I have studied and thought about her life and her wide-ranging family, the Plantagenets, the more I have had to wonder if she was not at the center of conspiracy: sometimes actively, sometimes quietly, perhaps always conscious of her family’s claim to the throne, and always with a claimant in exile, preparing to invade, or under arrest. There was never a time when Henry VII or his son were free from fear of a Plantagenet claimant, and although many historians have seen this as Tudor paranoia, I wonder if there was not a constant genuine threat from the old royal family, a sort of resistance movement: sometimes active but always present.
The novel opens with the controversial suggestion that Katherine of Aragon decided to lie about her marriage to Arthur so that she might be married for a second time to his brother, Henry. I think that an examination of the agreed facts—the official bedding, the young couple cohabiting at Ludlow, their youth and health, and the absence of any concern about the consummation of their marriage—convincingly indicates that they were wedded and bedded. Certainly, everyone thought so at the time, and Katherine’s own mother had requested a dispensation from the Pope that would permit her daughter to remarry whether or not intercourse had taken place.
Decades later, when she was asked if the marriage to Arthur had been consummated, she had every reason to lie: she was defending her marriage to Henry VIII and the legitimacy of her daughter. It was the stereotyped view of women by later historians (especially the Victorian historians) who suggested that since Katherine was a “good” woman, she must have been incapable of telling a lie. I tend to take a more liberal view of female mendacity.
As a historian, I can examine one side against the other and share these thoughts with the reader. As a novelist, I have to fix the story with one coherent viewpoint, thus the account of Katherine’s first marriage and her decision to marry Prince Harry is fictional and based on my interpretation of the historical facts.
I have drawn from the work of Sir John Dewhurst the dates of Katherine of Aragon’s pregnancies. There has been much work on the loss of Henry VIII’s babies. Current interesting research from Catrina Banks Whitley and Kyra Kramer suggests that Henry may have had the rare Kell positive blood type, which can cause miscarriages, stillbirths, and infant deaths when the mother has the more common Kell negative blood type. Whitley and Kramer also suggest that Henry’s later symptoms of paranoia and anger may have been caused by McLeod syndrome—a disease found only in Kell positive individuals. McLeod syndrome usually develops when sufferers are aged around forty and causes physical degeneration and personality changes resulting in paranoia, depression, and irrational behavior.
Interestingly, Whitley and Kramer trace Kell syndrome back to Jacquetta, Duchess of Bedford, the suspected witch and mother of Elizabeth Woodville. Sometimes, uncannily, fiction creates a metaphor for an historical truth: in a fictional scene in the novel, Elizabeth, together with her daughter Elizabeth of York, curse the murderer of her sons, swearing that they shall lose their son and their grandsons, while in real life her genes—unknown and undetectable at the time—entered the Tudor line through her daughter and may have caused the deaths of four Tudor babies to Katherine of Aragon and three to Anne Boleyn.
This novel is about the decline of Henry VIII from the young, handsome prince, seen as the savior of his country, into the sick, obese tyrant. The young king’s deterioration has been the subject of many fine histories—I list some of the ones I found most helpful below—but this is the first time in my research that I have fully understood the brutality of the reign and the depth of his corruption. It has made me think about how easily a ruler can slide into tyranny, especially if no one opposes him. As Henry moved from one advisor to another, as his moods deteriorated and his use of the gallows became an act of terror against his people, one sees in this well-known, well-loved Tudor world the rising of a despot. Henry could hang the faithful men and women of the North because nobody rose up to defend Thomas More, John Fisher, or even the Duke of Buckingham. He learned that he could execute two wives, divorce another, and threaten his last because no one effectively defended his first. The picture of the beloved Henry in the primary school histories—of an eccentric glamorous ruler who married six women—is also the ugly portrait of a wife and child abuser and a serial killer who made war against his own people, even against his own family.
Henry’s response to the appeal of the pilgrims for the maintenance of their traditional rulers and religion was to attack the North of England, and the Roman Catholic faithful. The king was consciously dishonest in his persecution of people who believed, firstly, that they could appeal to him for justice and, then, that he had given them a full pardon and would abide by his word. This is one of the worst episodes in our history, yet it is little known, perhaps because it is a history of defeat and tragedy, and the losers rarely tell the story.
Margaret went to the scaffold without a charge, a trial, or even adequate notice, as I describe here. Her execution was clumsy, perhaps because of an incompetent executioner, perhaps because she refused to put her head down on the block. As a tribute to her, and to all woman who refuse to take punishment meted out to them by an unjust world, I have described her in this novel as dying as she may have lived—resisting the Tudor tyranny. She was beatified in 1886 as a martyr for the faith and is honored by the Church as Blessed Margaret Pole on 28 May each year.
Her grandson Henry disappeared, probably dying in the Tower. Edward Courtenay was released only on the accession of Mary I, who freed him and gave him the title Earl of Devon in September 1553. Geoffrey Pole fled England and obtained absolution from the Pope for betraying his brother, returning only when Mary I came to the throne, as did Reginald, who was ordained and became Archbishop of Canterbury, working closely with Mary I to restore the Roman Catholic Church to England for the duration of her reign.
There is something in this story—of an old family displaced against their will, of their loyalty to a young woman who suffered extraordinarily unjust treatment, of their adherence to their faith and their attempt to survive—that I have found very moving to research and write. The fiction, as always, is secondary to the history; the real women are always more complex and more conflicted, greater than the heroines of the novel, just as real women now, as then, are often greater than they are reported, sometimes greater than the world wants them to be.
Touchstone Reading Group Guide
The King’s Curse
Philippa Gregory
Introduction
Lady-in-waiting Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, has spent her entire life attempting to deny her own royal blood and Plantagenet name while in service of the Tudor court. Her proximity and understanding of the court give her a unique view of Henry VIII’s stratospheric rise to power in Tudor England.