11. The oldest superstitions on the island help lead to Alinor’s trial. The causes of these trials are hard for modern readers to imagine. But given that they were described as an “epidemic” in mid-sixteenth- through mid-seventeenth-century Europe, does this novel help twenty-first-century readers understand why?
12. The novel ends with King Charles executed and parliament in power. But the political tides are still turning in England. How do you imagine women like Alinor and Alys will fare in this world where so much is changing?
Enhance Your Book Club
1. Alinor is a very compelling main character. She is driven by her desire to secure a better future for her children. Ask your book club to discuss if there are any figures in history like Alinor or any contemporary heroines, in real life or fiction.
2. Have your book club discuss what factors in our current times might have motivated Philippa Gregory to write the story of a woman whose life was severely constrained by her social and financial status.
3. Has anyone in your group read other Philippa Gregory novels? Some of her most famous books are about royalty or those in the royal circle. How does Alinor compare to other Gregory heroines, like Elizabeth of York in The White Princess or Mary Boleyn in The Other Boleyn Girl?
4. When Alinor and Alys visit the market in Chichester, the lace maker says, “ ‘It’s a crime to be poor in this country; it’s a sin to be old. It’s never good to be a woman.’ ” How would your group describe conditions for those three categories (poor, old, female) now?
A Conversation with Philippa Gregory
You are best known for your series about royal families. But Cromwellian England is a time when the monarchy is out of power. What drew you to start your newest series during this time period?
It’s true that I have set many previous books in the royal courts, but what interested me about them was not the royalty but the concentration of power and therefore jeopardy—which is the heart of any dramatic story. Also, in the royal courts we have records of women that are completely absent further down the social scale, and it was the stories of historical women that I wanted to tell. Further ahead in time there are more records of what ordinary women and men were doing, which I could draw on to root the fiction in a historical reality. By making Alinor a wholly fictional character, I was able to write a historical novel which was true to the time. I don’t know that there is any record of the life of an ordinary working woman in this period. The diarists and letter writers simply were not interested in them, so any account is going to have to be mostly fictional.
I wanted to leave the world of the royals—I have tried to write about them without “rose-tinted” vision; but inevitably these are elite people and their difficulties and dangers, though sometimes extreme, are not the difficulties and dangers of people on the edge of poverty. This first book is where my family starts, in poverty. They’re going to rise in the world, but they come (as most English families do, however grand they are now) from agricultural laborers on the edge of survival. It’s a very leveling thought!
You have a great ability to flesh out characters only briefly mentioned in the historical record. But at the time Alinor lived, there would be almost no original source material for a poor woman with no social status. Were you still able to use the same research process to build her character?
There is a wealth of material about working people and working women from historians who are interested in the supporters of Cromwell and parliament—so ordinary people. Though there is nothing (that I could find) about people living in this particular area, there are surveys and reports of poor parts of England as the armies went through. For unruly women there are criminal court records, and a lot of complaints from ministers and vicars and magistrates. There are records of midwives, and herbalists, and of course there is a wealth of documentary evidence when literate men (almost always men) supervised witchcraft hunts and trials and so reported (probably the first time they had ever considered) the private lives of poor women.
History is said to be written by the winners. But your novels tend to show what it is like to be both in the favor of the powerful and out of favor with the powerful. What inspired you to make James a spy for the losing side?
James is a spy for the elite—the upper classes—so he starts his life as one of the “winners.” His family adhered to the Roman Catholic faith when the rest of the country turned Protestant, but there were many elite Catholics who survive to this day. He would have thought he was on the winning side for most of the war, and I don’t think he genuinely imagines defeat until he is responsible for one of the many failed escape attempts by the captured king. Of course, ultimately, he is on the winning side, as the monarchy is restored in the king’s son Charles II.
In fiction terms, I wanted a character who would be able to show the weakness of the monarchy case and a character who would expose Alinor to more danger. This was a civil war; it divided families and I wanted to show that, too. Also—this was a book that was very fictional in process as well as outcome—as I was writing, James ran into the book, as he does into Alinor’s life, and he turned out to be a royalist spy. I didn’t know that was what he would be when he first arrived. I thought he would be a recusant priest, but all the rest unfolded.
When you wrote the scene between James and King Charles, was there anything in your research that particularly helped you portray the king?
There’s a lot of biographical material about the king and especially about his deterioration during his imprisonment. There are quite a lot of accounts of failed rescue attempts at this stage of his imprisonment, too, so there was a lot of history and historians’ opinions to draw on to write this completely fictional scene.
I was especially interested in Charles’s change of attitude during his captivity. From his own letters we know that he started confident that he could outwit and outnegotiate the parliamentary representatives, and he was certain that he would negotiate a return to his throne. This was partly because he was convinced that kingship was a state of being, a divinely appointed state, which nothing could alter. He thought everyone would come to realize that they could arrest him but that being a king was intrinsic to him—he would always be king. Ultimately, I think he came to think that to be a martyred king was the best way to demonstrate this.
It’s hard for us in the modern world to imagine that someone should think that they are a genuinely superior being to another person—we’re so inculcated with democracy now! But Charles believed that he had been chosen by God to be king of England and that meant that he was father to his people, and that they could not reject this relationship.
Your novels about royalty are told from the first-person perspective. Tidelands is written in the third person. Why did you decide to make this change? Was it a challenge or a thrill?
The first-person characters are women at the royal courts and include commoners (like Mary Boleyn) and indeed imposters (like Hannah in The Queen’s Fool), so the point of moving from first to third person was not about status but about the story I wanted to tell.
In Tidelands I wanted to be able to describe the inner world of more than one person; I wanted to be free to describe events that happened far from the primary character. I wanted Alinor to live like an uneducated woman in a highly complex world—it was important that she was not present at great events. So if I wanted the reader to see James’s life at his college in Douai, I had to write in third person (or have a series of first-person narrators). Contradictorily, when it came to the execution of King Charles, I did not use third person! Instead I found it really useful to imbue the account with emotion by letting James and Ned be reporters.