True treachery of the Tudors

THE SISTERS WHO WOULD BE QUEEN by Leanda de Lisle (HarperPress, £25)

What a gift the Tudors were to writers and filmmakers. Powerful characters and spiritual passions; lives hanging by a thread, dependent on the birth of a son, or the whims of monarchs and the ambitious intrigues of whispering courtiers. Plus the ever-present threat of captivity, barbaric punishments, sweating sickness, smallpox and the plague, all set against a luxuriously textured, richly jewelled backcloth of beautiful palaces.

The Execution of Lady Jane Grey, 1833 by Delaroche

The Execution of Lady Jane Grey, 1833 by Delaroche

The three Grey sisters were tragic. Their misfortune was to have been Henry VIII's great-nieces, named in Henry's will as his successors, should his own offspring - Edward, Mary and Elizabeth - die childless (as indeed they did).

Lady Jane is the one we all know about. Named heir to the throne by Henry's Protestant son Edward VI, she became the nine-day queen who went, blameless and blindfold, to the block in 1554.

Her sister, Katherine, having made a clandestine marriage and borne two sons, died in captivity in the Tower.

The dwarfish Mary, disgraced for marrying without the approval of Elizabeth I, was kept apart from her beloved giant of a husband, and then died in poverty and obscurity.

Leanda de Lisle has already written about James I's accession after the death of Elizabeth, and finds the complex succession after Henry VIII an equally fruitful subject.

The death at 56 of the once-magnificent Henry (pallid, obese, feverish, almost unable to walk, his eyes 'pinpoints of pain') led his great-nieces and their cousin Margaret Clifford to be 'lined up for a race to the birthing-stool', in the hope that an heir might improve their chances of succession.

Lady Jane Grey was 16 when she was given to Lord Guildford Dudley; the youngest sister, Mary, just eight years old, was betrothed to a middle-aged kinsman whose face was disfigured at the Battle of Pinkie.

That the nation's political stability should depend on young girls who could be manipulated and married off for dynastic purposes seems fantastical - until you recall a recent royal marriage, apparently undertaken for more modern reasons...

Lady Jane Grey

First known surviving portrait of Lady Jane Grey

Lady Jane still enjoys the reputation of a pious and devoted student, dutiful and accomplished, who scorned childhood games ('sport in the park') and preferred the pleasures of Plato.

She absorbed Greek and Latin, Hebrew, rhetoric, music, philosophy, and possibly Arabic.

At 11, she walked with dignity behind the coffin of Catherine Parr, at England's first Protestant royal funeral.

She was regarded at 13 as the leading evangelical woman in England. At 16 or 17, freckle-faced and in cork platform soles to add height, she was crowned queen, 'with many tears'. Within months she was dead.

Queen Jane did not lose her famous composure as her father delivered the grim news that Mary Tudor had been proclaimed Queen in St Paul's churchyard.

And when she was imprisoned in the Tower, tormented by the people's reversion to Catholic idolatry and facing a trial for treason, she determined to defend her religion 'gilded about with verity' and wearing 'the breastplate of righteousness'.

It is a relief whenever de Lisle relaxes her austere approach, as when she remarks of Mary Grey's yellow kirtle teamed with a black gown: 'The diminutive princess must have been in danger of resembling a bumblebee.' And there are some delicious nuggets in the copious endnotes, such as a recipe for ippocras, a spiced wine, which will be ready to drink 'after xxiii houres in a stone potte'.

There is also a cross-reference to the 1993 film Six Degrees Of Separation, in which Will Smith asks: 'What do the rich like to give each other as presents? Jam!' According to de Lisle: 'The same was true in Tudor England.'

De Lisle is intent on separating myth from truth, exposing previous misreadings and faulty assumptions: 'Jane, who was notably acerbic, is remembered for a kitsch sweetness, of which there is no evidence in her life.' The author's sober, meticulous narrative is the antithesis of the prettified and preposterous televised version of The Tudors.

It takes a dedicated historian to deconstruct the shifting complexities of the Tudor court. There is no doubt that helping the general reader to follow the internal dynamics of family bloodlines, by dint of which the unwary were ensnared by the conspiracies of traitors and turncoats, is a considerable challenge.