The Constant Princess

Review by Breanne Boland January 26, 2006 Issue

Despite being found in the fiction aisle, the cover of The Constant Princess seems to be doing everything it can to make you think it’s a romance novel. From the indistinct rendition of a regal looking woman touching a man’s hand to the swirling, calligraphic font, the book seems to want you to believe that it’s a bodice ripper. While there are some nice sex scenes in it—Henry VIII’s first wife is best known for mostly likely lying about her virginity when she married him, after all—and “historical fiction” is often used as a euphemism for “literate smut,” this book is much more than that. In keeping with the period of time in which the story takes place, love happens but is secondary, a nice bonus to an advantageous marriage. Queen Katherine gets to experience it a couple of times, but it’s her cunning and difficult maneuvering that makes her tale worth reading.

The Constant Princess dives into Tudor-era England, familiar territory for Philippa Gregory, who has written several novels about the more infamous characters of that period. This book could almost serve as a prequel to The Other Boleyn Girl, Gregory’s telling of the making of Henry VIII’s second marriage, as there are only a few years between the two books. This time Gregory focuses on Queen Katherine, the first wife of Henry VIII. Katherine was born Catalina, the youngest daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, and was betrothed to Henry’s older brother Arthur from her early childhood. However, she was married to Arthur for only five months before his life was claimed by illness. Widowed at 16, she had to redefine the path of her life, which had seemed so certain for most of her life

It’s from there that Gregory runs with the dramatic license. The bare plot is laid out in history, but her liberties are taken with the unrecorded parts—the motivations, the conversations, and what happened in bedrooms and private parlors. History usually dictates that Katherine married Henry VIII because of a deathbed request of his father, but here it’s from a promise Katherine made to Arthur as he lay dying, to deny that their marriage was ever consummated so that she can marry his younger brother and create the England the two of them had imagined. Gregory puts great persuasive power in Katherine’s hands, rather than letting her be entirely at the mercy of the men around her. Could she have influenced her destiny as much as Gregory suggests? Perhaps, but at the point of this kind of departure from reality, it hardly matters. It begins edging into the territory of, “But it’s a good story!” And the tale of this determined, patient Katherine certainly is.

Gregory has a good eye for detail, and, as a historian, she certainly has plenty of facts to with which to stock her story. As women of that era weren’t the ones writing the history, their private lives ended up being underrepresented, leaving Gregory much room to weave a story.

She does that amply here, alternating between third-person sections that advance the action to first-person confessional parts laying out Katherine’s inner life. However, sometimes this ends up being distracting as even the third person parts are told from Katherine’s point of view. Sometimes the only thing added by her specific voice is melodrama—Queen Katherine’s Most Secret Diary—especially when certain passages switch rapidly between the two voices. It’s different than Gregory’s previous method of breathing life into historical personalities, but it might have been the safer approach for someone as well documented as Queen Katherine.

In The Other Boleyn Girl, she had a far emptier slate to work with when she created Mary Boleyn, Anne’s sister, to the point that gaps in history allowed her to create the whole end of Mary’s story. With Katherine, there’s not nearly so much wiggle room, so creating the motivations behind some of the great movements of that period in history was where most of her creativity had to flow. Even so, the italics that indicated the story was returning to the Katherine’s inner monologue were not always welcome.

Best of all is her characterization of a young Henry VIII, who he was, or who he might have been, before he was best known for his serial marriages and his rearranging of public religion to allow them. She creates a marvelous portrait of him as a selfish, easily distracted but magnetic young man, showing the flaws that would later let so many people manipulate him, the same traits that let Katherine control him but would also be her undoing.

The Constant Princess makes for a good, quick read, with substance enough to keep the reader engaged, and even to let you walk away with a few new facts about a very strange period in England’s history. The confessional bits from Katherine are distracting, but not so much as to detract from a fascinating period. It’s too bad this rendition of Katherine’s story has to be good in spite of the structure rather than because of it, but fortunately Gregory is savvy enough to choose good source material, making the story sufficiently gripping that you’ll keep the pages turning, even if you find yourself thinking, “Get on with it!” every now and then.

Touchstone, an imprint of Simon and Schuster, 393 pages, available at local booksellers and libraries.

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