40. The Queens Fool
Rating: ☆☆☆☆
Recommended by:
Author: Phillipa Gregory
Genre: Historical Fiction
Info: 490 pages, published February 4, 2004
Format: Book
Summary
The Queen’s Fool starts in 1553 and follows the story of Hannah Green, a fourteen-year-old Jewish girl who is forced to flee the Spanish Inquisition to London with her father. With her gift of “Sight,” the ability to foresee the future, Hannah is befriended by the charismatic Robert Dudley, son of King Edward’s protector.
Dudley brings Hannah to court as a “holy fool,” first for Queen Mary (daughter of Henry VIII and his first wife Catherine of Aragon), and then for Mary’s half sister Queen Elizabeth. Hannah is recruited as a spy and endangered by the political upheaval rocking England as Mary, Elizabeth and others vie for power in a country divided between Protestants and Catholics.
Quotes
“Because all books are forbidden when a country turns to terror. The scaffolds on the corners, the list of things you may not read. These things always go together.”
“Ideas are more dangerous than an unsheathed sword in this world, half of them are forbidden, the other half would lead a man to question the very place of the earth itself, safe at the center of the universe.”
“One should never offend more men than one can persuade,”
“Daniel, I did not know what I wanted when I was a girl. And then I was a fool in every sense of the word. And now that I am a woman grown, I know that I love you and I want this son of yours, and our children who will come. I have seen a woman break her heart for love: my Queen Mary. I have seen another break her soul to avoid it: my Princess Elizabeth. I don’t want to be Mary or Elizabeth, I want to be me: Hannah Verde Carpenter.”
“might be that marriage was not the death of a woman and the end of her true self, but the unfolding of her. It might be that a woman could be a wife without having to cut the pride and the spirit out of herself. A woman might blossom into being a wife, not be trimmed down to fit.”
“And we shall live somewhere that we can follow our beliefs without danger,” he insisted. “Yes,” I said, “in the England that Elizabeth will make.”
My Take
English history comes alive through the magical pen of Philippa Gregory. After quickly reading the highly entertaining and page-turning The Queen’s Fool, I had a much better grasp of English history in the era just following the death of Henry VIII. I was in full Cliff Clavin mode with all of this new knowledge when I visited the burial chamber of Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth in Westminster Abbey this summer and regaled my fellow travelers with a brief history of their struggle for the crown. With multiple claims to the throne, rapidly switching allegiances, spying and intrigue, and a religious schism tearing the country apart, England in the mid-14th Century makes our current political climate seem tame by comparison.
