46. The Taming of the Queen
Rating: ☆☆☆☆
Recommended by:
Author: Phillipa Gregory
Genre: Historical Fiction
425 pages, published February 1, 2008
Reading Format: Book
Summary
The Taming of the Queen is the story of Henry VIII’s sixth and last wife, Catherine Parr, a thirty-year-old widow who is compelled to give up the love of her life when she is ordered to marry an old, obese, mercurial Henry. Catherine appreciates the danger she faces. The previous queen lasted sixteen months and the one before barely half a year. But Henry adores his new bride and Catherine’s trust in him grows as she unites the royal family, creates a radical study circle at the heart of the court, and rules the kingdom as Regent. An educated scholar with a mind of her own, Catherine becomes a leader of religious reform and the first woman to publish in English. Catholic churchmen and rivals for power accuse Catherine of heresy and the king has signed a warrant for her arrest.
Quotes
“I have learned that the most precious thing is a place where you can be as you are, where someone can see you as your true self.”
“But this world is changing. Perhaps by the time you are old enough to marry the world will hear a woman’s voice. Perhaps she will not have to swear to obey in her wedding vows. Perhaps one day a woman will be allowed to both love and think.”
“I think my heart has broken, but I have offered the fragments to God.”
“If you are a reader, you are already halfway to being a writer,” she says. “For you have a love of words and pleasure from seeing them on a page. And if you are a writer, then you will find that you are driven to write. It is a gift that demands to be shared. You cannot be a silent singer.”
“I feel as if I can think only when I see the words flowing from the nib of my quill, that my thoughts make sense only when they are black ink on cream paper. I love the sensation of a thought in my head and the vision of the word on the page.”
“To assure someone that if enough nuns sing enough Masses then her dead child will go to heaven is trickery as low as passing a false coin as good. To buy a pardon from the pope, to force the pope to annul a marriage, to make him set aside kinship laws, to watch as he fleeces his cardinals, who charge the bishops, who rent to the priests, who seek their tithes from the poor – all these abuses would have to fall away if we agreed that a soul can come to God without any intervention. The crucifixion is the work of God. The church is the work of man.”
“Getting a woman into power is not the point—it’s getting a good woman into power who thinks and cares about what she does.”
“I listen with the air of an eager disciple as he propounds things that I have thought ever since I began my studies. Now he is glancing into books that I have read and hidden for my own safety, and he tells me the things that strike him as if they are a great novelty and I should learn them from him. Little Lady Jane Grey knows these opinions, Princess Elizabeth has read them; I taught them both myself. But now I sit beside the king and exclaim when he describes the blindingly obvious, I admire his discovery of the widely known, and I remark on his perception.”