Author | Philippa Gregory |
---|---|
Audio read by | Bianca Amato |
Country | United Kingdom |
Language | English |
Series | The Cousins' War |
Genre | Historical fiction |
Publisher | Simon & Schuster |
Publication date | 14 August 2014 |
Media type | |
Pages | 608 |
ISBN | 978-0-85720-756-2 |
Preceded by | The White Princess |
The King's Curse is a 2014 historical novel by Philippa Gregory, part of her series The Cousins' War . A direct sequel to The White Princess , it follows the adult life of Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, the daughter of George Plantagenet, 1st Duke of Clarence and Isabel Neville. [1]
Since Henry Tudor's accession to the English throne as Henry VII, Margaret Plantagenet has had to distance herself from her connection to the former royal family to survive. Married to a minor Tudor knight, she now mourns her younger brother, Edward, a potential claimant to the throne who has been executed by Henry on false charges of treason after 14 years imprisoned in the Tower of London. Margaret and her husband, Sir Richard Pole, manage the household of teenage Arthur, Prince of Wales, Henry's son and heir by his queen Elizabeth of York, Margaret's Plantagenet first cousin. Margaret makes fast friends with Arthur's new young bride, the Spanish princess Katherine of Aragon, but Arthur's sudden death leaves both women on uncertain ground.
Commanded by Arthur on his deathbed to marry his young brother Henry and someday become queen, Katherine asserts publicly that their marriage was never consummated. With Elizabeth now dead, King Henry considers preserving the alliance with Spain by marrying Katherine himself; his imperious mother Margaret Beaufort believes Katherine is lying, and fiercely opposes this therefore sinful marriage to her son or grandson. Richard's death leaves Margaret with five young children and a dwindling income. The King's Mother offers to relieve her burdens in exchange for a statement contradicting Katherine, but Margaret remains loyal. She is forced to foster her two oldest sons with a cousin, place her third son in Sheen Priory, and take her daughter and infant son with her to live in Syon Abbey.
Prince Henry succeeds his father as Henry VIII, and immediately marries Katherine. Margaret's maternal family fortunes and titles are restored to her, making her Countess of Salisbury in her own right. Her eldest son Henry Pole, 1st Baron Montagu, becomes a friend and confidante of the young king, and her son Reginald is sent to Oxford to become a scholar for the king. Margaret sets to make advantageous marriages for all of her children. Katherine loses several children before giving birth to Princess Mary, to whom Margaret is named governess. The execution for treason of their cousin Edward Stafford, 3rd Duke of Buckingham puts Margaret and her family in danger, but the scandal blows over. Margaret's son Arthur dies. Not having a legitimate male heir, Henry seeks to somehow put Katherine aside and marry the courtier Anne Boleyn; refused any such dispensation by the pope, Henry ultimately declares himself head of the Church of England, proclaims his marriage to Katherine invalid, and Mary illegitimate. Though scandalized, Margaret, her family, and everyone in England is compelled to swear an oath asserting Henry's right to do so; anyone who does not swear is executed.
Thomas Cromwell has begun a systematic dissolution of the monasteries in Henry's name, which causes increasing unrest among the common people. It has become a treasonous crime to disagree with the king, and even after Katherine's death, Margaret and her relations must hide their support for Mary and the Catholic Church. Henry has fathered only a daughter, Elizabeth, with Anne, and the vindictive greed of the Boleyns has left them with few allies. When Henry decides on a new consort, Jane Seymour, Anne is executed for adultery, and Elizabeth is also declared illegitimate. Henry is devastated when his illegitimate son Henry FitzRoy dies, but Jane finally gives him a legitimate son. Meanwhile, in self-imposed exile, Reginald has made an enemy of the king by writing and acting against Henry's split from papal authority. Margaret and her sons distance themselves from Reginald's disloyalty, but Cromwell focuses his attentions on them. Soon Margaret's youngest son Geoffrey has been arrested, and implicates Montagu, their cousins Henry Courtenay, Edward Neville, and others in seditious conversations going back years. Despite a lack of concrete evidence, all but Geoffrey are beheaded. Though protesting her innocence of any wrongdoing, Margaret is stripped of her fortune, imprisoned in the Tower of London, and attainted. Though Cromwell himself is executed for treason in the meantime, after two years in the Tower, Margaret is beheaded.
Publishers Weekly called The King's Curse "carefully researched" and "an illuminating portrait" of Margaret Pole, adding that "Gregory moves confidently through a tangle of intrigue, revenge, and tyranny toward a shocking betrayal that brings Margaret face-to-face with the king’s ire." [2]
AudioFile magazine gave its Earphones Award to the audiobook recording of The King's Curse, noting Gregory's "steady grasp of history" and praising narrator Bianca Amato's performance. [3]
The House of Tudor was a dynasty of largely Welsh and English origin that held the English throne from 1485 to 1603. They descended from the Tudors of Penmynydd and Catherine of Valois. The Tudor monarchs ruled the Kingdom of England and its realms, including their ancestral Wales and the Lordship of Ireland for 118 years with five monarchs: Henry VII, Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I and Elizabeth I. The Tudors succeeded the House of Plantagenet as rulers of the Kingdom of England, and were succeeded by the House of Stuart. The first Tudor monarch, Henry VII of England, descended through his mother from a legitimised branch of the English royal House of Lancaster, a cadet house of the Plantagenets. The Tudor family rose to power and started the Tudor period in the wake of the Wars of the Roses (1455–1487), which left the main House of Lancaster extinct in the male line.
Reginald Pole was an English cardinal and the last Catholic archbishop of Canterbury, holding the office from 1556 to 1558, during the Counter-Reformation.
Margaret Plantagenet, Countess of Salisbury, was the only surviving daughter of George Plantagenet, Duke of Clarence, a brother of Kings Edward IV and Richard III, by his wife Isabel Neville. As a result of her marriage to Richard Pole, she was also known as Margaret Pole. One of the few members of the House of Plantagenet to have survived the Wars of the Roses, she was executed in 1541 at the command of King Henry VIII, the second monarch of the House of Tudor, who was the son of her first cousin, Elizabeth of York. Pope Leo XIII beatified her as a martyr for the Catholic Church on 29 December 1886. One of her sons, Reginald Pole was the last Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury.
Philippa Gregory is an English historical novelist who has been publishing since 1987. The best known of her works is The Other Boleyn Girl (2001), which in 2002 won the Romantic Novel of the Year Award from the Romantic Novelists' Association and has been adapted into two films.
Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke of Norfolk, was a prominent English politician and nobleman of the Tudor era. He was an uncle of two of the wives of King Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard, both of whom were beheaded, and played a major role in the machinations affecting these royal marriages. After falling from favour in 1546, he was stripped of his dukedom and imprisoned in the Tower of London, avoiding execution when Henry VIII died on 28 January 1547.
The Other Boleyn Girl (2001) is a historical novel written by British author Philippa Gregory, loosely based on the life of 16th-century aristocrat Mary Boleyn of whom little is known. Inspired by Mary's life story, Gregory depicts the annulment of one of the most significant royal marriages in English history and conveys the urgency of the need for a male heir to the throne. Much of the history is highly distorted in her account.
The House of Plantagenet was a royal house which originated in Anjou, France. The name Plantagenet is used by modern historians to identify four distinct royal houses; the Angevins, who were also Counts of Anjou; the main line of the Plantagenets following the loss of Anjou; and the houses of Lancaster and York, the Plantagenets' two cadet branches. The family held the English throne from 1154, with the accession of Henry II, until 1485, when Richard III died.
In common parlance, the wives of Henry VIII were the six queens consort of King Henry VIII of England between 1509 and his death in 1547. In legal terms, Henry had only three wives, because three of his marriages were annulled by the Church of England. However, he was never granted an annulment by the Pope, as he desired, for Catherine of Aragon, his first wife. Annulments declare that a true marriage never took place, unlike a divorce, in which a married couple end their union. Along with his six wives, Henry took several mistresses.
The Exeter Conspiracy in 1538 was a supposed attempt to overthrow Henry VIII, who had taken control of the Church of England away from the Pope, and replace him with Henry Courtenay, 1st Marquess of Exeter, who was a first cousin of the King.
Henry Pole, 1st Baron Montagu, was an English nobleman, the only holder of the title Baron Montagu under its 1514 creation, and one of the relatives whom King Henry VIII of England had executed for treason.
The Boleyn Inheritance is a novel by British author Philippa Gregory which was first published in 2006. It is a direct sequel to her previous novel The Other Boleyn Girl, and one of the additions to her six-part series on the Tudor royals. * The novel is told through the first-person narratives of – Anne of Cleves, Katherine Howard, and Jane Boleyn, who was mentioned in The Other Boleyn Girl. It covers a period from 1539 until 1542 and chronicles the fourth and fifth marriages of King Henry VIII of England.
The Tudors is a historical fiction television series set primarily in 16th-century England, created and written by Michael Hirst and produced for the American premium cable television channel Showtime. The series was a collaboration among American, British, and Canadian producers, and was filmed mostly in Ireland. While named after the Tudor dynasty as a whole, it is based specifically upon the reign of King Henry VIII.
Henry VIII is a two-part British television serial produced principally by Granada Television for ITV from 12 to 19 October 2003. It chronicles the life of Henry VIII of England from the disintegration of his first marriage to an aging Spanish princess until his death following a stroke in 1547, by which time he had married for the sixth time. Additional production funding was provided by WGBH Boston, Powercorp and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
The Constant Princess is a historical fiction novel by Philippa Gregory, published in 2005. The novel depicts a highly fictionalized version of the life of Catherine of Aragon and her rise to power in England.
Mary Boleyn, also known as Lady Mary, was the elder sister of English queen consort Anne Boleyn, whose family enjoyed considerable influence during the reign of King Henry VIII.
Sir Edward Neville was an English courtier. He was born at Abergavenny, Monmouthshire. He was the son of George Neville, 4th Baron Bergavenny and his wife Margaret, daughter of Hugh Fenn. He married Eleanor Windsor, daughter of Andrew Windsor, 1st Baron Windsor and Elizabeth Blount, before 6 April 1529. He was the brother of George Nevill, 5th Baron Bergavenny and the two of them became close to King Henry VIII and the Queen, Catherine of Aragon.
Ursula Pole, Baroness Stafford was an English noblewoman; the wife of Henry Stafford, 1st Baron Stafford; a wealthy heiress and the only daughter of Margaret Pole, 8th Countess of Salisbury. Her mother was the last surviving member of the Plantagenet dynasty and was executed for treason at the age of 67 in 1541 by the command of King Henry VIII.
Sir Richard Pole, KG was a supporter and first cousin of King Henry VII of England. He was created a Knight of the Garter and was married to Margaret Plantagenet, a member of the House of York. The marriage reinforced the Tudor alliance between the houses of York and Lancaster.
The mistresses of Henry VIII included many notable women between 1509 and 1536. They have been the subject of biographies, novels and films.
The White Princess is a historical drama television miniseries developed for Starz. It is based on Philippa Gregory's 2013 novel of the same name and, to a lesser extent, its 2014 sequel The King's Curse. It is a sequel to the 2013 miniseries The White Queen, which adapted three of Gregory's previous novels, and begins immediately where The White Queen finished.