For all the tabloid fuss and docudramas, the messy love lives of today’s British royals seem like pallid reflections of monarchical scandals past. The personalities are smaller, the stakes so much lower. Can the Windsors’ blame games even begin to compare to the murderous fickleness of Henry VIII?
Half a millennium later, the Tudors remain fodder for entertainment, from the novelist Hilary Mantel’s brilliant modernist reimaging of the courtier Thomas Cromwell’s rise and fall to the bouncy Broadway pop musical “Six.” The latest product of this fascination is Sarah Gristwood’s enticingly titled, deeply researched, but ultimately disappointing chronicle, “The Tudors in Love.”
The book is animated by a bold idea: that the conventions of courtly love, a literary conceit influenced by the legend of King Arthur and embedded in medieval balladry, shaped the marital and other dramas of the Tudor court. In fact, Gristwood claims that seeing the Tudors through this lens “explains as nothing else has done some of the conundrums of our most intriguing dynasty.”
But she never really proves her case — that courtly love, with its emphasis on the prospective lover’s submission to his perennially coy mistress, mattered more than the vertiginously shifting political and religious currents of the day.
A former journalist, Gristwood is no novice when it comes to 15th- and 16th-century British royal history; four of her previous books dealt with the subject. She seems in command of the patchy documentary evidence, and at her best when she carefully notes its limitations. “The Tudors in Love” does offer a fresh look at royal women who chafed at the constraints of their era, including Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII’s two sisters, and his daughter, Elizabeth I. (Cromwell merits only the merest cameo, and the king himself remains as unsympathetic as ever.)
But Gristwood may be too steeped in the period, too wedded to inessential detail (not to mention semicolons and words such as “albeit” and “whence,” both misused). Long-winded accounts of the Wars of the Roses and the medieval history of the courtly ideal, intended as context, weigh down the narrative, which only takes off when it reaches Henry VIII.
The larger problem, though, is the book’s half-baked execution of its core idea, beginning with uncertainties of definition and ending with the author’s own change of heart about her thesis.
Gristwood associates courtly love with “the old passion of uplifting pain, the lover elevated by his adoration of a lady who held him at bay” — and insists that “[t]he pervasive influence of the romantic obsession called courtly love still governs us today.” But she also notes that the concept is “elusive,” mutable, and “profoundly contentious.”
Courtly love tropes unquestionably informed Tudor spectacles, such as jousts and masques, as well as Henry VIII’s own propensity for disguises, Gristwood points out. “Palpitating, vulnerable, many times wounded, the symbol [of the heart] was everywhere,” she writes. She unearths similar symbolism in letters of the period, in particular the king’s wooing of Anne Boleyn. (With one possible exception, Anne’s responses do not survive.) But Gristwood also asserts, less convincingly, that “[t]he romantic ideal, in one form or another, would dominate Henry VIII’s marital alliances” (not, as we’ve come to believe, his quest for a male heir).
As the so-called Virgin Queen, Elizabeth I seemed to personify unattainability. But Gristwood can’t be sure, centuries later, just how literary conventions intersected with actual romantic behavior. The contours and limits of the queen’s relationships with both Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, and his stepson Robert Devereaux, Earl of Essex, as well as other suitors, remain maddeningly indistinct.
On the larger world stage, as Gristwood recounts, England was engaged in a dance of alliances and hostilities involving Spain, France, and the Protestant countries of Northern Europe. Internal power struggles were another front in a seemingly Hobbesian war of all against all. Both were related to the era’s religious movements. Bracketed by Roman Catholicism and the Protestant Reformation, they embraced a vast spectrum of conflict and reform, distinctions that mattered deeply, often fatally, at the time.
“The Tudors in Love” culminates in a candid and surprising nod to Gristwood’s own intellectual evolution. “I began writing this book,” she says, “with the idea that courtly love was a tool ready to the hand of the ambitious, most notably Anne Boleyn and Essex. That it was the Tudors themselves who were fools for love, taking in deadly earnest what should have been a game. I wound up believing almost the reverse: that the royal Tudors were the ones skillfully manipulating its tropes.”
The Tudors, after all, survived. It was their suitors, advisers, rivals, and mates who often ended up with their heads on the block. Love then, as now, had a way of not conquering all.
THE TUDORS IN LOVE: Passion and Politics in the Age of England’s Most Famous Dynasty
By Sarah Gristwood
St. Martin’s Press, 400 pp., $29.99
Julia M. Klein, a cultural reporter and critic in Philadelphia, has been a two-time finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing.