The Elegance of the Hedgehog, by Muriel Barbery

I think novels are a bit like travel destinations in the sense that our response to both depends largely upon serendipity. When your luggage disappears, and the hotel has lost track of your reservation, you spill the welcome glass of papaya juice down the front of your shirt, and the monsoon clouds are closing in, you quickly have the sense that this isn't going to be the best holiday ever. Nothing quite works out. And it's maddening, because you know that some months earlier or later, it might all have been magnificent.

I've had the very same experience with books. I've finished a novel with a shrug thinking I might have just relished it at some other time, and conversely, I ended The Elegance of the Hedgehog believing it was providentially well-timed. When we're enchanted with a boutique hotel, we overlook the dust-bunnies under the armoire, and I was so wrapped up in these characters that I didn't give a hedgehog's derriere about the book's flaws.

Paloma Josse is a whip-smart 12 year-old Parisian girl who has (quite correctly, by many standards) judged that life is stupid and pointless. She has resolved to kill herself before her 13th birthday. Renee Michel is the concierge in the apartment building where Paloma's family lives. She carefully hides her love of existential philosophy, Tolstoy and classical opera behind the facade of an irritable, middle-aged factotum. The narration switches back and forth between them, these two ladies who keep their brilliant lights under bushel baskets.

Every now and again, however, Mme. Michel lets something slip. Fortunately, most of the residents of the building are steadfast in their assumptions about her and barely notice when she says something to shake them. She is unimpressed when one of the young residents announces to her that he has just been reading Marx. And he liked it.

Antoine Pallières, prosperous heir to an old industrial dynasty, is the son of one of my eight employers. There he stood, the most recent eructation of the ruling corporate elite—a class that reproduces itself solely by means of virtuous and proper hiccups—beaming at his discovery, sharing it with me without thinking or ever dreaming for a moment that I might actually understand what he was referring to.
“Whosoever sows desire harvests oppression,” I nearly murmured, as if only my cat were listening to me.
But Antoine Pallières, whose repulsive and embryonic whiskers have nothing the least bit feline about them, is staring at me, uncertain of my strange words. As always, I am saved by the inability of living creatures to believe anything that might cause the walls of their little mental assumptions to crumble. Concierges do not read The German Ideology; hence, they would certainly be incapable of quoting the eleventh thesis on Feuerbach.

Paloma, records in her diary why there is no hope for her future. Life is absurd, and only those dullards who haven't cottoned onto this fact can carry on into adulthood.

Even for someone like me who is supersmart and gifted in her studies and different from everyone else, in fact superior to the vast majority—even for me life is already all plotted out and so dismal you could cry: no one seems to have thought of the fact that if life is absurd, being a brilliant success has no greater value than being a failure. It’s just more comfortable. And even then: I think lucidity gives your success a bitter taste, whereas mediocrity still leaves hope for something.

Paloma's diary entries fall under one of two headings, either Profound Thoughts or Journal of the Movement of the World, in which she records her observations of motion. As her father watches a New Zealand football match on television, she is captivated by the haka, or ritual Maori dance, that the players perform on the field as the match is set to start. One player in particular catches her eye. Her observation makes me think that this adolescent girl in her pink-framed eyeglasses also has an internal strength that she hasn't quite discovered yet.

And so the haka, which is a warrior chant, gained all its strength from him. What makes the strength of a soldier isn’t the energy he uses trying to intimidate the other guy by sending him a whole lot of signals, it’s the strength he’s able to concentrate within himself, by staying centered... That Maori player was like a tree, a great indestructible oak with deep roots and a powerful radiance—everyone could feel it. And yet you also got the impression that the great oak could fly, that it would be as quick as the wind, despite, or perhaps because of, its deep roots.

She has very clear opinions of what knowledge is valuable, and they rarely align with those of her parents or teachers. Although they haven't had a conversation yet, one gets the sense that Paloma and Renee would see eye to eye on a great many things. Mme. Josse, however, is just one more vexation to her daughter.

My mother, who has read all of Balzac and quotes Flaubert at every dinner, is living proof every day of how education is a raving fraud. All you need to do is watch her with the cats. She’s vaguely aware of their decorative potential, and yet she insists on talking to them as if they were people, which she would never do with a lamp or an Etruscan statue.

Renee is a plain, middle-aged woman who takes no pains to look like anything else. She has as little interaction with the building's residents as she can manage. Although she is their equal (and often their superior) in terms of intellect, she knows that her role as a concierge is a well-defined and very subordinate one, and she stays within it. She and her late husband had shared the job until he died, after a long, slow battle with cancer.

Since we were concierges, it was a given that death, for us, must be a matter of course, whereas for our privileged neighbors it carried all the weight of injustice and drama... The death of a concierge leaves a slight indentation on everyday life, belongs to a biological certainty that has nothing tragic about it and, for the apartment owners who encountered him every day in the stairs or at the door to our loge, Lucien was a non-entity who was merely returning to a nothingness from which he had never fully emerged, a creature who, because he had lived only half a life, with neither luxury nor artifice, must at the moment of his death have felt no more than half a shudder of revolt. The fact that we might be going through hell like any other human being, or that our hearts might be filling with rage as Lucien’s suffering ravaged our lives, or that we might be slowly going to pieces inside, in the torment of fear and horror that death inspires in everyone, did not cross the mind of anyone on these premises.

About halfway through the book, Paloma happens to look a bit more deeply into the concierge. 

Madame Michel has the elegance of the hedgehog: on the outside, she’s covered in quills, a real fortress, but my gut feeling is that on the inside, she has the same simple refinement as the hedgehog: a deceptively indolent little creature, fiercely solitary—and terribly elegant.

Much excitement commences amongst the building's residents when the apartment of the late food critic is purchased by a Messr. Ozu, a refined, retired Japanese gentleman. The ladies are all a-twitter, wondering about the drastic renovations he appears to be making, starved for more information about him. Renee had let slip a bit of Tolstoy one day in Ozu's presence: 'All happy families are the same...' He had, to her mortification, completed the sentence ('but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way'). Renee learns from her friend, the Portuguese cleaning lady, that Ozu has two cats. She asks for more information about them.

“They’re ever so thin and move around without a sound, like this.” With her hand she draws strange undulations in the air. “Do you know their names?” I ask again. “The female is Kitty, but I didn’t catch the male’s name.” A bead of cold sweat races down my spine. “Levin?” I venture. “Yes, that’s it. Levin. How did you know?”

Paloma asks the concierge if she might 'hide' in her loge from time to time, whenever she needs to get away from her dreadful parents and sister to think her Profound Thoughts. Renee welcomes her to do so, and about the same time, Ozu gets into the habit of dropping by. He too has seen through her brusque facade and invites her to his apartment for dinner one evening. She eventually relents, and allows her Portuguese friend to spruce her up a bit -- new hair-do, new (well, only slightly used) dress. Renee is a nervous wreck.

After a bit of sake and some appetisers, she agonises over how to ask to use the toilet. She runs through a whole stream of euphemisms, but her bladder can take no more, and she asks for direction to the rest room, where she confronts a toilet the likes of which she's never seen. When it's time to flush, she considers the row of buttons and presses the one with a flower on it. A loud blast of music -- it sounds like Mozart's requiem, but surely that cannot be -- reverberates through the room, and Mme. Michel panics. She tries to flee the bathroom but cannot seem to open the door. She hears Ozu on the opposite side, gently encouraging her to turn the handle in the other direction. The door opens. She emerges, shaking, into the hallway.

“I . . . ” I say to Monsieur Ozu, for there is no one else here, “I . . . well . . . You know, the Requiem?” I should have named my cat Badsyntax. “Oh, I imagine you were frightened!” he says. “I should have warned you. This is a Japanese thing . . . my daughter’s idea to import it. When you flush, it sets off the music, it’s . . . more pleasant, you see?” What I see, above all, is that we are standing in the hallway outside the toilet, in a situation that is blasting to smithereens all world records for ridiculousness.

Nonetheless, the friendship between Renee and Ozu deepens; he sees the elegance, and the hedgehog begins to let her bristles drop. Paloma is also part of their secret society of kindred spirits. What these three eccentric individuals give to and take from each other is priceless. I loved them dearly.  

The People of the Abyss, by Jack London

Sometimes the best remedy for gloomy exhaustion is a dive into a novel about people who are mired in even worse straits. "You're reading what?!" asked my English colleague. "Is that really a good idea?" Well, The People of the Abyss, Jack London's account of life in squalid East London at the dawn of the 20th century, is not going to jolly anyone out of  funk. It is highly likely, however, to make most people's 21st century problems seem relatively benign.

I'd always associated Jack London with books about sled dogs -- White Fang and Call of the Wild. I avoided these books when I was a child, since my father was a veterinarian and I needed no reminding that humans treat animals badly. Now, in my mid-life, Jack London reminds me of how callously humans handle each other. In 1901, Jack went to England and decided to investigate life in the slums of East London. For the people living there, life was no less (and quite possibly more) harsh than for creatures struggling to survive in the brutal arctic zone. Mercy was all but nonexistent and social safety nets unheard of. The Abyss of this book seems no less brutal than the slums and poorhouses of Dickens' day. In the Malaysia of 2012, with England among the "civilised" nations scolding Asia about human rights violations, I have to sit back and marvel at Jack London's exposé .

When the author first arrived, he asked "proper" Londoners to give him some pointers about East London. They responded with incredulity, as if he were asking about a neighbourhood in central Africa. It is Jack's first clue that London consists of two very separate worlds.

“You don’t want to live down there!” everybody said, with disapprobation writ large upon their faces.  “Why, it is said there are places where a man’s life isn’t worth tu’pence.” “The very places I wish to see,” I broke in. “But you can’t, you know,” was the unfailing rejoinder. “Which is not what I came to see you about,” I answered brusquely, somewhat nettled by their incomprehension.  “I am a stranger here, and I want you to tell me what you know of the East End, in order that I may have something to start on.” “But we know nothing of the East End.  It is over there, somewhere.”  And they waved their hands vaguely.

The American consul's reply at least speaks to me of the can-do attitude of American men of that period. No bureaucracy, no neurosis. Just confidence and determination.

I took my way to the American consul-general.  And here, at last, I found a man with whom I could “do business.”  There was no hemming and hawing, no lifted brows, open incredulity, or blank amazement.  In one minute I explained myself and my project, which he accepted as a matter of course.  In the second minute he asked my age, height, and weight, and looked me over.  And in the third minute, as we shook hands at parting, he said: “All right, Jack.  I’ll remember you and keep track.”

Jack began by paying a grudging hansom cab driver to take him on a scenic tour of the East End. The view varied little.

We rolled along through miles of bricks and squalor, and from each cross street and alley flashed long vistas of bricks and misery. 

He rented a room for himself -- rather posh by East London standards -- but it still lacked certain amenities.

Not only did the houses I investigated have no bath-tubs, but I learned that there were no bath-tubs in all the thousands of houses I had seen. 

We speak of air pollution today as if it's a phenomenon of the automotive age. Pack an insanely high population density into a small area with oil and wood fires for heat, cooking and light, and the result was most unhealthy. Plants could not survive in East London then.

Leaving out the disease germs that fill the air of the East End, consider but the one item of smoke.  Sir William Thiselton-Dyer, curator of Kew Gardens, has been studying smoke deposits on vegetation, and, according to his calculations, no less than six tons of solid matter, consisting of soot and tarry hydrocarbons, are deposited every week on every quarter of a square mile in and about London. 

Jack had to compete with hordes of impoverished men to experience one night in a London poorhouse. These facilities had limited space, and gaining entry for a night was a mixed blessing. The accommodations were foul and had to be paid for by hard labour all the following day. At the end of that, the men were tossed back out into the streets to make room for the next batch. Those with no shelter were doomed to walk the streets all night as laws prohibited their sleeping in the open. His descriptions of the utter exhaustion were devastating, but a night in the workhouse offered small solace.

Jack was "quite certain that the twenty-two of us washed in the same water." The bedding was hardly cleaner:  "... the back of one poor wretch was a mass of blood from attacks of vermin and retaliatory scratching."  On the following day, he and other inmates worked off their lodging debt in the local infirmary. They were given one last meal before their discharge.

At eight o’clock we went down into a cellar under the infirmary, where tea was brought to us, and the hospital scraps.  These were heaped high on a huge platter in an indescribable mess—pieces of bread, chunks of grease and fat pork, the burnt skin from the outside of roasted joints, bones, in short, all the leavings from the fingers and mouths of the sick ones suffering from all manner of diseases.  Into this mess the men plunged their hands, digging, pawing, turning over, examining, rejecting, and scrambling for. 

Shortly after his night in the workhouse, Jack surfaced to witness the coronation of King Edward VII. His recent experiences and his American socialist sensibilities dampened his appreciation for the pomp and grandeur.

Vivat Rex Eduardus!  They crowned a king this day, and there has been great rejoicing and elaborate tomfoolery, and I am perplexed and saddened.  I never saw anything to compare with the pageant, except Yankee circuses and Alhambra ballets; nor did I ever see anything so hopeless and so tragic.

 He made several observations about the deadening effects of living in cramped squalor, starved of food, heat and education. Such impoverished people managed only "conversation as meditative and vacant as the chewing of a heifer’s cud."

He also noted that England was at the peak of its colonial glory, and her best young men had gone off to South Africa, India, and beyond. Those who remained behind struggled to survive in what he perceived to be an abandoned and dying mother ship.

The erstwhile men of England are now the men of Australia, of Africa, of America.  England has sent forth “the best she breeds” for so long, and has destroyed those that remained so fiercely, that little remains for her to do but to sit down through the long nights and gaze at royalty on the wall.The strength of the English-speaking race to-day is not in the tight little island, but in the New World overseas.

As if his anecdotal observations weren't potent enough, he resorts to numbers. I found these statistics staggering.

The population of London is one-seventh of the total population of the United Kingdom, and in London, year in and year out, one adult in every four dies on public charity, either in the workhouse, the hospital, or the asylum.  When the fact that the well-to-do do not end thus is taken into consideration, it becomes manifest that it is the fate of at least one in every three adult workers to die on public charity...

There are 300,000 people in London, divided into families, that live in one-room tenements.  Far, far more live in two and three rooms and are as badly crowded, regardless of sex, as those that live in one room.  The law demands 400 cubic feet of space for each person.  In army barracks each soldier is allowed 600 cubic feet.  Professor Huxley, at one time himself a medical officer in East London, always held that each person should have 800 cubic feet of space, and that it should be well ventilated with pure air.  Yet in London there are 900,000 people living in less than the 400 cubic feet prescribed by the law...

One in every four in London dies on public charity, while 939 out of every 1000 in the United Kingdom die in poverty; 8,000,000 simply struggle on the ragged edge of starvation, and 20,000,000 more are not comfortable in the simple and clean sense of the word.,, 

The average age at death among the people of the West End is fifty-five years; the average age at death among the people of the East End is thirty years. 

Finally, Jack takes the opportunity to ridicule the misguided attempts by some well-meaning and well-off Londoners to bring some light to the East End. It's hard to appreciate fine art on an empty stomach. Until England can offer its poor (many of whom fell into ruin simply because they fell ill or were injured) a way to survive a temporary misfortune without going straight to the poorhouse, he says, there is no point in offering token gestures. They are simply ridiculous. You might better offer beer.

I have gone through an exhibition of Japanese art, got up for the poor of Whitechapel with the idea of elevating them, of begetting in them yearnings for the Beautiful and True and Good.
Did Destiny to-day bind me down to the life of an East End slave for the rest of my years, and did Destiny grant me but one wish, I should ask that I might forget all about the Beautiful and True and Good; that I might forget all I had learned from the open books, and forget the people I had known, the things I had heard, and the lands I had seen.  And if Destiny didn’t grant it, I am pretty confident that I should get drunk and forget it as often as possible.

Calling Out for You, by Karin Fossum

When the flood of business writing left me feeling like a drowned rat at the end of a day, I turned to Karin Fossum for respite. There's nothing like a murder in Norway to put everything back in proper perspective. Calling Out for You is the fifth of Fossum's novels, and the fourth that I've read. (That first one is still awaiting translation.) It's certainly the richest of them that I've read so far, and the critics agreed -- it won the CWA Dagger Award in 2005.

The CWA is, by the way, the Crime Writers' Association, and its members obviously appreciate Fossum's marvelous knack of writing about the horrible ordinariness of most crimes. She doesn't write thrillers, and if you want the kind of suspense that will keep you reading til your eyes glaze over, forget about her. I will not easily forget, though, the characters in this novel -- the killer (assuming the Inspector got the right man), the victim, her widower, or the various and assorted witnesses in the small Norwegian village where the murder takes place. Even Chief Inspector Sejer and his sidekick, Officer Skarre, reveal more of their inner selves in this book. (Fossum maintains that she doesn't want Sejer to attract a cult following, but I feel she's taken that a bit too far -- he was almost a non-entity in the earlier books.)

As the book opens, a mother greets her 20-something son who has just come into the house with a badly scratched face, which he attributes to wrestling with his Rottweiler. Everything about this young man radiates testosterone and anger, and the dog story immediately sounds dubious. The mother can or will see only so much.

Later she hears him in the bathroom, sounding hollow in the tiled space. He's singing. The door to the medicine cupboard slams. He's probably looking for a plaster, silly boy. His mother smiles. All of this violence is only to be expected. He is a man, after all. Later, she would never forget this. The last moment when life was good.

Then we meet Gunder,who is a simple man. That's not to say he's stupid; he is uncomplicated. He sells farm equipment. He is a middle-aged bachelor who relies upon his sister for female companionship. Years before, she gave him an illustrated book about different cultures around the world, and he has always been captivated by the illustration of an Indian woman in traditional attire. Very slowly and methodically, he arrives at the decision to make a trip to India in pursuit of a wife. He knows that the other villagers will find it outlandish, so he buys a traditional Norwegian brooch (which he feels would look nice on a sari) for the bride he feels certain he will meet, and he tells only his sister where he is going and why.

It was clear to him that he wanted an Indian wife. Not because he wanted a subservient and self-sacrificing woman, but because he wanted someone he could cherish and adore. Norwegian women didn't want to be adored. Actually he had never understood them, never understood what they wanted. Because he lacked nothing, as far as he could see. He had a house, a garden, a car, a job, and his kitchen was well equipped. There was under-floor heating in the bathroom, and he had a television and a video recorder, a washing machine, a tumble-dryer, a microwave, a willing heart and money in the bank. Gunder understood that there were other, more abstract factors, which determined whether you were lucky in love – he wasn't an imbecile.

And to everyone's amazement but his own, Gunder does exactly what he sets out to do. He meets Poona in a Mumbai restaurant (where he eats every meal) and, toward the end of his stay, proposes marriage to her. She sees in Gunder a decent, kind man, and she accepts. They marry in India. Gunder returns to Norway, and Poona is to follow later, after putting her affairs in order. Gunder is on his way to meet her at the airport when he receives word that his sister has been in a terrible car crash and is lying comatose in hospital. In a terror, he asks an old friend, a cab-driver, to go fetch Poona. The friend could not find her at the airport, and soon after, one of Gunder's neighbours finds a horribly battered foreign woman's corpse in his meadow.

Watching Gunder trying to absorb the fact that his new wife has been murdered and that his sister may never awaken is nothing short of excruciating. In a very touching scene, Inspector Sejer advises Gunder to confide all his grief to his comatose sister. "Just start talking. No one can hear you in here. Tell her about Poona... Tell her everything that has happened."


Sejer and Skarre have their own frustrations. The people in small villages generally don't like to discuss each other's business with the police. Sejer deeply understands this, and he chats about it with his favourite confidante -- his dog, Kollberg.

"In a place like this," Sejer said aloud and studied the wood and the meadow and Gunwald's house. "In a place like this people will protect one another. That's how it always is. If they've seen something they don't understand they wouldn't dare to say so. They think I must be mistaken, I grew up with him, we've worked together and anyway, he's my cousin. Or neighbour. Or brother. We went to school together. So I won't say anything, it must be a mistake. Human beings are like that. And that's a good thing, isn't it, Kollberg?" He looked at the dog. "We're not talking about evil here, but the good in people which stops them from saying what they know."

One witness, however, is very informative. Linda is a young woman with a less than solid reputation amongst the locals, most of whom find her emotionally off-balance. After meeting young and handsome Officer Skarre, Linda begins to remember increasing numbers of details about the crime scene. It's not long before she believes that fate has thrown her and the gorgeous investigator together for a reason.

She found the telephone directory. Looked under S and found Skarre, Jacob, 45 Nedre Storgate, and his telephone number, which she memorised twice. After that it was burned into her brain. She found the folder with the newspaper cuttings and went upstairs to her room. Stood for a while in front of the mirror. Then she read them all again. She had to keep this case alive. Had to blow on it the way you blew on embers. It had become something that sustained her, almost like a mission.

There are quite a few men who seem like plausible suspects in this senseless and brutal murder. Based upon the information that they've gathered from Linda (a patently unreliable witness) and everyone else in the village (patently uncooperative witnesses) and their gut instincts, the police arrest Gøran, the muscle-bound, angry young man with the scratched face. His parents are devastated, the other villagers run the gamut from disbelieving to accepting that the right man is in jail, and Gøran is cocky and defiant. He quickly learns, however, that Sejer, tall, grey-haired, and soft-spoken, should not be underestimated. He has subtle and devious ways of triggering self-incriminating outbursts. When they begin chatting about body-building and fitness, Gøran at last feels that he is in control of the interview. He suggests an arm-wrestling match.Sejer shrugs. Why not?

Gøran counted to three and pushed violently. Sejer did not attempt to drive Gøran's fist down. He was only concerned to hold out. And he managed that. Gøran's strength exploded in one violent charge, then it died away. Very slowly, Sejer pushed his fist to the table. "Too much static training. Don't forget stamina. Remember that in future." Gøran massaged his shoulders. He didn't feel good.

Have Skarre and Sejer arrested the killer? They think so. We hope so, but Fossum reminds us that unless a killer is caught red-handed, there will always be room for doubt. It's untidy and uncomfortable, and it's just the way life is. 

This novel was published in the US with the title The Indian Bride. I suppose it's a more memorable title, but Calling Out for You is haunting. So many characters in this book are calling out -- for help, for love, for attention. And they almost never get what they seek. 

The Lady Elizabeth, by Alison Weir

Bookface has fallen behind on both reading and blogging over the past few months, having been consumed by a deluge of business writing and editing assignments with short deadlines. The work and associated compensation are always welcome, but I will be happy when my eyes stop colliding with "up-skilled employees" and "leverage" used as a verb.

As I was reading David Starkey's Six Wives in January, I realised that my knowledge of Tudor history has some mortifying and gaping holes. I actually know very little about that other famous red-haired monarch, Elizabeth I. I found this book on my Kindle and decided to dive in. The Lady Elizabeth is (as I should have surmised from the title) about her pre-coronation years. It is also historical fiction, but I trust Alison Weir implicitly to stay within the facts at hand. There are a few writers who maintain that exquisite balance between historic and fictional detail, and the result is a book that reads like a black-and-white history reproduced in colour. Alison Weir is one of those writers, and this is one of those books.

Elizabeth is three years old, living in a country house in northern England when her 21 year-old half-sister arrives with a retinue that includes a female fool. In what is quite possibly the most sympathetic glimpse of Mary, she struggles to explain to the toddler that her mother, the late Anne Boleyn, has just been executed for treason. She had brought her fool along to distract the hysterical child when the news finally sinks in. Mary wrestles with her own mixed emotions -- she had, with good reason, loathed Anne Boleyn and must have at least secretly rejoiced in her death. For this fleeting time, however, she perceives her half-sister as an innocent and treats her kindly.

Even as a small tot, Elizabeth showed precocious intelligence. It doesn't escape her notice that her servants no longer address her as Princess. He may have stripped her of her royal title and her legitimacy, but King Henry VIII still ensured that his younger daughter lived in comfort and had superlative teachers. And those teachers marveled at the speed with which she picked up Latin and Greek, rhetoric and literature. In this, she took after her father. When she rode in procession with him, sitting in front of him on his horse, another similarity came to light.

The common touch came effortlessly to him; he loved the adulation. Elizabeth loved it too, and began waving herself, much to everyone’s amusement; and on that day, there was born in her a craving to be thus acclaimed, to be such a person as her father was, to bask in the people’s love and approval.

Mary and Elizabeth were both fond of Jane Seymour, Henry's third wife. Jane's death following the birth of Prince Edward was another devastating loss for Elizabeth. Weir hints that it might also have sparked her belief that having children is a deadly game.

But she knew that the Queen would never wake up, that her soul had fled, and that, in some mysterious way, having the Prince had killed her. Appalled by the sweet scent of death, and realizing with dread that there were more perils in the world than she had ever imagined, Elizabeth buried her face in her hands to shut out the sight of the white, waxen face and tried very hard to pray. 

Weir gives some delicious glimpses of what must have been the child Elizabeth's perceptions of the bawdy Tudor court. When he wasn't hunting fowl and game, Henry was hunting women (whether or not he was currently married to one of them). Of course, not all Europeans found the English randiness so amusing. Elizabeth overhears a courtier describing the King's latest hunt.

“He asked that suitable French ladies be brought to Calais so that he could meet them and get to know them a little before choosing. Well, the ambassador was furious. He said that the great ladies of France were not to be paraded like prize animals in a market. And then he dared to suggest”—Sir John was almost whispering—“that His Majesty might like to mount them one after the other, and keep the one he found most agreeable.”

She was too busy striving to imagine her father riding the French ladies, much as she would ride her hobbyhorse, round and round Calais. The images this conjured up made her giggle under her breath. Adults did the silliest things.

As Elizabeth grows a bit older, she displays flashes of rage (for which her father had long been famous) and a pronounced tendency to speak her mind. She and Mary are clearly girls of very different temperaments and, it becomes clear, both are being raised by adults profoundly loyal to their mothers. Or, more accurately, to the religious beliefs their mothers had held. Mary has grown into as devout a Catholic as the Pope might wish for, and Elizabeth is a staunch little Protestant. When Mary realises that her half-sister is growing up a heretic, the tenuous bond between them begins to crack.

After Mass one day, Elizabeth asked, “Why do they ring those bells?” Mary looked shocked.
“Have you not been taught, Sister?” she asked, frowning. “The bells signal the elevation of the Host.”
“Father Parker says that it’s wrong to have bells at Mass,” Elizabeth said, quite innocently.
“It is very wicked of him to say such things,” she said firmly. “The bells signify the holiest moment in the Mass. Come with me.” Taking the child’s hand, she led her back into the empty chapel, to the altar rails. “When the priest holds up the bread and the wine before the people,” she explained, “he does it to show that a miracle has taken place, for during Mass, as Our Lord promised at the Last Supper, the gifts of bread and wine become His very body and blood, given for us for the redemption of our sins.”
“But how can that be?” she asked. “They are still bread and wine. I have tasted them.”
Mary was appalled. What had they been teaching the child? “But that is the miracle!” she exclaimed. “When they are consecrated, they still look like bread and wine, but they become the real body and blood of Jesus Christ. I’m surprised that Father Parker has not explained this to you. It is our Faith.” Elizabeth forbore to say that Father Parker had said something rather different: She guessed that Mary would be cross if she did.

By the time Elizabeth is 15, King Henry has died, boyish Prince Edward acts as the puppet monarch maneuvered by his council, and Elizabeth is living with Henry's widow. Catherine Parr shed her mourning attire indecently soon, according to many, and re-married Admiral Thomas Seymour, her first love. It all looked so promising -- after a stormy marriage to the old, ill and irascible King, Catherine could look forward to the rest of her life with handsome and dashing Seymour, perhaps even having children with him. It all went sour, because the scoundrel husband only had eyes for the adolescent Lady Elizabeth. In well-documented romps, he would burst into her bedchamber at all hours, rough-housing with her and flirting shamelessly, much to the horror of her lady-in-waiting (who was responsible for protecting her honour.) A scandal ensued, and Elizabeth faced an outraged council to defend her purity. It became painfully clear that her life would never be a private one. She would always face public scrutiny. And men with agendas.

“He was a man of much wit and very little judgment,” she said quietly, knowing they were all waiting on her every word. Well, she would say no more, however traumatized and confused she felt. One thing she had learned from this whole sad and dangerous business, and that was that she must in future keep her own counsel and never betray her true feelings. It was a harsh lesson for one who was just fifteen years old.

(In the postscript, Weir confesses that she allowed herself to take one leap from the historical record in connection with this incident. It's perhaps the emotional climax of the story, so I won't reveal it here, but it gives the historian a chance to take a piece of gossip that's been circulating for centuries and have a lark with it.)

The gap between them widening to a chasm, Mary, now on the throne, begins to doubt that Elizabeth is Henry's biological daughter. Despite the fact that everyone else sees the unmistakable resemblance, Mary convinces herself that Elizabeth is the bastard of Anne Boleyn and one of her adulterous lovers. She is painfully aware that if England is to return to a permanent state of Catholic Grace, Elizabeth must never be allowed to rule after her. She begins a long campaign of vilifying, imprisoning and banishing her half-sibling.

“Yet I can scarcely believe that she is my sister. She is no longer the sweet, winning child whom I so loved when my father was alive. I fear that vanity, heresy, and ambition have changed her. I can no longer think of her as my dear sister, but as a viper in my bosom.”

Mary, meanwhile, weds Philip II of Spain, whose credentials as a devout Catholic include sponsoring the Inquisition. Many of the English oppose the match. Mary, however, is determined. She is giddy with a school-girlish excitement for her handsome young groom. This is not exclusively a marriage of political expedience for her.

“You know that there have been demonstrations against the marriage in London?” Renard asked gently.

"They have been dealt with,” Mary said sharply, the smile vanishing. “Some of my subjects do not know what is good for them, I fear. The rest, I am glad to say, rejoice for me, and for England.”

“As do I, madam”—Renard smiled—“and His Highness too. I hear he is an eager bridegroom.” He hoped that sounded convincing. Mary blushed deeply.

“I trust he will not find me wanting,” she said humbly. Looking at her faded, tired face and thin, flat-chested body, Renard could have wept for her.  

Men are from Mars, women from Venus. Always have been, even in the 16th century.

Mary lay in bed, watching the summer moonlight streaming through the open casement. Beside her, Philip—her Philip, her darling, her joy—was breathing evenly.

Her part, as she understood it, was to lie still, submit to his attentions, and pray for an heir. She was managing, she thought, rather well. Just let her get pregnant, and then that constant thorn in her side, her sister Elizabeth—if she was her sister, of course—could go hang herself. Next to her, Philip was pretending to be asleep. He was praying that his dried-up spinster of a wife would soon be with child, so that he could in conscience abstain from her bed and perhaps, if he could contrive it, get back to Spain for a while.

As the newlyweds begin a campaign of incinerating England's "heretics", Mary vacillates. Is it better to keep her menace of a half-sister nearby? If she's at court, she can be watched like a hawk, but she gets on Mary's nerves insufferably. If she's banished to a house in the middle of nowhere, she's pleasantly out of Mary's line of sight but woefully available to those Protestants who would overthrow her. Being far advanced in what turns out to be a false pregnancy, Mary feels especially indecisive and vulnerable.

Philip, her ostensibly devoted husband, has his own private thoughts on the matter.

“We will make no decision as to her future until after your confinement, but I do feel she should be brought back to court so that I can keep an eye on her until then.” And, he thought to himself, it would be wise to establish a good working relationship with Elizabeth just in case she ever does become queen.
Philip was thinking that, even as a furtive Protestant, Elizabeth would be preferable to Mary, Queen of Scots, any day.

Weir does a spectacular job of building what we know of the Virgin Queen from the records of her youth and the turbulent years of Mary's reign. This woman knew as a child that she wanted to rule. She knew herself to be capable of it. She had more than enough examples of good and strong women who had squandered or lost their power to husbands, Mary included. 

For in the course of her long seclusion, she had discovered that the most important thing to her in life was freedom: the freedom to come and go as she pleased, to make her own choices, and not constantly to have to submit to the will of others. Such freedoms did not come with marriage. 

Elizabeth is back in a remote country house in the north when the horsemen ride up, just as Mary's entourage had done years before. These horsemen bring a different message: Long Live the Queen. Long Live Queen Elizabeth.

Think Like a Cat, by Pam Johnson-Bennett

I'm fairly new to the business of cat-keeping. When I adopted my first feline furball from the Selangor SPCA in 2008, (or more accurately, when she adopted me), I figured cats were simply small, intransigent dogs.

In the intervening four years, I have been a mediocre student at Cat College. My professors, mentors, lecturers and gurus have been veterinarians, pet supply shop owners, fellow cat servants, and of course, cats. I've finally gotten around to the reading list. Pam Johnson-Bennett is a certified animal behavioural specialist in the US. No matter. I think Malaysian cats probably behave similarly to American ones. 

Now I have two cats. Twice the fun, twice the costs, and twice the opportunities for screwing with their little furry heads. This book was ideal for my present state of delving into the feline mind. It affirmed the things I'm doing right, and it tells me what I should do to keep them happy and healthy enough so they don't kill me while I sleep.

Ms. Johnson-Bennett talks about things that will never happen in my household. Walking my cats outdoors on a leash is simply out of the question. (Most of my friends question my own sanity in walking about in my neighbourhood.) She stresses that cats don't like to be pulled about. I fantasise about the effect this image might have on my neighbours.

Very important warning: don’t tug on the leash at this point or your mild mannered cat will turn into a thrashing, growling, fur-covered chain saw.

I worry that my cats seem to lie about a lot. Evidently this is just part of the programme.

In general, cats sleep about sixteen hours a day.

In the years when I lived with dogs, I learned that one of the biggest factors in dogs' behavioural problems is a lack of exercise. Why I had to learn this from a book when it comes to cats, I don't know. They are, of course, natural predators. They need to hunt, to stalk, to kill. They need to sharpen their mental and physical hunting skills. DUH!  If they live inside, they do this through play. And the best play requires our participation.

Cats engage in two forms of play: social play and object (or solo) play. Social play involves another cat, pet, or human... The cat who spies her prey makes a quick assessment to make sure she’s not in danger, focuses in on her hunt, and then eats. She begins to strengthen both her air hunting skills for flying prey and ground hunting skills for rodents, insects, and other creepy crawlies.

Many people assume the outdoor cat who “plays” with his prey after injuring or killing it, is being cruel. In reality, though, the behavior is most likely a displacement due to the excitement and anxiety of the hunt. During the hunt the cat must deal with the fear of getting injured himself in the process.

The problem with all of the cute little toys that are strewn about the house is that they’re essentially dead prey. An interactive toy lets you create the movement so the cat can just enjoy being a predator.

Johnson-Bennett spends a lot of time on how to play with your cat. Don't dangle the toy toward her but have it skitter away, just as a timid or injured prey animal would do. It's important to let the cat catch the toy once in a while and to relish the tactile joy of sinking teeth and claws into it. (This is one of the drawbacks of the red laser dot that is so popular now. Sure, it gives the cat something to chase but nothing to catch.)  Most important, she suggests at least 5-10 minutes a day of interactive play with the cat. That's such a small contribution to your pet's mental and physical fitness!

My second cat, Crumpet, is currently over-grooming to the point of leaving bald patches on her hindquarters. After a few visits to the vet, I turned to the local veterinary acupuncturist for help. I could write a tome on this whole experience, but one of the key things the acupuncturist advised me was to switch to a wet diet.  My two cats were never kibble addicts, but they were inordinately fond of tuna-flavoured wet foods of lower quality. For a number of reasons, fish-based food, and especially tuna, is unsuitable. Explaining the finer points of this issue to my cats has been grueling. I'm dealing with hard-core tuna junkies.

Cats can quickly become addicted to the strong taste of tuna. No matter what food you place before him, your cat will only want his tuna. To get him off of it, you have to gradually mix in other food. It’s not easy to reform a tuna junkie, so try not to create one.

One of the greatest advantages of wet food is the moisture content. I've seen this for myself, as my two fuzz-butts have all but stopped drinking from the water bowl while their urine output has tripled.  I think the wet food is probably the best thing, but it means a change in the way I deal with their food.

Wet food contains about 70–76 percent water. The lowcarb diet of wet food is beneficial to a cat as a carnivore. The cat gets more bang for the buck, so to speak. Canned food, once opened, should be stored in the refrigerator. Remove it from the can and store it in an airtight container. If you decide to store the food in the can, get a snap-on lid. Don’t just cover the can top with plastic wrap because the contents will spoil faster not to mention the aroma of the food will be detectable every time you open the refrigerator... 

When I left bowls of kibble out for the cats' free feeding, I didn't worry about how much or how little they ate. They seemed to eat what they needed, and I knew roughly how much to put out in a day. I'm having to recalibrate the appropriate servings of wet food. Will they turn into furry blimps, or will they become lean, mean, feline machines?

A cat of ideal weight has a little fat over his ribs (remember, I said a little) and a detectable slight indentation just behind the ribs, above the hips. If he looks more like a furry football than a cat, he’s overweight.

This book is a terrific resource. I admittedly skimmed through the chapters on caring for tiny kittens and geriatric cats, as I have neither, and praise be, I didn't need to focus on the very helpful chapter on health problems at the moment, but I take solace in knowing it's there for future reference.

Got a cat? Get this book!

The Geography of Books

Now how cool is this?

Very cool, indeed, but it's the wrong country.

But where will I ever find a woodworker who can turn this into bookshelves?

Six Wives, by David Starkey

I got off to a rough start with this book. I mentioned to an English friend that I'd started reading it. He had been one of Starkey's fellow students at Cambridge and quipped, "Ah, yes, one bitchy queen writing about six others." Oddly, being unfamiliar with the author when I began the book, I'd rather reached that very conclusion on my own after reading the introduction.  There are, of course, a great many books out there on this subject, and I suppose even a historian with David Starkey's credentials must justify yet another one. He does this by maligning earlier histories by Antonia Fraser and Alison Weir, both of which I read and greatly admired.

One other comment in Starkey's introduction struck me as simply silly: He insisted that this book is not about Henry but about his wives. I contend that every book on this subject is and must be about Henry. He was the monarch. The wives came into the story, one after the other, either because they were part of his political maneuverings or because he was infatuated with them. Four of them exited -- either the Court or this life -- when he commanded it. The women were indisputably interesting characters, but they played supporting roles.

One of his complaints, which is valid to a large extent, is that earlier writers tend to allot the same amount of space to each of the six wives. This reminds me a bit of the solar system maps from my schooldays, with each planet in orderly equidistance from its neighbours; I was shocked to learn that Neptune is 30 times further from Earth than we are from the sun. Henry's marriages don't fit into tidy episodes, either -- he was married to Catherine of Aragon for 24 years and to Anne of Cleves for about six months. Starkey's choice to allocate space to each wife in proportion to the length of her marriage and its historical impact makes sense, but it doesn't save him from wallowing in disproportionate reams of canonical law as Henry and Cardinal Wolsey tried to end the King's first marriage. Still, there's plenty to recommend this book, and it was a good refresher course for me. 

Catherine of Aragon:  The daughter of Francis and Isabella, who co-ruled two regions of Spain with equal power. ("Her mother, the warrior-queen Isabella of Castile, had spent most of her pregnancy on campaign against the Moors, rather than in ladylike retirement.") I often imagine Catherine as being demure and obedient, but her mother had brought her up to have a strong will, well-equipped to stand her ground when Henry decided to cast her aside. And did he want to be rid of Catherine because he was desperate for a male heir? Of course that must have been a factor, but in truth (Starkey and Weir agree), he was absolutely besotted with Anne Boleyn.  It didn't help that Catherine had lost her looks.

By the time she reached the menopause, which seems to have come to her very early at about thirty-five, she was (like the middle-aged Queen Victoria) nearly as wide as she was tall. What made it worse, of course, was that she had married a husband who was younger and better-looking than she, and who had kept his youth and looks longer.

And before menopause, she had been nearly constantly, and apart from Princess Mary, fruitlessly pregnant. Starkey reminds us that she was pregnant seven times in the nine years 1509-1518. It's small wonder she was stout and Henry was frustrated.

Getting rid of Catherine, however, was a Great Matter, indeed, and it dragged on for seven years. As with many contemporary break-ups, everyone was inclined to take sides.

Henry had envisaged the case as England versus Catherine. Thanks to Catherine’s intrepidity, Wolsey feared, it was turning into the World versus England and England’s King.

Wolsey wrote bulls, envoys pleaded and reasoned, and Henry commissioned a study of the theological issues at all Europe's greatest universities, hoping that academics would sway public opinion, if not the Pope. The Pope (infallible, of course) had no intention of annulling the marriage; he couldn't risk alienating Catherine's nephew, Charles, the Holy Roman Emperor.

The decision rested with Giulio de’ Medici, who had reigned as Pope Clement VII since 1523. He was a wily Florentine, who turned prevarication into an art form. He would talk, at inordinate length, without ever reaching a conclusion. And he knew every word, in mellifluous Italian or fluent Latin, apart from ‘yes’ and ‘no’. His other dominant characteristic was a certain timorousness... He was also hoping that something would either turn up (like a French victory in Italy) or go away (like Henry’s infatuation with his new woman) to let him off the hook.

Starkey portrays Catherine during this period as a shrewd, scholarly and determined woman. Henry lost more than one skirmish when he engaged her directly. The woman who would replace the Queen offered him no refuge, either.

For the King publicly to bandy words with his Queen was undignified. It was also a blunder. As Anne Boleyn later pointed out, whenever Henry got into an argument with Catherine, he lost. He did so spectacularly this time. ...

Bested, Henry retreated to Anne. But he found cold comfort. ‘Did I not tell you’, Anne snapped, ‘that whenever you disputed with the Queen she was sure to have the upper hand?’ Some fine day, she continued, Henry would succumb to Catherine’s arguments. Then what would happen to Anne? She would be cast off. ‘I have been waiting long’, she protested with increasing vehemence, ‘and might in the meanwhile have contracted some advantageous marriage, out of which I might have had issue . . . But, alas!, farewell to my time and youth spent to no purpose at all’. One almost begins to feel sorry for Henry, caught as he was in the cross-fire between two such women.

Anne Boleyn:  Although French in manners and education, Anne was, unlike her predecessor, an Englishwoman.

But there was also surely more than a nod to the fact that Anne was the first Queen of England who numbered a Mayor and citizen of London among her ancestors: when the citizens saluted Anne, they were hailing one of their own.

Anne was visibly pregnant during her coronation procession, which probably toned down the protests of those loyal to Catherine. Everyone knew that England needed an heir. A male heir.

What made the pressure worse, probably, was Henry’s serene confidence. ‘His physicians and astrologers’, Chapuys reported, had told him that it was ‘certain . . . that the Lady would bear a son’. The King clearly believed them and had made arrangements accordingly. He had already started planning the celebratory jousts. The French were approached to send a ‘notable personage’ to represent Francis I at the christening of the Prince. And the royal clerks prepared circular letters announcing the ‘deliverance and bringing forth of a Prince’ and requiring the addressees to ‘pray for the good health, prosperity and continual preservation of the said Prince’. The letters were written in Anne’s name and sealed with the Queen’s signet, and they needed only the date to be filled in.

Oops. To make matter's worse, Henry's lustful eyes had already begun to rove.

On 3 September, a week after Anne had taken to her Chamber... Henry and Anne had their first quarrel. It was, needless to say, about another woman – perhaps indeed one of the Court beauties whom Henry had had such opportunity to scrutinise at Anne’s coronation banquet. In response, Anne, ‘full of jealousy . . . used some words to the King at which he was displeased’. And this time Henry did not swallow his displeasure. Instead, he told her ‘that she must shut her eyes, and endure as her betters had done’. And he added a threat: ‘she ought to know that it was in his power to humble her again in a moment more than he had exalted her’. Anne was finding out the difference between being a mistress and a wife. And she did not like it.

Three years after her coronation, Anne traveled the same route by barge, but this time to the Tower, where she awaited her sham trial and execution. Starkey gives stunningly little space to this process or what led Henry to disavow the woman he'd worked so long and hard to gain. (No matter. Alison Weir can fill in the gaps. Read The Lady in the Tower.)  Both historians make it plain, however, that Henry had already set his sights on his third wife when he agreed to Anne's arrest. A mere ten days after Anne's decapitation, he remarried.

Jane Seymour:  Some historians have claimed that plain, quiet Jane was the love of Henry's life. Starkey is among those who disagree. His marriage with Jane seems rather like one of defeat and practicality. And, of course, religion and politics.

How a woman like Jane Seymour became Queen of England is a mystery. In Tudor terms she came from nowhere and was nothing... [Henry] also, more disturbingly, wanted submission. For increasing age and the Supremacy’s relentless elevation of the monarchy had made him ever more impatient of contradiction and disagreement. Only obedience, prompt, absolute and unconditional, would do... Jane was everything that Anne was not. She was calm, quiet, soft-spoken (when she spoke at all) and profoundly submissive, at least to Henry. In short, after Anne’s flagrant defiance of convention, Jane was the sixteenth-century’s ideal woman (or at least the sixteenth-century male’s ideal woman).

Jane welcomed the Ladies Mary and Elizabeth (now stripped of their Princess titles and reduced to bastardy as both their mothers' marriages had been declared invalid) into the Court, and it seems she sincerely wanted them to have warm relations with their father. She and Henry did in fact argue, and most often about religious matters. The split between England's Reformers and Catholics had not healed and was in fact only widening into a more violent chasm.

But it is important to be clear about Jane’s place in the scheme of things. For [Catholic nobles], she was a means, not an end. Their immediate goal was to restore Mary as heir to the throne, and, with Mary as a stalking-horse, to bring about a Catholic restoration also... Jane’s smooth ascent produced near euphoria among Mary’s supporters. ‘The joy shown . . . at the hope of [Mary’s] restoration is inconceivable,’ Chapuys reported.

Jane's submissiveness may have soothed Henry after his debacle with fiery Anne, and she did present him (at the cost of her own life) with that male heir for whom he was so desperate. This was not, however, what anyone might call a happy marriage.

A week after the publication of his marriage to Jane, Henry had met two beautiful young ladies. He had sighed and said ‘[he was] sorry that he had not seen them before he was married’.  Jane’s honeymoon was proving shorter than she expected.

Anne of Cleves:   She has often been my favourite of Henry's wives, although their marriage was the shortest and was never consummated. Anne had pluck and common sense, but Starkey adds a note of pathos to her story.

Anne, far from retreating thankfully into the status of a well-endowed divorcée, never gave up hope of remarrying Henry and viewed each of his succeeding marriages with despair and renewed chagrin.

But I've gotten ahead of myself. Jane had been dead less than a year when Henry started casting about for a new wife. He'd heard fabulous things about Christina, the Duchess of Milan, and the following says a lot about the superficiality of the King's affections.

Henry sent Holbein to paint the Duchess of Milan. The resulting portrait confirmed all the details of her beauty, down to the dimpled cheeks and chin. It also confirmed that she was Henry’s type. He fell in love with the woman, and, when the marriage failed to proceed, remained in love with the picture, which he kept in his collection to his dying day.

To Henry's angry astonishment (and bruised ego, no doubt), the Duchess famously rebuffed him, reportedly quipping, "If I had two heads, I should be happy to put one of them in the King's service."

Other reports came to Henry's ear, though, that Princess Anne of Cleves was even lovelier than the Duchess of Milan.

If Anne were really so superior to Christina then she was beautiful indeed... And his feelings were fed not with images but with words. All over the summer, Cromwell and his agents had told him that Anne – the beautiful, the gentle, the good and the kind – was the woman for him. Finally he had come to believe them.

I've often thought, based upon Holbein's portrait of her, that Anne of Cleves was among the most beautiful of Henry's wives. And it was an advantageous political match, to boot. It instead proved a fiasco. Henry was repulsed from the moment he laid eyes on her and was unable to consummate the marriage. It's a wonder that Holbein didn't lose his head. Cromwell lost his. He had offended a great many on his climb to power, of course, but the failed Anne of Cleves match was the last straw for His Majesty.

The fallen minister was not even given the dignity of a trial. Instead, he was condemned by a Parliamentary process known as an Act of Attainder. The charges were a fantastic mixture of treason, heresy and scandalum magnatum, or being rude and oppressive to nobles. Only the last had any vestige of truth. But truth, as Cromwell had fatally taught Henry, was not important. Only Henry’s convenience was. 

In a time before mass media, it surprised and touched me that Anne had managed to warm the public heart. 

Despite her short reign, Anne had become remarkably popular. Her divorce, Marillac reported, had been ‘to the great regret of this people, who loved and esteemed her as the sweetest, most gracious and kindest Queen they ever had or would desire’.

To her great credit, Anne appears to have made her exit with dignity (and a generous bit of real estate), if a great deal of sadness. Henry, of course, needed to prove his virility and had begun to look about for a new vehicle for that purpose.

Anne herself probably understood little of the political storm which raged round her and of which she was the all-too-passive cause. She was shrewd enough, however, to notice the King’s attentions to Catherine Howard, and, on 20 June, she complained vigorously about them to the Cleves agent in London, Karl Harst. Two days later, she was in better spirits, because Henry had spoken to her kindly. It was the last time she saw him as her husband.

Catherine Howard:  She's often portrayed as a flighty, flirty girl. Starkey presents Catherine as a political puppet, but also a young woman whom Henry apparently loved with a passion that may well have rivaled what he felt for her cousin, the late Anne Boleyn. 

Marillac’s picture of an infatuated King is borne out by the inventory of Catherine’s jewels, which shows that Henry lavished an Aladdin’s cave of precious stones on her.

Unlike Anne of Cleves, Catherine had grown up in the English court, and thus she was vivacious, funny, and bawdy. This sort of thing was quite normal in England, and the fact that Catherine had flirted, or possibly even had sex with handsome Francis Dereham before her marriage was no deal-breaker. Only cheating on the King was high treason. When someone left an anonymous note for Henry reporting her pre-marital monkey business, Henry was distraught. Hoping for the best, he asked his ministers to investigate more fully. When they found proof that she had smuggled a handsome young courtier, a Master Culpeper, into her bedchamber at night while the King slept in a nearby room, Henry was devastated.

Henry was badly shaken. He had believed. And he had been proved wrong. ‘His heart was so pierced with pensiveness’, the Council reported, ‘that long it was before his Majesty could speak and utter the sorrow of his heart unto us.’ And when he did so, he wept freely ‘which was strange in one of his courage’. Were his tears for Catherine? Or the loss of his own illusions?

Catherine Parr: Starkey dashes the often-bruited story that Catherine, his last wife, played the nursemaid to an ill and irascible Henry. That was simply not a role that a royal wife or Queen played in those times. She did, however, appear to sooth and comfort him when they spent time together. She barely dodged a bullet when Catholics launched a campaign to be rid of her, and before they could try again, the King was dead. As it happened with so many of his wives, Catherine didn't realise that she was seeing her husband for the last time.

Henry’s will, though it gave Catherine honour and wealth after her husband’s death, excluded her from all part in government. She would be Queen Dowager, not Queen Regent. On 11 January 1547, Catherine’s lodgings at Whitehall were got ready for her arrival. But it is unclear whether or not she was allowed to see the King. Certainly she was not present when Henry died on the night of 28 January 1547.

After Henry's death -- and some say after an indecently short time -- Catherine married Thomas Seymour, with whom she'd been in love as a girl and, despite being in her mid-thirties, conceived a child. The Lady Elizabeth came to live with them. It seemed that everyone was positioned to live happily ever after.

But it all went sour. Seymour made open love to Elizabeth. The baby turned out to be a girl. And Catherine, like Jane Seymour before her, caught puerperal fever after the birth.

Starkey never discusses Anne of Cleves' death. He simply leaves her in her household in the countryside. Did he forget her there, or was there simply no record of her death?  Poor Anne. In retrospect, though, being married to Henry VIII was never easy and rarely pleasant. These women all paid dearly for their status, jewels and their prominent places in English history books. 

Mr. Starkey has a glittering vocabulary, and here are some of my favourite gems, some new, some forgotten...  termagant (a violent, turbulent, brawling woman), libri pestiferi (noxious books), polyvalent (multifaceted), "an oleaginous speech" (haven't we all heard politicians making oily speeches?), and  "one of the liminal days in his short life" (relating to the point beyond which a sensation becomes too faint to be experienced, or more simply, related to a threshold).