Book Review: Royal Inheritance

Keeping Up with the TudorsRoyal InheritanceBy Kate EmersonGallery Books, 2013 Kate Emerson kicked off her career as a historical novelist with a salacious and quick-stepping trilogy (very prettily produced by Simon and Schuster, the umbrella company of Gallery Books) of books called “Secrets of the Tudor Court.” Those three books – The Pleasure Palace, By Royal Decree, and the especially enjoyable Between Two Queens – are pure cotton candy; their covers feature sumptuous ball-gowns, their embossed lettering is glittery, and the historical portions of their narratives are, shall we say, undemanding.Emerson is a fine storyteller and a good crafter of dialogue, and there’s always Wikipedia (and David Starkey, its printed equivalent) – and so, the novels that have followed “Secrets of the Tudor Court” have been longer and a bit more ambitious, and this applies as well to her new piece of Tudor historical fiction, Royal Inheritance.This latest novel centers on a young woman named Audrey Malte, daughter of John Malte, tailor to King Henry VIII. She’s lively and pretty and auburn-haired, and as she grows up in the court, she begins to notice certain pauses, certain hints, certain innuendos among the other court ladies (and some of the braver bravos). Gradually the unfathomable possibility asserts itself: is it possible John Malte is not her father? Is it possible she owes her bright hair (and the privileges of royal attention) to the fact that her mother once attracted the attention of King Henry himself? Is it possible that she’s royal?Readers of this kind of historical romance know perfectly well what the answer to such questions is, but young Audrey has never read Kate Emerson, so she sets out to uncover the truth of her own bloodline. She naturally falls in love (with one of those aforementioned brave bravos, but a sensitive one) along the way, and she also falls into the company of many bitter, tittle-tattling court women. Tudor fiction going all the way back to Thomas More and Shakespeare has utterly depended on bitter, tittle-tattling court women; we see their pinched faces in any collection of Hans Holbein’s sketches; Henry himself both mocked such women and married a couple of them. Audrey is surrounded by them, and Emerson’s wonderful ear for dialogue makes sure they get their say:

“The king has been known to ignore both the law and common sense when they stand in the way of what he wants.” I heard the bitterness in the Duchess of Richmond’s voice. “His punishments can be as fickle as his forgiveness In the manuscript Mary keeps of our poems you may read an exchange of love sonnets between the king’s niece and my uncle. They married in secret, without King Henry’s permission, and when he found out he imprisoned them both. Lord Thomas Howard died in the Tower.”

This is by far the biggest stretch in any of Emerson’s novels, these swaths of barbed gossip, since by the 1540s any one of those things the Duchess said would have been high treason – it’s not just that she’d have gone to the block for saying them, it’s that any of her listeners would have gone to the block for hearing them and not immediately reporting them. But given the fact that about a dozen characters in Royal Inheritance tell Audrey some version of “There are forces at work at court that you know nothing about,” it’s tough to see how Emerson could get around taking this kind of liberty, and her readers won’t mind, since she’s so good at it.The more Audrey learns, the better a guide she is for those readers:

The saddest part of Anne Boleyn’s disgrace and death was what it had done to her little daughter, Elizabeth. When the marriage was declared invalid, the child born during it became illegitimate. At barely three years old, Elizabeth Tudor went from being a pampered princess to a royal merry-begot.

But every time her investigations (and serial disillusionments) bring her close to becoming the kind of wryly insightful narrative focus readers might be familiar with from Wolf Hall, the glitter and suds of “Secrets of the Tudor Court” come gushing up through the cracks and dampen every dress-hem in sight. After all, Audrey’s a fine young lass, and the heart wanteth what the heart wanteth:

For a moment, Jack’s lips were cold and hard beneath mine. He held himself stiff and still. And then, in an instant, everything changed. His lips softened. They moved over my mouth, onto my cheeks, my forehead, even the tip of my nose before coming back to where they’d started. At the same time, he pulled me against him so that our bodies meshed from chest to toe. His arms wrapped themselves right around me. His hands caressed everywhere they touched. When I heard a low moan of pleasure, I could not tell which of us had made the sound.

A long march of Tudor history happens in the background of Royal Inheritance, from the chaos of Henry’s final years to the rise of Mary and her Spanish marriage to the blink-and-you-miss-it reign of Jane Grey, and our author captures some of it quite well – her abilities at conjuring the flashes of Tudor atmospherics are growing apace with each novel. Royal Inheritance will please all but the most finicky consumers of Tudor fiction. And those toughest hold-outs might very well come around if the follow-up to Royal Inheritance has fewer – or, here’s a thought, no – moans of pleasure at all.