Random Book Review: The Captive Queen

Every time I've sat down to write this review, I've thought about how long it's been since I read The Captive Queen, and how little of the story I remember, and abandoned my post half-way. But then I realised that none of the 'book reviews' I've written in the past have been book reviews at all. I've just read a book, written down whatever I was thinking at the time, gone off onto a tangent about the Wars of the Roses, and published that for all and sundry to read.

I must confess that when I read The Captive Queen, I knew next to nothing about Eleanor of Aquitaine. A few months earlier, I had read Rainbow Rowell's Eleanor and Park, in which Eleanor Douglas admits to being named after Eleanor of Aquitaine. And, believe it or not, that was the first time I ever read Eleanor's full title. Up until that point, she had just been King Henry II's 'Queen Eleanor' to me. 

But that's the whole point of reading, isn't it? Why would anyone ever read anything if they knew everything that there was to be known? After I read The Captive Queen, I read more about Eleanor, and now I do know who she is. And she fast became one of favourite Queens, too (Which is more than I can say about Elizabeth Woodville, that conniving Lancastrian widow who managed to fulfill her dynastic ambitions even though no one liked her). Here's why.

When the story begins, Eleanor is still married to her first husband, King Louis VII of France. She had been one of the most sought after brides in Europe, which is evident by the fact that, by virtue of his marriage to her, Louis has possession of Aquitaine, one of the largest French duchies of the time. But Louis and Eleanor [I'm writing about the King and Queen of France and I can only think about Louis from One Direction and his girlfriend Eleanor] don't have any sons - and besides, Eleanor doesn't really love Louis any way. So she annuls their marriage, giving her inability to produce a male heir as the reason, and then promptly marries Henry Plantagenet. 

Henry becomes the new Duke of Aquitaine, then he becomes the King of England, and the two have a lot of sons together... And then their sons grow up. And that's when the trouble begins.

King Henry has his eldest son, also Henry, crowned the 'Young King' in Westminster, the only time in English history that an heir was crowned while the present King was still on the throne. And I think we know why it was never done again - having been crowned, the Young King wants more power and authority than his father was willing to let him have. He leads a revolt against his father, the King, supported by his younger brothers and his mother. 

When Henry gets wind of the fact that his wife is helping their sons to rebel against him, he locks her in a tower at Sarum (And you thought things like that only happened in fairy tales!) and takes a mistress, Rosamund Clifford, while Eleanor sits in the tower, regretting her life choices. 

And then, one by one, the rebellious sons start dying. When the Young King dies, Henry briefly lets Eleanor out of her prison so that they can grieve together, and then again when Geoffrey dies and then again when their daughter, Eleanor, gets married to the King of Castile. At long last, King Henry dies too, Richard becomes King and Eleanor is let out of her tower. Hurray!

Eleanor of Aquitaine lived until she was 82, a surprisingly long time when you consider the fact that there were virtually no medical facilities at the time. She died during the reign of her last son, and second to become King, John, as a nun in Fontevrault Abbey - a less than fitting end for woman who had been Queen of both England and France and ruler of Aquitaine and Poitiers in her own right.

I have a feeling her life would have turned out very differently if she had lived today. 

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This was the first time that, after reading a historical novel, I learnt absolutely nothing about the life in court. Usually, there the protagonist is a woman who is pottering around her palace, plotting with her women of the bedchamber, going into confinement to give birth, ordering gowns for coronations. Nothing of that sort happened in The Captive Queen (or maybe it did, and I just wasn't paying attention). It was too fast paced to allow for n. Maybe Eleanor compared the English food to what she was used to having in France, but apart from that it was just historical event after historical event after historical event. The Anarchy, Thomas Beckett's murder, Princes going to war against Kings, sons going to war against their father - it's a little wonder, really, that the Angevins are said to be descended from the Devil.  

Alison Weir has also written a non-fiction account of Eleanor of Aquitaine's life, but I am never going to read that. I have a feeling that it'll be like studying.

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The Captive Queen can be purchased on Amazon (click here), or Flipkart (here) if you live in India.

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This Is Basically An Advertisement

It's been a boring couple of weeks, royal-ly speaking. No one has died, no one has gotten engaged (Well, no one royal anyway. I'll get back to this), the Duchess of Cambridge is pregnant, but we've known about that for a while now, so it isn't really news.

It has been confirmed, though, that the royal baby is due in April, which is the same month as I was born in, so hopefully, HOPEFULLY, Baby Cambridge No. 2 will share a birthday with me. *fingers crossed*

During this drought of royal news, I have been keeping myself otherwise occupied. You'd think that means that I actually did something useful with my life for once, like studied or cleaned up the disarray that is my desk, but no. I wrote a blog series about the lives of Georgian Queens (Also, I watched all 100 episodes of the Lizzie Bennett Diaries).

So, the wives of Georgian Kings. It's something that I'm actually quite proud of, and I'm pretty sure that's the only reason I was granted the title of Senior Reporter, so go and check that out, if you want. Links:

Sophia Dorothea of Celle, the consort (well....) of King George I.

Caroline of Ansbach, Queen to King George II.

Caroline of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, Queen to King George III. Incidentally, while I was writing this, I realised that I'd been spelling Mecklenburg-Strelitz wrong all this while. M-E-C-K-L-E-N-B-U-R-G S-T-R-E-L-I-T-Z.

Caroline of Brunswick, the mother of King George IV's daughter.

Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen, Queen to King William IV. I still don't know how to spell Saxe-Meiningen. I have to constantly copy and paste it from Wikipedia.

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In other news, Benedict Cumberbatch is engaged to Sophie I've-never-heard-of-her-before Hunter (Based on the time-stamp, it may seem odd that I know this, but I'm not actually writing this on the date that it says, I'm writing it much later). I was most upset about this, as my friends will testify, but not so much because he was actually engaged, but more so because I didn't even know that he had a girlfriend. I didn't think celebrities could do that - have a relationship without every single person on the Internet knowing. Because if they can, it means that Prince Harry could get engaged tomorrow, without so much as a sign.

I don't think I'd be able to survive that.

~

I really don't have anything to do until the next royal baby arrives, but I do have a stack of books that I have yet to sink my teeth into. I've completely abandoned the 100 Book Challenge - there is no way I'm going to be able to read sixty books in the next two months - but I don't see why I can't make it to at least 52 books.

And when I read books, I type some nonsense about them on my blog. So on Sunday (the next post, because you really don't know when I'm typing this), after much delay, I will post my review of The Captive Queen, and then the Red Queen after that. I've also got Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies, so if I ever tear myself away from YouTube and read, I'll review those as well.

It could be a while.

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Random Book Review : Katherine

This post is riddled with spoilers, so stop right here if you have an issue with that.

Over the past three weeks, I've been reading Katherine on the train to and from college. I used to get a lot of weird glances from middle aged women who would look at the words "love story" on the cover and immediately think of the most obscene things. Contrary to what they may think, this is not a completely salacious story (Although, it is also not entirely child appropriate either. There are some themes which may be a bit grown up, such as adultery, and the thing that adultery involves, so I would recommend that you not read this until you are older than... 13? Use your discretion). It is good, historical fiction, which I am now going to massacre in this thing that I call a book review.

Katherine is an old book, about an even older time. I'm not entirely sure if I came up with that myself or if I paraphrased it from Philippa Gregory's foreword (probably the latter), but it holds true. Set in the 14th century, during the reign of Kings Edward III and Richard II, the book revolves around Katherine Swynford, long time mistress of the Duke of Lancaster, John of Gaunt. Katherine and John's children were the Beauforts, the ancestors of King Henry VII. 

The story goes like such: Katherine meets the Duke of Lancaster while she is a part of the retinue of the Duchess of Lancaster, Blanche. When Blanche dies, the Duke's servant poisons Katherine's husband, Hugh Swynford, so that she can enter into a relationship with the Duke without it being adulterous (there is no historical evidence of this, but it seems to be the generally accepted sequence of events). Unfortunately, the Duke is already betrothed to Constanza of Castile, who he plans to use to get the thrones of Castile and Leon for himself. But the pair start a relationship anyway, and they have four children together. When Constanza dies, John and Katherine get married, their children are legitimized, and everyone is happy until John's own death some three years later. Well, as happy as they can be while tyrannical King Richard is seizing lands and killing nobles. 

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One of the main subplots of the story revolves around Blanche Swynford, Katherine's eldest daughter from her first marriage. Blanche was in the Savoy Palace when it burned down during the Peasant's Revolt of 1381, and it was presumed by everyone that she was dead. Katherine was, obviously, mightily upset. She thought that her daughter had been killed as a punishment for her (Katherine's) adultery, and so she severed all ties with the Duke, and went off on a pilgrimage to Walsingham.

The entire time that this was happening, I kept expecting that, as a reward for her suffering and penance, Katherine would be reunited with her daughter, and go back to the Duke, and that everything would go back to the way it was. Which it didn't. And I resigned myself to the fact, because, after all, this is a story based in history, and if Blanche Swynford died in the Savoy that day, Blanche Swynford died in the Savoy that day. I even Googled her, and though there's not a lot of information about Blanche Swynford, after a lot of reading, I was able to put her death down to sometime between 1375 and 1385, which fits with the story's timeline.

So imagine my surprise when Blanche Swynford returned! Many, many years after she was presumed dead at the Savoy, after John and Katherine's wedding, she shows up their palace dressed as a nun, and the book ends with mother and daughter being reunited at last. A most satisfactory conclusion to a story that already ended happily, I must say, although I really doubt its veracity.

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I apologise for ruining so much of the plot, if you brazenly ignored the first sentence of this post. Although, I supposed there is a tiny chance that, even though you thought you didn't want to read the book initially, you want to now. 

And I would strongly recommend that you do read Katherine. It can get a bit dry at times, especially when Katherine and the Duke of Lancaster are apart, and on a couple of occasions, the characters take it upon themselves to speak in French, so do keep some sort of translator handy.

But if you enjoy historical fiction, here is one about the Plantagenet dynasty at its finest. Anya Seton's writing is both extremely well researched, and also very true to the its historical setting. And, like every good bit of historical fiction, Katherine made me want to go online and read everything that I could about that period in history. 

From the book, I learned (1) who Alice Perrers was, (2) that Geoffrey Chaucer was married to Katherine Swynford's sister Philippa, and (3) that the Beauforts were named after Beaufort Castle (I had always wondered where they got their name from). Also some other things, that I can't think of off the top of my head. 

And I think that is the mark of good historical fiction - though it may not be completely historically accurate itself (come on, do you really think Blanche Swynford jumped into the Thames from the top floor of a flaming tower?), it intrigues you and it makes you learn. Somehow. 

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Also, do you remember Sunaina, my friend who gave me The White Queen for my birthday? Again, big thanks to her for spotting Katherine in a pile of books and thinking that I might like it. She has a really keen eye for good reads; you can check out some of her book reviews here.

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