Gregory and the good old historical novel

Seeing as my feelings about Philippa Gregory's novels (and the TV drama The White Queen, which was based on three of them) are mixed, it's a bit strange that I keep going back and trying yet another novel by her. I can be pretty sure that I won't love it, but I'll probably not hate it either, and sometimes that means a great deal. As I was rifling listlessly through the long-ago-bought but unread novels in my bookcase, Gregory's The White Princess was the one that managed to make me want to read on after the first few sentences. There's a professionalism about her writing which is easy to appreciate when you've waded through a fair share of surprisingly inept historical novels which somehow made it into print. Also, she focuses on the story and the characters without constantly showing off how much reading-up she has done about the period, and is interested in the kind of history I like: that of kings, queens and other powerful personages, and above all their personal relationships. It's ironic that this kind of history is often called "political history", when one of the beguiling things about it is that it isn't political - in the sense of charged with modern ideological concerns. Most welcome, in times when the BBC sees fit to politicise even something like an adaptation (or rather butchering) of one of my favourite Christies, The Pale Horse (I hated it). Gregory's a Yorkist, too, so I felt she could be trusted to tell the story of Elizabeth of York, the princess who was married off to Henry VII in order to strengthen his claim to the throne (or rather give him any claim whatsoever) and went on to found the Tudor dynasty with him.

I like Gregory's take on Elizabeth, except that she still claims the girl had an affair with her uncle, which I can't believe. This, at least, makes Elizabeth a staunch defender of Richard III and the York claim, and her marriage to the man who stole Richard's crown gets off to a very rocky start. It's an intriguing story, and I've always wanted to know more about Henry VII's reign. For all that he had no business to snatch the English crown and badly malign his predecessor, Henry was no fool, and I suspect that he made an annoyingly competent king. The White Princess more or less bears this out. It does harp on the fact that Henry didn't know how to make himself popular the way the Yorks (especially Elizabeth's father Edward IV) did and that he taxed the people and fined his noblemen heavily. But then, a king's foremost duty is perhaps not to make himself popular. Gregory's Henry is sensible enough, and as the marital relationship improves I couldn't help feeling relieved. Then the stakes are raised when the so-called Perkin Warbeck rebellion gathers momentum. Never one to turn down a historical theory because it sounds a bit fanciful, Gregory explores the possibility that the youth who headed the rebellion, far from being some low-born impostor, might actually have been who he claimed to be: Elizabeth's younger brother, escaped from The Tower (or rather, never sent there at all as his mother sent a page boy to take his place). 

Pretty fascinating stuff - and yet, I nearly gave up on The White Princess a couple of times. The novel feels overlong and repetitive. Gregory's characters sometimes insist on making the same statement over and over with a few variations - it's a rhetorical quirk which can work but easily palls. Early on, for instance, Elizabeth's mother intones: "A king cannot let a pretender live. No king can allow a pretender to live." We heard you the first time, love. Storywise, the same points are made again and again too. I kept wishing the novel had been severely edited down to 300 pages or so instead of 518.

Still, I must say, Gregory makes a good case for the young pretender at least not being a brat called Perkin Warbeck - it does seem likely there was no such person. A page taking young Prince Richard's place in The Tower feels a bit adventure novel, though, as does the boy resurfacing the way he did, by way of some silk merchant. Sounds a bit shady to me. Nevertheless, several crowned heads of Europe recognised his claims and took him to their hearts, noblemen defected to him in droves and Henry was seriously rattled. Not just any old guttersnipe, then.

Incidentally, Gregory's Elizabeth doesn't seem very eager to find out who did kill the Princes (or prince and page boy) in The Tower. It's enough for her to be certain that it wasn't Richard III wot dunnit. Fair enough, I suppose.