Book-Thirsty Thursday: The Last Tudor, Philippa Gregory
The Last Tudor is just one of many Philippa Gregory books set in the same time period, but it still manages to stand out from the crowd.
Even Philippa Gregory, in the author’s note for The Last Tudor, almost sounds a little tired of having written so much about the same time period. She even went back and covered the Wars of the Roses (those would be the books that turned into The White Queen and The White Princess on Starz). But The Last Tudor doesn’t actually feel tired as a novel.
It might be because the title has so many different interpretations. Who exactly is the last of the family? The standard historical argument would say, “Well, Elizabeth I was the last of the Tudors to reign.” (Indeed, her successor, though of Tudor heritage through his mother, was a Stuart.) But this book is only about Elizabeth in the most peripheral of ways, because she has no chance to narrate.
The choice to look at the Grey sisters is what makes The Last Tudor so interesting. As we argued above, Elizabeth is the obvious choice. However, Gregory has made readers learn more about somewhat lesser-known female figures of English history before, and it works again here.
For two of the three perspectives Gregory writes in, Elizabeth is the great antagonist to them, despite also being their cousin. The three Grey sisters — Jane, Katherine, and Mary — happen to also be related to royalty (they’re of the Tudor line through their mother and grandmother), and therein lies the source of their problems.
Jane’s the most famous of the three, and Gregory gives her some time, although it seems to be purposefully the shortest for a multitude of reasons that make sense if you have a passing familiarity with the Tudor period. (If you don’t, this would not be the book to start with anyway, but here’s Encyclopedia Britannica all the same to explain a little more.) Understandably, the real stars of the show here are Katherine and Mary, who have to live with the fallout of what happens to Jane and their own actions.
Even though there are flaws in all three of them (made very apparent even with the three of them all narrating), it doesn’t turn a reader away, because Gregory balances them skillfully with more compelling traits centering around their relationships. For Mary and Katherine in particular, it also doesn’t hurt that Gregory again has Elizabeth around to act as an implicit contrast — and historicity to back up what Mary and Katherine go through.
Of course, the book runs a little long. By the end, Gregory has spanned about 20 years, from Jane’s rise to the youngest sister, Mary, finally closing out the story. Since most of those 20 years involve a lot of anxiety and waiting, the book spends a lot of time waiting for Elizabeth to do something, and there are only so many times we can get the mix of anxiety and worry from our actual narrators.
One could almost argue that Elizabeth should have had the chance to have a perspective of her own in this book, but that would just exacerbate the length problem further. Besides, Gregory has already covered this period for Elizabeth before in The Virgin’s Lover, although that book arrived over a decade ago and Gregory presumably would have something new to offer.
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In short, The Last Tudor is a long drink of literature for even a dedicated Gregory reader, but if you like her earlier stuff, you’ll like this, too, and isn’t that what really matters in the end?