Tudor Fiction

By Charhys Baldwin

Tudor fiction is my preferred reading material and it has been since I was about 17 years old. It’s because of authors like Philippa Gregory, Alison Weir and Emily Purdy that I have become so addicted to reading these novels.  There is something about the combination of the factual history twinned with fiction that gives this genre such an interesting feel, that you can get inside of the heads of people that have long been dead.

Like most people I studied Tudors at school but I remember little from these lessons, it was the combination of the drama and the emotion that came from reading these historical stories that drew me in and made me want to learn more about this period. The Tudor times presented a class system based on a selection of important families that had been intermarried to increase power and importance, so when shifting loyalties occurred it has a knock-on effect to all players. This is one of the most interesting parts of Tudor history, as the relationships and connections cause as much drama as today’s soap operas. As I started to read different authors’ portrayal of the main characters that appear throughout this period, it not only made me interested in the people, but in the world they lived in. These influential people changed so much about Britain and aren’t just names in a text book, they were living breathing people that had hopes and fears and had no idea that in hundreds of years time people would be sat in a classroom reading about them.

One of the most interesting things about a lot of the Tudor fiction is the focus on the female characters. All of the books that Philippa Gregory has written on the Tudor period have been from a women’s perspective, although during this time women were seen as ‘the lesser sex’; men ruled and even when Mary I and Elizabeth I reigned they were both constantly bombarded with the need to marry so a King could take over. Tudor fiction shows the hardship many women had to suffer at the hand of 'superior' men but gives you an idea of how women felt about this and what they did to be able to have some control over their lives. Henry VII‘s mother, Margret Beaufort, had two arranged marriages but would later become mother to the King of England and the start of the Tudor dynasty. Philippa Gregory’s book ‘The Red Queen’ gives you the facts of her planning and plotting to have her son marry the Princess of York and also to overthrow Richard III, but the story also shows why, and dramatises the idea of her devotion to God combined with her belief in her son’s destiny to become King. To be able to see women being oppressed, yet using their strengths to make something of their lives gives the reader a sense of female achievement that can also lead to many female readers feeling motivated to push for their own achievements in today’s modern world.

It is human nature to question why, so this makes us want to be able to understand why these characters took the actions they did; even though we may know how the story ends we want to know the reasons behind the decisions. I believe it makes a story stronger and more emotive when you think that you are reading about real lives and real choices, increasing the ability to associate with characters and care about their lives. As the opening line for ‘The Tudors’ TV series says: 

“You think you know a story, but you only know how it ends. To get to the heart of a story, you have to go back to the beginning”.

While we develop a connection to the characters we read about, we create an image of them in our head and we start to realise the relationships between the different characters that overlap in different books. This way we can start to build an idea of how the families interlink and who did what in the Tudor period. Although technically fictional novels, these books take huge amounts of research and the stories are mostly built around facts, with parts dramatised or filling in the gaps lost over time for the sake of entertainment. What better way is there to build your historical knowledge then to read a story through the eyes of the person you are learning about?  So if you want to learn more about the period or you just want to read an interesting story about a different time to your own, I believe Tudor fiction entertains and educates equally.