Jean Plaidy's THE MURDER IN THE TOWER

Contrary to what the title probably immediately suggests to the modern reader, this does not concern the most famous murder in the Tower of London, of Richard III's royal nephews; this story takes place several generations and two dynasties later, during the time of James I, son of the unfortunate Mary, Queen of Scots (of Royal Road to Fotheringhay and Captive Queen of Scots fame; I find to my surprise that I've not yet read the latter! Oh no, I'm reading a series out of order!). James is, though, of relatively minor importance to this narrative, which concerns itself with one Frances Howard, who becomes Frances Carr by marrying a favorite courtier of James'.

Frances is nobly born -- a member of the almost-royal Howard family (descendents, all of Edward I via a younger son) -- young, and, most importantly for this story, very, very pretty. But whereas the other pretty young girls whose Plaidy accounts I've read this last year or so (Mary, Queen of Scots and Lucretzia Borgia) were pathological people pleasers, Frances Howard is only interested in pleasing herself. Married at age 12 to the 14-year-old Count of Essex, she is considered too young to live with him as his wife and so the Count is sent off to France to get some more education and she, being young and pretty and nobly born, gets to hang out at the royal court, where within just a few years she has seduced and discarded no less a lover than Henry, Prince of Wales and then set her sights on the king's favorite, the very good-looking and charming Robert Carr. Who, let us just observe, knows how to play a fish when he has one on the line.

But then Frances is a very strong fish, determined to pull Robert into the water with her by any means necessary, including witchcraft and poison. Ulp.

And also, perhaps, forgetting to wear a top?

Carr, by the way, emerges as almost as unlikeable as Frances, a spoilt young man who exploits his status as King James' bestie (there's only a slight homoerotic subtext here) pretty ruthlessly and is glad to take the position as King's secretary even though he's barely literate, the Renaissance equivalent of a dumb jock, knowing he can just find some underling to do the actual work for him. Enter poor Thomas Overby, who effectively becomes Carr's ghostwriter and thus gets ensnared in Frances' sordid machinations to become Carr's wife instead of Essex's.

Then there's this guy:

 Trust me. Or at least, trust my brow ridges!

Simon Forman, astrologer, fauxsician, womanizer and all-around scoundrel, probable father of Frances' friend Anne, sees ducat signs and all the gossip he can eat when this beautiful brat crosses his threshold. His appearance in this novel is by far the best thing about it, and comes just in time, at a point when this reader had come to the realization that she hated pretty much everybody of any importance in this story (note, this does not include poor Elizabeth Stuart, the future Winter Queen, who barely shows up here, alas) and was ready for someone to make them all miserable. Alas, there is not nearly enough Simon Forman in this novel, but one takes what one can get, no?

Before long there is a giant conspiracy to off anyone who stands between Frances and her chosen husband, and yes, that includes her original husband. Some plots work, some don't, and soon we see poor, poor Frances (heh) not enjoying her rewards one bit, haunted by guilt and suspicion, waiting for the day when her crimes are discovered and her downfall enacted. After many chapters of watching her scheme and step on toes, this is is pretty satisfying, especially since Plaidy didn't even try to whitewash this frankly awful woman.

This doesn't quite qualify as a hate read, because the storytelling and the prose are quite good, as one expects from Plaidy, but it comes close, just because its two main characters are so thoroughly unappealing. Heh.

Jean Plaidy's ROYAL ROAD TO FOTHERINGAY #OneBookAtATime

I've always preferred stories about Queen Elizabeth I to those of her cousin, Mary, Queen of Scots, and this novel did not change my mind. If anything, it cemented my general contempt for the latter for all time.

That should by no means be taken as a statement about the quality of Royal Road to Fotheringay, which is textbook Jean Plaidy fictionalized biography. The novel takes us from Mary Stuart's early days as the toddler queen of Scotland, romping through various castles and monastaries with her "four Marys" (four little girls of noble birth, all of whom share her given name, who were raised along with her to give her company and, later on, servants) through her later upbringing in France as the intended bride of the Dauphin, the sickly boy who grew up (sort of) to be the short-reigning King Francis II, her disastrous second and third marriages, and then skips on to her infamously botched execution on the orders of her cousin Elizabeth I of England. A sequel, The Captive Queen of Scots, presumably covers the twenty or so years between the death of her third husband and Mary's own death, and will be read in due course. Probably. Once I'm done with gnashing my teeth over how much I wanted to slap Mary through most of this novel.

I had, of course, a similar experience reading Plaidy's two novels concerning Lucrezia Borgia last year. I'm not sure how similar these two heroines really were, but as Plaidy wrote them, both were spoiled, petted young things who grew up into pathological people pleasers who allowed monstrous goings on to take place all around them without even trying to do anything about said goings on, before, during or after. Of course they are also products of their age, and I'm meant to feel sympathy towards them (Plaidy seems to have made it her special mission to rehabilitate, or at least explain, Borgia), or at least try to understand them, but... man, it's rough. It's rough.

Royal Road to Fotheringay was a lot more unpleasant a read than the Borgia books, though, because so many of the characters it has to portray are unpleasant. From Mary's creepy Uncle Clarence, a Roman Catholic Cardinal who helped "guide" her during her upbringing in France and who does a lot of "caressing" and  engages in blatant emotional manipulation that all but amounts to abuse, to her first husband, the vain and spoilt and cranky Darnley to her womanizing, raping, pillaging jackass of a second husband, James Hepburn, to Mary's mother Mary of Guise and one-time mother-in-law Catherine de' Medici, Mary Stuart's life is like one long parade of monsters. If only she weren't so damned passive, gullible, foolishly romantic and willing to be manipulated... seriously, she is the Dobby the House Elf of European monarchs. Not that she ever stood much of a chance of being anything else.

And this chick ruled a country. Well, sort of.

Maddening as it is, though, it's a good story, impeccably told. And that counts for something.

100 Books #114 - Jean Plaidy's LIGHT ON LUCREZIA

I thoroughly enjoyed Plaidy's earlier look at the life of the infamous but possibly unfairly maligned Lucrezia Borgia, Madonna of the Seven Hills, in which Plaidy neatly focused, not on the most infamous rumors and legends about this woman and her family, but on how those nasty tales might have gotten started. This is a nice distinction, maybe -- you can't talk effectively about rumors without mentioning their content, at least in passing, after all -- but one that Plaidy is a master of making, and making into satisfying novels.

Which is why I love her, and, as I mentioned when writing about The Scarlet Contessa, a book set in pretty much the same time and place as Plaidy's Borgia books, wish she'd taken up Caterina Sforza as a subject at some point. Oh, what a glorious book that would have been!

La Sforza does make an appearance in  Light on Lucrezia. the sequel to Madonna of the Seven Hills, but only for a few pages: a swift depiction of her resistance to Cesare's military onslaught and her famously rapey personal encounter with the man after he won the battle. How Plaidy could convey this account and then pass over the notion of writing a book about Caterina will always be a mystery to me. If I'm wrong about this, and she did write about Caterina in more detail under one of her many, many pseudonyms, please, for all love, enlighten me.

But enough about the Lady of Forli; this book is about Lucrezia, picking up exactly after the previous book with the apprehensive coming of the second of her three husbands, Alfonso, illegitimate son of the king of Naples, to Rome. Plaidy protrays this marriage as utterly idyllic, marred only by what every relationship in Lucrezia's life seems to have been marred: the jealousy of the odious Cesare. Every page devoted to this marriage -- and there really aren't many of them -- foreshadows the poor Alfonso's inevitable fate, so when it comes, the reader yawns a bit. And yawns a bit further when Lucrezia predictably chooses to stick by her evil brother, whom she has been conditioned to worship and seek to please since birth.

The rest of the novel focuses on Lucrezia's third marriage, to another Alfonso, this one the heir to the Duke of Ferrara -- which is to say that things pick up from here. Ferrara is ruled by an ancient line of haughty, snotty aristocrats, the Estes (who trace their lineage to times before the Carolingians ruled a good chunk of Europe), who resent that their bloodline will now bear the taint of Borgia ancestry, too, if Lucrezia does her job and makes Este babies. Which is to say that Lucrezia is thrown into a den of vipers, with the chief she-snake being her sister-in-law, Isabella, Marquesa of Mantua, who has long regarded herself the prettiest, most stylish, most accomplished woman in Italy and so sees Lucrezia as a rival to be humiliated at every opportunity. Hilariously, the passive and pliant Lucrezia's non-reaction to Isabella's ploys (and those of Isabella's own sister-in-law, Elisabetta Gonzaga) is precisely the best way to keep her would-be rival at the height of annoyance.

As Lucrezia's domestic troubles take center stage, at last the figures of her father Rodrigo (Pope Alexander VI) and brother Cesare the Fratricide, fade into the background. This may be why a lot of readers have complained that this second Borgia novel is dull compared to the first; it lacks the dramatic focus the first book, devoted almost wholly to foreshadowing the murder of Giovanni Borgia by Cesare, had. But really? It's all in the title: Light on Lucrezia. Finally, Lucrezia Borgia is the heroine of her own life, or at least as much of one as a Renaissance Pope's only (acknowledged) daughter can be. Which is to say that the modern reader spends a lot of these books wanting to slap Lucrezia and tell her to take some control and set some boundaries, but yeah...

La Borgia's reputation seems to have been on the mend in my lifetime, and I wonder if Plaidy's books might not have helped get this started. For my part, I find her portrait of a passive people pleaser annoying but having the ring of truth to it. A pretty little girl with such monstrous relatives might well just teach herself not to see them as they were as long as they kept her in nice dresses and poets and behaved themselves when she was around, especially in a society that still exercised mighty energies to keep women in their places (the odd amazing virago like Caterina Sforza or Isabella d'Este notwithstanding; some people just don't follow the rules, no matter when they're born), and I find the idea that Lucrezia was such a one far more plausible than that she was a monstrous female Cesare, whoring and poisoning her way across Italy out of ego, malice and desire for power.

So yeah, Holliday Granger played her just right.

100 Books #96 - Jean Plaidy's MADONNA OF THE SEVEN HILLS

This is the first Jean Plaidy book I've ever read that did not concern itself with a Queen of England. I was expecting the reading of it to be a stranger experience.

But Jean Plaidy is always Jean Plaidy, writing as if she's telling a fairy tale but not sparing us any of the unsavory or unpleasant details. So of course she had to take on the infamous Lucrezia Borgia.

I've noticed a tendency, in Plaidy, to build the tale around the most popular anecdote about her subject known at the time, whether it's truth or folklore. Thus, for instance, The Follies of the King is one long argument/justification for the infamous (and possibly fanciful) murder, at the behest of his long-suffering wife, of Edward III by means of a red hot poker. And thus this first of two books Plaidy wrote about Lucrezia and the rest of the Borgia family is just a giant bit of foreshadowing for the legendary fratricide of Lucrezia's brother Juan/Giovanni by her other brother Cesare.

Thus even as it tells the story of Lucrezia's father's elevation from Cardinal Roderigo Borgia to Pope Alexander III despite being the father of three and possibly four illegitimate children by a courtesan, which is a tale quite worthy of a novel in its own right, Madonna of the Seven Hills focuses on perhaps the most famous case of sibling rivalry gone wild since Cain and Abel, except this time, instead of God's favor, the brothers are dueling for that of their own sister and father.*

Some later writers (Madonna of the Seven Hills was first published in 1958) might have gone all out for the scandalous, salacious incest plot, but Plaidy, as always, was more interested in who Lucrezia really was and why she would accept and even embrace a situation that most modern women would find intolerable. From the first pages, we see Lucrezia as a girl born to a bizarre station in life (tartly observing at one point to her friend Giulia Farnese [who has also by that point taken over Lucrezia's mother's job as the pope's mistress] that accepting bribes and telling her father all about them is her job) but who never knew anything else; the only daughter of a family of vain, proud, selfish and violently passionate pseudo-aristocrats who can't afford not to stick together however much they have gotten sick of each other.

So of course Plaidy's Lucrezia** grows up to be a pathological people pleaser. She is rich and powerful and beautiful and educated, but despite these advantages her self-worth is bound up only in how her father and brothers react to her; if they are adoring her, they are not fighting each other, or killing people, or starting wars or seduce-raping innocent girls (or boys) -- so it's very important that they keep on adoring her, even if it means keeping them trapped as rivals for her attention and affection. Whether or not she had a sexual relationship with any of them is quite beside the point, for Plaidy; if she did, it was just another symptom. Plaidy is more interested in how the rumors got started than if they were true.

As I said, though, all of this is just foreshadowing for the culmination of the big and legendary hatred between Cesare and Giovanni***, the two brothers who have only ever been friends when they were teaming up against an outsider whom they perceived as a threat to the family (usually a husband or lover or would-be lover of Lucrezia's). It's a tricky thing Plaidy has done here, making us sympathize for their prize even as our author so obviously taps her foot impatiently waiting for the Big Showdown. Lucrezia gets humanized only to be turned into a thing, a prize, anyway.

Which is to say that in Madonna of the Seven Hills, Plaidy may have achieved her greatest degree of verisimilitude, of art imitating life almost painfully perfectly, of all.

But that's not quite what we turn to historical fiction/romance for, is it?

*Alexander VI was an infamously indulgent and doting father, but even so, imposed his will on his children somewhat mercilessly. Giovanni, his favorite, he chose to be the soldier and the secular nobleman, blind to the fact that Giovanni was about as much a soldier as, as, well, as Cesare was a clergyman. And, famously, Cesare was the one who got trained up in the priesthood and made a Cardinal by age 18. Of course, had this not happened, Niccolo Macchiavelli wouldn't have had his model for The Prince, because Cesare wouldn't have had to become the consummate schemer he was, etc.

**And possibly the historical Lucrezia, too.

***Peculiarly, the actual murder is dealt with offstage, which feels like a bit of a cheat after all of the build-up, but again, is the sort of anti-climactic "truth" writers like Plaidy most like to highlight, even at the expense of causing the last third or so of the novel to fall flat.

100 Books #91 - Jean Plaidy's CAROLINE THE QUEEN

Like a lot of readers of my generation, I first encountered the fascinating figure of Caroline of Ansbach in Neal Stephenson's giant Baroque Cycle, which touched upon her early life as a refugee princess in Germany who finally washed up in the court of the redoubtable Sophie Charlotte, Electress of Hanover and there was a pupil of Gottfried Liebniz. She finished those novels as the wife of Sophie's grandson George Augustus, the future Prince of Wales and thus the future George II of England. All signs at the end of the third novel, The System of the World, pointed to her as being a figure on which many hopes are to be pinned, a future champion of reason and science, the reconciler of Liebniz and Isaac Newton, perhaps even a latter-day Elizabeth, albeit with a lunkheaded husband...

It's hard to reconcile that portrait with Jean Plaidy's though. Caroline the Queen picks up Caroline's life many years after the Hanoverians came to power on a wave of Whig adoration. She has learned to manage her difficult husband and endured many years of his father's somewhat ridiculous rule, but at great cost to her intellectual life and continued education. The death of George I, who had all but exiled George Louis and his pretty, clever wife, is the first act of this novel and caused a flutter in this Baroque Cycle lover's heart, but this Baroque Cycle lover knew better than to expect anything remotely like more of Stephenson's version of Caroline and her life and times. No, this is Jean Plaidy -- not really a bad thing, just a very different thing.

Long before Stephenson was anything but just another beardy, computer nerdy face in the crowd, Jean Plaidy (and her various alters ego, Victoria Holt, Philippa Carr, Eleanor Hibbert, et al) reigned supreme as a chronicler of the lives and times of British royalty, especially those of its queens. Some of the first books I truly shared with my mother were Plaidy's cycle of Plantagenet novels, chiefly concerned with the amazing Eleanor of Aquitaine, wife of both Louis VII of France and Henry II of England, mother of Richard the Lion-Hearted and John Lackland, Duchess of Aquitaine and Countess of Poitiers and kickass heroine in her very own right (she even accompanied her first husband on the Second Crusade to the Holy Land). Plaidy's books made Eleanor one of my first not-made-up heroines, even though I knew I was reading fiction. So when I found out she had written a book about Caroline, I knew I was going to have to hunt it up at some point.

But so, like in her Eleanor books, Plaidy is much more interested in the domestic and personal life of Queen Caroline than in any of her intellectual pursuits -- except for Caroline's exercising of her considerable political acumen in partnership with Robert Walpole, the Whig Prime-Minister-before-there-was-a-Prime-Minister whose power was already considerable before Caroline became queen but who really came into his prime at her side and with her help. Plaidy's version of this duo* is the real governing power in Britain, with Walpole proposing and Caroline persuading her husband that disposing was all his own idea in the first place through a campaign of swallowing insults and bad behavior in public and making subtle suggestions during royal pillow talk, the latter form of influence she was only able to exercise by concealing from pretty much everyone the umbilical hernia (a result of multiple pregnancies and bad luck) that ultimately claimed her life when it caused her womb to rupture. But in her heyday, as depicted in Caroline the Queen, she winds up ruling Britain outright as Regent four times when her husband hares off to Hanover, his native land which she has convinced him he prefers to Britain. After all, there's no Parliament or Cabinet to deal with there, and the Hanoverians are ever so much more docile and respectful than the bratty, chatty English, aren't they, dear? I'll miss you terribly while you're away, and I'm just a girl in the world, but I'll do my best to make do... Hey, Sir Robert, dust off all those treaties and plans we've been saving up!

Thus Plaidy's Caroline is a poster child for the most old-fashioned version of female power: great indirect influence at great personal cost and sacrifice. She may be brilliant, she may be educated, she may have more ability in her little finger than her husband has in his whole strutting body, but she's still a she, so that's how it has to be. Did Caroline dream of better? I'm pretty sure Eleanor did. Did Plaidy?

In any case, the real fun of the book doesn't surface until just past the halfway mark, when the redoubtable Sarah Churchill, the dowager Duchess of Marlborough (widow of John Churchill, whose exploits are given a fun airing in the Baroque Cycle) turns up as a minor villainess, trying, mostly in vain, to recover her lost glory from the days when she bullied Queen Anne and ruled behind the scenes the way Caroline does now. Proud, shrewd, calculating, litigious, shrewish, scheming, she is by far the most entertaining character in the book, and never more so than in defeat. This may not be an entirely fair portrait of her, but it's an amusing one. I would have liked to have seen more of this, but alas, Sarah and Caroline were too far apart in age to have much to do with each other, and it's likely that Plaidy beefed up Sarah's part as it is.

But of course the real villain of this piece is Caroline's eldest son, Frederick, the Prince of Wales**, raised in Hanover on the orders of George I, come as an adult stranger to his family to take up his post after a long delay he has always resented, ready and willing to be a tool for Walpole's enemies once he realizes that his parents are going to keep him on a tight leash in perceived poverty. He spends most of the novel doing what he considers to be his best to annoy them (though of course he never stoops to attempting to improve his means by his own actual efforts). The courtiers jockeying for his favor reminded me rather tiresomely of perhaps my least favorite of Plaidy's books, The Follies of the King, though here, at least, none of the men are competing to be the Prince's lover, just his pal and maybe also his creditor.

The result of all this is an entertaining little stew of a book, if salted a bit too much by the repetition of the same observations over and over again. Yes, Ms. Plaidy, we get that George liked to write letters to Caroline about his love affairs; yes, we get that Caroline found Lord Hervey especially amusing; yes, we get that Frederick liked making his parents angry. Telling us once and then just showing us would have been fine, really.

As I look over Plaidy's catalog, I see that I've only read maybe 15-20% of her total output (and that's just using this particular pen name). I can't at this point decide if I feel like a peasant at a banquet or a student in a cafeteria, contemplating this fact. I can't decide if all of those other books are going to be richly varied courses and delicacies or blandly similar steam-table offerings. Right now I'm inclined to suspect the latter -- but I believe I have felt that way before. And sometimes, one is just plain hungry.

*Which seems pretty factual. Plaidy always did her homework, that's for certain.

**Whom we know from history never got to be king, but whose son grew up to be George III. Yeah, that George III. Which maybe makes Frederick an even better villain, eh?