Philippa Gregory turns her attention to Henry VIII's untameable wife

The Taming of the Queen, published this week, charts the life of Henry VIII’s sixth and final wife. Parr’s journey is captivating and terrifying in equal measure. You can almost hear the Hollywood voiceover: “Why would a woman marry a serial killer? Because she cannot refuse...”

The previous queen had lasted 16 months and the one before that less than half a year. To be the wife of Henry VIII was a perilous undertaking. Yet, as Gregory documents, Parr possessed remarkable strength of character and scholarly brilliance. She was a leader of religious reform and the first woman to publish in the English language under her own name.

She would outlive her husband – albeit by the skin of her teeth given the fate of past queens, not to mention her own brush with danger due to her Protestant leanings – but Parr’s life under Henry VIII was far from enviable. The king, who had first adored his new bride unquestionably, would go on to publicly punish her in cruel and merciless manner.

“Kateryn is so undervalued in our history and in the way people think about the wives,” says Gregory. “Clearly she was a most interesting and most stimulating woman. She was very spiritual and a leader of the reformation. She risked her life in clinging to the reformation when Henry VIII was moving back toward the Roman Catholic Church.

“The title – The Taming of the Queen – reflects that he then humiliated her in front of the whole court in order to make her recant. With the threat of death over her head Kateryn did so, but she survived him to publish a biographical devotional book under her own name after his death.”

The name of Gregory’s book is a deliberate nod to the Shakespeare comedy, The Taming of the Shrew, after she uncovered some intriguing details during her research.

It is her belief that Shakespeare most likely based his work on a number of plays in what is known as “the shrew genre”. One of those was written by a playwright at Parr’s court called Nicholas Udall who penned a work called Ralph Roister Doister.

“In this play – which Udall performed before Kateryn when she was regent of England – there is a women-led household,” says Gregory. “A rogue comes and proposes to them, they defeat him, humiliate him and bundle him off. It is comical, but the women are definitely the victors.

“Shakespeare takes this play and in a sense inverts it so a rogue comes to the household dominated by Kate and he takes her, confuses her, baffles and abuses her. The happy ending is her complete defeat.

“I think that Shakespeare took the Udall play and changed it around. I’m sure that he must have read the story of Kateryn Parr’s humiliation by Henry VIII in front of the court and that affected the story he told. It is a very dark undertone to what, even now, is called Shakespeare’s most difficult comedy.”

Gregory believes this theory is strengthened by accounts in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, published in 1563, which she asserts “Shakespeare would have undoubtedly read”.

The astute parallels that she draws between Udall’s play, the submission of Kate in The Taming of the Shrew (with its famous line: “Kiss me, Kate”) and Foxe’s writings on Parr’s life as the queen of Henry VIII is something that has not been widely known or discussed until now.

When we speak, Gregory’s voice drifting down the line from her Yorkshire home, she describes a potent scene from Foxe’s Book of Martyrs.

“As John Foxe reports it, Henry says to Kateryn: ‘Do you think you have become a doctor to teach me in my old age?’” says Gregory. “She replies: ‘Absolutely not. I don’t know anything except what your majesty teaches me. Everybody knows that men are put above women as their head. As my husband and King of England, I would never ever presume to teach you anything. Indeed, as a woman, I naturally know nothing.’ He says: ‘Is that so then, sweetheart?’ And then he kisses her.

“That kiss is the most interesting kiss in history short of Judas Iscariot because it is not a kiss of affection, it as kiss of absolute dominance. In the way that the Tudors would make a child kiss the rod, he kisses her – it is a symbol of her complete obedience.”

Gregory, for whom The Taming of the Queen marks the seventh book in her Tudor Court series, is keen to clear up any hackneyed ideas about the sextet of wives wedded to the tyrannical Henry VIII.

“The myth is such a stereotype,” she says. “The saying goes: ‘Divorced, beheaded, died; divorced, beheaded, survived’ as if that covers it but all that tells you is where they ended up. What it doesn’t tell you is what they had to do to get there, the complexity of their personalities, the decisions they take and how they survive or don’t.”

Gregory, 61, doesn’t flinch from tackling thorny topics, not least themes in The Taming of the Queen that transcend the centuries such as oppression of women and domestic abuse.

“The consequence of having unequal power in a society is always bad,” she says. “That is why, all my life, I have argued and campaigned for equality of women and other oppressed minorities. Justice depends upon equality.

“If you have an unequal society you are going to have an unjust society. Women are often on the bottom of this pyramid of power. Even now, in our society, that is still the case today. We have a lot of work to do.”

I moot that Gregory’s novels have been subject to past criticism by some academics including historian David Starkey who described her work as “good Mills and Boon”. Gregory interjects. “I don’t get criticised by academics, I just get criticised by David Starkey,” she says, wryly. “Just him. That is because he doesn’t like historical fiction and that is absolutely fair enough.

“Historical fiction – the clue is in the name. It has got to be history and fiction. It’s not that I’ve set out to write a history book and then gone: ‘Oh, the hell, I don’t know what happened here. I think I’ll make up a chunk.’ I start off with a complete account of a life historically researched with everything that I need to know and then I take a decision to write a novel.

“I don’t have any academics saying that the history is tremendously faulty. I do have David Starkey saying he doesn’t like historical fiction to which one goes: ‘Pity.’”

Home for Gregory is the 100-acre mixed arable farm on the North York Moors where she and her husband Anthony have lived for the past decade. When not writing, she can usually be found out riding on her Connemara Irish pony, Cardagh, or caring for a menagerie of birds.

“We breed and raise ducks,” she says. “I have some extraordinarily endearing ducks at the moment including three I raised from an egg – I have an incubator and put the eggs in there. They are really tame and come up to be stroked and sit in my lap.

“We have two pairs of swans. We have a barn owl who isn’t mine but who lives in the top of the barn which we converted into a barn owl penthouse. He came to us as a rescue chick. I’m expecting this very day two tawny owls to arrive and some more rescue ducklings.”

She recently traded in her beloved Porsche Carrera for a more sensible Audi. “I needed a car I could put my grandsons in,” says Gregory. “It’s a lovely car but I think I may get a bigger car for winter because I drive in and out the farm track which gets blocked with snow.

“I’m pretty keen on my cars but more thoughtful about them than I used to be because I’m concerned about climate change and burning up fossil fuels. I do see them as a luxury which is increasingly hard to justify.”

Gregory is already immersed in work on her next novel which centres on Margaret Tudor, Queen of Scotland and mother of James V, which is a period in the 16th century that the author describes as “completely fascinating”.

“Margaret Tudor is an English princess but a Scottish queen who identifies herself as a Scots queen and makes sure that her son – a Scot – becomes the next king,” she says. “It is a beautiful story, again, about a woman struggling in exceptionally difficult circumstances.”

The Taming of the Queen by Philippa Gregory is published by Simon and Schuster on Thursday, priced £20. An evening with Philippa Gregory takes place at the Mitchell Library in Glasgow on August 20 at 6pm. Tickets cost £6. For more information, visit www.ayewrite.com. She is also appearing at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on Friday 21 August.