Iset's Reviews > The White Princess

I must admit I couldn’t finish this one. I gave up at the 57% mark. Still, I feel it’s worth reviewing and explaining why I couldn’t get any further.

So what went wrong? Was The White Princess filled with absolutely awful writing? Well, no. It wasn’t dire, by any means. It was a far better read than The Other Queen or The Virgin’s Lover – the real slumps in Philippa Gregory’s set of Tudor themed novels. Was it a case of terrible characterisations, á la The Other Boleyn Girl? Again, no, although to be honest both the writing and the characterisations in The White Princess were rather wobbly.

The simple fact of the matter is that The White Princess is dull, dull, dull, and that’s why I didn’t finish it. Had I been of a mind to, I could have persisted with this to the end. But I found myself contemplating it as it sat on my bedside table and thinking that I’m just not motivated in any way, shape, or form to continue reading this. At 57% in – over 300 pages – I still didn’t care or connect to any of the characters within, the plot was flimsy and totally lacking substance, the attempts to create tension were thin, artificial, and failures, and I frankly have no interest whatsoever in finding out where the story would go or where Gregory would take the characters.

The same scenario plays out over and over again, characters have exactly the same conversations, recycled ad nauseam.

Elizabeth of York: I’m so sad my Uncle Richard died! We were true lovers forever! Never mind that he possibly killed my brothers and definitely seized my brother’s throne, or that people were seriously unhappy about the possibility of our incestuous union! Now I have to marry that miserly Henry Tudor. He has no clue how to be a real king. Noob.

Henry: I will never be safe on the throne! Nobody loves me! They’re plotting to put ANOTHER York boy on the throne and you know something about it! I’ll never trust you!

Elizabeth of York: Who’s they?

Henry: It’s your mother! Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about!

Elizabeth of York: Mother, do you know what’s going on?

Elizabeth Woodville: What, innocent old me? Do you really want to open that can of worms?

Elizabeth of York: Alright. I’m going to conveniently forget that I helped you get my younger brother Prince Richard out of the country all those years ago in The White Queen. Henry, my husband, I know nothing, and also, I’m pregnant.

Henry: Really?! I love you, mother of my child!

Margaret Beaufort: Now get in that confinement chamber so I can appropriate all your power.

Seriously, Henry keeps telling Elizabeth about some York boy, she goes to ask her mother about it, her mother is all evasive, she sticks her head in the sand, Henry goes off to do some silly old battling but we’re not interested in that, he comes back, Elizabeth gets pregnant a few times, Henry and Elizabeth discuss yet another rumour of some “York boy”. Round and round and round it goes, where it stops, nobody knows. The repetition of certain phrases isn’t as bad in some of Gregory’s previous books – anyone remember Elizabeth I tearing her cuticles, or Mary Queen of Scots being “three times a queen”, or Margaret Beaufort’s anachronistic obsession with Joan of Arc? – but plot wise these scenes keep repeating and the infernal constant discussion of “York boys” was tedious in the extreme.

Somehow, even though a lot has happened historically by the point at which I stopped in the book, it felt like hardly anything had happened in the story. By this stage Elizabeth has given birth to Arthur, Margaret, Henry, and Elizabeth, Elizabeth Woodville has died, Henry VII has successfully defeated Lambert Simnel, and Perkin Warbeck’s rebellion is just gearing up. You’d think that all that would mean quite a lot of exciting events had happened so far, but you’d be wrong. The births are barely described, and proceed along at the drop of a hat with Elizabeth Woodville there to remind Elizabeth of York that she has water magic and birthing a 9lb baby is as easy as the soothing flow of a river. Henry’s decisive battle against Lambert Simnel occurs offscreen and summarised by a messenger, who is sure to add that it’s a good thing Henry won because none of his troops really cared that much if he lost. Woop de doo, that really gets me excited about rooting for these protagonists. There is Henry and Elizabeth’s bickering over whether or not she knows something about a secret York boy, and whether or not her mother is involved, but this is neither exciting nor tense, and ultimately feels false and manufactured.

There is one exciting event, but Philippa Gregory invents it out of thin air, possibly in a desperate attempt to inject some juicy scandal into these dull proceedings. Henry rapes Elizabeth before they get married, claiming that if he has to be forced into marrying her then he’s darn well going to make sure his potential bride isn’t barren. This is hilarious in the extreme, in the most absurd way. Firstly, there are multiple examples of Medieval queens who were married for several years before going on to have a slew of children: Adeliza of Louvain, Empress Matilda, Eleanor of Aquitaine… Philippa Gregory’s Henry says that if Elizabeth of York doesn’t get pregnant and is barren, he’ll marry her sister Cecily instead. So, what would this character have done if he’d married Cecily, married the “barren” Elizabeth off to some minor Tudor loyalist, and she had a veritable host of children? The whole premise behind this threat, and the reason for the “rape” is preposterous and absurd. Historically the match was a political and dynastic one. Barren or not, Elizabeth was too well recognised as her father’s eldest child and heiress to be thrown over, there was simply too much at stake in the long-running Wars of the Roses not to seize the chance to unite the houses and secure the throne. Secondly, Catherine of Aragon comes swiftly to mind – what if Elizabeth had become pregnant as Henry in the book wishes, but infant mortality and miscarriage leave him without an heir? The flawed reasoning of Gregory’s Henry is as flimsy as a house of cards; approach this question with even the most basic of logical questions and it all falls apart.

The notions that Elizabeth Woodville must have been involved in the rebellions against Henry VII because she spent the end of her life at Bermondsey Abbey, and that Elizabeth of York was in love with her uncle, Richard III, are absolute howlers with not a shred of evidence to support them. Elizabeth of York acts with shock when discovering that her husband broke sanctuary after a battle – she’s conveniently forgetting when her own father, Edward IV broke sanctuary after the Battle of Tewkesbury. Philippa Gregory tends to do that a lot, I’ve noticed – her characters conveniently forget historical facts that are contrary to her portrayals. And her stories are always laced with far too much hindsight. Elizabeth of York, after the birth of her daughter, also named Elizabeth, declares that an Elizabeth Tudor will be the greatest monarch England has ever seen. Whilst this particular Elizabeth Tudor died young, we of course know that an Elizabeth Tudor did become a great monarch. But that’s the problem. People in history had no way of knowing what the future held. To have characters in a historical novel make such uncanny predictions about the future just doesn’t ring true, not to mention it sucks all the tension out of the story if the characters know what’s coming next. This isn’t subtle foreshadowing; it’s glaringly obvious hindsight, and very distracting.

The characters are all just shallow shells with no depth or humanity to them – Henry is paranoid and miserly, Margaret Beaufort is smug and mean, Elizabeth Woodville is evasive and patronising, and Elizabeth of York is utterly apathetic. The story is repetitive, recycled, and dull, and history is once again dumbed down to the level who is superficially friends with whom, with key events taking place offstage and relayed in lacklustre summary.

No, it wasn’t downright awful, but I just have so much better books I could be reading right now. Avoid.

2 out of 10