Reviews often begin by warning of spoilers. Neither excuse nor warning here for saying that Alison Weir’s book, Innocent Traitor, recounts the public and political life of Lady Jane Grey. She was sixteen years old and married by agreement when, in 1554, she was beheaded upon the order of Queen Mary of England, after being convicted of treason. Mary, you see, was a Roman Catholic and Lady Jane Grey was a Protestant. The young lady had been elevated to the throne by interested parties and had herself been Queen of England for just nine days after the death of the juvenile, and himself manipulated, Edward The Sixth. Jane Grey’s elevation to the throne had been nothing more than a blatant plot to hold on to power by a group led by the dead King’s Proetctor, if that be the word to use. The plot, which had not involved Lady Jane herself, was a ploy to maintain the Protestant identity of the English crown. Mary, Henry The Eighth’s daughter by Spanish Catholic Katherine of Aragon perhaps had the greater claim to the throne. She was the old king’s daughter, but she had been born of an annulled marriage to a queen who had also formerly been married to Henry’s brother, a fact that in some eyes rendered the marriage to Henry illegal from the start. Opinion was determined by which side of the religious divide was asked. But, as ever, pragmatism surfaced and interests ruled. But no-one can hold on to usurped power without support. And when what you have ebbs away, you get it in the neck. Here endeth the spoilers.
Innocent
Traitor is an historical novel. It sticks to the facts, embroidering them only
when records are scant. This is not Hollywood, and so reality cannot be edited.
And we all know the facts, so it is neither cliché nor spoiler to re-state that
“she dies in the end”. What is crucial to Alison Weir’s scheme, however, is how
things happen, how motives and allegiances shift and coalesce to create what
eventually feels like an inevitable fate for Lady Jane, who became the only
remaining and unwilling pawn in a vast power play. And, in describing these
events, motives, allegiances and deceits, Alison Weir creates a rich tapestry
of fact, embroidered with minimal invention, depicting how fate unfolds to take
the life of Lady Jane. If you did not already understand the history, then by
the end of Innocent Traitor, you will. If you did already have a grasp on
events, then by the end of the book you will see them clearer.
The
story is told through the eyes and thoughts of several characters. Lady Jane
Grey herself is to the fore, but her scheming and unloving parents, Frances
Brandon and Henry Grey make crucial contributions. We also meet several queens,
Jane Seymour, Katherine Howard, Katherine Parr and Mary. We meet Elizabeth
almost in passing, but her tricks spice the tale throughout. The book appears
to concentrate on the women, which is interesting in itself, but then males
appear, such as the inevitable John Dudley and the flighty Henry Fitzalan. All
of these characters – and more! – relate their tales in the first person and
the present tense.
Now
here is the great shortcoming of Innocent Traitor, since each of these people
ought to have a different perspective, a different point of view and might even
use different types of language. They would certainly have brought different
assumptions into focus, given their disparate backgrounds. Innocent Traitor,
however, requires them to deliver facts to the reader, and they all do this
efficiently, and in rather similar style. And yet we, the readers, are taken into
the first person, present tense thoughts of a woman in childbirth, a person
being executed, a maid dressing her mistress, and then, almost in the next
breath, we are plotting potential treason, intrigue, or merely justifying
religious difference. As such, these characters rather lose their identities
and emerge as mere vehicles for delivering the plot of historical events.
But
despite the required and rather lengthy suspension of disbelief that is
required by the novel’s form, the complexity and jaw-sagging duplicity,
recalcitrance and utter selfishness of these people make Innocent Traitor an
absolutely riveting read. By the end, one wonders why it is that that these
people, and probably others like them, who populated the centres of power
throughout history are not today described simply as the two-faced, lying
murderers they were.
And
by the end we are also left with a certain emptiness of the stomach when we
realise that all this scheming was all prompted by these people’s adherence or
not to merely different versions of obvious myth. If we have to suspend belief
to accommodate unlikely points of view, then we might also want to admit defeat
in order to appreciate the fact that these people, and many thousands of
others, were persecuted, executed or merely fell in war as a result of an
argument about a largely mythical man who defied gravity and rose bodily into
the skies, and an institution that maintains bread changes into flesh and wine
into blood – and does it daily!
Innocent
Traitor, despite faults generated by its form, is a highly successful book. It
captures the motives very accurately and leads the reader into complete
sympathy with the plight of Lady Jane Grey who, at just sixteen years of age
when the axe severed her neck, just wanted to be left alone with her books.
These, it seems, were the wrong books.
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