Except perhaps in the case of Anne Boleyn, passion was absent in the often interminable negotiations for a royal consort, but there was no shortage of oratory, correspondence, and poetry extolling the glories and painful sacrifices of courtly love. The author covers politics, war, and religion but also emphasizes royal matrimony as well as the obligatory mistresses and purported affairs. This book includes more literary scholarship than the average history buff expects, and most readers will be relieved when, around, Gristwood reaches the late 15th century and begins an appealing account of the Tudor years. This traditionally dates from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s 12th-century narrative of Arthur’s life but includes generous contributions from Dante, Chaucer, Malory, and Tennyson. Gristwood begins with a literary history of the Camelot legend. Bloody tournaments flourished throughout Europe, and royal courtships featured prolix exchanges of picturesque rhetoric.
Arthurian legends of knightly chivalry and passionate, more or less chaste, romance experienced a revival in the 15th century.
Without ignoring the lives of these consorts and candidates and Renaissance European politics, the author emphasizes that, among the upper classes, courtship aimed to follow the medieval code of courtly love. British journalist and historian Gristwood, author of Game of Queens: The Women Who Made Sixteenth-Century Europe and other books, has produced another, but with a significant variation. Genuine love rarely played a role, but this hasn’t prevented a steady stream of authors from writing books about Tudor spouses or about Elizabeth’s stubborn refusal to choose one. Like most rulers of the era, they chose consorts as a matter of international diplomacy and national stability-i.e., to produce an heir. Five Tudor monarchs ruled England from 1485 until 1603.
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