Keeping Up With the TudorsThe Spanish Queenby Carolly EricksonSt. Martin's Press, 2013 The Michael Sittow portrait on the cover of the US edition of Carolly Erickson's latest Tudor-era historical novel tells you everything you need to know about the perils of the undertaking. Even if it's actually a painting of young Princess Catherine of Aragon as is widely believed (Sittow was in England in the first few years of the 1500s, sniffing around for a new patron; Catherine was there as well, freshly widowed in her match to the heir to the throne), it's a singularly uninviting prospect for a novelist: the sitter is plain, demure, and not even looking at the painter. She is pallid and dutiful, the last to leave chapel and the first to leave the tilt-yard. Hardly the stuff of gripping historical fiction. It's a cover that warns of devotions instead of drama.And it might not even be Catherine, which is also very much to the point: hundreds of biographies have been written about Henry VIII's first wife, daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, and hundreds of novels have been written about her, but as good as some of them have been, they traffic in suppositions and guesswork. That Catherine was frightened and hopeful as she journeyed to England to marry Prince Arthur, eldest son of England's King Henry VII, we can infer - and Erickson does, adding in some of the expositional observations Catherine would probably never have thought to think but that historical fiction requires:

I observed the prosperous-looking villages tucked between the hills, smoke rising from their roofs, animals grazing in their common pasturelands. Villagers came out to see us as we passed by, excited and full of well wishes. They were not like the ragged, half-starved, sun-baked peasants of Castile. These English peasants, shouting and waving eagerly, were well fed and rosy-cheeked, and looked to be in good spirits.

That she was devastated when Prince Arthur died only a few months after their marriage can also be inferred (as can the obvious lie that the marriage stayed unconsummated that whole time - Erickson politely skirts the issue by making Arthur sickly from the wedding night on), as can her guarded elation at being married years later to the king's second son, Prince Henry. Erickson too is guarded about that relationship, filling her thin novel with the usual hovering duennas and pious sentiments but with very little of the chemistry that must have existed between a fascinating young princess and a vibrant, handsome even younger prince. As one after another of Catherine's pregnancies fail (except for her healthy daughter Mary), she becomes frustrated by Henry's philandering with the likes of Bessie Blount, who conceives the royal bastard named Henry Fitzroy - and Erickson breaks her composure at least enough to have her hate the interloper:

How I wrestled with my conscience that spring! Each time I saw Bessie Blount, or overheard a whispered conversation about Henry Fitzroy, or saw him given an honor or title (he received many), I clenched my fists and wished him out of the way. Many a night I wished him dead, as my own babies had died, all but Mary.

We can infer that it all made Catherine even more desperate to conceive a son of her own - and she does so, probably many times, but they're born dead, or else live only a few heartbreaking days or weeks. In one touching scene (the kind of elaboration the record doesn't allow; the particular province of historical fiction), one such baby boy is choking to death even as he's delivered, with no midwife able to forestall it, until Catherine herself takes a hand:

"Give him to me!" My voice was hoarse, my own throat tight as the helpless baby was handed to me, half naked, half wrapped in a swathe of stained linen. I opened his mouth and blew into it as forcefully as I could, as I remembered doing when Princess Mary was born. He choked, then coughed, and began to breathe. In a moment I put him to my breast and he suckled, strongly and evenly. Before long he opened his eyes and clenched his fists once again.

But that boy dies in six days, and there are no others. The dark parade of the times begins to leave Catherine behind. She's exiled to drafty country houses as Anne Boleyn rises to the throne on the promise of heirs, and Henry's attempts to bully the Church into declaring he was never lawfully married to Catherine affords historians and novelists alike (and dramatists, including Shakespeare, who saw the scene's potential and caught it beautifully) one of the only moments in Catherine's unhappy life where no inference is needed: confronted with the legal machinery of Henry's ill will, she proudly refused to be judged by it at all - she insisted that she was the rightful queen and demanded that her case be heard in Rome by the Pope himself.It didn't matter. She never went to Rome (she was sent packing back to the drafty rooms she never left again alive), and Rome was disregarded in any case by a King bent on having his own way. For Catherine were left bleak years of acrimonious prayer and slow wasting - she moans and coughs for the final thirty pages of Erickson's novel, and so will its readers. Far more than Catherine of Aragon (who's long past caring), those readers are to be pitied - in every novel about this doomed Queen, they're caught between the jaws of inference and piety. Novelists - and actual historians, like Erickson - confronted with this tragic daughter of monarchs, never do their duty to their readers, by leading her into the light of fictional re-invention. Instead, they tend to keep their eyes downcast, and they go to chapel with their royal patron, to toll the quiet, lonely, waiting hours.