#3: The Red Queen, Philippa Gregory

The Red Queen is book two of the Cousins' War series; I read the first book, the aptly titled The White Queen, at the end of December 2009. The first two books portray more or less the same time period, but from opposite sides, during England's War of the Roses in the 1400s. The narrators of both books are the scheming wives of powerful men: The White Queen featured Elizabeth Woodville who married the Yorkist King Edward IV whereas The Red Queen centers on Margaret Beaufort, heir to the House of Lancaster. They're both desperately trying to put their own heirs on the throne (although god knows why, they're technically all part of one family...hooray for incest!).

About halfway through both Queen books, the stories merge together; I assumed book three would focus on the ultimate outcome (the two rivals becoming grandmothers to the same future king) but Philippa Gregory's website says that the next book, The Rivers Woman out fall 2011, will focus on Elizabeth's mother, Jacquetta, a rumored witch. But I digress...

I didn't enjoy this book as much as the first, possibly because Margaret Beaufort might be one of the most annoying characters working in fiction today. As a child, she believes that she has divine visions of Joan of Arc and believes she is just as chosen, making for a lot of sanctimonious selfishness. It is slightly amusing when she utters clueless things like, "I care nothing for his good looks as I am devoid of vanity and lust, but the rightness of being his wife and becoming Queen of England haunts me like a lost love" (p. 212). But then, passage after passage, I was reminded of how much I hate people like this...because mon dieu, if you gotta let everyone know just how devout you are, you're in it for the wrong reasons.

Besides drinking the Jesus juice, Margaret harbors some serious jealous toward Elizabeth Woodville for marrying Edward IV, a mate that would have made Margaret queen. And Margaret deserved to be queen, dontcha know? "The plans were formed by a woman who thought herself the mother of a king, who could not be satisfied to be an ordinary woman," Margaret says on page 301, speaking of Elizabeth though she easily could be describing herself. "The fault of the enterprise lay in the vanity of a woman who would be queen, and who would overturn the peace of the country for her own selfish desire." She says this, of course, after she's failed to overthrow King Richard III when trying to put her own kid on the throne.

So after all this, you expect (nay, pray!) she'll get the comeuppance she so rightly deserves. The book ends before the saga concludes but historically, you know it's not going to happen. Her kid is Henry Tudor, i.e. Henry VII. She gets exactly what she wants and becomes a very powerful figure at court, far more powerful than her rival's daughter, Elizabeth of York, who ends up bearing her a grandchild. Margaret deserves a swift kick in the ass but alas, it never arrives. And that ends up being a real shame after putting up with this woman for 400 pages.