Tudor period

In The King's Curse, the Tudor period is not simply a succession of rulers but a gradual change in what royal power can claim. Through Margaret Pole’s life in and around the court, dynastic insecurity, the vulnerability of royal children, and disputes over religious and legal authority become parts of one political story: a family seeking to secure its rule increasingly treats opposition as a threat to be silenced.

Dynastic Inheritance and Kinship

The novel begins its Tudor account amid the unresolved danger attached to Plantagenet blood. Margaret, daughter of George, Duke of Clarence, is a cousin to Elizabeth of York and an heiress whose name carries political risk. Henry VII arranges her marriage to Sir Richard Pole, a steady supporter of the Lancastrian cause, but the marriage cannot erase the importance of her lineage. Her brother Edward Plantagenet’s claim remains consequential; Henry VII has him executed at Tower Hill, leaving Margaret to live with the continuing uncertainty of her family’s position.

That uncertainty is sharpened by the contrast between the two royal houses. Margaret remembers Edmund de la Pole as a Plantagenet who had remained fiercely loyal to the Tudor king and enjoyed his favor. As a duke, court ornament, and leader of the jousters, he seemed to embody the possibility that York and Tudor might coexist within one royal family. His presence made service to the Tudor court appear to offer a place for Plantagenet kin; his arrest threatens that reassuring image.

The family’s reach is also a source of political strength. Margaret sees Plantagenet cousins and kinsmen joined across England by marriage and blood, while the Tudor family appears comparatively small. Later, she describes the Pole and Courtenay connections as a tightly interwoven network: marriages join households, preserve wealth within families, concentrate power, and connect lands. The same structure can be recast by suspicious observers as evidence of faction or conspiracy. Kinship therefore offers alliance and protection, but under Tudor rule it can also make an entire family appear politically dangerous.

Heirs and the Vulnerable Royal Body

The novel repeatedly makes the condition of royal bodies a matter of public consequence. When Margaret is told that she will raise the next king, the expectation of a male heir is conveyed through the infant’s golden enamelled crib and the king’s confidence in her role. The promise collapses when the nurse finds the baby lifeless. Margaret carries the child from the nursery back toward the queen’s confinement room, where the queen is praying; the private loss immediately becomes a crisis of succession and grief within the household.

The stakes are equally explicit during a later premature labor. The court’s unspoken hope is that a son might silence those who call Katherine weak, infertile, or cursed, and restore her standing against the women seeking the king’s attention. Instead, the child is a girl, already dead before birth. Margaret must leave the grieving queen and cross the palace to convey the news to the king. The movement between the confinement chamber and the king’s rooms makes the political reach of childbirth visible: a failed pregnancy changes not only a family’s hopes but the balance of status around the throne.

The novel also links Henry VIII’s bodily and emotional vulnerability to his claims of authority. After the death of Henry FitzRoy, he asks Margaret to account for his losses as evidence of a curse, yet she does not affirm his explanation. In another scene, he is so overcome by grief that attendants must lift him into bed. At the same time, the change in his title from Your Grace to Majesty marks the expansion of his political dignity. The contrast is deliberate: the ruler who claims a more exalted status remains subject to bereavement, while the fate of his children bears directly on the dynasty he seeks to secure.

Church, Law, and the Power to Define Truth

The Tudor period in the novel is also shaped by a contest over who has authority to decide what is lawful and true. In the dispute over Henry VIII’s marriage to Katherine, Margaret is pressed to confirm that Prince Arthur and the dowager princess were regularly placed together. The question is not merely what happened in the past: whether the marriage was consummated bears on whether Henry can seek a dispensation to marry his former sister-in-law. When Margaret’s account supports the fact that they were placed together, it is treated as support for the king’s case, even though it does not resolve the underlying question of consummation.

This struggle over evidence becomes a struggle over the meaning of marriage. Margaret is urged to say that Katherine was married and bedded, because Katherine’s claim that her first marriage was not consummated could, if accepted, affect the legitimacy of Henry’s second marriage and the security of his house. The scene shows how a woman’s testimony can be made to carry dynastic consequences, and how the demand for a particular account pressures loyalty to the court against personal judgment.

The break with the Papacy makes the conflict institutional. Margaret’s son Montague tells her and Princess Mary that the Church has surrendered to the king: the Pope is to be disregarded in England, while the king will rule the Church himself. Thomas More has resigned as Lord Chancellor and returned the seal of office. Mary understands the announcement as an enlargement of royal possession over the Church’s wealth, laws, and courts. The change is therefore more than a dispute about doctrine; it alters the jurisdictions that had limited the king’s authority.

When Thomas Cromwell summons the peers to Westminster Palace to administer the oath of succession, Margaret knows that the Pope has publicly ruled Henry and Katherine’s marriage valid. Yet the Pope has not excommunicated the king, and the nobles must decide what they themselves can conscientiously do. The king’s position is that his declaration can determine which wife is recognized, which woman is queen, and which child is a princess. Thomas More refuses the oath as written, though he is willing to sign a revised form, and Henry’s earlier promise not to test his friend on this question does not protect him. The episode presents royal power as an attempt to make declaration function as reality, even when other authorities and private consciences contradict it.

From Favor to Coercion

Margaret’s story tracks a widening cost for those who fail to align themselves with the king. She returns to Bisham Manor in 1534 with what she describes as a daily sense of cowardice, aware that John Fisher and Thomas More are imprisoned in the Tower of London and that Elizabeth Barton has been executed. Her withdrawal from London does not separate her from the consequences of royal policy; it gives her a vantage point from which to see how quickly public dissent becomes perilous.

The novel’s retrospective account connects that pattern to the suppression of the Pilgrimage of Grace. The pilgrims seek the preservation of traditional rulers and religion, and believe they can appeal to the king for justice. Henry’s response is an attack on northern England and on the Catholic faithful. The author’s framing stresses that the king acts dishonestly toward people who believe they have received a full pardon and that he will keep his word. Their defeat, the account argues, helps explain why this episode is less widely remembered: the losers rarely tell the story.

Margaret’s own fate is presented as the culmination of this movement from service to persecution. The author’s note states that she went to the scaffold without a charge, a trial, or adequate notice. The novel portrays her as resisting rather than submitting to an unjust punishment; the historical afterword notes that she was beatified in 1886 and honored as Blessed Margaret Pole. Her death thus becomes both the destruction of a politically suspect Plantagenet and a challenge to the Tudor claim that royal power is beyond effective opposition.

The Tudor Period as a Story of Decline

The book’s introductory framing follows Margaret across more than forty years in and around the Tudor court, first under Henry VII and then under Henry VIII, as her family’s fortunes rise and fall. Its closing reflection describes Henry’s transformation from a young, handsome prince regarded as his country’s savior into a sick and tyrannical ruler. As he moves from one adviser to another and increasingly uses executions to terrorize his subjects, the court’s familiar glamour gives way to a picture of despotism sustained by the failure of others to resist.

That interpretation joins the family plot to the political one. The absence of a secure male succession exposes the fragility beneath royal display; the king’s growing control over marriage, church, and law makes that fragility a rationale for extending his power. At the same time, the intermarried Plantagenet network that once represented shared service becomes legible as a threat. The Tudor period, as the novel renders it, is therefore marked by a reversal: the promise of dynastic coexistence gives way to rule in which family loyalty, religious conscience, and even the meaning of lawful succession are tested against the king’s will.