"Divorced, beheaded, died; divorced, beheaded, survived" is the catchy, reductive mnemonic to help one remember the fates of Henry VIII's six wives. But as English historian Nicola Clark demonstrates, there was so much more to these women as political, social, and religious actors than just how their marriages ended. In The Waiting Game, Clark uses archival material to construct engaging portraits of women from the queens' households, which were dominated by their respective ladies-in-waiting. These high-ranking women saw the most intimate parts of the lives of Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves, Katherine Howard, and Kathryn Parr, many of them serving multiple queens and becoming part of the machinations that brought each woman to power or then removed her.
The Waiting Game is the first history of Tudor England written through the eyes and experiences of women who were thought of as window-dressing first, and only as agentic political actors in their own right toward the end of Henry VIII's reign. To be a lady-in-waiting was to have a front-row seat to a changing world. It was a coveted role, but it was not a safe one; these women spied for their mistresses, for the crown, vied for the attentions of the king, and were often in as much danger as his wives in the shifting religious and political space of Tudor England. Clark breathes life into their fascinating stories, tracing the ways that their lives were woven together, and how they claimed what power they could in a world built for men. --Michelle Anya Anjirbag, freelance reviewer