"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 even 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. Clark's work is distinct because this period of time has all too often been framed through the reports of men, not only in the interpretation of it, but in the literal construction of archives. Letters of women that survived were more rare, and their correspondence often preserved in the context of crown investigations into perceived slights at a period of extreme political and religious turmoil. Furthermore, women of this period were considered extensions of their husbands through a legal doctrine known as "coverture," which did not recognize them as separate people under the law, despite what their responsibilities and duties might have entailed. Clark thus constructs their stories from official documents, household lists, accounts of various gifts.
Women such as María de Salinas, Elizabeth Stafford, Anne Basset, and Jane Parker had a front-row seat to a changing world, and as such Clark considers them to be "intimate and underused witnesses to one of the most tumultuous periods of pre-modern history." To be a lady in waiting was to have 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, especially toward the end of Henry VIII's reign, 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
Shelf Talker: Nicola Clark writes an engaging, thorough exploration of the lives of the women behind the thrones of King Henry VIII's wives.