Book Review: To Ruin a Queen

A Fair Trade Book

Title: To Ruin a Queen

Author: Fiona Buckley

Date: 2000

Publisher: Scribner / Simon & Schuster

ISBN: 0-684-86268-9

Length: 287 pages

Quote: “We need to find out, quietly, what Mortimer is about.”

As the front matter in this book makes clear, there was a real Roger Mortimer, Earl of March, killed 1398. His daughter was the great-grandmother of Elizabeth of York, who was the mother of Henry VIII, who was the father of Elizabeth I. Roger Mortimer also had a son who died in 1424. For the purpose of this story, Fiona Buckley has given that son a secret marriage in 1423 that makes him the great-great-grandfather of Bess Mortimer Haggard, mother of a willful daughter Alice, and of Philip Mortimer, who dreams of restoring the family's wealth and grandeur and schemes of a way to do that.

In real life, for one thing, Elizabeth I always worked with men when she could, and told them to leave their wives at home. That's only one way this novel diverges from real history. For fictional purposes, Buckley has also given Roger Mortimer a great-granddaughter who was the grandmother of Ursula Faldene, a fictional cousin in the same generation with (real) Elizabeth and (fictional) Philip Mortimer, whom Elizabeth sends to the fictional Vetch Castle in Wales to find out more about Philip Mortimer's schemes.

For me, it's hard to suspend disbelief without relocating this whole story into some alternate universe, because none of these characters is an Elizabethan. The Mortimer clan are about as twentieth-century as they can be, even if they've adopted Elizabethan clothes and technology. They speak twentieth century English; they demand twentieth century evidence to solve the one murder in this relatively gentle mystery; Ursula does things all by herself rather than worrying about what “becomes a woman” and what needs to be delegated to men, and instead of fearing the village witch Ursula ends up offering her a job. 

These characters do not live in a world where the existence of God, precisely as explained by the medieval Catholic church, was a fact, where people fought and killed one another in disagreements about the Pope's place in the Great Chain of Being because they all devoutly believed God was likely to punish those who took the wrong side. They don't live in a world where people either are “mad” or are not, and if they're not completely “mad” they're completely responsible for every word and act. They don't live in a world where rich “ladies” are constantly told they're not as strong as either men or working-class “women,” and dressed in costumes that might have been designed to make this true; Elizabethan court ladies wore barrel-shaped, barrel-hooped underskirts to achieve that perfect cylinder shape covering their lower halves, but Ursula sprints about like any modern girl. They're not even obsessed with titles and court etiquette, and as that, too, was part of the Great Chain of Being in medieval philosophy, for a real Elizabethan to treat all of her cousins alike without bothering about their relative positions in the feudal hierarchy would have been heresy; real Elizabethans recognized a difference between “his little lordship” and “milord's younger son” even if the boys were infants—and twins. And “ladies” was used as the inclusive term because it was an insult to call a “lady” a “woman.”

Anyway, in the story, Elizabeth is right to suspect Philip's plot—its goal is indeed to “ruin” her—and Ursula finds the proof, solving the murder along the way. There's also a cliche-busting subplot: Alice's parents want her to marry a man who's older than she is; Alice thinks she wants to marry a handsome boy her own age; Alice marries the better man and lives happily ever after, but not in the way novel readers have been conditioned to expect. 

There's a murkier subplot. Ursula has already outlived her first husband and, as Tudors often really did, fostered out her daughter while living with her second husband in France. She likes her second husband well enough but, as rich Tudors often really were, she's much closer to a couple who work for them. The second husband is exposed to a deadly disease, in this book, and the hired woman comes down with something nasty...and Ursula realizes that she feels attraction, as well as loyalty, to the hired man...If all four of these people are alive at the end of the book and all of them have behaved well, that's to generate a market for the next volume in the series.

I could suspend disbelief in the Brother Cadfael mysteries but I balked at this one. The fact that there's been a series shows, however, that some people enjoy solving twentieth century “gentle” mysteries transplanted into a fictional reenactment of the sixteenth century. Well...I'm sure my own mental image of the sixteenth century, though based on more research than Buckley's seems to have done, is a long way from the reality too. Elizabethans didn't let an anachronism spoil a good story, even when Shakespeare transported a "modern" clock into Julius Caesar, and Elizabethans would probably be amused if they could see any of our efforts to reenact their century.

In the end it's a plausible story, anyway. The scheme to discredit Elizabeth fails, as real schemes against her always did. The murderer is caught. Ursula racks up another success. The village witch cleans up nice, if not pretty, and the pretty girl marries a worthy man. And if Ursula is healthier, and everyone understands emotional problems better, and the aristocrats are less pretentious and status-conscious, than would really have been the case in the sixteenth century, how bad is that?

The author of the ten Ursula Blanchard stories credited to "Fiona Buckley," and of other books under other names, is still alive and writing in England; web pages are maintained for her by various publishers and booksellers. It's possible to buy newer, uniform editions of all ten Ursula Blanchard books as new books. If you can afford them, and think you can tolerate the reenactment setting long enough, this web site recommends buying them that way to show respect. If you want to try reading just one, this is the one I have; it's available on the usual terms, $5 per book, $5 per package, $1 per online payment, from which we send $1 to the author or a charity of her choice. Four books of this size will fit into a package, for a total of $25, from which Buckley or her charity gets $1.