The Unfaithful Queen: A Novel of Henry VIII's Fifth Wife - Couverture rigide

Amid the turbulent, faction-ridden late reign of the fearsome Henry, eager high-spirited Catherine Howard caught the king's eye - but not before she had been the sensual plaything of at least three other men. Ignorant of her past, seeing only her youthful exuberance and believing that she could make him happy, he married her - only to discover, too late, that her heart belonged to his gentleman usher Tom Culpeper. As the net of court intrigue tightens around her, and with the Tudor succession yet again in peril because of Prince Edward's severe illness, Queen Catherine struggles to give the angry, bloated and impotent king a son. But when her relations turn against her, she finds herself doomed, just as her cousin Anne Boleyn was, to face the executioner. The "Unfaithful Queen" lays bare the dark underbelly of the Tudor court, with its sugared rivalries and bitter struggles for power, where a girl of noble family could find herself sent to labor among the turnspits in the kitchens or - should fortune favour her - be exalted to the throne.

The Favored Queen amply demonstrates, there is no trust among Tudors. A delectable serving of Tudor dish. --Kirkus Reviews. Carolly Erickson turns cold fact to hot fiction. --India Edghill, author of Wisdom's Daughter. I read. The Hidden Diary of Marie Antoinette in two days, and when I finished it, I re-read the final pages, as hungry for more as a child scraping the last crumbs of chocolate cake off her plate with her fingers. --The New York Times Book Review. Rollicking good, admittedly unhistorical, fun--complete with all the dish on the great and powerful, and what they wore, that an Empire-waisted fashionista could desire. Kirkus Reviews --Various