The People’s Queen by Vanora Bennett

I might not have picked this up had it not been a Royal Mistress title, as I’d noted the mixed reactions fellow readers had had to Vanora Bennett’s earlier works. I’m glad to say I was very pleasantly surprised: this was a four-star book for me.

Another reason I might not have picked it up is the cover. I’m with those reviewers who think the model appears to be examining her train for doggy doo. The cover also misdescribes the book: a woman in medieval dress suggest that this is women’s historical fiction in the Philippa Gregory mould, whereas it is actually much closer to the Wolf Hall end of the spectrum.

The ‘Queen’ of the title is Alice Perrers, mistress to the ageing Edward III. It’s established fairly early on that the people hate Alice, but she is their queen in the sense that she is of the people. Whereas the Alice Emma Campion portrayed in The King’s Mistress was the virginal daughter of a respectable merchant family, Bennett’s Alice has risen from the peasantry to the court via a Forever Amber-like series of escapades and marriages. (Although this is anything but a bodice ripper: sex scenes are few and not explicit). I kept having to smile as I read because of the vast gap between the Alice of The King’s Mistress (passive victim of events) and this Alice (manipulative social climber). While I don’t know enough about Alice and her world to say which is closer to the truth, I did find Bennett’s characterisation far more rounded and convincing.

The People’s Queen covers seven years in Alice’s life: 1374 to 1381, year of the Peasants’ Revolt. The prologue is set during the Black Death, known as the Mortality, which claimed the lives of a third of Europe’s population. The book takes for its theme the Wheel of Fortune, and when it begins Alice is at the top of the wheel, feared and respected in both Court and City. So there’s nowhere to go but down.

…Alice has begun to understand that the enchanted dream she’s been living in until now – the best part of a decade as the indulged darling of a dear old man who, himself, has been on the throne for nearly half a century, and is loved, everywhere, as England’s greatest king – must soon come to an end. No one else seems to have noticed or to be planning their next move, although when Edward does pass on the end of his reign will surely affect them all. The gentry grumble about paying taxes to fund his war in France, true. But they carry on buying expensive clothes and jewels, far beyond their means, and raiding each other’s manor houses when they think they can get away with stealing a few fields, just as the courtiers carry on dancing and jousting and prancing off to the war at vast expense and raiding each other’s castles, as if they all thought they could somehow continue for ever in the golden sunset years of Edward’s reign, in more or less peace, and more or less prosperity, stuffing their faces with larks’ tongues and honeyed peacock breasts, and watching the ice swans melt at an unending succession of banquet tables.

Alice’s fight to secure her future by exploiting the broken postwar economy is linked with the power struggle between Edward III’s sons, Geoffrey Chaucer’s marital misfortunes and the career of Wat Tyler, leader of the Peasants’ Revolt. I enjoyed the voice despite the use of my unfavourite present tense and the frequent dips into ‘God’s eye’ point of view, i.e. authorial narration:

Alice has always prided herself on being more alert than most to the first whiff of danger, and quicker than most to neutralise it, too.

But she is far from even imagining the four people walking, very fast, around the cloister of the Abbey of St Albans, in a dusk with snow threatening, as the year 1374 draws to a close. There are three men and a woman in the group. It’s the woman who’s talking, flashing her eyes, sweeping her long cloak behind her. But all of them, one way or another, are Alice’s enemies, or are about to be.

It’s very Victorian, but it worked for me because Vanora Bennett writes with such confidence and enthusiasm, whether describing the free-for-all that followed the Black Death or the peripatetic medieval court. The downside: although there is enough action to carry the book along, it could have been faster-paced. Occasionally it gets bogged down in detail, and the Chaucer scenes in particular don’t tend to move the story very far along. Katherine Swynford, mistress of John of Gaunt, appears, but only in a cameo role – I would have liked her point of view to have been added into the mix. I would also have liked dates at the top of each chapter and I would have liked the Author’s Note to have more discussion of the background to the story as well as an explanation of what happened after it ends.

As historical fiction, this is a welcome blend of the literary and the popular. As a royal mistress novel, it’s the ideal answer to anyone who thinks the subject of royal mistresses belongs in a pink, frilly historical ghetto. Bennett’s Alice is the first power mistress, socially mobile, a property tycoon, a symbol of her grasping, ambitious age, who would be broken on the wheel of fortune for her sex and her class as much as for her corruption.

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Vanora Bennett’s website

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The Royal Mistress Challenge 2010

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I borrowed The People’s Queen from the library.

Tags: alice perrers, emma campion, the king's mistress, the people's queen, vanora bennett