The Taming of the Queen

Philippa Gregory's Inside Story: “One of my favourites—and one of my lasting favourites. The character of Catherine Parr is not well-known and not truly known either. People think they know about her, but what they know about her is mostly incorrect and incredibly cliched. Just because she was the last wife married to a terminally ill tyrant, people assume that he chose her for her nursing skills, which is laughable. But it's a very, very hard legend to fight.

“It was quite shocking to write and it was quite startling to write in the sense that when I started it, I knew I wanted to write about her. But I didn't know fully until I started researching her in detail how important she was in terms of women's literacy and in terms of feminine history. They say that she led the reform at court and Thomas Cranmer led the reform in the country, and neither of them could've achieved it without the support of the other. She's also the first woman to write in the English language ever. Lamentations of a Sinner is the first time a woman put her name to something that she has herself written. She's the first woman to stand up as a published author.

“It's such a wonderfully political novel in the sense that it's a novel in which a woman thinks that she's engaged in a personal relationship, but discovers that actually, she is merely one in a political dynasty. And not even even the important one. In terms of Henry's use and abuse of women, I think it's a wonderful way of showing that actually far from being the question I'm always asked—which did he love best?—it shows he didn't love anybody very much. He got fantastic crushes on people, but basically, he had no capacity for genuine giving love.

“The other thing that I didn't know until I was researching was that Henry did write a will, one which nominated a wife after Catherine. He was certainly considering a seventh wife. And I worked very closely with the late historian David Baldwin, who had, unfortunately for all of us, only got as far as manuscript for a story about the seventh wife, which would have been Catherine Willoughby. I should just say the reason that I'm so absorbed in her still, though it's such a long ago book, is I've written the film script for a film, and we're currently trying to get into production. We're very excited about it.”