"The Boleyn King" by Laura Andersen

[igenlode]

"The Boleyn King" by Laura Andersen -- this is, basically, published fan-fiction :-)

Or, at any rate, as alternate history it does what we do: it takes the 'canon' events, postulates a different fork at some crucial moment, and explores the consequences for the 'canon' characters in this resulting new environment, where they are all recognisably the same people but in different positions.

In this version of history, Anne Boleyn carried her son William to term and he now reigns as the seventeen-year-old child king Henry IX under the guidance of the Lord Protector: George Boleyn, Duke of Rochford. There is a familiar cast of supporting characters: the young king's older sister, scholarly Princess Elizabeth, lively and impecunious Robin Dudley, a younger son at Court who doesn't care whom he offends, the Catholic Duke of Norfolk and the stiff-necked Lady Mary, the king's spinster half-sister who attracts plots and plotters... and, of course, the widowed Queen Anne, intelligent, resourceful, and taking a reluctant back seat. There are also the author's two vividly-drawn Original Characters: Minuette, daughter of one of Anne's French ladies and foster-sister to Elizabeth and William, and Dominic Courtenay, son of a traitor and Rochford's ward. (I can't help feeling that given his ancestry he must surely be the Yorkist claimant to the throne, and was expecting this to crop up in the course of the book's intrigues -- but it is never mentioned, bar the briefest of allusions to his royal grandmother, whom I calculate to have been the daughter of Edward IV.)

In classic fashion the story starts out with the young protagonists trying to solve what seems to be a personal matter -- the suicide of one of Minuette's friends -- and discovering that this is all tied up with matters of far greater import: plots and treason abound. But beyond the detective/thriller elements half the fun is watching the alternate history play out. George Boleyn as the Lord Protector (always an ominous title...) is a fascinating character who reminds me of Cardinal Richelieu: manipulative, dangerous, ambitious, and yet with moments of shocking honesty as a great statesman. The Elizabeth of this universe has had a happier, more stable adolescence (although not unmarked by horrors), but she is still very recognisably the same character -- and in fact she makes an excellent detective :-) And then there is the fun of identifying the background characters who flit past (Lady Jane Grey, for example).

I suppose this is probably marketed as a Young Adult book, since the central quartet of characters are all under the age of twenty, although according to the conventions of their era they are expected to be adults. This didn't occur to me when I was reading it, though: I was intrigued enough by the title to pull it out of the historical fiction section at the library, and captured enough by the plot and style not to be able to put it back again!

My one disappointment was the hints that future volumes of this alternate history were going to end up with Elizabeth becoming the Virgin Queen after all: of course she is everybody's favourite character, but I was rather enjoying the prospect of seeing how she would have turned out if she'd had a chance to live a 'normal' life (or as normal as a legitimate princess of a royal house could hope for). Also, it implies that the author is planning to kill William off in order to put his sister on the throne, and he's a fascinating character in his own right -- very credible as a 'Boleyn King' who takes after both parents and has learned intrigue from his devious uncle. I don't particularly want to see him dumped in favour of boring old history-as-we-know-it :-p