The Queen's Fool by Philippa Gregory

Bleeding heart for Bloody Mary

The slice of history that Philippa Gregory offers is generous, filling and never ambiguous: readers of commercial historical fiction like to know what they are getting. So, after serving up the highly delicious The Other Boleyn Girl, which saw Henry VIII from the point of view of his discarded mistress Mary Boleyn, sister of Anne, Gregory has concocted yet another treat from the Tudor court. There is a little surprise in the mixture this time, for Gregory's take on the reign of Bloody Mary is a lot sweeter than history tells it.

Gregory likes the underdog, and neither the scheming Anne Boleyn nor her equally scheming daughter Elizabeth fare well. The Other Boleyn Girl painted Anne as "arrogant" from the start, and in The Queen's Fool, our first sight is of 14-year-old Elizabeth, cavorting with her step-father, Thomas Seymour. She is a whore and a traitor already, and before we even meet her half-sister Mary we know where our sympathies will be directed. Sure enough, Mary is a saintly but courageous princess, noble and compassionate, her bloody reign put down more to bad luck and nasty Elizabeth flirting with her husband than bigotry and a need for vengeance.

Gregory's masterstroke, however, is to lead us throughout this novel by an even more marginal historical figure than the discarded Mary Boleyn: a female Fool, in the shape of Hannah Green, a young Jewish girl from Spain who has escaped the Inquisition with her father, and arrived in London to run a printing press. When young Robert Dudley enters her father's shop with his tutor, he is taken with Hannah who, it turns out, is a Seer. He takes her back to the ailing King Edward's court to be the King's Fool, and all are so impressed with her that she is soon sent to work for the Princess Mary, before Mary ascends to the throne. Once Mary becomes Queen, Hannah is sent between her and her half-sister Elizabeth, operating as a double spy: spying on Elizabeth for Mary, and on Mary for Robert Dudley.

Hannah's perspective is unique and, coupled with her need to keep her own identity hidden as religious intolerance increases, gives us a highly personal view of the religious persecution taking place, without simplifying it. The worldly intrigues of court politics become highly localised in the sexually ambivalent figure of Hannah (she dresses as a male fool for much of the novel), darting between one sister and another, between different sets of powerful male figures attempting to control events to their own advantage, and this personal aspect is the novel's strength.

It needs that kind of strength, as it has all the negative trappings of historical romance to offset - as in her previous novel, Gregory takes the young Hannah on a romantic journey, where naturally she learns the value of true love and ends up in the arms of her loving husband. Together with the generous scattering of clichés, the emphasis on feeling to the detriment of intellect, the all-too-easy mapping of a 21st-century consciousness on to a 16th-century girl (Hannah fights for the kind of equal footing with her betrothed, Daniel, in terms that Mary Wollstonecraft would have found radical), it is easy to see why Gregory has won awards for romance fiction.

And yet this self-confessed literary snob is convinced every time. I loved The Other Boleyn Girl and The Queen's Fool is even better. The pleasure to be found in this kind of historical fiction - as opposed to its more literary, post-modern sister - is a chair-by-the-fireside-on-a-cold-winter's-night kind of pleasure: warm and comforting, satisfying and utterly escapist. It is the kind of pleasure only a born storyteller can offer.