Alison Weir: A biographer acquits the queen
Alison Weir has been fascinated by the British monarchy since she was 14, when she read what she unabashedly calls a "pretty trashy" novel about Katherine of Aragon. "It was the sex and the executions that got me into it," she says cheerfully. "I know it's terrible to admit it!"
There's plenty of sex and several very gruesome executions in Weir's latest foray into royal history, "Queen Isabella: Treachery, Adultery, and Murder in Medieval England" (Ballantine, $27.95). And those 14th century intrigues seem as near as the next table when the author begins vividly expounding on them in between bites of eggs Benedict at the Bryant Park Grill.
It's her ability to capture the personalities of her aristocratic subjects - and to deliciously catalogue their clothes, food and entertainments - that have made Weir such a popular historian. In "Queen Isabella," as in the bestselling "Eleanor of Aquitaine," the author sympathetically profiles a strong-minded female monarch she feels has been unfairly vilified by historians. Yet she stoutly insists, "I don't go into a project with an idea. I do it because it's a fascinating story that needs to be told. With Isabella, I didn't even like her until I got into the research; I was going to write the book as a cracking good tale, not a whitewash."
Daughter of France's King Philip IV, married at age 12 to Edward II of England, Isabella in 1326 led an invasion of Britain with her lover, forced her husband to abdicate in favor of their son, and has been judged by most historians as an accessory (at the very least) to Edward's murder a few months later. Weir, on the contrary, comes to the startling conclusion that Edward escaped from imprisonment and that the would-be assassins - sent by Isabella's lover, not her - substituted another body, which was buried in pomp without anyone noticing the switch. "I was very dismissive of the claims that Edward wasn't murdered," she comments, "but I came round full circle. You have to go with the facts, and you never know how a book's going to turn out until you actually analyze all the source material."
It takes a lot of self-confidence to dissent from several centuries of received wisdom, but Weir's personal history reveals a character as formidable as any of the royalty she's written about. After that trashy novel got her interested in the past, she began reading "proper history," and by age 15 had amassed a three-volume compendium of facts about the Tudors. This was not exactly the approved curriculum at her English secondary school. "There I was in the library, beavering away researching kings and queens, when I was supposed to be doing the Industrial Revolution! I just couldn't get on with factory acts and unions; I needed people. I was always doing my own thing; I never wanted to do what I was supposed to."
Undaunted by being told her grades were too poor to study history at an advanced level, she went to teacher-training college - and specialized in history. Her first book was rejected, but she kept writing, and "The Six Wives of Henry VIII" eventually appeared in 1991 (substantially cut from the original single-spaced, double-sided, 1,024-page manuscript). Meanwhile, she'd married, had two children and grown increasingly frustrated by the British educational system's inability to provide for her son, who had a condition known as dyspraxia that affects motor and social skills. In the end, Weir simply founded her own school for children with special needs. "We converted part of our home, we were inspected by the Department of Education, and eventually the authorities were sending me children they couldn't place! I ran it for seven years, and feel quite militant about it, because there's just no provision in Britain for children who can't cope with mainstream schools."...
There's plenty of sex and several very gruesome executions in Weir's latest foray into royal history, "Queen Isabella: Treachery, Adultery, and Murder in Medieval England" (Ballantine, $27.95). And those 14th century intrigues seem as near as the next table when the author begins vividly expounding on them in between bites of eggs Benedict at the Bryant Park Grill.
It's her ability to capture the personalities of her aristocratic subjects - and to deliciously catalogue their clothes, food and entertainments - that have made Weir such a popular historian. In "Queen Isabella," as in the bestselling "Eleanor of Aquitaine," the author sympathetically profiles a strong-minded female monarch she feels has been unfairly vilified by historians. Yet she stoutly insists, "I don't go into a project with an idea. I do it because it's a fascinating story that needs to be told. With Isabella, I didn't even like her until I got into the research; I was going to write the book as a cracking good tale, not a whitewash."
Daughter of France's King Philip IV, married at age 12 to Edward II of England, Isabella in 1326 led an invasion of Britain with her lover, forced her husband to abdicate in favor of their son, and has been judged by most historians as an accessory (at the very least) to Edward's murder a few months later. Weir, on the contrary, comes to the startling conclusion that Edward escaped from imprisonment and that the would-be assassins - sent by Isabella's lover, not her - substituted another body, which was buried in pomp without anyone noticing the switch. "I was very dismissive of the claims that Edward wasn't murdered," she comments, "but I came round full circle. You have to go with the facts, and you never know how a book's going to turn out until you actually analyze all the source material."
It takes a lot of self-confidence to dissent from several centuries of received wisdom, but Weir's personal history reveals a character as formidable as any of the royalty she's written about. After that trashy novel got her interested in the past, she began reading "proper history," and by age 15 had amassed a three-volume compendium of facts about the Tudors. This was not exactly the approved curriculum at her English secondary school. "There I was in the library, beavering away researching kings and queens, when I was supposed to be doing the Industrial Revolution! I just couldn't get on with factory acts and unions; I needed people. I was always doing my own thing; I never wanted to do what I was supposed to."
Undaunted by being told her grades were too poor to study history at an advanced level, she went to teacher-training college - and specialized in history. Her first book was rejected, but she kept writing, and "The Six Wives of Henry VIII" eventually appeared in 1991 (substantially cut from the original single-spaced, double-sided, 1,024-page manuscript). Meanwhile, she'd married, had two children and grown increasingly frustrated by the British educational system's inability to provide for her son, who had a condition known as dyspraxia that affects motor and social skills. In the end, Weir simply founded her own school for children with special needs. "We converted part of our home, we were inspected by the Department of Education, and eventually the authorities were sending me children they couldn't place! I ran it for seven years, and feel quite militant about it, because there's just no provision in Britain for children who can't cope with mainstream schools."...