The Unfaithful Queen: A Novel of Henry VIII's Fifth Wife (35 page)

Among
New York Times
bestselling author CAROLLY ERICKSON’s twenty-eight critically acclaimed, prize-winning books are biographies, histories, and the recent series of fictional historical entertainments. Her range is wide, her audience worldwide. She lives in Washington, D.C., and Hawaii.

Discussion Questions

  1. What impact do you think the sight of her cousin Anne Boleyn’s gory execution had on young Catherine Howard? Did she have nightmares about Anne’s head being wrapped in a blood-stained cloth?

  2. Charyn tells her cousin Catherine Howard that she is a runt, an inferior whelp, and that she will never be allowed to breed—that in fact she will never be allowed to marry. Did Catherine’s lightness of heart and sense of humor help to raise her spirits and free her from this supposed handicap?

  3. Were you surprised to read in
The Unfaithful Queen
about the sordidness of the goings-on in the Paradise Chamber at Horsham?

  4. What role do you think chance and opportunism played in Catherine Howard’s life story?

  5. Why do you suppose Henry VIII chose Catherine Howard to be his fifth wife? Was it her youth and naivete that charmed him? Or her resemblance to his old love Jocasta? Or other overriding forces that drew them together?

  6. Would it be true to say that Catherine’s future was dependent on “the strength of armies and alliances”? Or was much of this strength an illusion, full of risk and hazard, fortune and luck?

  7. Do you recognize from your own experience the paradox Catherine faced, when she belonged to one man yet it was another man who sent a disturbing tingle along her spine when he came near her? Do you think this is a common experience in women’s lives?

  8. “What a hard thing it is to write of love!” Catherine says when she has found her beloved Tom Culpeper. Would you agree with her that unlike infatuation or lust, love is in a sense undefinable? That, as she says, “there is only the word, and the knowing of it.”

  9. Did Catherine bring her ultimate destruction on herself through her own deceitfulness, or was she a victim of a court where the prevailing motto was “Do what you can, take what you need, act as you must”?

10. Was the moral ambiguity that plagued the Tudor court any different, either in kind or in degree, from the political corruption observable in our own twenty-first-century world?

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This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

THE UNFAITHFUL QUEEN.
Copyright © 2012 by Carolly Erickson. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

www.stmartins.com

Cover design by Danielle Fiorella

Cover photograph by Larry Rostant

The Library of Congress has catalogued the print edition as follows:

Erickson, Carolly, 1943–

   The unfaithful queen: a novel of Henry VIII’s fifth wife / Carolly Erickson. — 1st ed.

           p. cm.

   ISBN 978-0-312-59691-0 (hardcover)

   ISBN 978-1-250-01102-2 (e-book)

 1.  Catherine Howard, Queen, consort of Henry VIII, King of England, d. 1542.   2.  Great Britain—History—Henry VIII, 1509–1547—Fiction.   3.  Queens—Great Britain—Fiction.   I.  Title.

   PS3605.R53U54 2012

   813'.6—dc23

2012026402

e-ISBN 9781250011022

First Edition: September 2012