The King's Pleasure
By Alison Weir
Ballantine Books 2023

King Henry VIII came to the throne of England as a teenager, married his brother's widow, and was immediately ensconced in a world where his every whim was indulged and his every mood was considered meteorological reality. In the following decades, he indulged in steadily-increasing cruelty and caprice, betrayed virtually everybody he ever knew, and ordered the execution of dozens and dozens of people he'd once called dear friends, all the while believing himself to be the living avatar of God.

Given all this, it's entirely likely that Henry is, in a very real sense, unknowable to mentally healthy people. Certainly this would explain how elusive he's been even to dedicated biographers over the years, much less novelists, who tend to portray him as a gibbering madman, a leering Falstaff, a weeping man-baby, or all three rolled together. Even in the best Tudor historical fiction, he's usually a cartoon version of the terrifying real man he must have been.

Alas, despite the fact that Alison Weir has now written several hundred thousand words about the Tudors, including a six-book series of novels about the infamous procession of royal wives, she doesn't capture Henry either, even in a hefty book specifically designed to do that. He's the center of everything in The King's Pleasure, Weir's new novel, but he's never anything more than a string of exclamation points and a few changes of costume.

It's frustrating. Weir knows the history here, the documents and the reliable quotations, as well as anybody, but at every turn in this book, she refuses either to stray beyond those sources or to ignore them as any self-respecting historical novelist should feel free to do with abandon if the story demands it. That story, that living current of revelation, is always happening off-stage in The King's Pleasure, always being reported instead of dramatized. When the Duke of Suffolk conspires with young Henry to woo and bed Bessie Blount, for instance, the lady succumbs. “Two days later, Suffolk arranged for her to be in his lodging at midnight,” readers are told. “It was then that Harry bedded her, and found it so sweet a pleasure that he never wanted it to end.” Good to know this made it into Weir's notes … a shame she didn't feel like actually writing it.

Buckingham appears often in the book's first half (the narrative here is decidedly lopsided; Henry's early wives hang around like Thanksgiving leftovers, and his later wives shoot by like they were on roller skates), and although he pushes the boundaries of his long-standing privilege with the young monarch, the reader never feels the strain of this or anything else. Instead, it's more of the strangely removed tone that fills the rest of the book, seeming to echo the thoughts of Henry but never the slightest sense of the man:

It would not do to make an enemy of Buckingham. He was too near the throne for comfort. Best to keep him close and accord him the precedence and rewards that were his due, to stop him complaining, just as Wolsey had advised Henry to manage those other kinsfolk who had royal blood. It was wise to keep a watchful eye on his relations, as his father had done.

“He was too near the throne for comfort – Best to keep him close and accord him the precedence and rewards that were his due …” It sounds like whispered warnings from an advisor, doesn't it? It certainly doesn't sound anything like what anybody like Henry himself would find himself thinking – and in a novel devoted to Henry, it should, or it should have a good reason not to.

Anne Boleyn? “Oh, she was a mercurial woman! He never knew where he was with her.” Princess Mary, defying her father? “He shut his mind to the misery she must be feeling. After all, it was her own fault!” You look everywhere for some flash of insight, some risk on Weir's part, and it's just never there. The only standout achievement of The King's Pleasure is something no writer would want to crow about: it makes Henry VIII boring.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News.