The Waiting Game by Nicola Clark

The Waiting Game: The Untold Story of the Women Who Served the Tudor Queens

By Nicola Clark

Pegasus Books 2025

Nicola Clark’s new book looks beyond the marquee attractions of the Tudor era, the kings, the queens, the prelates and ministers of state, to the female courtiers who filled the background of the era. The Waiting Game: The Untold Story of the Women Who Served the Tudor Queens concentrates on three specific narratives: Maria de Salinas and Elizabeth Stafford during the reign of Catherine of Aragon, the first wife and rightful queen of King Henry VIII, Mary Howard, Gertrude Blount, and Jane Parker during the contentious courtly war between the establishment of Catherine of Aragon and that of Anne Boleyn, her rival and then supplanter, and finally a less focused final strand in which some ladies in waiting, like Anne Basset or Katherine, the daughter of Maria de Salinas, navigate the reigns that follow Anne’s downfall.

It amounts to a remarkable composite portrait of a little-studied world of whispered power and constantly-fluctuating status. As Clark points out, the lines of royal service were blurry even at the best of times:

The royal household had been gradually expanding since the beginning of the reign. Like most large organisations, it was by nature a place of slight administrative chaos. Some people were paid wages, some had no salary but were entitled to ‘bouche of court,’ i.e. food, lodging, fuel and light, some people had both, some neither, and some were merely ‘hangers-on.’

All of these manifestations had long roots, and many of them were veritable family concerns. Clark reminds her readers that Jane Parker, who would go on to become wife to Anne Boleyn’s brother George (and later be executed, demonstrating that being a lady-in-waiting could be far from a harmless sinecure), was from a courtier family, her parents having been long in the service of Lady Margaret Beaufort, and one of Clark’s narrative focal points, Maria de Salinas, revealed in her letters as a “vibrant, straight-talking, astute young woman,” had a daughter, Lady Willoughby, who continued on in the service. (Royalty-watchers of the present-day House of Windsor will recognize that this hereditary principle very much still applies, although with a boring paucity of beheadings)

As Clark pricelessly notes, “ladies-in-waiting were never not there.” Being seen, being on display, was their raison d’etre, and this infamously led to sexual affairs and all the high-flown nonsense of courtly love that played such an additional role in the destruction of Anne Boleyn. Clark seems refreshingly jaundiced on this whole protracted stage-play of fair maidens and love-struck swains:

Love was a meaningless exercise, and the faithlessness of lovers, were central themes in poetry at this time, though used as a device to express the general mood of frustration with courtly life. Thomas Wyatt was a particular master of the jaded hack pose. No doubt they had a point – Anne’s court was not a calm place – but it was also clearly fashionable to be a cynic. Misogyny, too, was all the rage.

It was through the display element of ladies in waiting that Henry VIII first became aware of Anne Boleyn, and Jane Seymour, and Katherine Howard, to say nothing of some of his famous mistresses like Bessie Blount or Mary Boleyn, and many of the gentlemen at Court had similar temptations. Clark does an increasingly absorbing job exploring how dangerous and how interesting these connections could be as the connections themselves grow more fraught and the Tudor era grows more frightening. By the end of The Waiting Game, the good old days of head-bowed churchlike piety under Queen Catherine seem very long ago indeed.

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 has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News