The King's Secret Matter

By: Jean Plaidy

Narrated by: Anne Flosnik

The 12-year marriage of Henry and Katharine has declined from an idyllic union into an uneasy stalemate. The king's love for his aging queen has grown cold, and he is angry with her failure to give him the heir to the throne he desperately wants. When the seductive Anne Boleyn arrives at court, the king is captivated by her dark beauty and bold spirit and becomes obsessed by the desire to possess her. With his chief advisor, Cardinal Wolsey, the king devises a secret plot to declare the marriage with Katharine null and void. But Katharine refuses to surrender to his wishes and fights desperately to retain her title and safeguard her daughter, Mary. The ensuing power struggle is one of the turning points in English history, and these pages capture it in spellbinding detail.©1990 Eleanor Hibbert (P)2008 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

Critic reviews

"Plaidy excels at blending history with romance and drama." (New York Times)
"Jean Plaidy, by the skilful blending of superb storytelling and meticulous attention to authenticity of detail and depth of characterization, has become one of the country's most widely read novelists." (Sunday Times)
"Full-blooded, dramatic, exciting." (Observer)

Not much of a secret

This is the last book in Jean Plaidy's trio of books about Henry's first wife Katherine of Aragon. This book goes over the bit of her life that we all know pretty well, his disillusion with her for not bearing sons, his infatuation with Anne Boleyn, the political and religious intrigue.

But Plaidy does it in her characteristic style. You're not subject to too much of Anne Boleyn here, but see her in a chess piece kind of way. She's not unimportant, but she's not the focus of the novel and that is just right. I also liked that Plaidy does spend time on Katherine's exile from Court, something many books and movies don't seem to worry about. You also get to feel a bit of what Katherine is feeling too when it comes to missing her daughter, Mary.

Again the narrator's accent isn't great, but it grated on me less here than it did in the three previous books with her reading them.