Innocent Traitor

Product Information

Innocent Traitor: A Novel of Lady Jane Grey is a historical novel by Alison Weir, published in 2006.

Innocent Traitor by Alison Weir | Waterstones Innocent Traitor by Alison Weir | Waterstones

This story is not only about Jane, but about the life and death intrigue of the day to day life of the Tudor court~and many of the voices in this novel often wish to be commoners rather than players on the royal, and very public stage (although i've always said IF i HAD to live in that place and time the only person i would want to be would be Anne of Cleves, because, though she was said to be ugly {which i'm not entirely convinced of} and smell bad), she had the most freedom of all {once her marriage was annulled}). The author exhibits a breathtaking grasp of the physical and cultural context of Queen Eleanor’s life.

This was my first multiple narrator audio book and I thoroughly enjoyed the experience, I think it helped me connect to the different characters. Alison Weir uses her unmatched skills as a historian to enliven the many dynamic characters of this majestic drama. My s-i-l, normally a woman with decent taste in books, swears by her and in fact loaned me this book and "The Lady Elizabeth. This book tells the life of "The Nine Day Queen" through various characters' eyes, from Lady Jane to Queen Mary.

Innocent Traitor - Penguin Books UK Innocent Traitor - Penguin Books UK

After the Reformation equivalent to a Dickensian childhood, she became the pawn of her parents and the Duke of Northumberland, was given in marriage to an abusive husband, maneuvered into a crown she didn’t want, lost it, was abandoned by everyone, thrown into prison and finally—thanks to her father’s second treachery against the Crown—Jane received the verdict of treason and was executed. Of the male narrators—her father, Dorset, and John Dudley, Earl of Warwick, later Duke of Northumberland—neither views Jane as anything more than a means to an end.

King Henry VIII meanwhile, at the time the future Edward VI was born, was 46 years old, on his third marriage after almost 30 years of married life, and had only two surviving acknowledged but illegitimated daughters, and it was important to him to have a son because it was unprecedented for a woman to be accepted as ruler of England in her own right and the young Tudor dynasty could still be overthrown. For example, a subtle anachronism - a reference to the discomfort of travelling in an unsprung carriage at a time when few, if any, benefitted from this convenience - was the very one I remember being cautioned against by my Latin teacher. The places where the text adds imaginative adornments are described at the end of the book, so, if you are persnickety about poetic license, you wouldn’t be too upset. Of course, the 21st century reader can feel nothing but pity for Jane and contempt for her conniving guardians, as well as for a social system that treated women as property. She was the great-granddaughter of Henry VII (her grandmother was Mary Tudor, Queen of France and sister to Henry VIII) and a first cousin of Edward VI.