Henry Tudor Must Die by Jillian Laine * * *
Unfortunately, while I loved the premise, I never became emotionally invested in the people carrying it.
The story begins shortly before Anne Boleyn's execution. Anne is a witch, and magic gives her a way to escape her fate, although it comes at a considerable physical cost. Catherine of Aragon has also faked her death, and the two former rivals find themselves working together. Both have lost almost everything because of Henry, and both are particularly concerned about their daughters, Mary and Elizabeth, whose legitimacy and futures have been destroyed by their father.
They become involved with the Hellebore Society, a secret organisation of women working to improve women's lives and undermine the men and institutions keeping them powerless. Anne and Catherine leave England and become part of this larger network, but England and Henry are never far from their minds. Eventually, inevitably, they have to return. After all, the book is called Henry Tudor Must Die.
As a story, I actually think a lot of this works. I especially enjoyed the middle section, when Anne and Catherine are outside England and the novel gets to explore more of the Hellebore Society and its activities. There is a sense of adventure to those sections that I found genuinely fun. I liked the concept of women creating their own networks of education, knowledge, protection, and power within a world specifically designed to deny them those things. There are some exciting moments, and I was interested in seeing how the story would eventually bring everything back to Henry.
My problem was Anne and Catherine themselves.
They never quite felt like living, breathing people to me. They felt like pieces being moved around a chessboard. They have goals. They have motivations. They hate Henry. They love their daughters. They want revenge. I understand all of those things intellectually, but I rarely felt them emotionally.
Anne is probably the clearest example. At the beginning of the novel, she loses a finger as the cost of the magic that saves her from execution. That is enormous. This woman was about to be beheaded. She uses magic to escape death and loses part of her body in the process. The missing finger is mentioned afterwards. Sometimes it hurts or twitches. She needs to wear gloves to hide it. But I kept waiting for Anne herself to really think about what happened to her.
What does she feel when she looks down and sees that missing finger? Does it remind her that Henry almost killed her? Does she think about the price she paid to survive? Does she resent it? Is she grateful for it because she is alive? Does she ever look at her altered body and think about everything that brought her to this point?
That emotional layer just wasn't there for me.
And it is especially noticeable because these women have experienced horrific things. Anne has seen people around her die. She has been imprisoned and sentenced to death. Catherine has been separated from her daughter and spent years being systematically stripped of her position and power. Yet so much of that remains background information rather than something that seems to live inside them.
We get their rage, certainly. This is very much feminist rage fiction, and I enjoyed that aspect of it. We get their hatred of Henry and their determination to protect their daughters. But rage cannot be the entirety of someone's emotional life, and I wanted to see what existed underneath it. Grief, fear, guilt, trauma, loneliness, uncertainty, even ordinary little moments of happiness or irritation would have made them feel more grounded in the world around them.
Instead, I often felt as though Anne and Catherine existed primarily to perform the next action required by the story. They go somewhere. They meet someone. They make a plan. They carry it out. The plot keeps moving, but the women themselves rarely seemed to exist beyond the needs of that plot.
Oddly enough, Catherine Howard was the character I connected with the most.
She has a much smaller role than either Anne or Catherine of Aragon, but somehow she felt more emotionally present to me. There was something more immediate and human about her, and I found myself caring about her very quickly. It is especially funny because Catherine Howard is probably the character in this book who is least like me, yet she was the one who felt most alive. That made the emotional distance I felt from the two protagonists even more noticeable.
And that is ultimately why Henry Tudor Must Die landed at three stars for me.
The premise is fantastic. The combination of Tudor history, witchcraft, feminist rage, secret societies, revenge, and historical women reclaiming power should have been exactly my kind of book. The actual mechanics of the story are interesting too, and there were sections, particularly in the middle, that I genuinely enjoyed.
But an interesting plot can only carry me so far when I don't feel emotionally connected to the people living through it. I wanted Anne and Catherine to feel like women who continued to exist when the narrative wasn't looking at them. I wanted their experiences to leave marks that went deeper than the physical ones. Instead, too often I felt as though I was watching pieces move across a board.
Three stars for a brilliant premise and some genuinely enjoyable story moments. I just wish the women at the centre of it had felt as alive as the history they were rewriting.
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