24th October 2015
It's a decade today since The Constant Princess was published – I can't believe it has been so long. When I wrote The Other Boleyn Girl I intended it to be my only Tudor novel. I'd found Mary Boleyn, who was marvellously interesting, and after I'd written about her I was going to do something different – but it turned out that the whole period was marvellously interesting. I rather fell in love with Katherine of Aragon, and four years later I went back in time to research her early life. I wanted to show her without the hindsight that paints her always as the tragic, abandoned older wife. And I was writing after the attacks of 9/11, and wanted to comment on religious tolerance and the lack of it, and relations between the Christian and Muslim worlds, so it seemed very worthwhile to write about Katherine's Spanish background, and the multicultural society her parents had destroyed.
The Constant Princess stands out amongst my work – it's a reader favourite and one of my most-read books. Ten years later, I've completed my story of Henry VIII's reign with the tale of his sixth wife, Kateryn Parr. Kateryn was probably named after Katherine, and they were both devoted and devout queens, intelligent and educated, passionate about their (differing) ideals of the Church. They were two of the few women to act as regent in England over the centuries, both ruling while Henry invaded France.
Katherine is one of the most fascinating women I've studied, and I'm very glad to have written a novel of her. Here's a collection of the book's covers – which is your favourite?