Taken from The Sunday Express review by Elizabeth Fremantle

The queen of historical fiction is on fine form with the tale of Margaret Plantagenet and her shocking fate at the hands of Henry VIII.

It is a well-known adage that history is written by the victors but, in The King’s Curse, Philippa Gregory gives voice to those who lost in the death throes of the bloody struggle between the houses of York and Lancaster.

Spanning 40 years and charting the dramatic and brutal rise of the Tudors, this expansive novel is told by the last York princess, Margaret Plantagenet. She bore witness to the actions of her increasingly tyrannical cousin Henry VIII in his attempt to make his dynasty unassailable.

Margaret is devastated when her brother Edward, already incarcerated for years in the Tower, is executed in a deal that brings the Spanish Princess Katherine to England as a bride for the Tudor heir. Her brother’s claim on the throne was simply too great for him to live.

Margaret is married into obscurity for her own safety but her children are all filled with the Plantagenet blood that marks them out as potential rivals to the Tudors so she lives quietly away from court. After giving birth to three sons and a daughter, she is left widowed and living in poverty, barely able to provide for her children.

However when the young Henry VIII comes to the throne, he wants to create unity between the conflicting houses and returns all the forfeited York lands and riches to Margaret.

She is welcomed back to court, into the household of the new Queen Katherine to whom she becomes devoted.

Her sons too are given positions amongst the King’s closest servants and it seems that order is finally restored. But Margaret has to watch as the poor Queen suffers a decade of miscarriages and stillbirths, giving birth to a single healthy daughter, Mary, and eventually loses the favour of her once devoted husband.

The King’s paranoia is ignited when court and country divide over his decision to break with Rome and set his Queen aside in favour of the upstart Anne Boleyn.

The Plantagenets are the natural allies of the cast-off Queen and her daughter and Margaret finds herself at the heart of a fatal political battle between the old order and the new – a battle that she cannot win.

Margaret’s story is shocking, deeply moving and offers an alternative view on a much-told tale. Gregory is on form here; her depiction of Henry VIII’s transformation from indulged golden boy to sinister tyrant is perfectly pitched and seems more horrific still when we are made intimate witnesses to the devastation of Margaret’s family.

The problem with having Margaret as sole narrator is that she spends many years away from court, meaning much of the action is reported through her sons, which takes some of the impact and pace out of the overall novel.

The most powerful passages are those where she is at the heart of the action and I defy anyone to remain dry-eyed as the story reaches its tragic denouement.