Where Lady Jane Grey Falls to Queen Mary

The Tower of London by William Harrison Ainsworth
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Tower of London, published in 1840, is a medieval romance historical fiction novel set in 1553, and virtually all action takes place at the castle in the title. It is written in the high ornate style of the time, very similar to the tone and style of Sir Walter Scott, and it compares favorably with his writing. I liked it. It's very entertaining, full of lots of surprises, and informative. A great deal of it is fiction (I mean, there are ghosts), but there's a lot of concrete factual information found here, too, and it was an education.

From the title, it is clear that Ainsworth is partly telling the story of a place. In the same way that Hugo, in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, incorporated direct instruction into the layout of Paris and especially the famous cathedral, Ainsworth takes pains to instruct the reader in the various towers, throne rooms, dungeons, and other buildings on the site of the Tower of London. In fact, it becomes obvious that some of the action is included just so that he has an excuse to lead us to another interesting chamber. He literally stops telling the story to describe the construction and history of each location, directly addressing the reader. It is less distracting than it sounds; I found it mostly quaint.

His second purpose in the novel is to give us the story of Lady Jane Grey. The story begins with her arrival at the Tower as a new queen and follows her and those around her to the day of her death on the scaffold. (Sorry--spoiler.) The author is a gifted historian but also a gifted storyteller, and he supplies the reader with a lot of speculation, private conversation, intrigue, and invention to fill in the blank parts of the record. In addition to the main story of plotters and ambassadors and soldiers, he tells the story of many lesser characters in the castle, including their drinking and feasting and fighting and laughing. His favorites are three giants (supposedly bastards of Henry the VII) and a little person named Xit who is combative and proud, all of whom the author had enormous affection for. (Xit is like a smaller and even more foolish Falstaff who is more fortunate in his friends than the doomed Shakespeare character and lands on his feet after making a fool of himself, eventually receiving a knighthood.) The feasts are described in probably too much detail, but you know how they love their food in tales of the time.

Lady Jane Grey is made sympathetic, and even though you know perfectly well what's gonna happen to her, it's hard not to hope something will intervene. Queen Mary comes off as, well, bloody and vindictive, though not completely, and Elizabeth is treated as kinda complicit and kinda manipulated--but lucky. The men around these women are all ambitious and don't have enough sense to quit destroying themselves and everyone who loves them. Now, that sounds horrible, but the mix of melodrama and comedy and, here and there, gothic romance keeps the story from being too much of any one thing. Some folks won't like that; I did.

Again, those who liked anything by Hugo or Dumas or Scott are likely to find the writing of Ainsworth--language, plotting, characters, themes--similar enough to see a lot to like in this or another of his novels. Anyway, I did.

Recommended.

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