very interesting look at Jane Grey and her siblings. While it may be "good to be the queen", it's really not good to be part of the family that's next in line!

Interesting and lively account of the Grey sisters who were named as Henry VIII's heirs in his will. Based on new and original research, the book presents the most complete and historically accurate portrait of the sisters. I did not realize the extent of their significance in shaping English politics for centuries. Nice combination of scholarly study with engaging storytelling.

Once in college I had to read one of those awful books fetishizing Jane Grey, the very works that de Lisle rails against. Girl, let's talk about how weird those books are. I've kind of hated Jane Grey from that moment on. In class, my peers and I often made fun of how the author must have had some crush on Jane.
Luckily, in this book Jane is a real, live, feisty human, not some weird male historian's wet dream. And, she dies a third of the way through the book, which I enjoyed. Her sisters come alive too, along with the very real dangers and opportunities they faced.
Tl;dr: Jane dies and ruins it for everyone and I enjoyed this book immensely.

Convincing revisionist view of the three Grey sisters Jane, Katherine and Mary, who, far from being pious Victorian victims, were calculating players in Tudor politics, taking calculated chances, which, given the recent events of the War of the Roses, might have paid off with a crown. However, they did not know, as we do (with crystal clear hindsight) that Elizabeth I and William Cecil were people with whom you should not trifle.

In May of 1553, Durham House in London witnessed a triple wedding. The eldest of the couples were barely past their mid teens; the other two brides were age twelve, their husbands not much older. One of these boys was severely ill, dragged out of bed to stand by his new wife's side.

No one objected to what we now would howl down as child abuse, to say nothing of illegality. The average marriage age for ordinary English folk was twenty, but these were all noble children, and the entire purpose behind these weddings was political--an attempt to consolidate power in order to prevent Mary Tudor from being regarded as the severely ill Edward's heir. It didn't work. Most of those who arranged it would lose their heads in the gamble.

Of those children, none of them had a family intact, and indeed, the number of beheaded relatives was going to climb. Meantime, sickness was going to strike down a grim number of these young people, but even so, there was a remarkable number of youths during this stressful time after the death of Henry VIII, as every court faction struggled to secure the succession.

The most remarkable result was two generations of female queens or potential queens, in spite of firm conviction that women were subordinate to men according to the Great Chain of Being, the orderly hierarchy of the universe.

I read de Lisle's first book, After Elizabeth, which I felt was unmoored at times, shifting back and forth in order to delineate all the remarkable figures on England and Scotland's royal stages. This book suffered no such lack of focus. It's brilliantly organized, with the three Grey sisters central; the Stuarts succeeded in winning the throne, though by rights Katherine Grey's son Beauchamp should have been the next king, according to Henry VIII's will.

But Elizabeth Tudor, having grown up witnessing the bloody destruction caused by power mongers impatient to replace a reigning monarch with the next heir, spent her entire reign refusing to acknowledge anyone as heir. When the surviving Grey sisters sneaked away to marry, the infuriated queen threw them into prison until they died.

The first of the sisters, of course, was famous Lady Jane Grey, and it's her story that really makes the book earn its price. De Lisle uncovers with painstaking scholarship the accretions of fiction and politically motivated sentimentality around Jane Grey, providing a fascinating portrait of a teen who not only accepted queenship, but fought all her nearly fortnight's rule to hold onto power, and chose death rather than compromise.

It might be good to be king (it wasn't for Jane!) but one thing for certain, it is very dangerous to be near the king, or queen, as this book demonstrates with unflinching eye to detail. It makes riveting reading, with careful explication of motivation within the Tudor paradigm, and the decisions that led to the idea that Parliament must decide who is the future monarch. Once that jack in the box had popped out, it could not be stuffed back in by the Stuarts' attempt to emulate Henry VIII's absolute rule.

The flamboyant court figures, most of whom died at tragically young ages, come to life under de Lisle's skilled description, backed by formidable notes and bibliographic sources.

This book made me fall in love with the Grey sisters. All so tragic.

An interesting take on the historical biography, that looks at not just the 9 days Queen, but her two sisters who suffered in the wake of her short reign due to their closeness to the throne. Well written (I also really enjoyed the author's biography of Charles I), it does slow down a bit after Jane's execution when, despite the paranoia of Mary and Elizabeth, Mary and Katherine weren't really active power players.

When we think of the Grey family, we often come up with certain stereotypes. Lady Jane Grey was a passive, obedient girl who did whatever her family and her husband’s family wanted her to do. Frances Grey was a cruel mother. Katherine and Mary lived very uneventful lives. These could not be further from the truth. Leanda de Lisle in her book, “The Sisters Who Would Be Queen” attempts to paint a more realistic of the Grey sisters; Jane, Katherine and Mary.

Leanda de Lisle explains the importance of the Grey sisters:

Dynastic politics, religious propaganda, and sexual prejudice have since buried the stories of the three Grey sisters in legend and obscurity. The eldest, Lady Jane Grey, is mythologized, even fetishized, as an icon of helpless innocence, destroyed by the ambitions of others. The people and events in her life are all distorted to fit this image, but Jane was much more than the victim she is portrayed as being, and the efforts of courtiers and religious factions to seize control of the succession did not end with her death. Jane’s sisters would have to tread carefully to survive: Lady Katherine Grey as the forgotten rival Queen Elizabeth feared most, and Lady Mary Grey as the last of the sisters who were heirs to the throne. (de Lisle, xxx).

These three sisters were the daughters of Henry and Frances Grey. Frances is often viewed as a power hungry mother who didn’t care about Jane, but de Lisle explains why this is merely a stereotype. The Grey’s gave their daughters the best education imaginable for those who were in line for the throne. Jane, Katherine and Mary were raised to be educated and opinionated young ladies, which really defined who Jane was, even when she became queen for a fortnight, not the nine days of the myth. Jane was in fact one of the leaders of the new Protestant movement and she stuck to her beliefs, even when she was facing execution.

It was the memory of Jane that was always in the back of Katherine and Mary’s minds. After Jane’s death, neither girl truly pursued the crown of England. Instead, they wanted to be happy and marry who they wanted for love, no matter what. It started with Katherine, who was going to be next in line to the throne after Elizabeth became queen since Elizabeth never married. Katherine wanted a simple life so she married Edward Seymour, 1st Earl of Hertford without Elizabeth’s knowledge. Elizabeth sent both Katherine and Edward to the Tower where they had two children, Thomas and Edward Lord Beauchamp. Katherine would die sick, impoverished and under house arrest, separated from her husband and her children.

Mary did not fare much better. Mary married Thomas Keyes, a sergeant porter to Elizabeth I, in secret. Unlike Katherine, Mary and Thomas’s marriage ended badly after Thomas was sent to a cramp and dark prison cell. Mary never married again, but she was able to return to court.

This is the story of the Grey family without all the frills. The stories of Jane, Katherine and Mary are stories of heartache and pain. They were too close to the throne to have a normal life that they wanted. When I started reading this book, I will admit that it shocked me. I thought I knew the story of the Grey family, but I was wrong. Leanda de Lisle has opened my eyes to the truth about the Greys with her book “The Sisters Who Would Be Queen”. This book is very well written and so easy to understand. If you are interested in the Grey family and the story of Jane, Katherine and Mary, this is the book for you.

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I really enjoyed this book. Well worth the red I thought.