The Joanna Stafford Trilogy: All in Paperback

As of today, all three of Nancy Bilyeau's Joanna Stafford series novels are in paperback: The Crown, The Chalice, and The Tapestry. Joanna Stafford is a Dominican nun who is cast out of her priory because of the Dissolution of the Monasteries (and the Friaries, and the Convents) perpetrated by Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell.

As you know if you read this blog with any regularity, I post often about the Dissolution of the Monasteries: It was the greatest cultural calamity ever inflicted upon England. It meant the loss of great art and architecture, books and music, order and rule, hospitality, education, and the spiritual, religious life. It left a gaping hole in English life: the prayer and penitence of good monks and nuns and the preaching and poverty of good friars.

It's easy to say that not all monks, nuns, and friars were good, but many, even the vast majority were faithful to their Rule and their vows. If the English Reformation was supposed to improve and revive the Church in England, it failed entirely in this case because all it did was destroy, pillage, and plunder the religious heart of England.

Although Bilyeau does not focus on these losses directly, since she is telling stories of intrigue, danger, and conspiracy, her choice of Joanna Stafford as a heroine means that calamity is part of the desperation at the heart of each plot. When we first meet Joanna Stafford at the beginning of The Crown she is on her way to offer some sort of comfort to her cousin, Margaret Bulmer, who is being burned at the stake for her role in the Pilgrimage of Grace, the northern uprising of commons, nobles, and monks against the suppression of monasteries and other changes in religion being enforced by the monarch and his minions. One of the last times we see her in The Tapestry, she is trying to comfort Catherine Howard as Henry VIII's fifth wife awaits her fate.

At the heart of each plot, each symbol (the crown, the chalice, the tapestry) is indeed the desperation of those English men and women who saw how destructive Henry VIII's Supremacy and tyranny were. Joanna Stafford witnesses and gets involved with these plots to thwart Henry VIII or even remove him from the throne through murder (The Chalice).

As I wrote in my review of The Tapestry last year:

In this novel, however, Henry has unraveled his own kingdom, setting factions against each other like colors in the pattern of Joanna's tapestries. Men and women are willing to do almost anything to remove him from power or keep him in power--the former was clear in The Chalice when Joanna almost participated in the murder of Henry VIII when he drank wine from a poisoned chalice--and the conspirators in this volume will even seek help from the occult to remove Thomas Cromwell from his position of influence on Henry VIII.

While Joanna is still in danger after Cromwell's fall and execution, Joanna recognizes that England is in even greater danger because nothing will stop Henry VIII. She realizes this when she sees Thomas Abel, Richard Featherston, and Edward Powell, three former chaplains and defenders of Queen Catherine of Aragon and Robert Barnes, Thomas Garrett, and William Jerome, three Lutheran supporters of Cromwell drawn on sledges to Smithfield. The Catholics would be hung and quartered, while the Lutherans would be burned alive. According to Henry VIII, the first three are traitors, the second, heretics:

So King Henry VIII showed his true heart. He did not favor the Catholics, nor did he follow the Lutherans. It was impossible to understand him, to live safely in his kingdom. The removal of Cromwell had not made him a better man. There was something twisted--even diseased--in a mind that would command that the condemned be paired as opposites on the hurdles. How foolish Bishop Gardiner and the Howards were to think they could predict what King Henry would do--or control his actions.

When it is impossible to live safely in a kingdom, the King has failed because he is a tyrant.

I recommend all three books as good historical fiction! More about the books from the publisher and more about Nancy on her website. Nancy Bilyeau discusses her books and the research she did with Christine Niles here.

Weaving Up Loose Ends: Nancy Bilyeau's THE TAPESTRY

Nancy Bilyeau, the author of the Joanna Stafford trilogy, kindly sent me a copy of the third volume in her trilogy--which also led me to look back on the first volume (The Crown) and read the second volume (The Chalice) this weekend. I am wrapped up in the reign of Henry VIII right now while the end of The Tapestry indicates Joanna Stafford, former Dominican novice, daughter of a second tier noble, tapestry weaver, and conspirator may not be back to involve herself in other Court intrigues. (The Tapestry originally had the alliterative title, The Covenant to go with the first two novels.)

I can't help thinking that Joanna's story should have another reason to go to Court so we can see her view of the end of Henry VIII's reign. She should be the witness of the last days of Henry VIII: the Prebendaries Plot, Katherine Parr bringing the three Tudor children together, the final Howard family fall, etc. Joanna Stafford is not just a fascinating character and actor in Bilyeau's fictional conspiracies, but she is a lens through which to view the Tudor Court and England after Henry VIII broke away from the Catholic Church, dissolved the monasteries and the friaries,. and changed his subject's religious lives.

This interview gives me some hope as Nancy Bilyeau states: "But I do have other ideas for Joanna Stafford, and it’s possible that I will write a second trilogy of Joanna novels. I really want to bring Joanna forward to the reigns of the children of Henry VIII, and particularly the Marian Counter-Reformation!"

In this novel, however, Henry has unraveled his own kingdom, setting factions against each other like colors in the pattern of Joanna's tapestries. Men and women are willing to do almost anything to remove him from power or keep him in power--the former was clear in The Chalice when Joanna almost participated in the murder of Henry VIII when he drank wine from a poisoned chalice--and the conspirators in this volume will even seek help from the occult to remove Thomas Cromwell from his position of influence on Henry VIII

While Joanna is still in danger after Cromwell's fall and execution, Joanna recognizes that England is in even greater danger because nothing will stop Henry VIII. She realizes this when she sees Thomas Abel, Richard Featherston, and Edward Powell, three former chaplains and defenders of Queen Catherine of Aragon and Robert Barnes, Thomas Garrett, and William Jerome, three Lutheran supporters of Cromwell drawn on sledges to Smithfield. The Catholics would be hung and quartered, while the Lutherans would be burned alive. According to Henry VIII, the first three are traitors, the second, heretics:

So King Henry VIII showed his true heart. He did not favor the Catholics, nor did he follow the Lutherans. It was impossible to understand him, to live safely in his kingdom. The removal of Cromwell had not made him a better man. There was something twisted--even diseased--in a mind that would command that the condemned be paired as opposites on the hurdles. How foolish Bishop Gardiner and the Howards were to think they could predict what King Henry would do--or control his actions.

When it is impossible to live safely in a kingdom, the King has failed because he is a tyrant.

I went back to read The Chalice, which I already had on Kindle, to understand the danger posed to Joanna throughout this novel. I found it an even more compelling read as Joanna was drawn into the so-called Exeter Conspiracy, the legacies of Elizabeth Barton, the Nun of Kent, and even the turmoil between Catholics and Protestants in the Holy Roman Empire. Nevertheless, as this book weaves the past and present dangers together, it is a compelling read.

Joanna is always loyal to her family, even though she is sensitive to the slights she receives and the horrors she witnesses. In this novel, she does all she can for Catherine Howard as she fears for how she is being used by the Howards and by Henry VIII. She nearly always does what someone tells her what not do (or does not do what someone tells her to do) especially when Geoffrey Scovill tells her what not to do or what to do. If she should stay, she leaves; if she should go, she stays--but that's what drives the story forward.

Catherine Howard and Thomas Culpepper's story in The Tapestry matches in a way the story of the Courtenays and the Poles in The Chalice, although Bilyeau does omit the involvement and execution of Francis Dereham, in a way I think to build up Catherine's innocence--especially because Dereham experienced the full agony of being partially hung, eviscerated, and quartered.

Throughout this trilogy, Bilyeau provides excellent character studies of the historical figures from Henry VIII, so sad at the end, through the Princess Mary, and of course Stephen Gardiner, the Bishop of Winchester and Thomas Howard,  the Duke of Norfolk. She also demonstrates the effects the English Reformation was having on the common people, with whom Joanna lives in Dartford. They are experiencing--and will continue to experience--the changes in religion after the break from Rome. Bilyeau shows how the same unraveling that is taking place at the very top of English culture is also occurring among the common folk: the same hatred, opposition of Protestant vs. Papist (which everyone had been before in England), and the same spying and conspiring against one another. As Joanna knows, it is impossible to live safely in Henry VIII's kingdom. How she and the man she chooses (no other revelations here) will live without interference from Henry VIII and his successors remains either to to seen or is up to the readers' imagination.

The Tapestry is available for pre-order at Amazon here and at Barnes & Noble here.

From the Author of "The Crown" and "The Chalice"

The Catholic Herald features this article by Nancy Bilyeau, the author of two historical fiction novels set in the reign of Henry VIII and featuring a young almost nun who has been cast out of her Dominican convent by the Dissolution of the Monasteries. I've read The Crown, but have also enjoyed Bilyeau's non-fiction essays describing the historical background of this era. This article exemplifies that pleasure :

I began my journey as a life-long Tudor history addict but fairly ignorant of the specifics of the religious orders. I had no spiritual agenda; I was raised by agnostic parents in the American Midwest. But after I learned a family secret when I was 19, I felt increasing curiosity about the Catholic Church. In the last month of her life, my grandmother told my mother that while she and my grandfather, Francis Aloysius O’Neill, babysat me as an infant, they took me to a priest in Chicago, Illinois, for baptism. The first priest they approached for baptism without the parents being present said no; the second one said yes. I was baptised in the Catholic Church but for nearly 20 years did not know it.

After university, I moved to New York City to work in the magazine business. Occasionally I found myself on Fifth Avenue in midtown and would slow down as I approached St Patrick’s Cathedral. I’d walk up the steps, push open the heavy doors, and slide inside to look at the magnificent 330ft-tall space. “Do I belong here?” I’d ask myself as I watched people light candles and pray.

Now, with a plan to write a historical thriller, I dived into my research of the Dissolution of the Monasteries. In most books on the reign of Henry VIII the refrain is the same: the numbers of monks, priests and nuns had dwindled by the 16th century, and many questions had already been raised about the abbeys’ financial and moral soundness. After the monasteries were closed and their occupants evicted, no one much cared, except for some rebels in a failed uprising in the north known as the Pilgrimage of Grace.

Two books that went deeper into the topic made me start to question that conventional wisdom: G W Bernard’s The King’s Reformation described the extreme brutality the king doled out to those who opposed him. It went beyond the executions of Sir Thomas More and Cardinal John Fisher – monks and friars who did not want to forsake the pope and swear an oath to Henry VIII as the head of the church were imprisoned, starved, hanged, beheaded and even carved into pieces. Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England made a convincing argument that the Catholic faith was a vibrant and essential part of daily life when Henry VIII broke from Rome because he could not get an annulment from his first wife, Catherine of Aragon. Most significantly, by dissolving the monasteries the king was able to seize a colossal amount of money.

As with the book I recently reviewed, Treason, by Dena Hunt, Bilyeau's historical fiction has to be judged first for its qualities and effectiveness as a work of fiction. But their influence on readers' impressions of English history are also important--that's the great mixture of historical fiction, when it's well done. It can lead readers to nonfiction works to understand the background of the work, especially when the story seems to contradict the "conventional wisdom". And in the case of the English Reformation, either when dealing with the Dissolution of the Monasteries on the martyrdoms of Catholic priests during the reign of Elizabeth I, I think Supremacy and Survival: How Catholics Endured the English Reformation is a good introduction!