The Taming of The Queen

The Taming of the Queen tells the story of Kateryn Parr, twice widowed and in love with another man when King Henry VIII proposes marriage. Becoming his sixth wife means becoming stepmother to his three children, running his sickroom as his health declines from gout and an ulcerated leg, and navigating a court where two previous queens have already lost their heads.

Kateryn is a scholar with a private commitment to religious reform, and the novel follows her attempt to practice and publish reformist theology without provoking the conservative faction at court, even as her sympathies bring her under suspicion of heresy. Philippa Gregory places her within the larger arc of the Plantagenet and Tudor Novels, giving Henry's last wife a political and intellectual life beyond her marriage.

The novel closes out Gregory's portrait of Henry VIII's six wives, following The Other Boleyn Girl and The Boleyn Inheritance.