The Dragon & the Rose

I purchased this book title by Roberta Gellis, but was sent a book with the same title by a different author, David Scott Daniel.

Though most publishers and booksellers consider Gellis a writer of romance, I personally think of her as a historical novelist who happens to insert some romance in her novels (as most historical novelists do). That may be why I read her work at all, when ordinarily I can't stand romance. This novel is a prime example of its appeal to me. It's the story of the early life of Henry VII of England, the first of the Tudor monarchs, beginning with his birth as the posthumous son of Edmund Tudor, Earl of Richmond, by his 13-year-old widow, Lady Margaret Beaufort, and following him through his victory over the Earl of Lincoln's rebellion 30 years later. As a great-great-grandson on his mother's side of King Edward III, and on his father's of Henry V's widow, he has a tenuous claim to the throne, and from boyhood he is hunted, betrayed, and attacked by political enemies and those who simply see him as a dangerous lightning rod for their own rivals. When he usurps the throne from Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth and marries Richard's niece, Elizabeth of York, the eldest daughter of Edward IV and sister of the two "Little Princes" murdered in the Tower (see Shakespeare), his position becomes at once better (the English people for the most part love him) and shakier. Though the cover blurb declares that his and Elizabeth's "passion for one another would change the course of history," the two don't even meet till the book is more than half finished, and most of the story is concerned with political maneuvering and battles. Gellis's great strength is that (although she admits in her afternote that "the emotions accredited to the characters are mostly fictional") she portrays Henry and Elizabeth as human beings, with comprehensible emotions that readers can understand and identify with. Henry is deeply attached to his mother and to his uncle Jasper, his father's older brother, who in fact has been the nearest thing to a father he has ever known; having lived an insecure life, he tends naturally toward suspicion of everyone he meets. Elizabeth is the browbeaten daughter of a tyrannical mother, grieving for the loss of her beloved little brothers, terrified of the uncle who killed them and almost forced her to marry him, yet fearful too of Henry. Indeed, Gellis's moral, if she could be said to have one, would be best expressed as, "Don't keep things to yourself--TALK to your mate and tell him/her what's troubling you!" If Henry and Elizabeth could have brought themselves to express their real motivations early on, their later misunderstandings, suspicions (Henry at one point believes Elizabeth to be implicated in Lincoln's plot), and months of painful adjustment wouldn't have had to happen. Yet in spite of all, they come gradually to genuinely love each other, and if that fact makes the book a romance, so be it. It is, perhaps, a romance for those who don't like romances--like me.

A well written story presenting an overview of the youth of Henry VII and Elizabeth York, daughter of Edward IV. Historical detail is evident in the descriptions of the tumultuous time between Edward's death in 1483 and Henry's assuming the throne in 1485. The stories emphasis, however, is to offer a humanistic perspective to the family conflicts and court intrigue that plagued Henry's fight to the throne and his entire reign. While the battle scenes are well described, it is the imagined romance between Henry and Elizabeth that is the book's true focus. (Includes romanticized sexual scenes.