I've read many books on Tudor history - it's a favorite period of mine - but Nicola Clark's The Waiting Game: The Untold Story of the Women Who Served the Tudor Queens (#1,351) breaks new and fascinating ground. However, a clarification is necessary. The Tudor queens of the title are solely the wives of Henry VIII, not his two daughters who ruled after him although they, too, are Tudor queens.
If you read much Tudor history a few of the ladies-in-waiting's names will be familiar to you, but they tend to be generally lumped together in history as an amorphous mass, only filling in background spaces. In truth, these spots were coveted by the gentry and nobility as steppingstones for their own and their families' ambitions. Along with the spot came duties as well as allowances for bed, board and dress. Not too shabby, especially as the position put the women in a prominent position in the most serious marriage market in the country.
Ms. Clark chronicles the court service of as many of these unseen women as she can pull from official records and correspondence to put together how exciting, and yet increasingly dangerous being a maid of honor became over the course of Henry's reign. These women had to play the court games more skillfully than anyone else in order to keep their positions, not to mention their heads!
A splendid addition to your history shelf!
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