The Captive of Kensington Palace

Author: Jean Plaidy

Genre: Historical

Rating: C+

The Captive of Kensington Palace is the first in historical fiction author Jean Plaidy's Queen Victoria series and follows the life of the future Queen in the years of her childhood, primarily during the reign of her uncle King William IV - the book picks up shortly before the death of George IV and ends with the death of William IV.  Following a number of characters, but centred entirely around Victoria, it shows the conflicts between the English house of Hanover and the German house of Saxe-Coburg and Gothas which compete over control of Victoria - on one side is her long deceased father's family, and the uncles through which she will inherit the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and on the other side is her ever present and rather domineering mother and her mother's rather ambitious comptroller Sir John Conroy.

The thing that both makes this an exemplary work of historical fiction while also seriously disabling the book is Plaidy's adherence to history.  Often historical fiction looks at events from the perspective of fictional characters, created for the purpose of giving the author some creative licence, but Plaidy's works (both in regards to Captive and her many other books) instead look at things through the eyes of the real people during the real events.  She relies heavily on the use of non-fiction sources and primary sources - in this case including the letters and diaries of Victoria, passages of which are outright quoted here.   In a way, I really love it because it gives you such a strong sense of what actually happened, but at the same time it kind of makes the story itself a bit jilted and repetitive.  Peoples day-to-day lives tend to not be all that interesting, even when they're royalty, and can be rather repetitive, as we see in this work.  The problems that continually rise up, and the conversations (and arguments) that happen all just repeat the same things over and over again - Victoria will be Queen one day, William IV is like his father and destined for the straight jacket, the Duke of Cumberland wants to do away with Victoria although he will take the kingdom of Hanover as second place, the Duchess of Kent and Sir John want to control Victoria and fear the influence of the King and his wife, the King has no legitimate children and his wife is rather plain, but they're both in love.... it goes on like that.

The other problem with this book, and its follow up The Queen and Lord M, is that Victoria is very young and naive here, and as such her voice gets rather annoying after awhile. I found myself wanting to yell at her half the time, and tell her to learn about the position she is about to have thrust upon her - or even better, to yell at William IV or the Duchess of Kent for allowing Victoria to remain so uneducated on the matter.  In the case of the Duchess I really got it - an educated Victoria was a Victoria she could not control - but it pissed me off in regards to William IV, who did not want his heir controlled by the Duchess.  But then, that was the way history worked out here, so I can't really fault Plaidy, can I?  Overall, not Plaidy's best work, but still enjoyable.