She survives four queens. Will she fall to a tyrant?
Philippa Gregory brings the Boleyn traitor into the light in an explosive story of one woman’s survival in the treacherous heart of the Tudor court.
It’s been a while since author and historian Phillipa Gregory delved into the lives of the Tudors, but what a character to come back to. I’ve always been interested in those women who survived Henry VIII, not just Katherine Parr but Mary Boleyn, who was the subject of Phillipa’s first book and managed to spurn court and live in the countryside with her husband and children. There’s Anne of Cleeves who had the common sense to take an annulment and lived the rest of her life as a wealthy woman. Then there’s Jane Boleyn, one of those fascinating people who seems in the background and very unimportant. In fact when I first read about Anne Boleyn her sister-in-law was no more than a functionary, a lady-in-waiting with no bearing on the main story. However, the more I read, the more interesting little snippets occurred to me. She’s named as someone who betrayed their own husband in the trial Henry VIII held against Anne and three men who were close to her, including her brother and Jane’s husband, George Boleyn. I wondered why he wanted to prove incest against Anne, when her adultery was treason anyway. This was a claim that had anger and spite behind it, that wanted to taint and bury the name Boleyn and with Jane surviving the fall it seemed likely that she had provided this salacious claim, perhaps jealous of her husband’s close relationship with his sister. Maybe she was just lucky, but Jane survived four queens, serving as lady in waiting from Katherine of Aragon to Katheryn Howard. That shows she was accomplished at court and able to weather the changes under a very unpredictable king. She survived the change from Roman Catholicism to the Church of England and the huge change in Henry’s court when he became less dependent on the opinions of his dukes and more on the commoner Thomas Cromwell. So I was really looking forward to reading more about this woman and her perspective on a story we know very well.
Of course there was a certain amount of repetition, but that’s my fault for having read everything there is to know about Henry’s court. Even though we’re firmly in Henry’s time, this book felt strangely contemporary in its themes. As it goes along we start to see Henry the tyrant emerge from the sought after and enlightened prince he once was, possibly due to the blow on the head he suffered while jousting. Now America is in the grip of a similar man, they’re both petty, vindictive, vengeful and willing to manipulate the truth to get the outcome they want.
“Pity about the horse” my father says […] “the King had him beheaded”.
By the time we reach Cromwell’s search for a new wife, after the death of Jane Seymour, Henry seems on the brink of insanity and no one can say no to his demands. A whole court revolves around his wishes, no matter how irrational they may be.
“The King kills those closest to him […] he loves them at first, calling them to his side to make himself shine and then he cannot tolerate that they eclipse him.”
Phillipa writes a brilliant scene based on what we know of Anne of Cleeve’s arrival in the country. We know she spoke very little English or French, but she also had no experience of Henry. One of his foibles was dressing up and fooling people with his appearance. He failed to realise that his sheer size, not to mention his gait which was affected by the wound on his leg, meant he was likely to be identified whatever mask or disguise he wore. Used to the pandering of his courtiers who would pretend not to know him, he was horrified when he burst into Anne’s room dressed as a beggar and she failed to recognise him, even flinching at his touch. It’s was an appalling first impression and Phillipa writes Jane as desperately trying to stop it from happening. She had spent time with the German bride and knew she wouldn’t get the King’s humour, pleading with Cromwell to stop him. However, it was too late and seeing this woman’s reaction to him would have been a huge dent to his pride. This rejection doomed their relationship before it started, with Henry claiming she was overweight, her breasts were slack and she had a strange smell – a rather bold claim considering Henry’s persistently infected leg and his courtiers having to hold perfume to their noses to disguise the smell. The annulment was swift and Henry’s eye was drawn to a new girl at court, the fifteen year old Katheryn Howard.
Of course, there is also a contemporary parallel between Epstein’s island and Katheryn Howard’s past at her aunt’s home, supposedly being trained as a lady-in-waiting. In Gregory’s novel about Katheryn’s short time as Queen she reveals that this finishing school in Norfolk is a magnet for the men of the area who are allowed to visit the girls at night. Katheryn has always been portrayed as promiscuous and it is thought by more recent historians that she was sexually active from a very young age of about twelve to thirteen. We would consider this grooming of a minor for sexual exploitation and it’s worth remembering that she was executed for treason due to her infidelity with Thomas Culpepper, who had been the King’s favourite, but also for adultery with young men she met before she’d ever come to court. He changed the law specifically to do this when he had the evidence to sign her death warrant anyway. He’s not alone in his predilection for young women. His best friend Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, has a young ‘ward’ who lives at Grimsthorpe Castle in my home county of Lincolnshire. As a middle aged man he thinks nothing of marrying her as soon as she’s of age and taking her property as his own. He’s also a lot less appealing when I’m not imagining Henry Cavill who played him in The Tudors. I found the scenes where Henry is brought to Katheryn’s bedchamber almost unbearable to read, but I can’t deny that they are well written. Henry is described as bloated, sweating and leaning upon his courtiers who have to heave him into bed with this young girl. We know he is likely to be impotent at this point in his life, but the fact that this tiny girl has to try and initiate sexual activity with him made me feel sick. I felt a tremendous pity for her and a hope that she found some moments of happiness and love in her short life.
Gregory writes Jane as a woman who lost her husband, her status and her role as a mother to serve this tyrant King. It’s so fascinating to read how she stays within the King’s good graces for such a length of time. Here the author writes an alliance that might explain that, but we can see she’s intelligent, speaks several languages, is good at reading people and has a shrewd ability to sense which way the King might drift next. I found myself admiring her quick thinking and felt she could have easily been a politician or spin doctor in modern times. Something that stood out strongly in this novel was the misogyny, which wasn’t surprising but still felt desperately unfair. After Henry suffers his jousting accident he is unconscious for anything from 45 minutes to a couple of hours, with Anne distraught and by his side. Later she miscarries and as awful as that experience is, having been there more than once, what struck me was the shame and guilt she was made to feel. The rush to clean her up and change the bed, making sure it’s all presentable and the Queen looks well enough to accept a visit from the King. Her brother George is the only man who goes to bring comfort, not caring what state she is in. This belief that women are unclean and should come to a marriage bed untouched, no matter how experienced her new husband may be, does breed a resentment and fury into those women who start to question but it can’t be voiced yet. This is about little rebellions and pushing the boundaries of the powers they do have and Jane is very good at this, knowing which powerful men to trust and those to placate. I found the book gripping even though I knew the outcome would not change and I think that’s a great skill to have. Phillipa Gregory takes people we know from school and history books and makes them into living breathing humans, with wants and needs that are no different from ours. I felt Jane’s loneliness and this was perhaps why she helped Katheryn. Both have had very little love in their lives and for Jane living this vicariously was tempting, but very dangerous. This was an interesting look at the Tudor court from the viewpoint of a character whose position makes her almost invisible and a very compelling witness.
Meet the Author
Philippa Gregory is an internationally renowned historian and novelist. She holds a PhD in eighteenth-century literature at the University of Edinburgh and is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the Universities of Sussex and Cardiff, an honorary research fellow at Birkbeck University of London and she was awarded a CBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours for her services to literature and to charity. Her novels have been adapted for stage and screen and in 2023 she published her groundbreaking history book, Normal Women – 900 Years of Making History, which was also released as a podcast, a teen edition and a series for young children.
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