Boleyn Traitor, page 51
I think Jane helped the lovers because she saw the opportunity for herself. I believe that she looked at Katheryn Howard, nearly thirty years younger than her injured, overweight, deteriorating husband, and thought: this could be a dowager queen of England. If Katheryn could get pregnant and crowned before the king’s death, she would have a good chance of being on a regency council ruling England. If she gave birth to a royal son, her importance was guaranteed – and so was Jane’s. But how was Katheryn Howard to conceive?
Jane knew that the king was frequently impotent and had been so for years. He had been occasionally impotent with her sister-in-law, Anne Boleyn, he conceived a son with Jane Seymour; but complained that he could not consummate his marriage Anne of Cleves – Jane was even commissioned to state this as evidence for the divorce. Jane may have thought that the only way Katheryn Howard was going to get pregnant was by another man: Thomas Culpeper.
Jane had good reasons to help the lovers meet: their dangerous bond linked them forever in a treasonous conspiracy that guaranteed her future, either as trusted ally or a blackmailer. But in the novel, as fiction, I suggest that this woman, who had never been in love, whose life was always dedicated to ambition and the hard-hearted flirtations of a court, saw a real love, a tender love between two young people, and was inspired to help them.
Unspoken thoughts and unwritten emotions are always the material of fiction, and not of history, which cannot see or record them. So, this part of my novel is all fiction. But it is based – as my fiction always is – on the facts that history does know and report. We know that Jane took a fatal risk to help Katheryn and Culpeper be together, and that she played the part of chaperone at the meetings where he did no more than kiss Katheryn’s hand. Far from throwing them into bed together, she helped them meet and talk. The two never confessed to doing more than falling in love and meeting in secret. Jane never confessed to more than helping them to do that. What they seem to have wanted was to be together, to court like young lovers, and what Jane seems to have done is help them do that.
We know nothing about Jane’s education, except that her father was a famous scholar, specialising in translations from Greek and Latin to English. He gave his works as New Year’s gifts to the king and to Lady Mary – as I describe in the novel. David Starkey’s work on Jane’s father, Lord Morley, even tells us the titles of his works, and it is from that research that I discovered that Jane’s father gave Thomas Cromwell a gift of the works of Niccolò Machiavelli – the famously cynical description of power and tyranny. Whether Jane was trained as a Machiavellian courtier, we do not know – but the connection between her father and Thomas Cromwell is deeply intriguing.
One of the metaphors used throughout the book is the two-faced nature of the Tudor court: the costumes and disguises of the masques reflect the dishonesty of the court of a tyrant. This view of Henry VIII has evolved from the first, Elizabethan view of him as the founder of a nation, and from a post-war view of him as a jolly eccentric. Now, there is a growing understanding of him as a dangerous man: an abuser of women, a false friend, and a tyrant. Like modern tyrants, Henry used the institutions and traditions against his society, he used the law to unlawfully persecute his victims. Advised by Thomas Cromwell, he used the writ of attainder to sidestep treason trials and execute men and women on his word alone. Even more complex: he ordered a new law to execute Thomas More, Bishop Fisher, and many others. He even changed the law which excluded the insane from execution, solely to behead Jane Boleyn, who was either mad or pretending to be mad hoping for asylum under the law’s protection. Tyrants corrupt good institutions against their people; Henry VIII did this five centuries ago.
Tyranny is the theme of this novel, written in difficult times when so-called ‘strong men’ (or those who posture as strong), are in power. All of us have to decide what offence against our institutions, against our traditions, against our liberties, or against the liberties and lives of others, is our sticking point: the point where we say ‘no’. History tells us that we must find the courage to defend others, and our country’s institutions and traditions before the danger is immediate and personal. By the time the tyrant comes for us – it is too late. We must not be like Jane Boleyn, recognising the dangers too late to say ‘no’, or we will be silenced like her, and the tyrant will write our history, too.
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About the Author
DR 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.
Also by Philippa Gregory
THE PLANTAGENET AND TUDOR NOVELS
The Lady of the Rivers
The Red Queen
The White Queen
The White Princess
The Kingmaker’s Daughter
The Constant Princess
The King’s Curse
Three Sisters, Three Queens
The Other Boleyn Girl
The Boleyn Inheritance
The Taming of the Queen
The Queen’s Fool
The Virgin’s Lover
The Last Tudor
The Other Queen
ORDER OF DARKNESS SERIES
Changeling
Stormbringers
Fools’ Gold
Dark Tracks
THE FAIRMILE SERIES
Tidelands
Dark Tides
Dawnlands
THE WIDEACRE TRILOGY
Wideacre
The Favoured Child
Meridon
TRADESCANT NOVELS
Earthly Joys
Virgin Earth
MODERN NOVELS
Alice Hartley’s Happiness
Perfectly Correct
The Little House
Zelda’s Cut
SHORT STORIES
Bread and Chocolate
OTHER HISTORICAL NOVELS
The Wise Woman
Fallen Skies
A Respectable Trade
NON-FICTION
The Women of the Cousins’ War
Normal Women
Normal Women Teen Edition
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Author photograph by Chris Leah
Philippa Gregory, Boleyn Traitor
