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- [00:00]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb. If you'd like Not Just the Tudors ad free to get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to historyhit With a historyhit subscription. You can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my own recent two part series A World Torn the Dissolution of the Monasteries and enjoy a.
- [00:24]
Philippa Gregory
New release every week.
- [00:25]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com forward/subscribe.
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Mayra Amit
A Mochi Moment from Sadie who writes I'm not crying, you're crying. This is what I said during my first appointment with my physician at Mochi because I didn't have to convince him I needed a GLP one. He understood and I felt supported, not judged. I came for the weight loss and stayed for the empathy. Thanks, Sadie. I'm Mayra Amit, founder of Mochi Health. To find your mochi moment, visit joinmochi.com.
- [00:59]
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- [02:04]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb, and welcome to Not Just the Tudors From History Hit the podcast in which we explore everything from Anne Boleyn to the Aztecs, from Holbein to the Huguenots, from Shakespeare to samurais, relieved by regular doses of murder, espionage and witchcraft. Not, in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. Jane Boleyn, born Jane Parker and later Viscountess Rochford, had an extraordinary career as a courtier. She served five of Henry VIII's queens. Married to George Boleyn, she was the sister in law of one of them, and she's long been associated with the downfall of two queens of England, both of them her kinswoman. She's long been accused of being the jealous Source of the rumours that Anne Boleyn and her brother committed incest and that Henry VIII was impotent. And it is certain that after the execution of her husband and sister in law in May 1536, her return to court was surprisingly swift and enduring. She was the lady of the Bedchamber to Jane Seymour and carried Princess Mary's train at Jane's funeral. It was she, apparently, who advised Anne of Cleves on what was necessary for the making of a child, evidence that allowed Henry away out of his despised fourth marriage. And it is she who was blamed by Thomas Culpepper for having provoked him much to love the Queen Catherine Howard, acting as the couple's go between and the facilitator of their secret trysts. She was condemned by act of attainder and died a childless widow on tower Green on 13 February 1542. But underneath these facts, what do we know of her surviving 20 years at the Tudor court? In a position of influence, she was evidently a woman of some substance. But what sort of person was she? The records are silent, but into that space has stepped the imagination of one of Tudor England's best and best loved novelists, Philippa Gregory, who brought us the Other Boleyn Girl and the Berlin Inheritance, along with my personal favourite, the Queen's Fall. Philippa Gregory is actually a doctor. Philippa Gregory, CBE, with a PhD in 18th century literature from the University of Edinburgh. She's written so many best selling novels that it's actually hard to count them. The Historical Writers association awarded her an Outstanding Contribution to Historical fiction award in 2016. She's also the author of Works of History. She last came onto the podcast to talk about Normal Women, which looks at the history of women across nine centuries. And today we're going to talk about her new fictional version of Jane Boleyn and what relation it bears to the historical record. I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb and this is not just the Tudors from history hit. Philippa Grogi, what an honour it is to have you back on the podcast.
- [04:59]
Philippa Gregory
Thank you. It's such a pleasure to be here. What a great synopsis as well of Jane. Like, really helpful.
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Professor Susannah Lipscomb
This is your first Tudor novel in a decade. What called you back?
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Philippa Gregory
I think Jane Boleyn herself called me back that I was conscious at the time of writing the Other Boleyn Girl all those years ago that my version of Jane was very much the conventional version of Jane. And since then there have been other biographies written about her. And also I myself have had a sort of A revulsion from the conventional version of women, really right across the board. I mean, I think we are all really, really doubtful about the way women are told in the conventional older histories. And I think the best result of that is that we're going back to the original records and the original chronic saying what actually was going on then, not what did subsequent historians make of it.
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Professor Susannah Lipscomb
I couldn't agree more. And I'm going to be asking you about your characters. So you're Jane, your Henry, your George, your Anne. But I think we probably need to talk about what that means and about the nature of historical fiction, because it seems to be easily misunderstood.
- [06:16]
Philippa Gregory
I'm surprised that given that it's such a long lived genre, I mean, it was invented at the same time as the novel. The first 18th century novels were historical fictions. They were mostly retelling of Greek and classical mythology stories. So you would think that by now we would be clear in our minds that there is history, which is supposed to be an account of the records with the selection of the historian in his or her wisdom. And then there's historical fiction, which can be as much or as little based on the records as you want. Clearly there's now also things like historical fantasy and romantasy, in which in a sense, the history is barely the starting point. It's literally the springboard from which you do your dive wherever. Personally, I have always preferred to start with the historical record as we have it, to try and put aside the prejudices of previous historians and look at exactly what we are absolutely sure literally happened, and then construct my story from that. And that of course leads me into fiction, because that's the job that I'm doing. I'm not trying to write another history of Jane Rochford. There's some very good histories now of Jane Rochford. But what I do want to write is I want to write an explanation of when those histories fall silent. And the biggest, as you describe, is how she manages when all the Boleyns go to ground and disappear and keep their heads down for at least a generation. How Jane uniquely returns to court, not just not in disgrace, but far more richly rewarded than even her dowry provisions would have allowed. Somebody changes the law so that she can get her marital home and her dower is vastly improved.
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Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So would you say that the relationship between history and fiction for you is that the history is there in the sort of bald facts, as it were, but the fiction is in the interpretation of them, in the story, in the meaning and the kind of thinking the Emotions behind them.
- [08:30]
Philippa Gregory
Yes, exactly. Sometimes an explanation. Sometimes you get. I mean, you know, as a historian yourself, you sometimes get historical facts that seem completely contradictory. And, you know, you can do all you like with them, but they make no sense. And, you know, it's in those kind of gaps in the contradictions that it seems to me that historical fiction can have its finest moment. And more than once I've had an explanation, I've offered an explanation in fiction for things that the historical record could not explain. And more than once that's been proved to be the case after my publication. And that's when you go, like, I am doing something here which is extremely interesting.
- [09:14]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
I completely agree. And it's very, very interesting that we'll come to a number of theories that you sort of put forward, as it were, in the course of this, about why something happened. Because one thing I felt as I was reading your novel is that there's this sense that the imagination of a novelist working on historical fiction and your imagination, not just anyone's, allows you to kind of probe the emotional veracity of these moments in a way that historians sometimes hesitate to do. And therefore, I think, does mean that you come up with some really interesting ideas about what might have happened. So we'll come to some of those.
- [09:58]
Philippa Gregory
As we go on. But yes, I mean, I think my job is to say, if I'm talking to a historian, this might be the case. I'm not saying it is. I'm saying in the world of my novel, which clearly says on the front, a novel clearly says my name, so it's clearly mine. This is my idea of what might have happened. I'm not saying it is what happened. Sometimes it turns out that it is the case. But this is not history in which you put yourself behind something and you say. I say this happened. I say this is fact. No, on the contrary, I'm saying this is fiction. And the joy of it for me is that leaves me free to speculate. I like to speculate within the bounds of probability. I like to speculate really, really tightly on the record. But nonetheless, it is speculation. And I think some of the debate about this is a little bit fake. That some. Most of my readers, I mean, I've just been on book tour, I've been seeing hundreds of readers every night on book tour, and they completely understand what historical fiction is. It's only the outliers who like to be a bit nitpicky about it. And of course, that's their right. Anybody can say whatever they like. But I Don't always think that it's true that people are baffled by this genre. It's hardly new. Thousands of people have written it for literally hundreds of years. It's not of my inventing. I think it's very clear what I'm doing. And it's very clear that what you get when you do something like this is a very, very interesting sort of sidelong view at the historical facts, which is stimulating for all of us.
- [11:40]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Yes. And actually, I would say as a historian, there's quite a lot of work of imagination involved in writing history as well. But let's start to move into your imaginative world here. We begin in 1534. We're at court and there's the wearing of disguises and the play acting that goes on about the King's ongoing handsomeness Elsewhere. You talk of busy boredom, which I loved as a phrase. Can you paint a picture for me of how you see the nature of courtly life?
- [12:09]
Philippa Gregory
It's no accident that I actually start with Anne Boleyn and her sister in law, Jane, in front of a looking glass. And they are unmasking after a rehearsal of the Mask. And this is the first novel, I think, where I really dug into the Mask as an art form and a hobby and a metaphor and really the glue that holds the ritual of the court together. So they're always dressing up and disguising and putting on false faces at the same time as they are always lying and pretending and putting on false faces. And the activities are wonderful in the course of a novel is a wonderful metaphor for what people are really doing. And they themselves are aware of the fact that they are constantly pretending to be what they are not. And of course, one of the biggest pretenses is that nobody recognizes the King, that he comes in much taller and increasingly much fatter than everybody else, and increasingly lame and increasingly unpleasant. And continually they pretend that they mistake him for the people around him who are men, as the years go on, 20 and 30 years his junior, and always much more handsome and fitter. So there's this kind of illusion which I think suits a novel so well, that you're starting, in which you're saying to the reader, do not trust a word of this. Everybody is lying. And it's very rich, I think, to write a court which is riven with faction, which is completely divided into different parties, which is spying constantly on each other, trying to outguess each other all the time, in which success isn't just political or financial, but actually also sexual, that if you can get your girl into the king's bed, then you've advanced your cause, you've advanced your fortune, you might even be the in laws to the next king of England. I mean, there's everything to play for because it's the court of a tyrant as well. So that sense of really dark political background just runs through this novel at the same time as this sort of constant party rolls on, on top.
- [14:21]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
I think that's a really, really good summary. And one of the things that you do in this book, as we've just alluded, is kind of paint a picture of how things might have been in that courtly world. And one of the fictions you put forward is a kind of interesting theory about why certain words could not be used and why there's no good evidence of Amberlyn having had a miscarriage in 1534, although there seems to be some evidence that she was pregnant. Can you give me the take that this novel suggests on this strange way in which the facts don't really add up?
- [15:03]
Philippa Gregory
I think, you know very, very clear that Henry was traumatised by the deaths of his stillborn babies and his live babies as well. With Catherine of Aragon, I can't remember the exact figure, but I think there's a total of probably about 12 or 13 deaths after birth or before birth for Catherine of Aragon. Of course, I am in no doubt at all that the pain was worse for her, but certainly for Henry, whose entire Persona and reign and success and the estab of his line depended upon him getting at least two boys in the royal cradle, I think it became a completely taboo word for him. Interestingly, Tudors don't have a word. Miscarriage, they say miscarry. So it's not the object, as it were, of the dead baby, but they do have words like stillbirth and stillborn. But it's curious how some words are fashionable and some words are not. And for Henry, I think the whole idea of anything abstaining, obstetric and gynecological became deeply taboo and frightening and threatening. And very much, I think he wanted to associate all that with the wife that he had deliberately exiled and got rid of and never saw again. And the new wife, Anne Boleyn, was supposed to be the one who was undoubtedly fertile, who pointed to her fertile mother, who pointed to her fertile family, the Howards are very prolific and who promised him, promised him absolutely that she would have a boy and that he should marry her and she would deliver a boy. And her sister had indeed had a boy while she was the king's. Mistress. So I think the whole idea of, you know, as we know even today, the new young wife is supposed to deliver all the benefits that the older discarded wife failed to do. And when Anne Boleyn failed to have a baby, though, we believe that she said she was pregnant. But we never get an announcement of a miscarriage or a stillbirth. I think that's accounted for, because in the world at the time, I don't think Anne ever said anything. I just. Everybody just glossed over it. And Henry is not a man to want. Plain speaking, he lives a fiction all his life.
- [17:25]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Later in the novel, you say, or Jane says, when he exiled Catherine of Aragon, the love of his life, he lost his ability to love. Do you think that she was. Or is this just in the world of the novel?
- [17:40]
Philippa Gregory
Isn't that lovely? I mean, that's what you can do in a novel. I think she was the love of his life. I think he married her without any advantage declared to doing so. He married her against the wishes of his father and probably against the wishes of his immensely influential grandmother, Lady Margaret Beaufort. And he married her, I think, because he thought that marrying her would make him as good as her first husband, Prince Arthur, his older brother, who was the boy who was really, really prepared for the throne and was obviously a very successful Prince of Wales. And he remained married to her for a long time. He's longer married to Catherine of Aragon than he is to anybody else. I think in that sense, in the sense that everybody's first love is the love of their life in that sort of very novelish thing to say. But I think in the sense, both in the sense that emotionally that's true, but also historically, I think it's true as well. I think there's a point where he gives up on Catherine of Aragon and I think that's the point where his heart really hardens. Because after that, he finds his way to killing Thomas More, his great friend, who he admired so much, the archbishop. You know, there is a hardening of Henry's heart even towards his own faith. So he leaves Rome and establishes the Church of England, dissolving these monasteries and these nunneries and these abbeys where he had worshipped so fervently, destroying the shrines that he had loved so much. There's a kind of a turn, I think, which comes around the time of the exile of Catherine of Aragon. And I know, because I know your book on 1536, that there's another big turn coming. But I think the loss of faith in his own health and his own vitality comes after this terrible cold experience of getting rid of a wife he.
- [19:40]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Married for love and thinking about Henry and love. One other wonderful idea you put forward here is that for Henry, it's all about the quest that he desires. Refusal. Do you think he's confusing courtly love with reality?
- [19:58]
Philippa Gregory
I think everybody confuses courtly love with reality, including people. In the present day, everyone who wants a fairytale wedding has actually got a bit muddled up between the idea of the ritual that we traditionally perform around courtship and seduction and marriage and the reality of it, which is more banal but actually more rewarding. You know, the idea of a day in which you are a princess that is absolutely central to the myth of courtly love. And Henry as a prince anyway, is completely absorbed with the idea of courtly love. And I put this criticism of him in the mouth of his second wife, Anne, who says it's not, as we often say, the pleasure of the chase that Henry wants. He wants nothing but the pleasure of the chase. He doesn't actually want to actually catch. So some of our explanation for male reluctance to attach is our belief that they want the pursuit and they want the seduction, but they don't want to stay. Anne suggests it's even worse than that. She suggests that for Henry, he's seducing himself when he sees himself as a sort of chevalier knight. It's himself he's falling in love with as he's riding into these glamorous scenes where everybody, you know, admires him and dances with him. And actually the bedding of a real woman is the least interesting part about.
- [21:25]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
It that's so interesting. Pure narcissist, in other words.
- [21:30]
Philippa Gregory
Yes, exactly. I mean, and I believe he is a narcissist and one of the. I mean, I read so many off Piste books for this book. So I read about tyranny and I read about what identifies as a very good book on tyranny, which compares Stalin, Hitler and Sherman Mao. And then I also read psychology books about narcissism and psychopathology. And I think Henry was both a tyrant and a narcissist. And of course, that's of real importance to readers today, especially to women today, when we see a world which is becoming more and more adapted to tyranny and narcissism.
- [22:13]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
When we talked about Anne there that this idea is suggested by Anne. Can we discuss your characterization of Anne? She is complex, isn't she? We've got her being at times vindictive or spiteful at Other times full of ideas like the dissolution of the monasteries. In this book in is Anne's idea and she has good charitable intentions for it. Give me a sense of who Anne is in this book and how that relates to what we know of her.
- [22:45]
Philippa Gregory
I think a lot of the things that I describe about her do come from other people's histories. Some of them comes from the historical record, some of them comes from historians opinions, of course. And some of it, having thought about her for so many years myself, and also thought about women in general for so many years, especially after writing Normal Women, which was really trying to see women not as they are written in history, but as they probably were in the past. I mean, I am conscious that every single woman I know is an extremely complex woman and is capable of great acts of generosity and also great acts of vindictive ill behavior. One of my quarrels with some forms of feminist history is that they are driven to describe women as heroines. And I go, actually, you're not helping. That's no more than describing women as angels, as the Victorians did. It doesn't help.
- [23:42]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Yes, it's a hagiography, isn't it? It's a saint's life. It's just.
- [23:45]
Philippa Gregory
It absolutely is. Firstly, it's terribly boring, it's completely unconvincing. But also it doesn't help women today in any way become better because you just go like, I can't be Catherine of Aragon, you know, but I could be Anne Boleyn. Anne herself, I think, was a creature of. I mean, the reason that we have such incredibly conflicting reports of her, and the reason, I think, that she ends up on the scaffold early for Henry. That's not to say that she wouldn't. That she wasn't always going to be there, but I think she in a sense, prepared her own death, not ever consciously, not ever deliberately, by being part of the hardening of Henry's heart and by encouraging him to think about his own power and his own ambition and by feeding that for her own interests, actually creates the monster that then turns on her. I think she was obviously, she was highly intelligent. She doesn't. I don't think we have any writings from her like we do from Catherine Parr, but she was obviously part of this sort of scholarly elite, Tudor women, which we know there are more than Watau. She's not exceptionally intelligent. This is a period where women's scholarship is accepted and encouraged. And she's one of these clever women. She's clearly very, very sophisticated. She spends a Long time at the court of Margaret of Navarre in France. That itself, a highly educated, highly cultured, sophisticated French court. And then she comes to England and she has what everybody says is not beauty but absolute allure. I mean, she has a lot of sex appeal, I think we'd say now. And I think that comes from confidence. I think it always comes from confidence. So what you have there is a woman who is extremely confident, extremely well educated, and I'm sure extremely ambitious, because she wouldn't have got to where she was without an extraordinary amount of defiant, revolutionary, radical ambition quite quickly.
- [25:51]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
We're at that moment where Henry fell from his horse in early 1536. And you describe it so vividly, and maybe you can give us a bit of a flavor of that. One of the things that comes out of your writing about it is how clearly everything hung on a thread for those hours when Henry was unconscious, the possibilities that were open then. Can you give some sort of sense of that?
- [26:17]
Philippa Gregory
Yes. I mean, what was really important to me about that scene, you only really understand when you get to the end, that it is in that scene when Henry is unconscious that I have in my novel. Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, go to Anne and as we know in the history, he's recorded as telling her that Henry's. There's an argument about it. Anne says that he told her that Henry was dead and that caused the miscarriage, which ultimately causes Anne's alienation from Henry and her, therefore her death. In my novel, he goes to her and he doesn't just tell her that Henry is dead, but he says to her, if you play your cards right here, if that baby in your belly is a boy, then you can be Queen Regent and we can have a Howard Regency. And it's that that I want the reader to get hold of, because subsequently, when Jane Boleyn encourages the love affair between Catherine Howard and Thomas Culpepper, it's because she thinking, I remember that happening, I know that if Henry dies, as he's indeed again, very likely to do during the Catherine marriage, leaving Catherine pregnant, and then she has a very good chance of being regenerate. So, as a novelist, it's a really, really, really important plot point. It's where you make clear that what there is for these queens is not just widowhood and the disappearance of Henry, an increasingly disagreeable husband, but the. The ultimate, ultimate top job that a woman could get, which would be mother to the next king, Queen's Regent, which they have all seen modeled by Margaret Beaufort, who called herself Lady Mother So in that sense, it's a very, very big plot point in the novel, in the structure of the novel. And of course for Anne, it's the moment where literally everything potentially opens up before her. And in the end, it's the moment where everything goes terribly wrong. The actual accident I described so graphically in terms of Henry going down in full armor and his armored big horse falling on top of him. And inevitably, if you think about how a horse gets up grinding him down as it tries to get to its feet, I found that so graphic and disturbing to write that I missed my next riding lesson. I just didn't. Dag, get on the horse. I mean, I, I've never in any previous novel really leaned into imagining what that would be like to be under an fully armored horse with it trying to get up off you. And I. I have fallen off a horse now and then, and it was a very disturbing scene. To.
- [29:19]
Mayra Amit
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- [29:45]
Philippa Gregory
Tara is a mochi member, compensated for.
- [29:48]
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- [30:18]
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- [31:03]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Yes, I bet. I've only fallen off horse once and it put me off riding for quite a while. And the whole point is you're supposed to just get back on, but it's. And this summer, I saw some jousting in France and it was all choreographed jousting. It was all, you know, we knew who was going to win and no one was going to die. And yet it was still totally thrilling and terrifying. And so you think the actual reality of jousting, and as you say, the armor, the size of these horses, the weight, I mean, you make it. You make it appear so vivid in the book. And I'm really grateful to you for doing that because it brings to life something that we just otherwise go, he fell off his horse whilst jousting. But to actually feel that, I think, is a different thing.
- [31:46]
Philippa Gregory
Exactly. Again, that's what fiction can do, that history can't. The fact is that he fell off his horse while jousting. The actual experience of it is what fiction can do. And I think the horror of it, you know, when, you know, it's not just. It's not just the fall, is it? It's that, first of all, they can't get the horse off him. Then they get the horse off him and then they're frightened to move him. And then there's a really gruesome moment where they want to take his helmet off. And Jane, watching this, has a moment of complete horror that she thinks his head will come off with it, you know, and this is like, this is your nightmare reflection in a nightmare moment. And of course, it's not history, because nobody knows what anybody thinks at that time, but, like, if one writes it, then you really get the reader going. This is. Jousting is not just a, you know, canter up and down a measured area. It's like a sort of car crash, but not car racing. It's like genuine car crash, just ghastly and, of course, completely. You couldn't turn away from it, you couldn't stop looking.
- [32:52]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Another interesting theory in these months in early 1536 that you've put forward, which I find very compelling, is that the words of courtly love that are used by the men towards the Queen, towards Anne in those early months are actually part of a strategy. Can you explain this and how those very words, which are designed to make her so desirable, have the opposite effect in the end?
- [33:22]
Philippa Gregory
Yes, I mean, I think this is a time where after 1536, as you suggest in your book, Henry's fitness and I think both physical and mental health really declines. It makes a big difference to him and they are desperate that he both overlooks Anne's miscarriage and thinks of her as sexually attractive. Again, and that he himself is encouraged to be potent again. That the real anxiety, as we know from the Bohlin trial, is is the king potent or not? Anyway, so everybody who wants the Boleyns to stay in power, nobody can imagine, I think, them not being in power, but everybody who wants the king to get a baby on Anne and for matters to go back to the not very satisfactory way they were before. But that was all anybody knew. There's a determination by all of the Boleyn faction and anyone whose livelihood depends upon them to get the king back into Anne's bed and to get Anne pregnant again. And Anne is very clear that that's what's got to happen. We've got a historical record of her saying that she's sure that she doesn't care that she lost the baby because the next one will be a boy, which is, I think, a real measure of her desperation that she would say that publicly, that she's literally confronting the loss of the baby as just preparation for the boy that's certain to come. So it's a very bold thing for her to say. And all around her, George, and all of the courtly love game around her becomes increasingly frantic and increasingly sexualized and increasingly trying to encourage the king to get into her bed and have sex with her successfully. And. And I don't have a record of that except in the evidence that they bring against Anne, which I think is probably largely invented at the trial, but I think may have the sort of the little gem, you know, the little grain of sand of the truth of it, which is that everybody is talking about sex and everybody is encouraging the king to think sexually, and everyone is encouraging everyone to think of Anne as the absolute catch, even though she is now his wife of some years and even though she has miscarried a couple of times. So it's that sort of last gasp panic for everybody to try and confirm to the king that he picked the right woman and that it's going to come out all right. And I think that's what gives you that feverish sense that even the early chronicles seem to pick up on, that the flirtation in her rooms is going beyond where it's ever been before.
- [36:17]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
In the book, Jane reflects that the charges against Anne are ridiculous, illogical and far fetched. It's very difficult to both commit adultery and not have been married at the same time. But what is the role that Jane plays in their downfall in your book?
- [36:35]
Philippa Gregory
Well, as you know, in the history, we don't know. We know that some Ladies gave evidence against George and Anne, and we have two probable names in the hat for that. George complains that at his trial, are they going to find him guilty on the evidence of that woman? But he doesn't say which woman, which is irritating of him, but we can't blame him, really, under the terms. So at the time, the chroniclers did not list Jane. As you know, we don't have Jane on a witness list. The chroniclers at the time of the trial and the death don't list Jane as a witness. Nobody says that she's given fantastically detrimental evidence. And there is some evidence that she writes to George and says she'll speak to the King if she can. So there's some evidence, it's not very strong, but that she's trying to do what she can. And that's all we have in terms of solid, reliable reports at the time. Then you have this extraordinary post facto construction of guilt, which comes, I think, mostly from the Victorian historians who are such enthusiasts of the Tudors. The Victorians are as avid readers and deconstructors of the Tudors almost as ourselves. And I think they are very, very. They're very moralistic, of course, because they're Victorians, they're very judgmental, of course, because they're historians. They're mostly men, because they're educated in universities and universities are not open to women at the. So you've got a very, very male, judgy, moralistic view of Jane and they link later fatal accusation of helping Catherine to adultery to the death of Anne. It's completely ahistorical, it's completely, dare I say it, fictional. But what it does is it suggests that she is a bad woman. At the very least, she's a bad wife, in that she fails to save George, as though anybody could. But secondly, it suggests that she's a. Because she's involved in sex later in life and therefore she's likely to be involved in sex earlier in life, because if you're involved in sex, you're a bad woman, full stop to a Victorian historian. So I think it's very, very unfair. The history of Jane is very, very unfair. And all I put in its place is a woman who doesn't know quite what to do, who can't get hold of anybody with any influence, who sees her in laws, George, Anne's parents completely disappear, George's sister, who's been brought back to court to help, completely disappears, and she's very, very much on her own. And then also in terms of how a novel is structured. There's this part that I really loved as a novelist, which is this period when she's at court. She still gets her right to sit down and eat, but she doesn't know how long that's going to last. She doesn't have an appointment because the Queen is dead and she was lady in waiting to the Queen. She doesn't have a relation at court because everyone's disappeared and she literally camps out in the Howard rooms and waits to see what will happen. And there's this in terms of a novel, this really. It's the long dark tea time of the soul. I mean, she literally doesn't know what's going to happen and so neither does the reader. So you have this very suspenseful anxious moment when she is completely alone. And it is from that loneliness and defeat that Thomas Cromwell in my version, pulls her out and puts her in the court of Jane Seymour.
- [40:22]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Yes, and again, there's at least a grain of truth here because we know that there's some evidence of Cromwell's hand in this. So give me a sense of her situation after George's execution and how that is transfigured into her coming into her power, her own power, by 1537.
- [40:49]
Philippa Gregory
I suggest that she was talking to Cromwell as everybody was talking to Cromwell before the trial, and I think she may have inadvertently confirmed some of his proposals that he was going to put forward as evidence. I think she was party to Cromwell's gathering of evidence, but I really, really doubt that she ever thought that it would come to a trial for adultery, witchcraft, incest and treason. I mean, who would ever put those things together if you were the wife and the sister in law of the two people who were accused, it would make no sense to her as a proposal. I think Cromwell gets a bit carried away. Or else, as I suggest in the novel, the Spanish party starts setting up allegations against Anne which widen the spread of the accusations to an absurd degree, which I don't think Cromwell would have done. So there's, in a sense everybody is getting their finger in this particular pie because the King doesn't want Anne anymore. And in that sense, not only Anne, but George and all the Howards are really, you know, they're the walking dead at this point. So. So I think Jane understands some of this, but not all of it, because you wouldn't understand all of it at the time, you wouldn't know what way to read it. And when the deaths are done, and you know, Thomas Howard, Anne's uncle, has actually pronounced a death sentence. So you can see that there's, you know, Jane is not the only one failing to support the Boleyns here. You know, nobody supports the Boleyns. The Boleyns all go to ground. Mary goes back to Essex. The mother and father Boleyn go back to Hever Castle. Thomas Howard suddenly remembers he's got an urgent appointment in the north of England and goes off there. And Jane is literally on her own with no plan and more importantly, no job, no place, no important relation at court and no money at all, because she is the. The widow of a guilty traitor, in which case she loses everything, as did all the other widows of all the other men accused with Anne. And that's when the thing happens that has to be explained somehow, and which nobody has an absolutely rock solid recorded evidence explanation for a law is passed in Parliament. The only person who controls Parliament at this point is Thomas Cromwell that awards Jane Blickling hall, her marital home in Norfolk for life. Puts together a bundle of lands as a dowry which the Boleyns have to sign off. They've got no time for Jane at this point, but nonetheless they sign off at a great disadvantage to them. So she ends up with a fortune. She is independently wealthy. Instead of being disgraced and widowed and poor, she has a very, very handsome income, an enormous stately home, an enormous estate to go with it. And she's appointed, as you say, to Jane Seymour's court. And she's appointed not just as a sort of afterthought, she's one of the chief ladies in waiting. She is honoured in Jane Seymour's court, this Jane being the former rival of her sister in law, and you would have thought absolutely daggers drawn, but all of that just doesn't seem to matter. And not only is she Jane's lady in waiting, but she goes on to be Anne of Cleves, lady in waiting, and Catherine Howard lady in waiting. And she just gets promoted upward all the time until Thomas Cromwell's death. And it is those, in a sense, bookshelf moments, the two ends of it, that what we see is her extraordinary rise to prosperity through means that Thomas Cromwell controls and only Thomas Cromwell controls. And then her loss of status and position and political wisdom after Thomas Cromwell's death is that that makes me think he's literally her spymaster. He puts her in the places where he wants her, she does the work he wants him to do, and when he's dead, she carries on working on her own account, but she doesn't have the backup and the support and the political noose. Behind her that she had when she was working for Thomas Cromwell.
- [45:36]
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- [46:02]
Philippa Gregory
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- [46:05]
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- [46:47]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Jane herself in your book is sort of a female Cromwell. I mean, she's intelligent enough to debate logical suppositions with him, and she's a machinator in all sorts of ways. And when, when things go wrong, see the meeting with Anne of Cleves, for example, it's because she hasn't been able to play that role. Can you give me a sense of the thinking behind making her such a sort of political operator?
- [47:16]
Philippa Gregory
One of the biggest excitements of the research for this book was to find a book of essays on Lord Morley, Jane's father, who was a Tudor courtier, sort of useful idiot, I think. He turns up at the trials and says, guilty, and goes away back to his country estate where he is an absorbed Renaissance scholar of a very, very high level of scholarship and quality. He's probably a sympathizer to Lady Mary, but he never commits himself in that direction at all. He's a very, very quiet, under the radar man. And the only thing in this book of essays about him which was of interest was of more interest than anything else in the world on that day, which is that he translates Niccolo Machiavelli's the Prince and he gives it as a gift. He gives his translations as New Year's gifts to members of the court, always to Henry viii, often to Lady Mary. But Niccolo Machiavelli's the Prince he gives to Thomas Cromwell. And there was just a moment where I went like, that's your smoking gun, right? There. So Jane's father is engaged in translating the biggest book, the most important book on how to be a tyrant. It's literally tyranny for dummies, and it gives us the word Machiavellian. I mean, it literally is used today to indicate that sort of double thinking, trouble thinking, two facedness, political engineering, entirely for the benefit of the prince and entirely to make the Prince a tyrant, because Machiavelli's belief is that tyranny is the only way to successfully rule. And there is Lord Morley translating this and giving it to Thomas Cromwell and I think perhaps discussing it with his daughter Jane. Certainly in my novel, Cromwell discusses the ideas with Jane, and certainly Jane, I think, could very well be one of these scholarly Tudor women, like Thomas More's daughter, Margaret Roper, like Anne Boleyn herself, one of these women who is perfectly capable of education being given her and of continuing her education herself, as all those women did.
- [49:35]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
One of the things that she does, as this Machiavellian figure, is that she's a key player in. In Anne of Cleves's annulment and also in enabling Anne to react in that extraordinary way where more or less she keeps her composure and certainly keeps her head. How is your Jane so instrumental in this moment?
- [49:58]
Philippa Gregory
Well, wonderfully, we do arrive at the record here. So the statement for Thomas Cromwell's inquiry as to what did Anne of Cleves and Henry VIII do in bed, there are a number of statements about that. Henry VIII makes one to his doctor, his doctor makes one to the inquiry, and three of Anne of Cleves, lady in waiting, make a statement in which they report what Anne is supposed to have said to them. And one of the signatures on the statement is that of Jane Rochford. She's second after Eleanor, Duchess of Rutland, so she's upped her eyes in it. I think personally that the statement that the ladies make about what Anne of Cleves says to them and what they say to her is completely fabricated by them. And there's no doubt in my mind, because Anne of Cleves is not speaking very good English at this point. And yet in her statement, she is extremely clear about the fact that the King kisses her good night and says, good night, sweetheart, and then in the morning kisses her again, lies still beside her all night in the morning, kisses her again and says, good morning, sweetheart. And Lady Rutland donates this wonderful piece of dialogue when she says, you know, madam, there must be more than this or, you know, we will not have a Duke of York ere long as this realm. So Desireth and you go like, that is how people write, that is not how people speak. So this was not taken down by a clerk. This has been constructed by, I believe, these three intelligent women on the instructions of Thomas Cromwell to say, what you have to do is to make it clear that Anne of Cleves has not lost her virginity to Henry viii, because that way we can annul the marriage and nobody can complain if she's had sex with him, if he's even attempted to have sex with her, then her reputation is of course completely destroyed, she's not a virgin anym, and there would have to be a full fledged divorce, which we know didn't go so well last time. The alternative, which I believe Thomas Cromwell had up his sleeve, was a whole set of accusations about witchcraft which would have resulted in a trial of Anne and possibly shame and exile to a convent, possibly even a death sentence if they thought they could get away with it. So, so I think Jane is instrumental in both in constructing the evidence for the inquiry as required, but I think also far more importantly, getting hold of Anne of Cleves and saying, this is your only safe route out, just agree to it. And we know that Anne of Cleves was desperately offended and desperately distressed and hoped to her death that Henry would come back to her when he went between other wives and, and actually is a survivor. I mean, she's a survived one. She goes to Princess Mary's coronation in the same carriage as Elizabeth. I mean, she survives and I don't think she would have survived without Jane's advice.
- [53:10]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
I completely agree with you about that conversation. I'm always amazed at the historians who take it at face value that Anne was a complete ingenue, entirely ignorant of the workings of sex. And I think one, one piece of evidence that's often overlooked but I think really upholds the interpretation you've given here is the three ladies who are reporting this discussion. So there's the Countess of Rutland, who had been born a Paston. Pastons are closely connected to the Howard family. Jane Boleyn, of course, George Boleyn's widow, and Catherine, Lady Edgecombe, who was Lady Rochford's aunt, are all related to each other and they're all related to the powerful Howard family. And their joint testimony in the voted commas is given when Henry has identified his next wife, their cousin, Catherine Howard. So like the, the fact, the idea that this could possibly be testament to a genuine conversation seems, you know, fabulous beyond belief.
- [54:09]
Philippa Gregory
Absolutely. And I think the reason that historians have traditionally nodded it through with Such, you know, naive enthusiasm is because it. We're following the lead of the Victorian historians who are absolutely happy to believe that a woman whose own wives were raised in ignorance and were put into bed not knowing how to have sex. And we have on record some Victorians, even, I think, a Victorian historian saying how distressing his wife found the act of sex because she had no idea what was happening. That's how women were brought up from about the 1800s. Prior to then, medieval women knew how sex happened because they saw it happening all the time in all of the farms and the livestock and the real world places that they were. And also, almost everybody slept in the same room as someone who was having sex. The shock about Catherine Howard possibly having sex in the room with Lady Rochford is a modern shock. It's a post Victorian shock. People know about sex. People have sex in front of other people because you're in. In medieval housing. So this whole idea of this, you know, again, it's a courtly love myth. This untouched princess who has no idea what's going on is contradicted in any case by Henry's evidence, which is that he got into bed with her and he felt her stomach and he felt her breasts and he felt too discouraged to continue. And the evidence from his doctor that he does that four or five times, which is not. He kisses me good night and say, good night, madam.
- [55:46]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Absolutely. We're starting to run out of time, but there's a couple more questions I want to ask you before we finish, because your characterization of Catherine Kitty in this book, Howard, is brilliant. What do you imagine her to be.
- [55:59]
Philippa Gregory
Like that's so nice? One of her biographers, Gareth Russell, said to me, that's my Kitty. And I said, I think it may even be the Kitty. I think. I mean, I know that she is younger than. Than previous historians have thought her to be. So she's about 16 at the age of her marriage. She's horrendously ill educated. I think that she is probably has been sexually abused. So we're not talking about the Victorian historian's idea of a experience, sexually experienced, flirtatious, if not voracious young woman unfit to be queen. We're talking about a teenager who is married to someone old enough to be her grandfather. And she takes full advantage of all of the jewels and the fun and the excitement and the glamour. And when Henry becomes very ill, as he does very, very early on into their marriage, she is genuinely, I think, frightened because she doesn't know what at all to do with Such an old man who retreats into his rooms and won't even see her. And it's not just as a result of her vanity, being hurt by that, but I think a real sense that she has no friends, that she depends very much upon Jane. And it just happens that she falls in love with Thomas Culpepper, who is clearly a very attractive young man about court, who is clearly very flirtatious with her, and they have some exchanges of gifts and they were flirting when she was a maid of honour, before she was Queen. So you've got this sort of affection and interest in each other and it just becomes, I think, more and more intense for both of them. I don't think Jane encouraged it, as Thomas Culpepper describes, because I don't think she would get any benefit from that. But I think once it occurs to her that Henry is increasingly ill and increasingly likely to die, I think she is probably thinking, well, what if Catherine Howard does get pregnant? What if Henry can't make her pregnant but Thomas Culpepper can? If Henry dies and he has crowned Catherine because she's pregnant, as he has promised to do, as we all think he's going to do at York, we, in my fictional world, but a lot of people thought he was going to crown her at York. In that case, again, we have what I've set up earlier, the possibility of a Regency, indeed again, a Howard Regency, and Catherine as a very, very young Queen Regent who will be on the Regency Council until Edward, Prince Edward, Jane Seymour's boy, is an adult. And part of the machinations of that time is Jane prompting the Seymours to see that this might happen and everybody going, yes, this might happen. But of course, it's illegal to say the King might die. It's even illegal to say the King is ill. So everyone is talking again in code. Everyone is behind a mask.
- [59:02]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Your description of Kitty Howard and Thomas Culpepper falling in love, I found very moving indeed. I'm an old romantic, but it brought me to tears.
- [59:11]
Philippa Gregory
Honestly, that's the greatest compliment you could give me. I'm so pleased. I'm so pleased, because I think it was, you know, if you read her letter, it's obviously a love letter. It's not somebody being vain or stupid or, you know, excessively sexual. It's literally she just says, yours, Yours, forever yours till just death. Gosh.
- [59:30]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Yes. Gosh, how sad. Well, let's finish by thinking about the title of your book, Boleyn Traitor. As people pick it up, they'll have all sorts of ideas about what that might mean. What should you like them to take away?
- [59:47]
Philippa Gregory
The at the end of the book, I'm really clear that all of this has taken place under the shadow of a growing tyranny. And at the end of it, Jane is convicted of treason because she has helped the Queen have sex with somebody else. But actually she is finally a traitor to the tyranny that she has served all her life. And I just want this to be, in a sense, a suggestion that blind obedience, even to the authority that you think is the correct authority you should never give blind obedience. You should always be prepared to think of treason. You should be bold enough to think of treason, because otherwise, if the King or the president or the Prime Minister or whoever it is is exceeding the bounds of their power, of their legitimate power, it is our our duty and our safest way out to oppose them.
- [60:54]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Philippa Gregory, thank you so much both for coming onto the podcast and also for the joyful experience of reading your new book, Willyn Traitor. Thank you once again.
- [61:06]
Philippa Gregory
Thank you. I'm so pleased you enjoyed it. I couldn't hope for praise from anybody else. Thank you, Suzanne. I appreciate it.
- [61:16]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Thank you for listening to this episode of Not Just the Tudors From History Hit. Thank you also to my researcher Max Wintool, my producer Rob Weinberg, and to Amy Haddo, who edited this episode. We are always eager to hear from you, including receiving your brilliant ideas for subjects we can cover. So do drop us a line@notjusthetorshistorykit.com and I look forward to joining you again for another episode. Next time on not just the Tutors from History Hit.
- [61:52]
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- [62:25]
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