Philippa Gregory - The Boleyn Inheritance

It is no small thing, this, for a woman: freedom.

Anne of Cleves and Katherine Howard are the two wives of Henry VIII whom we know least; as is so often the case, we think we know them well. In this fictional account of the real facts I have tried to get past the convention that one wife was ugly and the other stupid, to consider the lives and circumstances of these two very young women who were, so briefly, the most important women of England, successive wives to a man on the brink of madness.

The main historical facts of the characters are as I describe them here. I could discover little detail about the childhood of Anne of Cleves; but I thought the illness of her father and the dominance of her brother were interesting in the light of her later decision to take her chance on staying in England. Her prettiness and her charm were widely reported at the time and are shown in the painting by Holbein. I believe it was the disastrous meeting at Rochester that caused Henry to reject her out of grievously wounded vanity. The conspiracy to accuse her of witchcraft, or treason, as an alternative to divorce is well documented, especially by the historian Retha Warnicke, and was clearly as much of a lie as other evidence about her marriage given to the inquiry.

Katherine Howard’s childhood is better known, but drawn almost wholly from evidence given against her. My fictional account explores the historical facts and my bias is toward understanding Katherine as a young girl at a court of far older and more sophisticated people. Her surviving letter to Thomas Culpepper shows, I believe, a very young girl sincerely in love.

The character of Jane Boleyn, Lady Rochford, is drawn from history – few novelists would dare to invent such a horror as she seems to have been. She did indeed give the crucial evidence that led to the beheading of her husband and sister-in-law, and there seems to be no explanation for this but jealousy and a determination to preserve her inheritance. She was at the deathbed of Jane Seymour, and gave evidence that could have been used to send Anne of Cleves to the scaffold (as I describe). The evidence against her, and her own confession, clearly show that she encouraged Katherine Howard’s adultery, fully understanding the fatal danger to the young queen. The suggestion that she did this with the purpose of getting the queen pregnant is my own. I suggest that she pretended madness in the hope of escaping the scaffold, but I hope I show, both in this book and in The Other Boleyn Girl , that Jane Boleyn was never wholly sane.

On my website, philippagregory.com, there is a family tree and more background information about the writing of this novel.

The following works have been invaluable in the research for this book:

Baldwin Smith, Lacey, A Tudor Tragedy, The Life and Times of Catherine Howard , Jonathan Cape, 1961.

Bindoff, S. T., Pelican History of England: Tudor England , Penguin, 1993.

Bruce, Marie Louise, Anne Boleyn , Collins, 1972.

Cressy, David, Birth, Marriage and Death: Ritual Religions and the Life-cycle in Tudor and Stuart England , Oxford University Press, 1977.

Darby, H. C., A New Historical Geography of England before 1600 , Cambridge University Press, 1976.

Denny, Joanna, Katherine Howard, A Tudor Conspiracy , Portrait, 2005.

Elton, G. R., England under the Tudors , Methuen, 1955.

Fletcher, Anthony, Tudor Rebellions , Longman, 1968.

Guy, John, Tudor England , Oxford University Press, 1988.

Haynes, Alan, Sex in Elizabethan England , Sutton, 1997.

Hutchinson, Robert, The Last Days of Henry VIII , Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2005.

Lindsey, Karen, Divorced, Beheaded, Survived: A Feminist Reinterpretation of the Wives of Henry VIII , Perseus Publishing, 1995.

Loades, David, The Tudor Court , Batsford, 1986.

– – -, Henry VIII and His Queens , Sutton, 2000.

Mackie, J. D., Oxford History of England: The Earlier Tudors , Oxford University Press, 1952.

Mumby, Frank Arthur, The Youth of Henry VIII , Constable and Co., 1913.

Plowden, Alison, The House of Tudor , Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1976. – - -, Tudor Women: Queens and Commoners , Sutton, 1998.

Randall, Keith, Henry VIII and the Reformation in England , Hodder, 1993.

Robinson, John Martin, The Dukes of Norfolk , Oxford University Press, 1982.

Routh, C. R. N., Who’s Who in Tudor England , Shepheard-Walwyn, 1990.

Scarisbrick, J. J., Yale English Monarchs: Henry VIII , Yale University Press, 1997.

Starkey, David, Henry VIII: A European Court in England , Collins & Brown, 1991.

– – -, The Reign of Henry VIII: Personalities and Politics , G. Philip, 1985.

– – -, Six Wives: The Queens of Henry VIII , Vintage, 2003.

Tillyard, E.M.W., The Elizabethan World Picture , Pimlico, 1943.

Turner, Robert, Elizabethan Magic , Element, 1989.

Warnicke, Retha M., The Marrying of Anne of Cleves , Cambridge University Press, 2000.

– – -, The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn , Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Weir, Alison, Henry VIII: King and Court , Pimlico, 2002.

– – -, The Six Wives of Henry VIII , Pimlico, 1997.

Youings, Joyce, Sixteenth-Century England , Penguin, 1991.