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The Boleyn Inheritance
Tuesday, January 08, 2008 - 2:02 PM
The Boleyn Inheritance is Philippa Gregory's latest in the "Tudor Court Novels" and it's the book I'm currently reading. I've got to say that Henry Tudor is really starting to annoy me. He sucks young women's blood. I'm trying to avoid glancing at that portait of him - he stands there smugly on the spine of Antonia Fraser's The Six Wives of Henry VIII directly in my gaze.
I want to take a bath every other time I read one of Gregory's novels. They make me feel corrupt and disgusted with myself. As if I were there intriguing against a desperate queen. First, the Boleyns, then Elizabeth and that wishy washy Hannah Green. Now it's the duke of Norfolk and Jane Boleyn, wife of George Boleyn.
I will accept that Gregory has a talent for believable characterisation, despite certain historical inaccuracies. She's not as good as Marion Zimmer Bradley in The Mists of Avalon, but somewhere pretty close in the contemporary writers' list. Surely one of the top 10 in mine.
The fact that Anne of Cleves reacted badly to the old fool's advances - he stunned her with an "embrace" (a kiss in Gregory's novel) while wearing one of his many corny disguises - might have been what caused her downfall. She didn't get her head lopped off. Lucky enough for someone married to a serial killer husband. Nevertheless her reputation rests soley on the historical 'acceptance' that she was the turd amongst his 6 ladies - that he found her unattractive. Look at all 5 known portraits of the queens:
For the life of me, I don't quite know what there was in Anne Boleyn that drove men crazy to such a reverberating extent. I don't blame her for the English Reformation but you have to admit that she was a very important catalyst. I can imagine what a charmer she must have been, and quick-witted too; she accomplished quite much for a white woman in the 16th century.
Back to Anne of Cleves. If you look at the Holbein portrait that initially decided Henry's choice of a Cleves wife, you'll find she's actually not the famous 'Flanders Mare'. A cow, perhaps, but who says cows are ugly? She's gentle and pleasant to behold. I shall not speculate how Katherine Howard looked like, of course. That stained glass depiction of the Queen of Sheba (psst! she's supposed to be the one on the bottom right hand corner) shows a mannish woman and frankly, it's too tenuous a claim to believe it to be a likeness of Katherine Howard.
The title, The Boleyn Inheritance, seems to be a joke at Jane Boleyn's expense. Gregory doesn't spare the woman who gave false testimony - thereby inuring her husband's reputation in scandal of the most gross order. She is coldly systematic in her conniving and displays a mannered ease in everything she does for Norfolk.
The recent published study of Jane, Jane Boleyn: The Infamous Lady Rochford by Julia Fox, doesn't manage to salvage her reputation one bit - as most of the reviewers have already stated. Could this be another instance of historical fiction masquerading as fact? Or plain determination to sell a book with a teasing title like that based on conjectures?
