Anne of Cleves and Katherine Howard are the two wives of Henry VIII that 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 Anne of Cleves’ childhood; 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 towards 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, OUP, 1977
Darby, H. C., A New Historical Geography of England before 1600, CUP, 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, OUP, 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
Loades, David, Henry VIII and His Queens, Sutton, 2000
Mackie, J. D., Oxford History of England: The Earlier Tudors, OUP, 1952
Mumby, Frank Arthur, The Youth of Henry VIII, Constable and Co., 1913
Plowden, Alison, The House of Tudor, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1976
Plowden, Alison, 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, OUP, 1982
Routh, C.R.N., Who’s Who in Tudor England, Shepheard-Walwyn, 1990
Scarisbrick, J. J., Yale English Monarchs: Henry VIII, YUP, 1997
Starkey, David, Henry VIII: A European Court in England, Collins & Brown, 1991
Starkey, David, The Reign of Henry VIII: Personalities and Politics, G. Philip, 1985
Starkey, David, 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, CUP, 2000
Warnicke, Retha M., The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn, CUP, 1991
Weir, Alison, Henry VIII: King and Court, Pimlico, 2002
Weir, Alison, The Six Wives of Henry VIII, Pimlico, 1997
Youings, Joyce, Sixteenth-Century England, Penguin, 1991