“The Other Boleyn Girl” - Philippa Gregory

(Plantagenets book 9)

👑 TOBG is probably the most famous of Gregory’s Tudors and Plantagenets series based on its salacious historical subject matter and film adaptation. 

👑 The novel opens with the POV of married *13-year-old* Mary Boleyn worried that her sister’s return from France will upend her own status. Her parents and uncle are power brokers in Henry’s court, and they’re ruthlessly scheming about how best to parley Anne’s future to benefit the Boleyn family. 

👑 However, if we think the Boleyn parents and the wily Duke of Norfolk are busy at work, they are nothing to the plotting and scheming that a young Anne undertakes on her own counsel. I have to imagine that much of this is true, and that she was basically an island operating on her own in deeply treacherous waters. Think what you will of her, but she was out to win. 

As Henry became desperate for an heir, and increasingly capricious, the temperature at court altered dramatically. At that point, ladies in waiting had to know that the stakes were potentially life and death for any woman who caught the capricious eye of Henry if his favor changed. 

👑 Things take an unexpected transactional twist for the Boleyns, when it’s Mary who catches Henry’s fickle eye. Despite a healthy amount of sisterly envy, Gregory portrays Anne as advising a naive Mary suggesting that family bonds and a desire to benefit the clan are paramount (unlike how the Warwick sisters were portrayed).

👑 I thought Anne’s view of Catherine of Aragon versus Mary’s view was an interesting contrast. Mary’s evolved from initial criticism to eventual respect. Anne’s view was scathing and catty from the first moment to her final triumph over Catherine.

👑 Gregory offers a plausible explanation for Anne’s furious, self-destructive focus on unseating Catherine of Aragon. Not content to humiliate Catherine with all the benefits of being Henry’s adored mistress, Anne is intent on becoming the Queen.

Toppling Catherine as a form of vengeance for Henry and the Duke of Norfolk thwarting her young love, is an interesting theory. Vengeance is a dish best served cold, they say.

👑 The intellectual aspect of Anne is not played up in film adaptations. She is best known for her bedroom politics, but according to Gregory, she was no slouch intellectually and constantly fed a suggestible Henry her research. 

Gregory emphasizes that Anne’s own theological scholarship—used to persuade Henry that God favored him, that casting aside an innocent Catherine was justified, that the Pope could be ignored, and that Henry could assume spiritual authority himself—would ultimately come back to haunt her, undone by the very reasoning she once advanced. She was the willing instrument by which Henry obtained unchecked power. Her mistake was that she thought she would be able to control him always.

Next: “The Boleyn Inheritance”