After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal - Who Was The Ultimate Tudor Traitor?

Episode Date: October 9, 2025

The Tudor court was dangerous and high stakes at the best of times, where survival could often mean betraying others.Enter: Jane Boleyn, thrust into the Tudor limelight when her sister-in-law, Anne Boleyn, marries Henry VIII.Did she really contribute to the axe falling on Anne Boleyn's neck? Was she a spy for Thomas Cromwell? Was all of this just what it took to survive as a woman in this world?Joining Anthony and Maddy today is the fantastic Philippa Gregory, historian and author of Boleyn Traitor.This episode was edited by Tom Delargy, and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer is Charlotte Long.You can now watch After Dark on Youtube! www.youtube.com/@afterdarkhistoryhitSign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hi, we're your host's Anthony Delaney and Maddie Pelling. And if you would like After Dark myths, misdeeds and the paranormal, ad free and get early access, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries with top history presenters and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Adultery, incest, treason, insanity. The Tudor court had it all. And in the eye of the storm was the wicked Lady Rochford, Jane Berlin. The woman whose alleged testimony condemned her husband to death on the charge of incest with his own sister, Queen Anne Boleyn. The deposition, which may have been the killing blow, delivered the siblings to the chopping block on Tower Hill.

In a court notorious for chewing up and spitting out women, Jane Boulin kept her head longer than most. But her strategy for survival has marred her legacy. Was her testimony really the nail in the coffin for Anne and George? Was she really a conniving, jealous traitor driven to insanity? Or was she a skillful survivor in a system built for her destruction? From the heart of the Tudor court, this is after dark. It is a cold February morning in 1542, and inside the Tower of London, a woman waits to die. That woman is Jane Boleyn, Lady Rochford, who once moved through the heart of Henry VIII's court, but is now condemned.

Her mind frayed after months trapped inside these stone walls. The wife of George Belin, brother to the fallen former Queen Anne, she outlived them both, only to stand on the brink of the scaffold herself beside another doomed young queen. The Tudor court promised splendor and status, but for so many of its women it meant betrayal and ruin. Catherine of Aragon cast mercilessly aside, Anne Boleyn demonised and beheaded, Catherine Howard here about to fall. Queens, wives, ladies in waiting, all pawns in a game where favour could vanish overnight. Jane's crime is treason.

Her reputation forever stained as wicked. Yet her story is more complicated. But as the winter light spreads across Tower Green, her time has come to walk towards the block, another casualty of Henry's perilous court. This is after dark, and this is the story of the Bolin traitor. Hello.

enjoyed covering on a lot of previous After Dark episodes. We have covered the final days of Anne Boleyn. We've talked about Tudor sweating sickness, the plague, of course. But today we have something altogether more special than any of those. We are very, very excited to be joined by the incredible historian and author, Philippa Gregory. Philippa, welcome to After Dark. Thank you so much. Lovely to be here. Now, this is an exciting time because we have a brand new book called the Bolin Trader coming out on the 7th of October, 2025. We were talking about this before we came on air. You are heading into a really busy time.

You're already in a really busy time. Just give us an insight as to what it feels like for you as an author before the book hits the shelves. You know, you've been doing this long time. You've had such huge successes, but I would imagine it still feels like a very, a very raw time. Well, it's a very interesting time because there's a terrific appetite for this book. there's a lot of interest in it already, but there aren't very many readers. So it is a bit sort of on the top of a diving board like, how's it going to go? And publication day is not the day that people get their first copies because obviously reviewers get them a bit before,

but usually it's after publication that you start to get the reviews. And there is this really big sense of how's it going to go? Is it as I think it is? Are people going to read it as I intended it, are people going to go completely nuts about it, which sometimes happen? Is it going to be as well-received hope? It's a sort of a Christmas Eve with a little bit of Halloween thrown in. Oh, you're naming all the best times of the year. So it sounds like a good time to be in. Now, Philip, I'm sure it will be a huge success, but this is far from your first foray into the Tudor world. What is it about that particular period, those particular collections of people that interest you and why do you think people want to keep returning to that?

Well, I think politically it is one of the most interesting times in all of English history, that it is the time that what has been a sort of rule of the lords of quite dispersed country in which, for instance, people in Cornwall don't even speak the same language as people in other parts of England and someone in Yorkshire couldn't understand someone who lived in Southampton say. It's quite a dispersed country. It's been in a hundred years of war with France, so it's quite a poor country. It's had this massive War of the Roses, so it's a country accustomed to internal enmity. And out of all of that, the Tudors start to pull together the power on themselves and on, interestingly, London and the southeast. But very, very much on this one family

and of this one family, on this one person, Henry VIII. And that's really the start of tyranny. And it's an extraordinary thing to be in our time now and look at in a period of history when obviously a lot of countries are embracing the idea of a strong male leader and see there's England doing it in the 15th century with disastrous consequences for the parliament, for the lords,

and especially for the women. of the court. This is why I love having people on After Dark guests who are both historians and fiction writers because the way that, Philippa, that you speak about that period, the way that you weave together that story, it's just so evocative and it makes me excited as someone who works predominantly on the 18th century. It makes me feel so excited about the Tudor period, actually. And I think I'm always fascinated by, and we will, I know we'll talk about this as the episode

goes on, but the space that you occupy where you straddle the world of history and the world of fiction. And the way that you meld those two together is just so exciting to me as a historian. I absolutely love that. So I'm really excited for this conversation. Thank you. One of the things, you know, you're talking about some of the figures there, Henry the 8th, and we're hearing about this power coalescing around Henry and some figures and some histories that we might be a little bit more familiar with. But one of the people that I wasn't very familiar with takes center stage in this new book and has a really interesting history of her own. And her tenacity is quite, quite interesting and her approach to this world because, you know, you're saying the world is being

reshaped to a certain extent and therefore those interacting with that world have to change the ways in which they're interacting. Enter Jane. Tell us a little bit about Jane Parker as she initially is. Yeah, she's the daughter of Lord Morley. So she's sort of upper aristocrat. He's not a power broker at court. He's a scholar. He's very much distant from the court. He turns out when he's ordered to. But his great love is scholarship and living in the country. And he makes a good marriage for his daughter, Jane, to a neighbour, someone whose lands are adjacent. And they are the Bolins. They're, you know, rising gentry, not quite yet nobility. The father, Berlin, is married into the House of Howard, so they've got a noble connection. They're not middle class by any means. They're

above that. But in the Tudor world, they're not grand families. And Jane goes to court and is the made of honour to Catherine of Aragon. And so is a career court at court as her young husband, she marries him after she's been at court for a while, as her young husband is a career courtier at the court of the King, Henry VIII. And then, of course, the jackpot happens for the Billins, and Anne Boleyn pulls off this extraordinary coup, which is again both personal and political

in that she persuades Henry to abandon his, wife Catherine of Aragon and marry her. Q, you know, so many other changes, the reformation, everything else you can think about. But Jane, in that sense, suddenly jumps up to being sister-in-law to the Queen of England from no preparation whatsoever, suddenly bang, they're there. And suddenly they are the ruling elite, just as Henry is starting to concentrate power on themselves and by her own incredible political skills and her personal skills, concentrates Henry. Henry's authority on her. So she's advising Henry. She advises him against Cardinal Woolsey,

the traditional advisor of the King of England. And she built her own power base in court. And we start the novel pretty well while Anne is hoping to confirm that power base with the birth of a son and heir and thus guaranteeing the Tudor-Din dynasty, the Tudor Bolin dynasty and their power permanently. And Henry is still in love with her and that still looks like it's going to happen. And Jane's career then falls dramatically with the Bolins. I argue, unlike your introduction, that she does nothing to help the fall of her sister-in-law and her husband. I believe there are witnesses to Anne's behaviour, but I don't believe Jane is one of them. We've got one document that says that she will try and speak to the king for George, her husband, so she may

very well have been trying to save him. And then what's the million dollar giveaway for me is that when the Bolins are killed, George and Anne are executed. A father disappears, sister disappears. You don't hear a peep from any Bolin for years. Jane Boleyn gets promoted. She becomes Jane Seymour's lady in waiting. An act of parliament is passed in order to give a better dower as a widow than she was entitled to, though she's the widow of a traitor and should in theory get nothing. And you have to say, well, I have to say, nobody has said very much before, but it would be wise to say, how has this happened? This is the widow of a traitor and moreover, a traitor accused of incestuous sex with his sister, the Queen of England.

This is the sort of thing people die for and yet Jane rises up to be Jane Seymour's lady in waiting and from there continues to be lady in waiting to the subsequent queens until she makes her final fatal mistake. She's such a fascinating character, Philip, not least because it's so hard to access what was going on in her mind. You talk about this extraordinary climb through the ranks that she's starting, yes, from a privileged position within this world, but she, because of the association with the balloons,

ends up in stratosphere that she wouldn't otherwise have found her way into. And I just wonder as a novelist, how you approach someone who is so hard to define and around whom there is so much ambiguity in terms of her motives, in terms of the actual behaviour that she did, what she did or didn't do to Anne and George. So what's your starting point for a character like Jane? I think the starting point is the history and the way I like to write historical fiction. My starting point is always a history. So first of all, I try and figure out what she's doing. You can never know with a historical. or character prior to the age of diaries, you can never know what they're thinking. And even then, they're probably lying. So, you know, you have to start off with what are they actually doing. So I trace her career. You know, my research, I trace her early career and then her marriage

and then this inexplicable rise. And then I start to speculate as a historian, how could this be explained? How is the logical explanation for this? So previous historians have been very satisfied with a psychological and condemnatory and a stereotype view of her. So Victorian historians in particular, who are the great historians of the Tudor period, so you come across them all the time. But what they tend to say is that she's a bad woman. Her brother was having an incestuous relationship with his wife, or at any rate, she didn't keep him home. Whatever he's doing, it's not right. So she's a bad woman on account of that. And then, and subsequently she's involved in another adultery case.

So she's a sinful woman in the point of view of the Victorians. And that's the solution to the question. What is Jane like? She's a bad woman. End of story. Then you come ahead to the years where people start looking for a psychological explanation and you start, your past the years, the past the 60s of, as it were, women's lib. So people are prepared to look into what they imagine as being her inner thoughts and fears.

And they go like, she's involved in two adulteries. She's certainly in the room witness for one of them. She's a sexual voyeur. That explains what she's doing. So now we haven't got that she's bad anymore. We've got that she's obsessively addicted to sex, so much so that her particular kink is sex done by Queens of England. Very, very particular.

Very particular and very high risk. It's extremely high risk. So that doesn't make much sense. And then you go forward into our age, which is even more psychological in its search for explanations. And Our Age comes up with the fact that at her death, she is diagnosed as being insane. And so there you are.

She's just crazy. I think it takes a woman of some common sense and also a woman who doesn't believe in the stereotypes of women, in this instance, me, to go like, obviously. None of these are true. She's not sin, sinful. That's not an explanation for anything. obviously she's not a very, very, very particular voyeur

if she was addicted to sexual voyeurism with her money and the class she's in, she could satisfy it every single night without getting involved in the adulter of the Queens of England. That's mad. The idea that she is in fact mad, I think completely ignores the fact that at the time she, I think, pretends to be mad or at the time she is diagnosed as mad, there is no death penalty on people who are recognised as mad.

So it's a completely rational way of saving her own life and it would have worked very, very well except she failed to allow for the incredible vindictiveness of Henry VIII who changed the law so that he could execute a mad woman, indeed her. I want to zone in on one particular point in this history and we'll do this with different points as we go through this but I want to talk about what has been termed the first betrayal slightly And you alluded to this in terms of what we mentioned in the introduction about this potential betrayal of her husband, George, and how you don't really see that in the archive. And it doesn't really present itself in the novel either. Can you talk about what that betrayal was supposed to have been, what we have received that? And say how you circumnavigate that in this novel.

Well, the betrayal is supposed to be that, I mean, again, you go back to the Victorian historians. It matters very much to them that Anne, mother of Elizabeth I first, their top favourite historical character, is not, in fact, an adulterous bad woman, as you would be if you were an adulterous woman to a Victorian historian. So there's a real desire by the Victorian historians to exonerate Anne and to suggest that this is a show trial. So therefore, everybody who gave witnesses of George and Anne's intimacy, which was put together by mostly Thomas Cromwell to make it into a believable charge of Anne's adultery with many men, including her brother.

All of that, you've got to find some way of blaming it on others and show that it's exactly a show trial. It's not true. We now think as modern historians that it probably was a show trial, that it is unlikely that Anne Berlin had sex with this many people. and the evidence for that is pretty good that the dates and the places which are cited are simply not credible. She's not even there for a lot of them. There's a very good reason for her having sex with somebody she could trust in that Henry VIII is reported as being impotent even then. So certainly George is executed probably because he says in court that the king is impotent one way another. But there's a whole sense of like this is not.

a proper trial. This is not proper evidence. Who is responsible for the accusation? And it's very, very good for the Victorian historians to say it's his wife, horrible Jane. Yeah, another woman. Another woman, probably jealous. You know, you've got this really great story of female rivalry and female malice and this powerless woman who gains the greatest power by betraying her husband and her sister and nor. This month, the Gone Medieval podcast plunges headfirst into the wild world of Norse mythology. We're battling giants. Dodging tricksters and confronting the gods themselves.

From fierce clashes in Valhalla to the chaos of Ragnar. Monsters and mayhem await at every turn. Can you out-drink Thor or outwit Loki? Find out now on Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. It's very deeply Victorian narrative, isn't it? Of these women being pitted against each other, there's just not room in that version of the history being told

for more than one woman to exist and to have any kind of complexity. Philippa, you mentioned Thomas Cromwell when you were speaking then. And I just wonder if you can say a little bit more about his possible relationship with Jane, because you have a bit of a theory on this, don't you? Well, yes, Thomas Cromwell, I think, is the only man who had the power and ability to change the law so that she got her full diary, indeed more than her full diary. So she ends up with Blickling Hall in Norfolk, which is now post-17, century rebuild, but even at the time was an enormous palace. So she's a very wealthy woman in her

own right. She doesn't need to work anymore at the Queen's Court. Thomas Cromwell, I think, is the only person who would have got that for her from the Parliament. And Thomas Cromwell is probably the only person who would have placed her at the head of the Queen's ladies for three subsequent queens. And we really see, I think, why he does that when we see that Anne of Cleaves comes to England and Henry the 8th turns against her and wants a divorce, then there is witness statements about the incapacity of the two of them, Anne and Henry, to conceive a child. He is recorded as being impotent and she is recorded as being a completely innocent virgin, and the witnesses who provide this unlikely account are led by Jane.

So I think Thomas Cromwell puts her in place in the Queen's rooms and she does exactly what he needs at that point, which is produce incontrovertible evidence that Anne of Cleaves has said that in the morning, Henry the eighth kisses her and says, good day, sweetheart, and she says good day. And she says, in Jane's account to her ladies, she didn't know there was anything more than that to bedding a king. So you go like, this is a woman who's been sent by her family to England to get a son from the king of England. That's her only job. That's the only thing she has to do. And they have sent her, and she doesn't know anything about sexual intercourse at all. This is not a Victorian girl. This is a girl in the medieval world who will have been

brought up seeing animals on the farm all the time, who will inevitably have heard bawdy jokes and bawdy stories, who knows the laws about impotence, who knows what happens in the church courts about impotent and barren marriages. She knows absolutely. And also, she's not speaking English at this time. She is not going to say to her English ladies in waiting in the morning. The King says to me, good morrow sweetheart. She doesn't have those words. But those are the words she's reported as saying by Jane Berlin. So I think Jane is there in place. And Thomas Cromwell has put her in place. But again, this is fiction. Or if you like, the wild assures of speculation. I don't have any document that shows that Jane is ever paid by Thomas Cromwell

except all the money she gets could only have come to her, I think, by his goodwill. It is, however, I know you're saying speculation. It is, however, informed speculation. And I think that's very grounded in the history. I think that's one of the gems of your fiction work in that you work with the mind of a historian because you are a historian. And so that speculative point is what we all do as historians when we're sitting around chatting. You just channel it into a fiction and an outlet that is still ground. in the facts, in the historical facts. So I think that's what really draws people into your work

specifically, Philippa. But I want to talk a little bit about, you mentioned afterwards that there's the three successive queens that she's still there for. Give us an idea of what that looks like for Jane at that time. What is that experience like for her? And you've hinted at already, but let's get to the kind of heart of it. Why do you think that's such an unusual position for her to find herself in? Well, it's a not uncommon position. for a woman widowed, as she is, to become, as it were, a career courtier. And again, this is quite new history that most historians, up until now, have not been very interested in the ladies and waiting.

And so you miss out the women career courtiers. We all know that Thomas Howard is always there doing stuff. We all know that Thomas Stanley is there always doing stuff. We know that the Royal Dukes are always around the court and that they get different jobs to do often warfare. often diplomacy, sometimes politics. But there hasn't been a lot of study of the women's side of things and what the women are doing in the Queen's Court,

which runs parallel, but it is quite separate. But it has its own hierarchy. It has its own pensions, has its own pay. It has its own working conditions and traditions. And we see that really clearly when we have a Queen on the throne because then, as it were, the Queen's Court becomes much more important as the intimate court of the Queen. and the men's court becomes the external court of the queen.

But nonetheless, there were substantial queen's courts to every one of Henry's queens. And they all had career diplomats and almost certainly spies and ladies in waiting and supporters and cheerers and best friends attached. Jane as a widow is wealthy enough to step back from all of that and retire to her estates. But, you know, she's not very old. she's only in her 30s, I think she was a career courtier from a child. I think she would be bored to death in the country. You know, like also, this isn't Blickling Hall, Norfolk, with the communications that it is now. You'd go there, you'd disappear off the end of the world.

Nobody would ever remember you again. So she's been at the heart of everything that matters ever since she was a child of 12, since she isn't yet scarred and since she isn't yet really conscious of the danger that she's in, since she's got, I think, in Cromwell, a very, very astute patron, spymaster, who is asking her questions. And she has this terrific sense that we all know of being absolutely in on the secrets. And in her case, these are the secrets of a nation. You know, there's very few people that you see who have been in power who step away from it. It doesn't happen very often.

Most of the time, people want to stay in. If they can get back, they do. And she has this extraordinary opportunity after the collapse of her husband and sister-in-law to step right back into the court of a very inexperienced queen. So Jane Ballin knows much better than Jane Seymour, how Jane Seymour should behave. And she knows a ton better than Anne of Cleaves, who's a foreign princess anyway. Yes, and who is clueless on some level and then also acting potentially more clueless than did she really is. In terms of Jane's return to court, though, after everything that happens with Anne and George,

is there a world in which she's not welcome because of those associations and because of the downfall of that family? And is it there for Cromwell who facilitates her place at this court, or is she, in and of herself, a popular figure? Why is she allowed to stay for so long? You don't get to be lady-in-waiting to the Queen of England because people like you. It's a paid post. It's an incredibly desirable post. you get it by bribing the court officials or by being so important yourself that you get the post. So it's got to be Cromwell. The only other person who might have got it for her might have been Thomas Howard.

But she's not a direct relation to him. And we don't see her serving him in any way at all through the next stages. The next time she serves Thomas Howard, it's at the time of the reign of Anaclyphes. But you couldn't have foreseen that then because it's Jane Seymour. And she gets pregnant within the first. year of marriage. So, you know, in a way, you might go job done. All we need, from Thomas Cromwell's point of view, he probably goes, what I need is a really, really, really reliable pair of eyes and a reporter at Jane Seymour's court. Both Jane Seymour knew each other. Jane Seymour knew

Jane Boulin. But I don't think she was tainted in a sense by the accusations against her husband and her sister, nor, because I think everybody will have been absolutely terrified by that. It's not Just them who are killed, remember there are six, six men are charged, five other men are killed. And there's other men who are charged and released, and there's other men who aren't charged, but whose names are, in a sense, on the books. So I think it's like a shadow going across the court. I think everybody goes like, let's keep our heads down, let's see how it pans out. Let's hope to God, Jane Seymour gets a baby, and that we end up,

as we have been always before with a king and a queen who may or may not like each other at the time, but nobody gets killed. And everyone's fulfilling their function. Yeah. And, you know, as in the present day, something happens, and you all go like, gosh, that's absolutely terrible. That's never happened before. And you're very quick to go like it probably will never happen again.

We'll just stay quiet and hope that it passes on. And in the case of Henry and I would say, all tyrants, it just gets worse. Yes. What we have then, and you know, you're talking about this kind of game of stakes and game of politics that Jane is very much part of one way or the other, even if it's not Cromwell, but I think it's pretty persuasive that this is why she's in place. But almost inevitable in the Tudor Court, if you've managed to survive for X amount of time, is a downfall and Jane experiences a downfall too.

Let's touch on that and talk to us about how that comes about, Philippa. Well, like everything in history, there's a lot of reasons for anything. that ever happens. I think the fact that Cromwell loses his holdover Henry and is executed actually on Catherine of Howard's wedding day, which is just typical bad taste of Henry. I mean, the other thing that identifies Terrence as they always have the most awful manners. So there we go. But she loses then, I think, her spy master. But I think she also, she loses her patron. And I think she loses a key advisor. So now she is playing. a very dangerous game. She hasn't got anyone to report to. She hasn't got anyone to advise her.

And she hasn't got anyone to help her if she gets into a jam. So she's now very much on her own and she is looking after a queen who is very, very young. We're not sure Catherine Howard's actual age, but she's a teenager. She's a young teen. And she is now Queen of England with no training and no education and no background for this role. And she behaves understandably. like a child in a sweet shop. She's terribly greedy for jewels and things like that. And she falls in love, I believe, sincerely and totally with a young man who isn't steady or reliable or very safe, but is hugely attractive Thomas Culpepper and adventurer. And she begs Jane to help them meet. And here accounts differ. They all end up charged with adultery or helping the

adultery, and they all blame each other, Culpepper and Catherine mostly blame Jane. And Jane doesn't say actually as much as they do, but she says that they demanded it and that she exceeded to their demands. What she's actually doing, given that she's as clever as I believe she is, I think she may have thought that there's only one way that Catherine Howard is going to get pregnant, and that's if she has sex with somebody other than Henry VIII, who is now being impotent and proclaimed his impotence with three preceding queens. You know, he's not father material. There's no doubt in anybody's mind that this is not very hopeful.

During the marriage to Catherine Howard, although when we read about it, we normally read about the sort of December, May, blooming of Henry. He has a complete six weeks, eight weeks, when he just closes the door in the Hampton Court and won't see anybody and just stays in his room and eats. he's prone to these period of deep depression and ill health.

So they think he's not going to live. So I think Jane quite sensibly calculates that there's a very good chance that if she can get Catherine Howard pregnant by another man or allow Catherine Howard to sleep with the man that she's longing to sleep with, Catherine might get pregnant, in which case Henry will marry her, in which case she'll be queen, in which case if he dies soon, which everybody thinks he's going to, Catherine will become Dowager Queen with a very good chance of being on the Regency Council of her son. She's a Howard. It's Jane's house. She's in touch with Catherine's uncle, the Duke of Norfolk. If it had worked, it would have been an extraordinary power play.

And you would have seen Jane the power behind the throne of the Queen Dowager, possibly advising on a second marriage for the Queen Dowager. She could have married Thomas Goldpiper then, and her son would have been King of England. It's not a stupid thing to do. In the circumstances she's in, it's not the best thing to do. The best thing to do would probably be to keep her head down and try and keep the lid on Catherine Howard. But this is a very impulsive teen in love for the first time, who no one has ever said no to in probably all her life. I think you couldn't have kept the lid on Catherine Howard. You couldn't keep the lid on Thomas Culpepper, who's an adventurer. And so what she does is she does the best she can with it.

and constructs this really, really compelling possible future and hopes it's going to happen. And of course, what does happen is the reverse in that they are caught. And Catherine loses her head in the interrogation. She's not with Jane. Jane can't advise her. And Catherine ends up thinking she's throwing everybody off the scent, but in effect giving them enough evidence to pick up Culpepper

and his friends and the previous men in her life who were probably in any case abusers but the Tudor mind doesn't go there and actually neither did the Victorian mind so we have Jane as a reputation of being lascivious, immoral, light-hearted and very stupid whereas in fact her story is much more complicated and interesting than that

So, Philippa, Jane has this incredible propensity for plotting and survival and all of that But we do know that her downfall comes to the extent where she is potentially forced to feign madness in order to survive. And even then, that doesn't work for her. So what happens? What is the end of her story without giving too much of the novel away? Well, it's history. So you can Google us.

It is available on Wikipedia. Yeah. I think she comes up with a strategic plan, even in the Tower of London, even when in my novel she is in the room where her husband waited for his execution. even though she can see Tower Green where her sister-in-law was executed. So she knows the stakes are incredibly high. And in my version of events, she pretends to be mad. And Henry VIII sends his private physician to see her. And in my version of the events, the private physician reports her as insane,

but knows that she's pretending. And that puts her under the protection of the law, which says that people who are mad in the children, Tudor law cannot be executed. The assumption is that God has already punished them for whatever they've done. There's no point beheading them. They have lost their minds. So normally you'd go into the care of your family if you were noble and if you were poor, you would have the incredible mercy of being trapped on the streets or imprisoned for life. But either way, she's going to survive. And in the history, we know she is released to Admiral Russell and his wife and their beautiful

house on the Strand and she stays over Christmas and she's examined quite frequently. And then Henry the King deliberately and mindfully changes the law on madness. So mad people can be executed and the first person to be executed under this new law. And in my view, the only one he wanted is Jane herself. Classic Henry the eighth behaviour, that is it. It's so often personal with him when he changes those laws. So it makes sense. But it's also classic tarant behaviour. that Tarant's use the law for their personal vindictiveness. And you see it in Henry and we see it all around the world now. And it's one of the real kind of warning signs that you've gone beyond having a bit of a narcissist

running the country. You've stepped into Tarant territory. I wonder who you're talking about, Phil about who could you possibly be referencing. We're surrounded by it at the moment. That's so interesting. And I think it says something about, yeah, the vindictiveness and the insecurity. of the Henry the 8th as well as saying something about the potential strategising. Again, this is the word that keeps coming to me when we're talking about Jane is

strategizing and how easily women are so overlooked in terms of their strategy making in this time period, anything up to the 19th to 20th century, really. So you are building this more complex world where we can see women as power brokers and as participants in power. And I think that's really, really valuable as well. This month, the Gone Medieval podcast plunges headfirst into the wild world of Norse mythology. We're battling giants. Dodging tricksters and confronting the gods themselves.

From fierce clashes in Valhalla to the chaos of Ragnar. Monsters and mayhem await at every turn. Can you outdrink Thor? or outwit Loki. Find out now on Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. The way that you're describing Jane as well, Philip, I'm amazed by how savvy and skillful she actually is,

especially towards the end when she's lost Thomas Cromwell as a spy. master. And you touched on it earlier talking about, you know, there's this sort of, and I suppose it probably does come from those Victorian historians. And I think we're still dealing with it today and struggling to unpick it, this idea that the Tudor court is predominantly run by men, that it's men doing the scheming, the plotting, and that the women's court and those ladies in waiting who are so close to any queen in this period are just there to provide a bit of decoration to, you know, a little bit of gossip. Maybe they might know some secrets about who fancies who

who's sleeping with who, but beyond that, that they have no real power influence. And what you're explaining here with Jane is that actually she's a key player throughout this history for all three of these queens, that she's so central to what's happening, both good and bad, and that she is playing a game in terms of the wider court and where she sees herself and the direction that she wants that court to go in, actually. She is influencing royal history and rural politics, but also that she's a survivor and that she's out for herself as much as anyone else. And that's, there's something so powerful in that. I'm really compelled by this idea that she has more power than I may be imagined, which is, I think,

sort of, you know, a kind of internalised misogyny, I suppose that we're all, like I say, still dealing with this Victorian idea that these women held no power and were of no particular interest. I think it's true. And if you think of, you know, medieval women are normally identified in stereotypes. So you have the virgin, who becomes the virgin bride, and then you have the wife who hopefully is fertile, or you have the Eve, the adulteress, the woman who doesn't understand that her husband's honour is her honour and that she should defend that, and that's the most important thing. And then you have sort of the widow and the hag. What you don't have is any stereotype of a clever woman who plans her own life.

and is her own agent. Autonomy does not exist. There are hags and there are, you know, sluts. But there's no stereotype of a scholar. There's no stereotype of an artist. There's no stereotype of a female genius. You know, all of these stereotypes are... Only muses.

Yeah. They're not misogynist in the sense that they are anti-women, so I'm not complaining, but they are misogynist in the sense that women are just absent. Yes. And, you know, one of the things that really strikes me about history, why I wrote my book, Normal Women, 900 Years of Making History,

is a history of women in England, that women are just absent from the record, and you don't notice it because they're not there. Similarly, you know, in Tudor history, we don't notice, because the books are very often called Six Wives of Henry the Eighth. We don't notice that it's six stereotypes of Henry the Eighth. We don't observe the fact that these are. are not described to us as persuasive real women, trying the best in their own lives

for themselves, for their families, for their husband, for their children, if they have children. And they're only understood in terms of the king as well, the six wives of Henry 8th. Yes, exactly. And that's why, memorably, you hardly hear about any of Henry's mistresses because basically historians have gone, we've got six wives, that's enough by any way. That's too many. Too many already. So Jane is one of these forgotten women because they're in a sense too many women in the Henry Court for historians to grapple with. And the other thing is that her story is so incomprehensible if you don't go, here's a woman with agency, trying to survive, trying to prosper,

and trying every now and then to pull off a real coup. Yes, if you remove that element of her personality and who she was, some of her behavior in the places we find her in are sort of inexplicable, really, aren't they? They're inexplicable, and we do fall back on the fact it's got to be. be something irrational like lust or just madness because why else is she doing this? Yeah. That we're filling in those gaps with actually maybe the filling in is far more obvious than we have thought to think before.

By the way, if you haven't read Philip's book, Normal Women, please do. And in addition, listen to the podcast because I think what the podcast does, which it accompanies the book, it brings those histories right into the modern day. And you're speaking to some incredible women on there about. The ways in which adjacently these histories are informing everyday lives and how people are relating to those lives today. But I want to talk to you about something else before we let you go. You have a very busy person, so we have to let you go at some point.

But I want to talk to you about a little book called The Other Bolin Girl. You may have heard of it. It might crop up before you every now and again. You know, I like to ask obscure questions. But when you're approaching a new novel and, you know, it's time to sit down at the computer for the first day or however you write, a lot of. laptop, whatever it is, how on earth do you choose what is coming next? Because it's hard enough for the rest of us, but we don't have the scrutiny and the expectation, sorry to tell you

all of this. Well, the book's written now, but you know, people have expectations and they have desires of what you might be able to bring them. And so how does that sit in your shoulders on day one? It's lovely that I don't, I mean, I'm very sorry readers, but I don't think about them at all, because if I thought about them, I would make sure I didn't think about them because the last thing you can do when you're starting a novel is think about the readers. I think it would be chokingly discouraging. Also, I'm not interested in anything. By the time I sit down to write it, I've done something like a year of research on this character.

I am just desperate to start telling her story and to be inside her head. I want the experience of writing. I'm not thinking about the experience of reading. That's another year away. I'm actually very obsessive at the time. So I'm in my study. The door shut. The dogs are under the desk, ideally.

And in this case, Jane Berlin and I are starting the story of her extraordinary adventure that nobody has ever told before. And like, nothing's going to stop me there. You know, I am in love with my work. I just want to be with it all day. And then does that wrangle a little bit when you have to then start sharing that little bit when you're like, oh, now I have to hand this over and there's editors and then eventually there's, you know, it starts to go to print and then you have to book

tour it. And does it feel like a different experience, a different product then? It's a different job altogether. It is, isn't it? It's a completely different job. And it's not my favorite. It's not my favorite job. I mean, I do it.

And I am always, always, always glad to see the book go out. And it does have that excitement about it. But, you know, I do a series of lecture tours. I'm going to be doing it for this book. It's a very different thing to talk to you about the book or to stand up on stage and talk to an audience about the book from the non-like solitude of my study in the country where it's just me and Jane.

And every now and then I'll stop and say, why did you do that? And then I go like, I know why you did it. And nobody else knows what you did it. And the thrill of that is unlike real life. That's why it works as a novel, that people in their real lives go to it and it catches them up and it takes them somewhere else. And the power of it is that sometimes in that story you can say something about real life that you can't say another way. and that's why it's important as well as tremendously enjoyable to me.

Philippa, I can't wait to read The Blintrater. When is it out and where can people buy it? It's out on October the 7th and you can get it anywhere. You get your books. Fantastic. Thank you so much for joining us. I have to say, as someone who writes at home in her pajamas with her dogs under the desk, I feel a little bit like I'm going to be emulating to Liverpool every next time I sit down to write.

Yes, I feel thoroughly legitimised. If you've enjoyed this episode or After Dark, you can leave us. a five-star review wherever you get your podcast it helps other people to discover the show if you have a suggestion for a topic or a guest that you would like to see on then you can let us know after dark at history hit.com see you next time