Book Review: Jane Boleyn

Subtitled "The True Story of the Infamous Lady Rochford," Jane Boleyn is the biography of a little-known character in Henry VIII's court, written by Julia Fox, a Tudor historian.

The flap reads, "In a life of extraordinary drama, Jane Boleyn was catapulted from relative obscurity to the inner circle of King Henry VIII. As the leading members of the court became victims of Henry's ruthless and absolute power, including her own husband and sister-in-law, Queen Anne Boleyn, Jane's allegiance to the volatile monarch was sustained and rewarded. But the price of her loyalty would eventually be her undoing and the ruination of her name."

I've read quite a bit of literature on the Tudors and Henry VIII's tumultuous marriages, and if any of them included the mention of Jane Boleyn/Rochford, I cannot recall. That might be because not too much is known about her, and what is out there still "in extant" (a favourite phrase of the author's) was published long after Jane's death and was filtered through the political machinations of the times. Perhaps, if you are an esotericist, you might just find this an "electric account" of an obscure life, but I found it dry, verbose, and disappointing.

Indeed, Jane was Anne Boleyn's sister-in-law and one of Anne's main ladies-in-waiting. Jane married Anne's brother, George, but was from a very young age attached to Henry's court as one of Katherine of Aragon's ladies. When Katherine was discarded, Jane moved on to Anne's household and eventually lived to serve three queens beyond Anne in Henry's ludicrous cavalcade of wives. She certainly had a unique vantage point for this period of history, and the book does provide many insightful and fascinating details regarding Henry's personality and deeds, and is a meticulous account of Boleyn family ambition, which Jane was no doubt caught up in.

But as a biography of Jane Boleyn, I found it lacking immensely. The first two-thirds of the book focus predominantly on the Boleyns' rise to power and the fall of Katherine of Aragon. And while Jane was undoubtedly an observer in many of the events around Anne's rise and fall, the language Fox uses around Jane is very vague. We see a lot of "could have," "almost certainly," "if," "would have" and lots of phrasing similar to "although Jane wasn't documented as being there, she probably was, and if so, she would probably have seen/done/heard such-and-such."

Insufficient first-hand evidence in this book about such an obscure person is problematic. The lack of documents, accounts, or descriptions of Jane or her actions, much less her thoughts and impressions of events she witnessed, reveal nothing particularly interesting about Jane. This book feels like a lot of conjecturing on the part of Fox. It's educated conjecturing for sure, but it makes for a frustrating biography when there is little to discuss that is new or previously unrevealed, other than an author's bias. It's evident throughout the book that Fox is fond of Jane, but this doesn't seem like an effective biography of Jane's life. Fox seems to be using her book as away of refuting previous historians' opinions of Jane, and overall, Jane is more of a vehicle through which Fox explores Henry VIII's actions and Boleyn ambition. It isn't until after Anne Boleyn dies, in chapter 23, on page 201, that the story turns from the Boleyns to the next three queens Jane serves, and to the events which eventually bring about Jane's downfall.

And it didn't require an entire volume to discredit past historians' beliefs about Jane Boleyn; Fox sums it all up and adds her own take on things quite tidily in the epilogue, which was probably the most interesting part of the book.

Incidentally, not even a portrait or drawing of Jane exists today, and the cover art is a close-up of a famous painting of Queen Jane Seymour.