Boleyn Traitor Review: Philippa Gregory Plays the Hits

Boleyn Traitor Sees Philippa Gregory Revisit Familiar Ground with Mixed Results

At this point, you probably know if bestselling author Philippa Gregory’s megapopular series of historical fiction novels about many of the women of the Tudor and Plantagenet families is for you. Yes, her books tend to play fast and loose with the actual facts of history. But they’re also ridiculously entertaining reads: fast-paced, popcorn-style takes on one of England’s messiest, most dramatic periods that almost universally focus on some of history’s most frequently ignored figures: its women. From Plantagenet queens Elizabeth Woodville and Anne Neville to deposed princess Lady Margaret Pole and King Henry VIII’s six wives, Gregory’s stories have brought their lives to bright and vivid life. Granted, her books also present the Rivers women as witches, so it’s important to remember that these stories are fiction rather than historical fact. But you can’t deny that they’re a great time.

Gregory’s latest novel, Boleyn Traitor, returns to familiar ground, revisiting a story that has been told before in books like The Other Boleyn Girl and The Boleyn Inheritance. Her focus this time around is Lady Jane Rochford, wife of George Boleyn, sister by marriage to one Queen of England, and a lady-in-waiting to three more. She was executed for treason in 1542 alongside Henry’s fifth wife, Katherine Howard, and is largely remembered for the fact that she almost certainly played a key role in the investigations that led to the executions of her husband and sister-in-law, Anne Boleyn. Her motivations for this choice are lost to history, but have been endlessly speculated upon, with spite, jealousy, and an inveterate hatred for Anne (who was particularly close with George) the most frequently cited reasons behind what is objectively an almost unbelievable betrayal. (The truth is always stranger than fiction, y’all.)

The story picks up during Anne’s marriage to Henry, when the queen was struggling to give the king a son following the birth of Princess Elizabeth. We follow Jane through the heights of the Boleyns’ powers at court to their ultimate downfall and through a brief exile with her family, before she’s brought back to court to serve Queen Jane Seymour, as well as her later replacements Anne of Cleves and Katheryn Howard.

Boleyn Traitor is, first and foremost, an attempt to recenter and even rehabilitate Jane’s story, casting her as an educated, intelligent, and ambitious survivor. Here, Jane is now a trusted part of George and Anne’s inner circle, but somehow still presented as more of an innocent bystander who just happens to be caught in the relentless tide of Henry’s creeping tyranny. Though she regularly reports information to her uncle by marriage, the Duke of Norfolk, and to Thomas Cromwell, that’s the extent of her worst scheming. It is, to put it mildly, something of a swerve from the way Gregory has previously depicted this character.

The events of Boleyn Traitor take place in parallel with those depicted in Other Boleyn Girl and Boleyn Inheritance, but the Jane we see here couldn’t be more different than the woman who appears in those books. Gone is the inveterate schemer, the outright bitch, the callous wife who essentially accused her husband of sleeping with his sister to save her own neck. Here, she doesn’t even give any real evidence against her doomed family members at all!

It’s a jarring change for those who have read the other books in this series and one that’s not particularly justified in this story. (At least, not beyond the fact that Gregory appears to simply want to write Jane this way.) But turning Jane Rochford into a sympathetic heroine is no small task, and it’s one this book doesn’t really succeed at. Instead, it reimagines her as a sort of placid observer who is often left to narratively document the events that are happening around her rather than actively participating in them. The addition of her evident crush on Thomas Cromwell feels like nothing so much as a nod to Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, and since the story barely focuses on Jane’s marriage to George, her sudden decision to support “true love” by facilitating Katheryn’s affair with a king’s groomsman makes little sense.

To Gregory’s credit, despite the character and narrative inconsistencies that pepper the story, Boleyn Traitor is still an entertaining read. Yes, it clocks in at nearly 500 pages, which is deeply unnecessary given the fact that the story it’s telling is one she’s done before, but the pace still moves briskly, thanks in large part to the nonstop intrigue that comes with any story set at the Tudor court. This is still an author who can spin a good yarn out of the messiest aspects of history, and while your mileage may vary on whether or not this particular Jane feels like it could be a version who actually lived, her ultimate spiral into desperation and madness is still a compellingly tragic end.

The Boleyn Traitor is available now wherever books are sold.

Lacy Baugher Milas writes about Books and TV at Paste Magazine, but loves nerding out about all sorts of pop culture. You can find her on Twitter and Bluesky at @LacyMB

Boleyn Traitor Sees Philippa Gregory Revisit Familiar Ground with Mixed Results