THE BOLEYN WIFE: ALL ABOUT VENGEANCE
 
AN INTERVIEW WITH BRANDY PURDY 
 

Interview conducted by Nan Hawthorne, author of AN INVOLUNTARY KING, please visit her website  www.nanhawthorne.com

NH: Why do you believe the Tudors are so compelling to readers and authors?

BP: There is just something about this story that we never tire of, the events are so incredible, yet true, and the personalities so vivid, almost larger than life, yet they all lived.

NH: What did you want to convey about Jane Rochford that other authors have not?

BP: Lady Rochford has always been a shadowy character in the Tudor saga, and I wanted to try to bring her out of the shadows. Ever since I first learned about her, she has fascinated me; I wanted to understand her and why she did the things she did. I think Jealousy was a driving force in her life, it left her bitter and ate away at her mind, and fueled her desire for revenge. I also wanted to explore her motivations for the deed that we remember her for today: her accusation of incest between her husband George Boleyn and his sister Anne. When you accuse someone, falsely, of a horrible crime and watch them die for it, it has to affect you in some way, it has to stay with you, it doesn’t just go away and you go on with your life as if nothing happened, there are repercussions, and, I think, there must be some kind of guilt, even if you suppress it or try to runaway or hide from it, it is still there inside of you, so how do you cope, what does it do to you?

NH: You paint a vivid picture of Anne Boleyn's Evergreen Gallants.  What draws you to them?

BP: I have been reading about Anne Boleyn since I was about ten years old and in most of the books the men who died on the scaffold, falsely accused of committing adultery with her, are just names on a page, I never felt any true sense of who they were, what they were like, so I wanted to try to make them seem like real, living, breathing human beings.

NH: I found the connection you create between Anne of Cleves and Katherine Howard clever.  How did you come up with that?

BP: You know, when I made the decision to do that I intended it as a sort of joke, but so many people have been upset and expressed outrage over it, that the reason behind it has been completely lost. Contrary to what some people think, I have immense respect for Anne of Cleves, this woman was the subject of many unflattering comments, an object of ridicule, because she was a foreigner, different from the typical Englishwoman, and because she failed to arouse Henry’s libido, yet she came out a winner, she survived, by amicably accepting the divorce terms she became a woman of independent means, wealthy in her own right, without a husband, father, or brother to rule her life and dictate her every move. In a world where women’s lives were very constricted, she attained a true prize: Freedom. And I respect and admire that. Given the intense distaste Henry expressed for her physically, and the comments that have come down to us, I thought it would make an interesting twist to have her feel equally repulsed by Henry, to set out to purposefully make herself unattractive to him, to play a game that no one realized she was playing in which she came out the winner even when in almost everyone else’s eyes she was the loser.

NH: Would you say Jane Rochford was what we now call a stalker?

BP: In my novel, I think she displays a strong voyeuristic streak. Some readers have commented that her sneaking around, spying, and always being in the right place at the right time doesn’t ring true, however, more than once in my reading I have come across descriptions about the lack of privacy in royal courts, about the walls having ears and eyes. As a lady-in-waiting Jane would have been present at many of the key events in the lives of Henry’s queens. I also think, especially in the case of Katherine Howard, she may have lived vicariously through the objects of her jealousy. Even when she professes to hate Anne Boleyn, there are things about her she also admires, for instance, when Jane watches Anne die, she admits that Anne was undoubtedly the bravest person she has ever known.

NH: What caused Henry's decline after Anne Boleyn?  Was he still a vigorous man with Jane Seymour?

BP: I think chasing Anne and turning the world upside down to get her, then get rid of her, wore him out. With Jane Seymour he was craving someone who was Anne’s complete opposite, soft-spoken, demure, and domestic. He was approaching middle-age and wanted to settle down.  Years of indulgence at the dinner table were catching up with him, and a jousting injury to his leg that never truly healed kept him from the vigorous exercise of his youth that had helped to keep his weight in check. Who knows what might have happened if Jane Seymour had lived? Giving birth to his much coveted son would have made her future secure. The fourth marriage, to Anne of Cleves, was a political match that fell apart due to complete lack of physical attraction. In Katherine Howard, who was about 15 to Henry’s 50, I think he was looking to recapture his lost youth, I think he saw her as a sweeter, softer version of Anne Boleyn without the tart tongue and temper, but the results were disastrous for both, though more so for Katherine since she ended up on the scaffold before her eighteenth birthday. I think disillusionment over finding out his “Rose Without A Thorn” was not the sweet, pure, innocent little thing he imagined, largely contributed to his further decline, and by the time the sixth and final wife, Catherine Parr, came along, he was a cantankerous old man more in need of a nurse than a wife.