I quite enjoyed reading The Boleyn Inheritance by Philippa Gregory. I knew little of Henry VIII’s two wives, Anne of Cleves and Katherine Howard, beyond the 1970 BBC television series, “The Six Wives of Henry VIII”. Once I accustomed myself to the first person present narrative of Gregory’s book (which was a bit jarring at first), I found her telling of the stories of these two lesser-known queens fascinating. Katherine Howard particularly became uniquely sympathetic to me, her end quite heartbreaking.

I had always been curious about what became of Anne of Cleves after her “divorce” from Henry VIII, but in this regard, I have to admit I was disappointed by the book. Once Anne was no longer queen, her life became increasingly dull to follow, despite…or perhaps, because of…the author’s attempts to sustain the tension by keeping Anne always at risk of Henry VIII’s wrath. In the BBC series, Anne is a woman who saves herself from a distasteful marriage and a dangerous king by her intelligence and good humor. She was a woman I longed to follow into her subsequent domestic life as Henry VIII’s “sister”. In Gregory’s version, while equally intelligent, Anne appears to escape more by the whims of fate than through any cleverness or initiative of her own, and consequently continues her “escape” only by the “luck” of the king eventually dying. Although at this far date, no one can know which version of Anne of Cleves (if either) was true, I much preferred the witty, courageous, caring queen of the BBC series. In the end Gregory’s version of Queen Anne simply became tedious for me.

Lady Rochford, sister-in-law to Anne Boleyn and cousin to Katherine Howard, was the third woman whose story is told in this book. The author’s note at the end calls Lady Rochford a “horror”, but she did not come across to me that way. Perhaps if I had read The Other Boleyn Girl, rather than just seeing the movie, she might have seemed more “horrific” in The Boleyn Inheritance. Instead, while ambitious, willing to be manipulated, and ultimately disloyal to the extreme, I felt that Gregory wrote her with considerable sympathy. Perhaps I mistakenly took Lady Rochford’s rationalizations for her actions at face value, when Gregory did not intend me to do so, but if I was meant to see pure evil at Lady Rochford’s core, rather than the same pathetic weakness the rest of Henry VIII’s court was caught up in, Gregory failed to convince me in this regard.

I give the book four stars for sex scenes and images that were not, in my opinion, strictly necessary to advance the story (though admittedly, far fewer than there could have been), for an unconvincing scene between Lady Rochford and the Duke of Norfolk towards the end of the book that felt too “over the top” for me, and for a certain “distancing” of Katherine Howard’s emotions, also towards the end, due to the unconventional first person present narration. This is a book I enjoyed reading for new insights it gave me into the stories of Anne of Cleves and Katherine Howard, but it is not a book I am sure I would trouble myself to read again.