The Scandalous Boleyn Sisters
A woman is led to the scaffold inside the Tower of London in February 1542, only minutes after a queen has died on the same spot. Six years earlier, her husband and her sister-in-law were executed a few yards away. Her name is Jane Boleyn, and for nearly five hundred years she has been remembered as the spiteful wife who sent them to their deaths. The question is whether she really did.
In the first episode of Highly Improper, Zac and Lucy take on three women whose names have been dragged through the mud since the sixteenth century: Mary, Anne and Jane Boleyn. Mary was the king's mistress, rumoured to have been the plaything of the French court, who then scandalised her family by marrying for love. Anne was the queen whose rise and fall reshaped England, and who went to the block on charges that historians have been picking apart ever since. Jane was the sister-in-law cast as the villain of the story, whose real downfall came years later and for something else entirely.
Going back to the ambassadors' letters, the Tower reports and the trial records, and separating them from the propaganda that followed, we ask what each of them actually did, what they didn't do, and how the gossip version came to win. Along the way you'll hear about a papal dispensation that exposes Henry VIII's hypocrisy, a love letter that should never have been written, a courtroom moment that went badly wrong, and a scaffold speech that was invented a century after the fact.
📚 FURTHER READING Eric Ives, The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn (2004) Julia Fox, Jane Boleyn: The Infamous Lady Rochford (2007) G.W. Bernard, Anne Boleyn: Fatal Attractions (2010) Alison Weir, Mary Boleyn: The Great and Infamous Whore (2011)
Guilty, innocent, or somewhere in between? Tell us your verdict on each of the Boleyn women in the comments.
We'll see you there. Do try to behave.
Tags: Highly Improper, Present History, Anne Boleyn, Mary Boleyn, Jane Boleyn, Lady Rochford, George Boleyn, Boleyn sisters, Boleyn family, Henry VIII, Henry VIII wives, Anne Boleyn execution, Anne Boleyn guilty or innocent, Anne Boleyn trial, Catherine Howard, Tudor history, Tudor scandal, Tower of London history, Tudor podcast, history podcast, British history, women in history
Watch on YouTube (25 min)
