Philippa Gregory returns to the court of Henry VIII in her latest novel

At the centre of Philippa Gregory’s Boleyn Traitor, the first novel in a new three-book global deal with HarperCollins (see p6) and scheduled for publication in October 2025, is a “really enigmatic figure” who has been “a niggle” for the author ever since The Other Boleyn Girl, which was published in 2001 (later made into the film starring Scarlett Johansson and Natalie Portman): Jane Parker, wife of George Boleyn and sister-in-law to Anne Boleyn, whose testimony took two queens to the scaffold for adultery.

“Her testimony is part of the evidence that takes them to their deaths,” Gregory explains. “She’s literally partially responsible for the death of Anne and George, which is pretty extraordinary, and then more extraordinarily she doesn’t seem to be disgraced by their disgrace, but becomes Jane Seymour’s lady in waiting. At Seymour’s death, she transfers to the next queen, and provides evidence about the next queen’s grounds for annulment. Then she transfers to Catherine Howard, and she’s involved in Catherine Howard’s disgrace and ultimate death. So she’s really a sort of smoking gun.”

Traditionally, historians have regarded Parker as “either very bad or very, very mad,” or “just in the wrong place at the wrong time”. But in researching The Other Boleyn Girl, Gregory realised that “this is not a stupid woman, and this is not a mad woman… So what is this woman doing?” At the heart of the book is Gregory’s search for the motivations as to why Parker was driven to destroy her husband and go on to spy on three later queens: “I am settling on an interpretation that I am happy with, but the historical facts don’t give you an explanation as to why, as so often—especially with women’s history—you’re lucky if you get the events. You never get the motivation or much personality, unless the woman happens to be a queen, then you do get a bit more. But [Jane] is very little recorded, except in her witness statements.”

Jane Parker is really a sort of smoking gun... She’s partially responsible for the death of Anne and George Boleyn

In these, “you have her voice but it’s not her statement that she says and somebody copies down faithfully, it’s two or three steps away from her”. Gregory adds: “That’s all we have. She’s very unclear herself as to what she’s doing. And people around her at the time were very clear what she was doing, but never bothered to even ask why.”

That is “the trouble and the joy and the challenge” of a lot of women’s history, Gregory says. “People weren’t very interested in women, didn’t really record them. It’s not until the 20th century that people start thinking: ‘Hang on a minute. What were women doing at this time? What was this woman saying? What was she thinking? Why was she doing that?’”

The next two in the three-book deal will also focus on women whose stories Gregory has been “longing” to tell. One will be about a woman married into the royal Plantagenet family—marking a return to the Plantagenets for Gregory for the first time since 2014’s The King’s Curse—and back to the Tudors with the third title centring on a descendant of one of Catherine of Aragon’s ladies-in-waiting.

“I said [to HarperCollins], I’d like to do these three. And the response was: ‘Yes, absolutely.’ There’s a real sense that, if there’s something that I really want to write about, that’s what I should be working on. [And] it’s really lovely to be writing fiction about a historical character, straight off the back of my life’s [non-fiction] work, Normal Women (William Collins, 2023). The two parts inform each other so strongly.”