Anne Boleyn dramatic life and death feature in many novels, plays, and movies, but Jane Seymour doesn't get much notice. She was quiet, demure, wrote few letters, and died young. While that means she didn't leave a lot of drama, her silence leaves room for speculation, particularly whether Jane was as much of a social climber as her brothers or whether she was their pawn.
Alison Weir leans towards the latter, although she gives Jane a strong enough character to allow her to rationalize her role in Anne Boleyn's downfall. we first meet her as a devout 10-year-old who wants to become a nun. Obedient, domestically inclined, and devoted to her family, she helps her mother run the household until at age 18, she enters a local convent. She finds that contemplative life is not her calling (and that the convent is not quite the place of purity and devotion she thought). After returning home, her parents find a place for her as a maid-of-honor to Queen Katherine through the help of Sir Francis Bryan
Jane arrives as Katherine's court begins its fall from favor. Henry (still handsome and able to charm but with flashes of the mercurial despot he became with age and illness) has begun his flirtation with Anne Boleyn. Secret Protestants, including Jane's ambitious older brother Edmund and her sponsor (and potential suitor) Sir Francis, see the King's "great matter" as a route to Reformation. Jane, however, loves her mistress and cleves to the True Church. She dislikes what little she sees of Anne and disapproves of how Henry banishes Katherine to smaller and more dilapidated royal houses and of his treatment of his daughter, Mary.
Eventually, Jane finds herself unemployed as Henry all but eliminates Katherine's court. Sir Francis, still believing in reform but no longer enamored of the increasingly ill-tempered Anne, finds Jane a position in the new Queen's retinue. Jane doesn't want to serve the Lady but follows the wishes of her ambitious parents. At court, her calmness and submission catch Henry's eye. although aging and beginning to suffer from the leg wound that plagued the last decade of his life, he retained enough charm for Jane to fall in love with him.
Jane remains placid as the increasingly panicked Anne vents her fury on her rival and leaves her service. Ensconced in Edward's apartment, she continues her courtship with Henry and her gossip helps lead to Anne's downfall. The hasty marriage history sees as a political ploy is a love match to Jane, and the year or so she spends with Henry is generally happy, despite his rages and her insecurity as a knight's daughter raised to royalty. She argues (with limited success) against the dissolution of the religious houses and more successfully brokers a reconciliation between Henry and Mary before giving birth to the male heir Henry so desperately wanted (and needed) and dying a week after. Jane fills her final days with fantasies of growing old surrounded by princes and princesses, and ye we know the teven if she lived, Henry's encroaching chronic illnesses would have made a large family unlikely. While I wonder how differently history would have been if Jane had survived to produce a second son, Weir presents her death as a personal tragedy, and lets Henry grieve for the woman he truly loved...at least at the time.
