#(i would probably also give 4 stars altho i don't really much agree with taffe's judgement of her character

[fideidefenswhore]

Taffe poses a difficult, and even chilling, question about the great figures of the Henrician court. So much of our focus as writers and readers is only on the royal court that we tend to see it as a moral universe, in which there are good guys and bad guys – heroes, villains, and victims. However, there was a whole world beyond the palace walls and, while not everybody went to court willingly, many did. Taffe therefore asks if there is always a binary between victim and perpetrator in cases of tyranny. Jane’s fate in 1542 was tragic, he argues, but that does not necessarily mean that she herself was not complicit in some of the Henrician regime’s earlier horrors. Put another way – is it credible that somebody could have survived, and often thrived, at Henry VIII’s court for twenty years without being prepared to mutilate their own conscience in order to do so? And this brutal question does not just apply to Jane, but to most of her courtly contemporaries. Thomas More, who handed down the death penalty to religious opponents when he was in favour only to then have it turned on him a few years later; Katherine of Aragon, who thought nothing of trying to send a dead king’s mutilated corpse to her husband as a grotesque trophy and then wept at her own demotion from the throne; Anne Boleyn, who pleaded for some religious dissenters but chose to remain thunderously mute as men were castrated, tortured, and hacked apart in the streets of London; Thomas Cromwell, who pushed the law to acrobatic limits of flexibility to deliver for his king the gold and heads that he wanted; Catherine Howard, who accepted the confiscated treasures of martyred monks and abbots; Thomas Cranmer, who condemned people to burn long before the same fate came to him. They all cheered the monster on, until the day it turned round and consumed them, too. Is it possible that so many of these sixteenth-century figures who have passionate admirers today – who see them as victims, heroes, geniuses, or even saints – were in fact simultaneously beneficiaries of this regime and its victims?

Courting Scandal: The Rise and Fall of Jane Boleyn, Lady Rochford