#similar altho not as explicitly hostile to that he took of AB

[fideidefenswhore]

Part of what I find... ironic, if I may say so: Henry VIII's contemporaries praised how Jane Seymour was more discreet and submissive (obviously comparing Anne), but that's what makes her such a mystery today. No one knows what she was really like as a person, because she had to play all this role to keep herself as queen. This is why she is considered the least favorite of wives (and don't help some works try sell her as a sweet angel).

Well, that praise has been translated very much at face-value, very literally, so many would argue that there's no enigma. Jane was not so much a constant as a new constant and an unknown quantity; and the sense of stability was to some extent merely this extension of the former status quo (Princess Mary was not reinstated, in contrast to the usual narrative, it's Jane's ascendancy that sees Mary's supporters interrogated and/or arrested, and even soon after, sees Mary's chamberlain executed, this is the second marriage in as many years whose legitimacy and issue is affirmed by Parliament, without sanction, nor even this time, dispensations from the Pope); but the very nature of the praise (Jane as anodyne, Jane as gentle and sweet) is testament to the toothlessness of her tenure.

Measured approaches are going to help with that (people don't like being spoon-fed, nor about-faces, The Tudors actually does give us the blueprint of her usual historical narrative) but unfortunately there aren't many. So like, Retha Warnicke is one of the only historians to mention the dissonance of the report of her plea for the restoration of the abbeys versus the evidence that Jane and her family owned properties of the Dissolution. Unfortunately, she also just completely discredits that report, claiming that it was from Chapuys and thus cannot be trusted (it's definitely not, he never in his life referred to Mary as anything other than 'the princess', not 'Madame Marie'), despite that it turns up twice by two different sources; so actually what she does there is deny any dissonance when it's dissonance that makes historic people compelling (I usually just see the reverse of this from fandom, Jane was an angel without agency nor autonomy and thus every single thing she did or accepted she was 'forced' to do by Henry, including her own inventory inclusive of the above, including marrying him, etc...)