When a novel's main character and narrative focus refers to herself as “pure in heart” without the smallest trace of irony, you know you're in for a bit of a slog. Was it presumptuous to wonder if God had appointed her, Jane, to put an end to these ills? He had chosen a simple maiden as the mother of His Son why should He not choose another, pure in heart, to save England and its King from damnation? The English Church was in disarray and heresy was flourishing. Late in the novel, when she's reflecting on her peculiar role in history, she herself makes things plain enough:īecause of her, good men had died barbarously, innocent blood had been shed and good order overturned. Jane's brothers Thomas and Edward were as coarse and conniving a pair of climbers as were ever drawn to the flame of Court intrigue, but if we're to judge by personalities and world-views, Jane not only never talked with them, she very likely never met them. Instead, readers get buckets and buckets of otherworldly grace and delicacy. Such hopes might be valid, but there's precious little nuance in Weir's book.

One of the most startling minor notes of Hillary Mantel's Wolf Hall (the title is the name of the Seymour family's ancestral seat) is the depiction of Jane Seymour as indeed otherworldly but more in the style of the Vampire Carmilla than the Virgin Mary, and because Wolf Hall and its sequel Bring Up the Bodies were so successful, readers of Tudor fiction might have hoped that an era was dawning for more nuanced portraits of Jane. Jane Seymour was the daughter of a powerful and conniving Court family, and she caught Henry's wandering eye while she was a lady-in-waiting to his wife and queen, Catherine of Aragon, and she died while giving him the legitimate male heir, and yet despite the rather self-evident inferences to be drawn from all three of these facts, biographers and especially novelists have persistently portrayed Jane Seymour as a sweet, apolitical innocent, a maiden of almost otherworldly grace and delicacy, someone as far from the shrill conniving of, say, an Anne Boleyn or the wanton idiocy of a, say, Kathryn Howard as it was possible to be. Historian Alison Weir continues her series of mammoth Tudor historical novels “Six Tudor Queens” with her 500-page latest, Jane Seymour: The Haunted Queen, which tells the brief life story of King Henry VIII's third wife (the series title is a bit misleading the point here isn't that these six women were Tudor queens, it's that they were all wives of one Tudor king).

Jane seymour by alison weir