Jane Seymour - Historiography

Historiography

Books solely on Jane Seymour are scarce, but two biographies of the Queen have recently been published. The first is a scholarly biography by Pamela Gross, while the second, by Elizabeth Norton, is more accessible to the average reader. A third book, William Seymour's Ordeal by Ambition, is in part a biography of Jane.

Jane was widely praised as "the fairest, the most discreet, and the most meritous of all Henry VIII's wives" in the centuries after her death. One historian, however, took serious umbrage at this view in the 19th century. Victorian author Agnes Strickland, who wrote multi-volume anthologies of French, Scottish, and English royal women, said that the story of Anne Boleyn's last agonised hours and Henry VIII's swift remarriage to Jane Seymour "is repulsive enough, but it becomes tenfold more abhorrent when the woman who caused the whole tragedy is loaded with panegyric." Hester W. Chapman and Eric Ives resurrected Strickland's view of Jane Seymour, and believe she played a crucial and conscious role in the cold-blooded plot to bring Anne Boleyn to the executioner's block. Joanna Denny, Marie Louise Bruce and Carolly Erickson have also refrained from giving overly sympathetic accounts of Jane's life and career. It should be noted that Ives, Bruce, and Denny are biographers of Anne Boleyn as opposed to Jane Seymour.

On the other hand, historical writers like Alison Weir and Antonia Fraser paint a favourable portrait of a woman of discretion and good sense - "a strong-minded matriarch in the making," says Weir. David Starkey and Karen Lindsey are relatively dismissive of Jane's importance in comparison to that of Henry's other major queens (Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn and Catherine Parr), though they refrain from claiming that she was the cause of the unfair trial. They further state that it was unlikely Jane could accomplish as much as her predecessors or her successors because her reign had been relatively short and spent mainly pregnant or unwell.