Philippa Gregory
speaker
357 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2025
last heard 25 May
Philippa Gregory’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And Queen Anne's rooms are not being managed as a queen's room should be kept.
And I think that may be the case.
And one of the problems it solves is why, on the one hand, you have people saying that she has a genuine interest in religion.
She has a genuinely devout attitude to the reformed religion that she helps bring into England and that she initially instructs her ladies-in-waiting and her maids to behave very, very respectably and very devoutly.
And then at the end of it, you have this court dissolving in charges of the most bizarre sexual behavior and adultery.
And I think it's because the game of chivalry gets toxic.
Well, it is literally, it's a Game of Thrones.
So she goes from being Jane Seymour's lady-in-waiting and right-hand woman, which is a pretty abrupt and extraordinary transition, if you think about it.
And then she works for Anne of Cleves.
But I think all the way through, she is working for and with Thomas Cromwell and reporting to him what's going on in the Queen's rooms.
And we see that she's paid very, very highly by somebody for doing something.
And I think it's Thomas Cromwell for spying on the queens.
When Thomas Cromwell wants rid of Anne of Cleves because she has failed to please Henry, it is Lady Rochford she is by then, but it's Jane Boleyn whose signature is second on the witness evidence that says that the king is not consummating his marriage and that Anne of Cleves doesn't know what she's supposed to do and is unfit
fundamentally, therefore, to be Queen of England.
She's Anne of Cleves' chief advisor as her chief lady-in-waiting.
I think she probably advised her to take the money and go and be glad that she'd still got her head on.
And Anne of Cleves does just that and retires, as it happens, to Hever Castle and to other places around England, which lots of people will know because there's lots of Anne of
And then Jane just moves smoothly on to be lady-in-waiting at the court of her cousin, Catherine Howard.
And it's there that it all starts to go very wrong again.
Thomas Cromwell is executed on the day of Catherine Howard's wedding day, a coincidence which means nothing to Henry VIII, who is fed up with him by then, but which really signals, I think, the end of Jane having an advisor who knows the ins and outs of courts.
Showing 281–300 of 357 · page 15 of 18
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