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 from her point of view, someone who knows what the king is thinking and tells her before anything happens.
In addition to that, she's in the almost impossible job of trying to organize a 16-year-old, very spoiled, very ill-educated 16-year-old girl as Queen of England in a court which is now established as one of flirtation and adultery.
And
Catherine Howard, either already abused and groomed or prematurely sexually experienced, I think probably already abused and groomed, falls in love, I think, for the first and probably last time in her life with Thomas Culpepper, another friend of Henry's, handsome young friend of Henry's.
Of course, the friends are getting younger as the king is getting older.
The friends stay at a dazzlingly handsome mid-twenties as the king gets older and older.
He's now old enough to be Catherine's grandfather, but he marries her anyway, and he calls her his rose, and he thinks she's going to give him a son.
And I think Jane, without advice...
absolutely unable to control the steam train passion of Catherine for Thomas Culpepper, tries to be a duenna and stay with them in their meetings, but in fact is therefore just literally implicated in their adulterous affair.
So when the king finds out about it, which is unlucky because they might have got away with it, but when the king finds out about it, ultimately he executes Thomas Culpepper, someone else named as her lover, Thomas Culpepper's friend who's done absolutely nothing, and Catherine Howard, and most wrongly, Jane Boleyn.
It definitely continues with Queen Elizabeth I, who keeps a miniature of her mother, Anne Boleyn,
by her throughout her life and whose extraordinary high reputation in the regard of subsequent Protestant historians means a complete revaluation of Anne Boleyn, which means a complete revaluation of the Boleyn family, which really rises Anne Boleyn to this idea of virtuous reformer queen wrongly done to death by terrible people like Thomas Cromwell
And indeed, her sister-in-law, Jane, who then gets the blame for this execution, which she probably had very little to do with.
So yes, you end up with, as we believe, a virgin queen.
And that is the end of that line of the Boleyn family.
Of course, Mary Boleyn survives.
Absolutely.
Yeah, they're all over.
So Henry, the little baby Henry, grows to be Henry Carey, who is Elizabeth I's acknowledged cousin and highly regarded advisor.
He never makes any claim to being an heir to the throne.
Showing 301–320 of 357 · page 16 of 18
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