Tag: Lady Rochford

Lady Rochford – malicious or misunderstood?

In my post on Anne Boleyn’s family, I commented that I was interested to see how they were going to depict Jane, Lady Rochford’s involvement in Anne’s fall. In the end, they showed her talking to Cromwell after flirtatious chatter between Anne, Mark Smeaton, Francis Weston, Henry Norris and William Brereton gets out of hand. She then goes on to claim that her husband has committed adultery with his sister. Cromwell makes reference to Anne’s other ladies having talked after her arrest but we don’t see them. This is a departure from the book where Cromwell is shown talking to Elizabeth, countess of Worcester and Margaret Shelton before he talks to Jane Rochford.

Lady Rochford intrigues me as a character because of the contrast between her depiction in popular culture and the lack of evidence we really have about her. So, what do we know about her?  Continue reading “Lady Rochford – malicious or misunderstood?”

Wolf Hall Explained – Anne’s Family

In episode 3 of Wolf Hall, Cromwell was summoned to a crisis gathering of Anne’s family to deal with Henry Percy’s claim that he and Anne had been contracted to one another (in Tudor England, promises of marriage were seen as binding contracts and would mean that Anne was not free to marry Henry VIII). But who exactly were all the people standing around? Continue reading “Wolf Hall Explained – Anne’s Family”