Chapter summaries Boleyn Traitor Philippa Gregory

Chapter 64: The Tower of London, November 1541

Spoiler Notice

This analysis contains complete plot details for Chapter 64 of Boleyn Traitor. If you have not yet read the chapter, proceed with caution.

Summary

Jane Boleyn, Lady Rochford, arrives at the Tower water gate and is respectfully received by Sir John Gage. She is escorted to a comfortable room but recognises it instantly: it is the very chamber where her husband George Boleyn awaited his trial and execution. Sir John mentions that the Tower is full and that the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk and her daughter are even taking the royal rooms. Jane seizes on this news, convincing herself that the investigation must be about Katherine Howard’s precontract with Francis Dereham—not the adultery with Culpeper—and that everyone will soon be released. All she must do is stay calm.

Her dinner is tasteless, and she is acutely aware her maid is a spy. When she demands writing materials to study, Sir Thomas Wriothesley arrives and interprets her sarcastic remarks about Margaret Roper and her anguished references to her husband’s room as signs of mental instability. Seeing his fear, Jane realises she has an escape: a mad person cannot be interrogated, tried, or executed. She resolves to feign madness as her greatest performance.

She begins drinking heavily, letting her imagination spin loose. She hallucinates visits from her dead husband George, from Anne Boleyn, Sir Thomas More, and many executed figures. She rambles about Latin declensions and the king, alarming her spy-maid. Dr Butts visits and, after her erratic answers, promises to declare her unfit to testify, though he warns her not to melt into her mask.

One morning her maid tells her to dress; she is hustled onto a plain barge and taken upriver to Russell House on the Strand. Lady Russell welcomes her to private quarters overlooking the garden and the river. Jane believes her performance has succeeded—she will be treated as a harmless madwoman and spared. Yet she cannot stop playing the part. She reflects that every courtier wears a mask of sanity to mirror the king his own insane will, and that she has become what she pretended to be, madly loyal to her monstrous king.

Key Events

Jane is installed in the Tower room where her husband George Boleyn once waited to die.
Sir John Gage reveals that the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk and the Countess of Bridgewater are also imprisoned, fuelling Jane’s belief that the inquiry is only about Katherine Howard’s precontract.
Wriothesley questions Jane; her disjointed talk of Margaret Roper, George’s room, and her “family home” at the Tower convinces him she has lost her reason.
Jane consciously decides to perform madness, embracing drunkenness and hallucinatory conversations with the dead.
Dr Butts examines her and privately promises to report her unfit to stand trial.
She is abruptly moved from the Tower to the private Russell House on the Strand.
Jane thinks her mad-masque has saved her, but recognises she cannot stop the performance and that the court itself is a collective madness.

Character Development

Jane Boleyn undergoes the most dramatic shift. Initially she clings to logic, misreading the Dowager Duchess’s arrest as a sign of leniency. Once she grasps that Wriothesley fears her madness, she weaponises that fear, descending into a deliberate performance of insanity. Alcohol, sleep deprivation, and genuine trauma blur the line between act and reality: she sees ghosts, recites Latin as a test of her own mind, and begins to believe that she is indeed mad. By the chapter’s end, her identity collapses into her role; she the master performer cannot separate the mask from the self, having spent a lifetime pretending loyalty to a tyrant.

Sir Thomas Wriothesley appears briefly but tellingly. His eagerness to twist Jane’s ramblings into a confession and his panic when she seems unhinged reveal the administration’s paranoia. He flees the room, terrified of the madwoman he helped create.

Themes, Symbols, or Motifs

Madness as Performance and Survival: Jane adopts the “mask of Dionysus” to escape interrogation and execution. Her theatrical cunning is her last weapon, but it proves impossible to drop.
The Tower as Family Vault: Jane calls the Tower her “family home”; she sleeps in George’s bed, traces his carved name on the wall, and sees Anne’s ghost. The place that destroyed the Boleyns is the only home left to her.
Silence and Complicity: Jane recalls how nobody said “no” to the king—not for Anne, not for Lady Margaret Pole, not for the Carthusians. Her own past complicity haunts her, and she now calls herself “Silence,” knowing it does not save anyone.
Masks and the Mirror of the Court: Jane realises that all courtiers wear a mask of sanity to reflect a sane image back to the king, hiding his monstrous tyranny behind a shared delusion.
The Failure of the Senses: Food tastes of nothing, time blurs between chimes, dawn and dark confuse her. This sensory breakdown mirrors her psychological unravelling.

Why This Chapter Matters

This chapter marks the psychological climax of Jane Boleyn’s story. It re-stages her imprisonment in the same room where George Boleyn once waited for death, forcing her to relive the original Boleyn tragedy. The move from the Tower to Russell House appears to be a reprieve, yet it only deepens the ambiguity: is she truly mad, or a brilliant actress who has lost control of the part? The chapter crystallises the novel’s core critique of Henry VIII’s court as an engine that manufactures madness, and it prepares the ground for Jane’s ultimate fate by showing that even survival comes at the cost of her identity.

Study Questions and Answers

How does Jane use her supposed madness as a strategy, and what are the inherent dangers?
Jane deliberately acts deranged to avoid giving testimony, knowing that an insane person cannot be legally interrogated or executed. She drinks, rambles about ghosts, and confuses names and times. The danger is that the performance may become real—by the time she reaches Russell House she cannot stop “playing it,” and the boundary between calculated ruse and genuine breakdown dissolves.
What is the significance of the Tower room being her husband George’s former cell?
The room forces Jane into direct confrontation with the past she has tried to bury. She sees George’s ghost waiting for a pardon, traces his name, and relives the trial that killed both him and Anne. The setting underlines the cyclical nature of Tudor justice and positions Jane as the last Boleyn standing, trapped in the family’s tragic orbit.
How does Jane’s final reflection on the court’s collective madness comment on the king?
Jane concludes that everyone at court wears a mask of sanity to mirror the king’s own “mad face, his own mad will.” This suggests that Henry VIII’s court is a theatre of complicity, where performing loyalty is indistinguishable from insanity, and the only sane response—saying “no”—is never allowed. Her own madness becomes a distorted form of truth-telling.