Page "Jane Boleyn, Viscountess Rochford" Paragraph 10

Jane's sensational testimony against her husband may have been an act of malice, caused by their difficult relationship and possibly because of her jealousy of his close relationship with Anne.

Certainly, this was the conclusion formed at the time and for many generations afterwards.

Subsequent generations of historians also believed that Jane's testimony against her husband and sister-in-law in 1536 was motivated by spite rather than any actual belief in their guilt, hence her generally unfavourable historical reputation.

Within a generation, George Wyatt, whose father Thomas Wyatt had known the Boleyns personally, described Jane as a " wicked wife, accuser of her own husband, even to the seeking of his own blood.

" A century later, an English historian asserted that the reason Jane had testified against them was based purely on her " inveterate hatred " of Queen Anne, which sprang from jealousy at Anne's superior social skills and George's preference for his sister's company to his wife's.

Georgian and Victorian histories pointed to Jane's own eventual violent death in 1542 to suggest that moral justice had triumphed because " the infamous Lady Rochford ... justly deserved her fate for the concern which she had in bringing Anne Boleyn, as well as her own husband, to the block ".