55 pages • 1-hour read
The Other Boleyn Girl
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 44-49Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 44 Summary: “Spring 1535”
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death, graphic violence, pregnancy loss, gender discrimination, and sexual content.
In spring 1535, George writes a letter summoning Mary to court as Anne is pregnant and needs a sister and friend. Anne is the loneliest woman in the world as she “is no longer favorite either with the king or with her own family” (523). The common sentiment is against Anne as Henry’s oath of succession has driven popular and famous men to be beheaded at the Tower of London. Henry has no check on his power nor his whims, and the court has become a dangerous, corrupt place.
Mary obeys the summons so she might bargain to get back her other two children. She finds Anne strained and tired at prayer, which reminds her how desperately Queen Katherine prayed for a boy. Anne is grateful to have George and Mary with her. When Henry greets her as the other Boleyn girl, Mary thinks he looks like a fat, sulky boy, “a man both indulged and yet unhappy” (533). Mary asks the king’s permission to bring William to court and see her children at Hever that summer, going against Anne’s wishes. Mary thinks Anne is sick and sad.
Chapter 45 Summary: “Summer 1535”
It is summer 1535. George reminds a jealous Anne that she set the pattern for leading on the king and drawing him away from his wife. William warns Mary that Henry’s laws are neither fair nor just. When Bishop Fisher and Thomas More are beheaded for refusing to agree to Henry’s proclamations, Mary realizes no one is safe.
In June, when the baby is not moving in her womb, Anne sends George and Mary to fetch a potion from a midwife. The woman, having a premonition, says to fear not the drink but the blade. Anne takes the potion, but once again, she must hide the miscarriage.
Mary longs “for the simplicity and gentleness of William and the world where things were as they appeared” (548). William warns her of talk that Anne must have sinned in some way to make it difficult to have a child. When the court leaves on its summer progress, Mary and William go to Hever, and Mary is delighted to introduce her new baby, Anne, to Catherine and Henry.
Chapter 46 Summary: “Autumn 1535”
It is autumn 1535. Anne writes that Jane Seymour has the king mooning over her, but Anne is pregnant again. She is confident this baby will be strong. Catherine, nearly 12, asks to come to court.
Chapter 47 Summary: “Winter 1536”
Mary is glad to have her family around her at court in the winter of 1536. She sees the king watching Jane Seymour but is certain Jane will bore him. Catherine joins Anne’s ladies in waiting and helps sew the altar cloth. Word arrives that Queen Katherine is dead. Anne and Henry celebrate. Anne feels the baby quicken and has Mary tell the king. Anne says she went to the gates of hell to get this child, and Mary thinks George gets a guilty look when he learns the news.
The king participates in a joust and is thrown from his horse. Uncle Howard moves instantly to suggest that, if the king is dead, Anne shall be regent and her uncle on the council governing Princess Elizabeth. Mary writes letters for a stricken Anne while the king is brought inside. He is gravely injured and asks Mary to stay with him. Mary reflects on the instability that will strike the country if the king dies. An old wound on Henry’s calf reopens and needs to be treated, causing him to feel restless and in pain.
Henry is cold to Anne when she visits, telling her she had better be carrying a boy. He broods as he recovers, and they quarrel further. Jane Seymour is sweet to him. Anne flies into a rage when she catches Jane sitting in the king’s lap, and Henry accuses Anne of using whore’s tricks on him. Anne is sick with jealousy. That night, when she comes to dinner, there is blood on the back of her gown.
Anne loses the baby. The misshapen fetus makes them all fearful, and the midwife says, “This is not a child from a man, this is a child from a devil” (590). She insists that she is a witch-taker and must report this to the king. Mary runs for aid to Uncle Howard, who is not eager to protect Anne after she slighted him. William reports the gossip that Anne resorted to witchcraft to become pregnant with the child.
Henry leaves Anne behind when the court removes to Greenwich, and Jane Seymour is given her suite of rooms. Anne, hearing this, says she hopes if Jane is trying to take her place that she dies giving Henry the boy he wants. Anne refuses to change her ways, declaring, “If what the king wants is a biddable wife then I should never have tried for the throne in the first place. If I cannot be me, I might as well not be here at all” (606). The river freezes in the cold, and the court goes ice skating. Henry watches Anne with suspicion, while the Seymours push Jane toward the king.
Chapter 48 Summary: “Spring 1536”
It is spring 1536. When Anne asks Uncle Howard for help, he bargains with her to secure favors for the family, including getting George made a Knight of the Garter. The king gives the prized award to a friend of the Seymour family. The king holds secret meetings, and gossip swirls about the courtiers who spend time in Anne’s rooms. Her uncle advises Mary to collect her children and leave court. William goes to fetch Henry from where he is being tutored. Anne, thinking to defend herself, takes Princess Elizabeth into the room where the men are meeting to show Henry she gave him a perfect child.
At a joust, Henry is cold and judgmental to Anne. The king rides away with Henry Norris, and Jane Parker reports that Norris is being sent to the Tower. Mary tells Catherine to pack to leave, but she must wait while her horse is shod. The three siblings sit alone in Anne’s rooms through the night.
The next morning, George is arrested. Anne is sent to the Tower and takes Catherine with her. Mary, desperate, hides in town while asking for news. William learns that the imprisoned men are being charged with adultery and Anne for witchcraft. Catherine insists on staying with Anne while she is imprisoned. William comments on the courage of the Boleyns.
Chapter 49 Summary: “May 1536”
In May 1536, Madge Shelton tells Mary that everyone in court was questioned, and Jane Parker wrote out a long statement. William tells Mary to remain in hiding. Her uncle and father can’t stop the proceedings; “they know that Anne has taught the king to be a tyrant and now he is run mad and they cannot prevent his tyranny” (646). Anne is accused of seducing the king with sorcery and George with helping her. Mary’s father and mother refuse to be tainted by defending their children. The verdict of the trial goes against Anne.
Mary believes until the end that Anne will be sent to a nunnery or exile, but instead, she and George are beheaded. Mary and William witness Anne’s execution and then collect Catherine and leave London. Mary reflects on the fate of the Boleyns and their Princess Elizabeth. She tells William that she wants to live quietly in the country and find peace. William wonders what will happen to these children who bear the king’s blood.
Chapters 44-49 Analysis
This section, Act V in a five-act dramatic arc, bears the seeds of the conflicts sown earlier. The plot movement follows the classical definition of a tragic arc, where the protagonist—in this case, Anne—experiences a rise to fortune and then a sharp fall into poverty or death. In classical terms, the hero’s fall is caused by hamartia, a Greek word suggesting an error or mistake; in literary analysis, this is sometimes referred to as the fatal flaw that causes the hero’s downfall. In Anne’s case, her tragic flaw is her ambition, and Gregory suggests that Anne has in some way orchestrated her end as the inevitable harvest of the seeds she planted.
The narrative counterbalances Anne’s tragic arc by Mary’s, which can be called a comedy in the classical sense that the protagonist progresses from a state of misfortune to fortune. From her place at court where she was the pawn of her powerful family, an abandoned mistress, and then a banished wife, Mary ends the novel with a happy marriage, a pleasant home, and all her children about her. At the same time, her loyalty to her siblings means that the deaths of Anne and George deprive Mary of a part of herself. While the last lines of the novel point forward to the historical ascension of Queen Elizabeth I and good fortune for Mary’s children, ambition has never been Mary’s goal; she would rather keep her children safe. The concluding scene of an execution, mirroring the execution in the opening, lends a somber tone to the conclusion. This is the end of The Price of Personal Ambition for the Boleyns, even though there will be another Howard girl to replace Anne—Katherine Howard, Henry’s fifth wife.
Gregory’s characterization of Anne makes her guilty of the charges brought against her in her trial. While modern historians generally believe the charges against Anne were fabricated, Gregory’s Anne hints that she used witchcraft to get pregnant with the son she was desperate to have. The narrative furthers suggestions of wrongdoing by frequent references to the cost of Anne’s ambitions and the imagery surrounding her miscarriages. In the first, the mask Anne wears associates her with a figure in a morality play, a medieval genre of drama that plays out allegorical concepts of sin and redemption with the use of highly symbolic imagery. The fleeting moment where Mary sees guilt on George’s face hints that he may have played a part in Anne’s pregnancy, continuing the suggestions of incest in the previous scenes of him kissing Anne and seeing her naked. Sibling incest and witchcraft are prevalent themes in other of Gregory’s books, including Wideacre and The Wise Woman, so casting Anne as a villain is not a departure for her.
As before, this agency creates a sense of dramatic resolution that makes Anne not a preyed-upon victim but rather a powerful woman trapped by the machinery she set in place when she manipulated herself into Queen Katherine’s place. Several characters hint that Anne set the pattern for the king’s tyranny—another way these two characters are foils for one another. The difference in their fates, however, highlights the distinctions of status and gender that Gregory has been keen to point to throughout: Henry, as the chief political and now religious authority, can use the courts to execute his will, while Anne’s status as a woman makes her subject to the authority of her husband. Her only powers were her sexual allure and her potential to bear Henry’s coveted son, which underscores The Cost of Conflicting Loyalties. She shows herself as little but another iteration of Katherine, subject to miscarriages. Anne, unlike Katherine, does not have powerful relatives interceding for her. The midwife’s apprehension of demonic symbolism in the shape of the fetus reflects the era’s common belief that witchcraft entailed dealings with the devil and was thus morally wrong and prohibited by the Catholic Church.
Furthering the associations of Anne’s power with witchcraft are the prophecies that turn out to be true: the midwife’s prophecy that Anne should fear the blade hints at her execution, while Anne’s muttered wish for Jane Seymour’s demise works as a curse. Jane Seymour does go on to marry Henry—a mere 11 days after Anne’s death, according to the historical record. After a year and a half of marriage, she will die after giving birth to Henry’s coveted son. Though unkind, Anne’s curse gives her a dramatic power that fully lifts her from victim to villain.
While historians believe that Mary never returned to court after her banishment, Gregory’s change to the historical record that has Mary attend Anne is another dramatic necessity, since events have more interest when Mary, as narrator and protagonist, is there to observe them. Mary’s presence also strengthens the theme of Support and Rivalry Among Women, furthering the tension of their contested relationship as sisters; this provides further conflict in the opposition of the character arcs. Anne’s ambition leads to her death, while Mary’s choice of love leaves the other Boleyn girl with a home and family, her sister’s opposite to the last.
Unlock all 55 pages of this Study Guide
Get in-depth, chapter-by-chapter summaries and analysis from our literary experts.
- Grasp challenging concepts with clear, comprehensive explanations
- Revisit key plot points and ideas without rereading the book
- Share impressive insights in classes and book clubs