55 pages • 1 hour read
The Other Boleyn Girl
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Chapters 18-33Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 18 Summary: “Summer 1527”
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of sexual content, illness and death, and gender discrimination.
It is summer 1527. Mary is glad to spend the summer at Hever with her children and to be free from her rivalry with Anne for a time. Anne writes that she is secretly betrothed to the king while Wolsey works to annul Henry’s marriage to Katherine. Anne claims, “I have overturned the order. Nothing will ever be the same for any woman in this country again” (275). Mary has lost her status as a favorite. William, Mary’s husband, intends to take her to Norfolk. He reminds her, “You are my wife. Everything that is yours is mine. Everything that is mine I keep” (280). Mary is relieved when Anne summons them both back to court. Mary promises to try to be a good wife to William.
Chapter 19 Summary: “Autumn 1527”
In autumn 1527, Anne is being treated like a queen but trying to hold off having sex with Henry. Wolsey falls from the king’s favor after he fails to persuade the pope to annul Henry’s marriage to Katherine. Anne, vindictively, is glad to push Wolsey out of power.
Chapter 20 Summary: “Winter 1527”
Mary waits on Anne in the winter of 1527, doing her best to support Anne’s hold over the king, and spends her free time with her husband. George confesses that he is in love with Francis Weston, another courtier. Anne tells George he must cut Francis out of his heart so as not to harm Anne’s chances. She reminds them that it broke her heart to lose Henry Percy. George agrees, and Mary thinks, “There was something in that whispered pledge that felt not like a pact with Anne but like a promise to the devil” (296).
Chapter 21 Summary: “Summer 1528”
It is summer 1528. Mary enjoys her free time with William while Anne becomes weary from dancing for the king. When Anne falls ill with the plague, George wonders what will happen to them. William Carey becomes sick and dies. Mary and George go to Hever. Mary says she would be content to be a nobody, but George points out that her son could be heir to the king.
Chapter 22 Summary: “Autumn 1528”
In autumn 1528, Anne insists Mary return to court as Anne needs an ally. The king seems to be on good terms again with the queen and Princess Mary. Uncle Howard doesn’t know what to do with Anne now that Mary is free to wed. Anne observes that it is “[o]ne Boleyn girl or the other […] We might either of us be Queen of England and yet we’ll always be nothing to our family” (310). Anne decides she will adopt Mary’s son, Henry, so she has the advantage of holding the king’s son. Mary, in agony, tells Anne, “You’re like a cuckoo that eats all the other babes in the nest” (313). Mary swears Anne’s ambition will be the death of them all.
Chapter 23 Summary: “Spring 1529”
It is spring 1529. Mary and Anne eavesdrop on the legal audience to debate the validity of Henry’s marriage. Mary is delighted when Katherine speaks for herself to the king, standing up for all women.
Chapter 24 Summary: “Summer 1529”
In the summer of 1529, Anne objects when Mary wants to go to Hever to see her children. Mary visits the queen, who admits she knew Mary was spying on her. The papal legate doesn’t decide in Henry’s favor, and Anne summons Mary back to court. Anne vows she will yet become Queen of England.
Chapter 25 Summary: “Autumn 1529”
It is autumn 1529. Mary educates Anne on different ways she can sexually satisfy Henry to keep him interested in her. Anne, under strain, starts to show her temper to the king. Their father, Anne, and George receive titles, but Mary receives no honors.
Chapter 26 Summary: “Christmas 1529”
On Christmas 1529, George speculates on what Anne’s marriage to Henry will cost: “the happiness of a queen, the safety of the throne, the respect of the people, the sanctity of the church” (332). Jane Parker criticizes Mary, Anne, and George’s closeness as siblings. The queen continues to insist she is Henry’s rightful wife, and Princess Mary will be queen after her.
Chapter 27 Summary: “Summer 1530”
It is summer 1530. Mary goes to Hever escorted by William Stafford, a man in her uncle’s service. Stafford is a free man, beholden to no one, and says he will marry for love, not ambition. Mary weeps when she has to leave her children to return to court. William reminds her she has chosen to be obedient to her family, and this is the price.
Chapter 28 Summary: “Autumn 1530”
At a hunting competition in the autumn of 1530, Henry gives Anne a small golden crown. Anne remarks on how very few people around her she can trust. She brought Wolsey down to spite him and wants the king to listen to and love no one but her.
Chapter 29 Summary: “Christmas 1530”
On Christmas 1530, Mary spends time with Queen Katherine, sewing the altar cloth. She notes the queen is subdued now: “She still had the same quiet dignity, she still had the same confidence in herself as a Princess of Spain and Queen of England, but she would never again have the glow of a woman who knows that her husband adores her” (350). The queen receives a basket of oranges. Mary finds a note in the bottom and reports to her uncle. Mary sees and walks with William Stafford.
Chapter 30 Summary: “Spring 1531”
It is spring 1531. Henry turns against the Roman Catholic Church and claims that he should be head of the Church in England. Bishop Fisher, who stands against Henry, is poisoned at his dinner one evening, and three men die. Mary feels Anne’s ambition will poison the entire country. Princess Mary falls ill, but Henry says if Katherine leaves court she is not to return, and she refuses to abandon her place as his wife. Mary tells William Stafford she doesn’t think about him.
Chapter 31 Summary: “Summer 1531”
In the summer of 1531, Mary tells the queen that Anne and Henry are alike in that “[t]hey both know exactly what they want and they both stop at nothing to get it. They both have the ability to be absolutely single-minded” (367). Anne leaves with the king on their summer progress, abandoning the queen. Mary spends the summer with her children, and she and William Stafford talk of a future together. Anne reports that the queen has been sent away from court, and Mary must serve Anne now. Anne has become antagonistic toward their Uncle Howard.
Chapter 32 Summary: “Autumn 1531”
It is autumn 1531. Anne more or less reigns over the court, having gotten rid of the queen and sent away several of the Seymour girls, including Jane. The common people, however, dislike Anne. When the sisters dine at a friend’s one evening, a mob marches toward the house. They escape on a barge down the river. Anne wonders if the king will continue to stand by her. Mary thinks Anne is “a woman who had learned to throw everything, even her mortal soul, into the battle to become queen” (382). The efforts to keep the king’s attention are taking a toll on her temper.
Chapter 33 Summary: “Spring 1532”
It is spring 1532. The common people are saying that Anne used witchcraft to ensnare the king. Mary hears that William Stafford is planning to marry and feels hurt that he toyed with her. The Boleyns find George’s wife, Jane, spying on them as they converse in Anne’s bedroom. Anne is angry when George serves Mary wine first, and George kisses her in response. Mary hears that Henry Percy’s wife is trying to divorce him by claiming he was pre-contracted to Anne. Anne fights with the king and then is sweet to him. Mary tells George this is how Anne keeps his interest: “She has to hold him somehow. She has to be a castle that he besieges over and over again” (398).
Chapters 18-33 Analysis
The new world order that Uncle Howard hinted at in the second section is coming to pass. Once again, Anne has a part in its architecture and resists the subservience expected of women. Like her Uncle Howard, Anne is willing to shape the future of a kingdom, and she plans to be a central player. Her power, however, rests on her closeness to the king, and the strategy of her campaign relies on retaining his sexual interest. This section shows Anne gaining power, influence, and arrogance. Queen Katherine and Mary, the former favorites, find a small sense of solace in one another; they huddle together in the shadows and work on the altar cloth that comes to represent Katherine’s ambitions as well as beliefs, both of which are shaken by the coming changes. Mary’s small betrayal of the queen in reporting to her uncle shows that Mary still feels caught in the middle, further developing The Cost of Conflicting Loyalties. However, the new world Anne erects isn’t an improvement on the old one, a dramatic irony that the ensuing chapters will explore.
Mary’s role in these chapters further dramatizes the Support and Rivalry Among Women that form and break alliances. Once the queen’s rival, Mary now offers Katherine a form of support, sympathizing with her as she is left behind on progress and separated from her child. Out of the king’s favor, the queen faces the same difficulties as any woman—perhaps more because her privacy is never truly private, and her supporters can never truly be trusted. While Mary is continually called upon to offer sibling support to Anne, she continues to feel the same competition, especially when Anne takes guardianship of her son Henry. Like the Boleyn girls, whom Anne bitterly observes as replaceable to her uncle, Mary’s children are also pawns of the family ambitions.
Increasingly, the natural setting of Hever provides a domestic space that offers a counterpoint and relief to the court’s intrigues. Governed by the natural rhythms of agriculture and seasons, Hever is a place of nurturance and joy where Mary can indulge in her true interests and, in the form of William Stafford, form new attachments. Stafford, like Mary, appreciates the opposite of court: He desires freedom to govern his own life instead of being bound to other’s wishes. He desires a life as a farmer rather than a statesman, and he wants to marry for love. These are all interests in line with Mary’s inclinations, but she is not yet ready to confess them; she is not yet ready to form her new world, governed by her wishes. This is because she has long been treated as though her desires don’t matter.
Making her family pawns in her quest for status sets Anne up later to suffer The Price of Personal Ambition. Her ruthlessness, as Mary notes here, also makes her a match for King Henry himself, who operates by the same principles. Both are willing to pursue their desires at great expense. Mary, too, faces the choice of whether to pursue her desires. However, what Mary wishes is affection, not status, which makes her a foil and contrast to Anne. Certain historians think that Anne was the one who arranged a pension for Mary after the death of her husband and offered to take the wardship of young Henry to relieve the financial burden of his education from Mary. Gregory gives Anne inimical motives for these actions, turning her further into an antagonist for Mary, whose accusation that Anne’s ambition will be the death of them all turns out to be partly prophetic. However, these motives also attribute an agency to Anne’s character that the historical record lacks—an agency that adds to the novel’s narrative logic and further interrogates women’s roles and power.
Anne’s ending, as the narrative foreshadows several times, will be dark because of the choices she has made to sacrifice others to advance herself. In this respect, she is not a victim of a tyrant; rather, she is a tyrant who shapes her fate and suffers the consequences of the world she has created. This is a power that an innocent, victimized Anne would lack. Gregory’s characterizations impose a dramatic framework and meaning on the historical events. While others are pawns, Anne assumes the role of the queen, the most powerful piece on the chessboard. It is precisely the hardness of her self-serving ambition that leaves Anne alone and undefended at the end, a shadow queen that the fate of Queen Katherine presages.
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