The Creation of Anne Boleyn (2 page)

One goal of this book is to follow the cultural career of these mutating Annes, from the poisonous
putain
created by the Spanish ambassador Eustace Chapuys—a highly biased portrayal that became history for many later writers—to the radically revisioned Anne of the Internet generation. I’m not such a postmodernist, however, that I’m content to just write a history of competing narratives. I’m fascinated by their twists and turns, but even more fascinated by the real Anne, who has not been
quite
as disappeared as Henry wanted. Like Marilyn Monroe in our own time, she is an enigma who is hard to keep one’s hands off of; just as men dreamed of possessing her in the flesh, writers can’t resist the desire to solve the mysteries of how she came to be, to reign, to perish. I’m no exception. I have my own theories, and I won’t hide them. There are so many big questions that remain unanswered that this book would be very unsatisfying if I did not attempt to address them.

Perhaps the biggest question concerns Henry more than Anne herself.
How could he do it?
The execution of a queen was extreme and shocking, even to Anne’s enemies. They may have believed Anne guilty of adultery and treason—and Henry may have too—but even so, it still does not explain Anne’s
execution.
Eleanor of Aquitaine had been banished for the same crimes. Why did Anne have to die? The answer, I believe, is psychological as well as political; to find it, we have to venture—with caution, for his was an era that lived largely by roles rather than by introspection—into Henry’s psyche.

Another unsolved mystery is the relationship itself, which began with such powerful attraction, at least on Henry’s part, and created such havoc in the realm. It is often assumed that Anne, in encouraging Henry’s pursuit, was motivated solely by personal (or perhaps familial) ambition, while Henry was bewitched by her sexual allure. This scenario is a sociobiologist’s dream relationship—woman falls for power and protection, man for the promise of fertility—but ignores how long and at what expense the two hung in there in order to mesh their genes. We know that Henry was intent on finding a new wife to secure the male heir that Katherine, through their seventeen-year marriage, had failed to produce. But why Anne Boleyn? She wasn’t the most beautiful woman at court. She wasn’t royalty and thus able to serve in solidifying foreign relations. She wasn’t a popular choice (to put it mildly) among Henry’s advisers. Yet he pursued her for six years, sending old friends to the scaffold and splitting his kingdom down the middle to achieve legitimacy for the marriage. Surely he could have found a less divisive baby maker among the royalty of Europe?

One enduring answer to the mystery of Henry’s pursuit of Anne portrays her as a medieval Circe, with Henry as her hapless, hormone-driven man toy. This image, besides asking us to believe something outlandish about Henry, is an all too familiar female stereotype. Even the slight evidence we have tells us that Anne’s appeal was more complicated than that of a medieval codpiece teaser. We know, from recorded remarks, that she had a dark, sardonic sense of humor that stayed with her right to the end. We know that she
wasn’t
the great beauty, in her day, that Merle Oberon, Geneviéve Bujold, Natalie Dormer, and Natalie Portman are in ours, and that her fertility signals were weak: Her “dukkys” were quite small, and her complexion was sallow. We know that there was something piquantly “French” about her. Just what that means—today as well as then—is somewhat elusive, but in Anne’s case, it seems to have had a lot to do with her sense of fashion, her excellent dancing skills, and her gracefulness, which according to courtier and poet Lancelot de Carles, made her seem less like “an Englishwoman” than “a Frenchwoman born.”
⁵

Anne the stylish consort is a familiar image. What is less generally familiar, outside of some limited scholarly circles, is Anne the freethinking, reformist intellectual. Both courts at which she spent her teenage years were dominated by some of the most independent, influential women in Europe. Anne spent two years in the household of the sophisticated and politically powerful Archduchess Margaret of Austria, regent of the Netherlands, and then seven years in France, where she came into contact with Marguerite de Navarre, the sister of Francis I. Marguerite was visited by the most famous reformist thinkers of the day and was a kind of shadow queen at Francis’s court; Queen Claude had the babies, but Marguerite, who is sometimes called “the mother of the Renaissance,” ran the intellectual and artistic side of things. Anne spent most of her formative years at Francis’s court and was clearly influenced by Marguerite’s evangelicalism—which in those days meant a deep belief in the importance of a “personal” (rather than a church-mediated) relationship to God, with daily prayer and Bible study as its centerpiece.
⁶

It’s also possible that Marguerite taught Anne, by example, that a woman’s place extended beyond her husband’s bed and that this, ironically, was part of her appeal for Henry. For traditionalists at court, Anne’s having any say in Henry’s political affairs would have been outrageously presumptuous, particularly since Anne was not of royal blood. Henry, however, had been educated alongside his two sisters and was extremely close to his mother; there’s no evidence that he saw Anne’s “interference,” so long as it supported his own aims, as anything other than proof of her queenly potential. In fact, in the six-year-long battle for the divorce, they seem much more like coconspirators than manipulating female and hapless swain. Henry, whose intellect was, in fact, more restless than his hormones (compared to, say, the rapacious Francis), and who was already chafing at the bit of any authority other than his own, may have imagined Anne as someone with whom he could shape a kingdom.

These are pieces of Anne’s life that are like those entwined H’s and A’s that Henry’s revisionist architects didn’t see. But while Henry’s workmen were blinded by haste, we have had centuries to find the missing pieces. Sometimes our failure to see has been the result of political animosity, misogyny, or religious vendetta. Others have wanted to tell a good story and found the facts got in the way. Still others have been too trusting of the conclusions of others. And others didn’t know where or how to look when the trail wandered outside the boundaries of their discipline, time period, or areas of specialization. The Great Hall at Hampton Court is thus for me not just a reminder of Henry’s efforts to erase Anne, but also a metaphor for how later generations have perpetuated that erasure.

This book is
not,
however, a “corrective” biography of Anne that traces her life from birth to death, chronicling all the central events. For that, we already have Eric Ives’s magnum opus,
The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn,
as well as several other excellent biographies. Anyone who wants to find a full narrative of Boleyn’s life should consult those sources. Nor do I enter into specialized scholarly debates, found only in academic journals. What you
will
find here, in the first part of the book, is some cultural detective work into what I see as the soft spots—the missing pieces, the too-readily-accepted images, the biases, the absence of some key cultural context—in the existing literature, along with some theories of my own, based on the six years of research I’ve conducted for this book. Although not meant to be straight “history,” I have organized it chronologically and have attempted to provide enough historical detail to create a coherent backstory. That section, called Queen, Interrupted, concludes with Boleyn’s death.

The second part, Recipes for “Anne Boleyn,” and the third, An Anne for All Seasons, comprise a cultural history not of her life, but of how she has been imagined and represented over the centuries since her death, from the earliest attackers and defenders, to the most recent novels, biographies, plays, films, television shows, and websites. Readers whose image of Anne has been shaped by the recent media depictions and novels may be surprised at the variety of “Annes” who have strutted through history; I know I was. My annoyance with popular stereotypes was one reason why I started this book; I expected it to be a critical exposé of how thoroughly maligned and mishandled she has been throughout the centuries. But the truth is not so simple. Anne has been less the perpetual victim of the same old sexist stereotyping than she has been a shape-shifting trickster whose very incompleteness in the historical record has stirred the imaginations of different agendas, different generations, and different cultural moments to lay claim to their “own” Boleyn. In cutting her life so short and then ruthlessly disposing of the body of evidence of her “real” existence, Henry made it possible for her to live a hundred different lives, forever.

PART I: Queen, Interrupted

1

Why You Shouldn’t Believe Everything You’ve Heard About Anne Boleyn

“F
OR WEEKS ANNE
, like the goddess of the chase, had pursued her rival. She bullied Henry; she wheedled; she threatened; and most devastatingly, she cried. Her arrows pierced his heart and hardened his judgement. It was how she had destroyed Wolsey. Now she would remove Katherine.”
¹

Is this a quotation from Philippa Gregory’s novel
The Other Boleyn Girl,
with its desperate, vengeful Anne? Or perhaps a fragment from Catholic propagandist Nicholas Sander’s famously vitriolic portrait of Anne in
The Rise and Growth of the Anglican Schism
? Directions from the shooting script of an episode from the first season of
The Tudors
television series? No, the description was written by one of the twentieth century’s most respected and admired historians of the Tudor era, and it comes from a book that is advertised as “biography” and lauded, on the back cover, as “a masterful work of history.”

There’s no doubting David Starkey’s expertise or his ability to juice up the dry bones of the historical record with the narrative drive and color of a novel. It’s one of the main reasons his books like
Six Wives
(2004) are so popular; people enjoy them. They are less likely to recognize, though (it’s obscured by that label of authority: “historian”), that Starkey is creating a dramatic fantasy of what Anne thought, said, and did—and an equally creative fantasy about the impact her actions had on Henry. Starkey doesn’t have any proof that Anne bullied or shed tears in order to get her way with Henry; and his theory that the hardening of Henry’s character was due to Anne’s manipulation is just that—a theory. The idea that it was Anne who engineered Wolsey’s fall is speculation. The evidence for the portrait he paints—and it
is
a painting, though he presents it as documentary—would never pass muster in a modern court of law, for it is slender to begin with and is nestled in the gossip and hearsay of some highly biased sources. As such, Starkey might have legitimately presented it as a case that can be made. Instead, he delivers Anne’s motivation, moral character, and effect on Henry to us as though it were established fact.

Starkey is hardly alone in mixing fact and fantasy in his accounts of the life and death of Anne Boleyn. Not everyone tells the same story. But few historians or biographers acknowledge just how much of what they are doing
is
storytelling. It’s unavoidable, of course, for writers not to string facts together along some sort of narrative thread that, inevitably, has a point of view. But when it comes to Anne Boleyn, the narrative threads are more like lawyers’ briefs that argue for her sinfulness or saintliness while (like any good lawyer’s argument) cloaked in the grammar of “fact.” In the old days, the arguments were up-front: Paul Friedmann, in his 1884 biography, boldly states: “Anne was not good. She was incredibly vain, ambitious, unscrupulous, coarse, fierce, and relentless.”
²
James Froude, who followed in 1891 with a pro-Protestant defense of Henry’s divorce proceedings, did not extend his sympathies to Anne, although she was much more devotedly anticlerical than Henry: “Henry was, on the whole, right; the general cause for which he was contending was a good cause . . . [but] [h]e had stained the purity of his action by intermingling with it a weak passion for a foolish and bad woman, and bitterly he had to suffer for his mistake.”
³
Henry William Herbert charged Anne with responsibility for every death that occurred during the years she was Henry’s consort; with her ascension in Henry’s eyes, “Wolsey’s downfall was dated . . . [and] likewise may be dated the death-sentence of the venerable Fisher, bishop of Rochester, and of the excellent Sir Thomas More; for they had both given opinions adverse to the divorce, and although they continued to hold office, and even apparently to enjoy the royal favor, they were both inscribed on the black-list of the revengeful mistress, who never rested from her ill offices toward them, until their heads had fallen.”
⁴
More current prosecutors rely more on rhetoric than bald statements such as these. Starkey, for example, never actually accuses Anne of murder, but he certainly paints her as capable of it. Here he describes Anne’s reaction to Henry’s beheading of Thomas More, which has left her craving the blood of Katherine and her daughter, Mary, too: