The Creation of Anne Boleyn (22 page)

Henry VIII . . . was basically the Brad Pitt of his day when he was younger . . . Yet he is most remembered for being gluttonous, impaired and executing wives.

What happened?

Research conducted by bioarchaeologist Catrina Banks Whitley . . . and anthropologist Kyra Kramer, leads them to speculate that the numerous miscarriages suffered by Henry’s wives could be explained if the king’s blood carried the Kell antigen . . . If Henry also suffered from McLeod syndrome, a genetic disorder specific to the Kell blood group, it would finally provide an explanation for his shift in both physical form and personality from a strong, athletic, generous individual in his first 40 years to the monstrous paranoiac he would become, virtually immobilized by massive weight gain and leg ailments.

“It is our assertion that we have identified the causal medical condition underlying Henry’s reproductive problems and psychological deterioration,” write Whitley and Kramer.
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Pretty confident conclusion. Of course, it could be argued that Katherine’s and Anne’s miscarriages do not really require explanation. The sixteenth century’s version of good nutrition during pregnancy (or during any stage of life) was very different from ours, and would be frowned on by modern medicine. Prenatal care for queens involved isolation in a chamber hung with tapestries covering the walls, doors, and ceilings. (Fresh air was considered unnecessary, even dangerous.) Advice for prenatal bleeding was to avoid “fire, lightning, thunder, with monstrous and hideous aspects and fights of men and beasts, by immoderate joy, sorrow and lamentation.”
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As to Henry’s various ailments, it’s possible that Henry could have suffered from McLeod syndrome, whose symptoms include heart disease, muscular and nerve impairment, and paranoia and mental decline after forty. But, as Retha Warnicke points out, “Could is the big word. It’s an interesting theory and it’s possibly true, but it can’t be proven without some clinical evidence, and there is none.”
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The gap between “could” and “true” widens to the point of absurdity when Whitley and Kramer speculate that their genetic hypothesis “could explain why Henry shifted from supporting Anne to having her beheaded.”
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This is to collapse the three-year trajectory of a politically troubled, emotionally intense marriage into a diagnosis from
House.
Except on the television show, House’s assistants would go scurrying off to perform the blood tests to confirm or disprove the theory, whereas “bioarchaeology,” like evolutionary psychology, is heavy on theory and light on proof.

Ideas about Henry fall into one of two categories. There are the “turning point” theories that see the young Henry and the older Henry as two very different men, with some crisis or set of crises responsible for the change. Lipscomb’s and Starkey’s theories fall into this category, and so does Michael Hirst’s. Hirst, creator of
The Tudors,
described in an interview with me what he views as a shattering of Henry’s psyche brought on by the recognition that he had spent years of his life, shed the blood of friends, and broken with the Church of his childhood, only to be proved mistaken in the supposition that this was what God wanted of him. In this interpretation, Anne’s failure to produce an heir was not just a blow to the security of the Tudor line but also a sign that the hope he had built his entire life around was based on an illusion.

He had attacked the Church on the basis of a love affair, largely. But he felt sure of what he was doing at the time, and Anne had mistakenly promised him a son. After she’d given him a daughter and had the miscarriages, it began to seem to him as though he’d gone horribly wrong. He was plunged back into reality, which is messy and not perfect. And I think that as he confronted the huge seriousness of it, he began to think in weird ways, that she was a witch and so forth. This, of course, shows how juvenile he still was. And he did have an absolutely ruthless streak that his father, too, had possessed. But beyond that, he did suffer a severe psychological crisis, knowing he had been so deluded. He came out of that crisis a much worse person, a complete tyrant and monster, who killed off the best part of himself in the attempt to reconcile his psychological issues.
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Hirst dramatized this transformation with a chilling last scene in the final episode of the second season of
The Tudors.
This was the episode in which Anne is executed, and scenes of her suffering in the Tower were punctuated with the image of Henry, gazing contemplatively at two beautiful swans—creatures known to mate for life—nuzzling in the pond outside the palace. His mood and thoughts are left deliberately ambiguous; perhaps, the viewer imagines, he is thinking back over his love for Anne and the life they shared together, once imagined to be as enduring as that of the swans, perhaps he is having regrets, feeling sorrow for the beauty that is about to be lost? No. After the execution scene, we are immediately taken to the king at his table, looking forward to his breakfast, which is being brought to him in a large gilt tureen on a silver platter. The lid is lifted, and the servants and nobles surrounding Henry gasp and applaud in delight. There on the platter is one of the swans, roasted and decorated with its own beautiful wings, posed as gracefully as if it were still swimming in a lake. Hirst, referencing Charles Laughton’s famous eating scene but giving Henry’s voraciousness a menace missing from Laughton’s comic depiction, has Henry tear off a wing, plunge his hand into the body of the swan, and begin eating, oblivious to the greasy drool spilling from his mouth.

The theory of a great transformation depends, in part, on believing the enthusiastic PR that surrounded Henry when he first came to the throne, at eighteen years of age, and was hailed as ushering in the dawn of a bright new age. Thomas More, on the occasion of Henry’s coronation, wrote a prose poem welcoming him to the throne.

This day marks the limit of our slavery, the beginning of our freedom, the end of sadness, the source of joy . . . Now the people, freed, run before their king with bright faces. Their joy is almost beyond their own comprehension. They rejoice, they exult, they leap for joy and celebrate their having such a king. “The King” is all that any mouth can say.
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More, Greg Walker writes, was implicitly contrasting the erudite, exuberant, generous new king with his father, Henry VII, whom More and many others saw as a calculating, money-hoarding tyrant with little respect for the law and less for his people. Certainly, Henry did everything that he could to dramatize the contrast, forgiving those who had incurred enormous debts under his father and surrounding himself with humanists such as More and Erasmus, who had very strong ideas about what constituted a good prince. In
The Education of a Christian Prince
(1516), which Erasmus had sent to the young Henry, he argues that “whoever wants to bestow on himself the title of prince and wants to escape the hated name of tyrant must win it for himself by benevolent actions and not through fear and threats . . . The tyrant brings it about that everyone is under his thumb, either in law or through informers; the king delights in the freedom of his people.”
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Yet by the end of his reign and in descriptions after his death, “tyrant” was exactly what many were calling Henry, including Sir Walter Raleigh.

If all the pictures and patterns of a merciless prince were lost in the world, they might again be printed to the life out of the story of this king. For how many servants did he advance in haste (but for what virtue no man could suspect) and with the change of his fancy ruined again; no man knowing for what offense? To how many others of more desert gave he abundant flowers from whence to gather honey, and in the end of harvest burnt them in the hive? How many wives did he cut off, as his fancy and affection changed? How many princes of the blood (whereof some of them for age could hardly crawl toward the block) with a world of others of all degrees (of whom our common chronicles have kept the account) did he execute?
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But the contrast between More’s young prince and the tyrant that Raleigh describes does not depend on disbelieving More or postulating a radical change of character in Henry. Walker argues that for his first eighteen years as king, it was easy for Henry to “deliver on the early promise” that More extols. “Avoiding tyranny,” he writes, “was mainly a matter of not oppressing his people with unnecessary financial demands, of being pious, affable, and successful on the battlefield” and welcoming counsel and encouraging their candid advice without fear of retribution.
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So long as Henry and his advisers were on the same page, this was easy to do. But when he launched his “great matter” and found many—perhaps the majority—of his advisers and most of the people in opposition, “the results were wide-ranging and catastrophic.”
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Henry’s apparent equanimity, beneficence, and open-mindedness had depended on there being no challenge to what he wanted. Opposition unleashed the ruthless bully who had, in a sense, been lying in wait behind the carefully crafted posture of the virtuous prince.

There are many indications that, although Henry’s resilience, emotional balance, and temper may have degenerated as he got older, his personality and character were essentially the same from the beginning of his reign to the end. Chief among the characteristics that pop up throughout both early and later descriptions are his unpredictability and capriciousness. Francis I, in 1536, described him as “the hardest friend in the world to bear: sometimes so unstable . . . other times so obstinate and fiercely proud that it is almost impossible to bear with him.”
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That was said during 1536, the year Tudor scholars regard as Henry’s “annus horribilus.” But Thomas More had told a young courtier—in 1520, before any “crisis” had occurred in Henry’s reign—that having fun with the king was like “having fun with tamed lions—often it is harmless, but just as often there is the fear of harm. Often he roars in rage for no known reason, and suddenly the roar becomes fatal. The pleasure you get is not safe enough to relieve you of anxiety. For you it is a great pleasure. As for me, let my pleasure be less great—and safe.”
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George Boker, in his 1850 play, compared Henry to “the shifting sand that tumbles in the tide, taking new form from every wanton surge . . . careening now to passion’s fiery gust, now to the other side prostrated flat by self-styled reason’s icy hurricane.”
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Lacey Baldwin Smith argues that Henry was
always
a man of many faces, a “baffling composite of shifting silhouettes” who could be good-natured, generous, and charming one moment and dangerously cold as stone the next, highly emotional yet rigidly stubborn, a genuine searcher of his conscience for “God’s will” yet able to subordinate all moral scruples and guilt to solidifying his own authority or satisfying his own desires.
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The combination of informal warmth and lethal self-interest meant that even the closest relationships with him were never on solid ground. Thomas More, of all of Henry’s contemporaries, was the most perceptive about the inherent danger of making too much of the king’s outward gestures of affection. He told John Fisher that “[t]he king has a way of making every man feel that he is enjoying his special favor.”
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It may have been a compliment, but it was also a warning. More realized, as he told his son-in-law William Roper, that even though he was favored by the king “more singularly” than any subject in the realm, “I have no cause to be proud thereof, for if my head could win him a castle in France, it should not fail to go.”
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In the end, Henry was just that cavalier with More’s life, although not over a castle in France. Henry had promised, years before, that he would always allow More to avoid any declarations or actions that went against his conscience. But when Henry’s own supremacy was at issue, More’s conscience—and his head—proved to be easily dispensed with. On the day of More’s execution, Henry went hunting in Reading. This was the way Henry dealt with all his executions of old friends and lovers: Go hunting, have a party, be merry. Move on. It may have been a survival mechanism to defend himself against normal human feelings of regret or grief.

The problem with theories that postulate a crisis that turned Henry from a virtuous prince into the sort of man who could order the execution of a wife is that Henry was
always
capable of decisively and irrevocably turning off the switch of affection, love, tender feeling, and shared memories; striking a fatal blow; and refusing to look back. In fact, those whom he loved the most—Wolsey, More, Anne, Cromwell—were most at risk. Because he loved them, they had the most power to disappoint him—and for Henry, disappointment could never be “slight.” All wounds to his authority, his manhood, and his trust were bloody gashes that he could repair only by annihilating the one who inflicted the wound. This, perhaps, is what distinguishes Henry’s pattern from “ordinary” royal imperiousness. Kings execute people. Kings have grandiose ambitions. Kings are threatened by challenges to their authority. Kings can become drunk on power, and often do. But Henry may be unique among famous authoritarian kings in that his close relationships had only two switches: on and off. As Howard Brenton put it in an interview with me, “With Henry, you were either totally in or you were dead. He would have someone close to him, he’d elevate them, and they’d be terrific and virtually run everything on his behalf, and then when something went wrong, or a wind came his way, he would turn 180 degrees against them and they would be out. It happened to Wolsey, it happened to More, it happened to Anne, it happened to Cromwell.”
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Although it didn’t result in their deaths, it happened to Katherine and Mary as well. Mary, in particular, so enraged Henry when she refused, even after Anne was dead, to take the oath recognizing her father as Supreme Head of the Church of England, that Cranmer had to talk him out of ordering her execution.