The Creation of Anne Boleyn (24 page)

Chapuys knew, as we’ve seen, about Cromwell’s duplicity regarding Anne, as he himself had been encouraged to do everything he could to turn the king against her, and had done so with relish. (When he heard that Anne blamed him for her ruin, he told his friend Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle that he was “flattered.”
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) Yet it seems that he did not expect it to happen by means of invented charges. Cromwell, on the other hand, bragged to Chapuys, in June, that because of the “displeasure and anger” he had incurred with the king after his diplomatic efforts had failed, he had “set himself to arrange the plot (
a fantasier et conspirer led. affaire
)” against Anne.
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It had “taken a great deal of trouble” but now that Anne was dead, he assured Chapuys, “matters would be more easily arranged than before.”
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Chief among those “matters” was the reinstating of Princess Mary. Chapuys was doubtful, still fearing “the obstinacy of the King towards the Princess.”
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And indeed, Chapuys’ instincts were better than Cromwell’s on this score (or, more likely, Cromwell was spinning things in the best light for Charles’s consumption). For even with Anne dead, Henry continued to demand that Mary accept the invalidity of his marriage to her mother and warned Jane Seymour, when she expressed sympathy with the Catholic rebels who, among other things, were Mary’s champions, that her predecessor had died “in consequence of meddling too much with state affairs,” implying that she should take care that the same thing not happen to her.
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Insisting that others bow to his will, clearly, had become more important to Henry than personal history, blood relations, emotional bonds, or even international alliances. Perhaps it had always been that way for him. Or perhaps—I believe this to be more likely—he was feeling greater and greater need to bolster his authority, which was no longer ensured by the free love of his subjects, but had to be bolted down through absolute submission. He was no longer the dashing and generous young king, bringing learning, light, and intellectual freedom into the realm, but a destroyer of two wives, a callous father, and a plunderer of monasteries who could not endure any dissent from his wishes and decrees. The less love he felt from his subjects, the more he needed the oaths and genuflections to his authority; the more acts of tyranny that followed, the less he was loved—a vicious circle.

In private, people had begun to doubt the justice of what had been done to Anne, George, Norris, Brereton, Weston, and Smeaton. Alexander Ales, a Scottish Protestant theologian and friend of Cranmer’s, who resided in court at the time but who could not bear to go to the executions himself,
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had dinner with his landlord and some of the spectators the night of Anne’s beheading. The charges, evidence, and outcome were being discussed; it had become the hot topic of the day, as the verdict of the O. J. Simpson trial was among twentieth-century observers. Charge by charge, the dinner guests took apart the evidence and found it lacking, concluding that “no probable suspicion of adultery could be collected; and that therefore there must have been some other reason which moved the king”—the desire for a male heir, Anne’s interference in negotiations with Spain and Germany,
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his fear that the Catholic princes of Europe would band together against him, and so on. None of them knew yet about Jane Seymour.
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In the middle of the conversation, a servant of Cromwell’s arrived, and when asked for news, he replied cynically that just as the queen had betrayed the king by “enjoying herself with others” so now “while the Queen was being beheaded, [the king] was enjoying himself with another woman.”
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The other dinner guests were shocked and disbelieving—but, of course, they soon found out that it was true, for even as they dined, the king was already betrothed to his third wife.

Ales, who was sympathetic to Anne because of her reformist activities, recounted this story in a 1558 letter to Anne’s daughter, Queen Elizabeth, and was one of the first to speak openly (and, due to Elizabeth’s accession, quite safely) of his high regard for Anne. By then, Ales was convinced that Anne had been the victim of a conspiracy of papists (Chapuys as well as various bishops) who were responsible for all “the hatred, the treachery, and the false accusations laid to the charge of that most holy Queen, your most pious mother.”
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Ales was not exactly right about this. Although the hostility (and in Chapuys’ case, machinations) of papists certainly contributed to Anne’s fall, it is now generally agreed that it was Cromwell who engineered the coup, with or without the instigation of the king. Cromwell was a reformist, and he and Anne had once been collaborators of a sort in bringing reformist ideas to court. But Cromwell was a pragmatist, raised in the school of very hard knocks, and he looked after himself above all else.

Whomever one thought responsible for the plot, once the facts were assembled, it required a defiance of reason to believe in Anne’s guilt. Reason, however, has never played a very large part in attitudes toward Anne. Henry’s first successor (Edward VI, his son by Jane Seymour), no doubt influenced by his father’s version of things, bitterly described Anne as “more inclined to couple with a number of courtiers rather than reverencing her husband.”
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Edward may have sincerely believed this, but he and his chief minister, John Dudley, also had political motives. Because they were intent on skipping over Mary and Elizabeth in the line of succession,
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it suited their purposes that Elizabeth’s mother remain the Great Whore in people’s eyes.

When Edward’s appointed successor (and very Protestant) Lady Jane Grey was executed, in a coup d’état even more staggeringly swift and brutal than Cromwell’s against Anne, and with the aggressively Catholic (and still resentful) Mary Tudor on the throne, there was little chance that Anne’s reputation would be rehabilitated. Mary had been badly treated by Anne—while awaiting her death, Anne confessed that this was the one thing that she repented of and wished to apologize for—and had seen her mother and her mother’s religion moved from an unassailable position in her father’s life to an obstacle in the way of his authority and his love life. Virtually abandoned by her father, forbidden to see her mother, she had formed close bonds with Eustace Chapuys, who brought her his own version of events, which cast Anne as Mary’s would-be poisoner. According to Jane Dormer (a lady-in-waiting to Mary when she was queen), Mary never stopped believing that this had been the case, and she also was convinced—or at least, made a great public show of insisting—that Elizabeth was the daughter of Anne and Mark Smeaton. Mary’s eventual husband, Philip II of Spain, came from a country that was not only devoutly Catholic but fiercely anti-Anne. Fed by Chapuys’ portrait of the satanic schemer who spent half her time thinking of ways to get rid of Katherine and Mary, and the other half of her time plotting to spread the Lutheran heresy throughout the world, the Spanish saw Anne as a militant offender against church and state, with Mary as the great avenger of her mother and defender of the faith. It was likely that Mary hated Anne to her dying breath, and it was thus prudent for those who had a different view to remain silent during her reign.

Elizabeth’s ascension to the throne brought Anne’s Protestant defenders out of the closet, determined not just to exonerate her of the charges that brought her down, but also to create a new martyr to their cause. Alexander Ales, who wrote to Elizabeth about the dinner-table discussion and who in the same letter tells a memorable story about Anne and Henry quarreling near the end, with Elizabeth in her “sainted mother’s arms” as Anne beseeched the immovable Henry for sympathy, declared that “True religion in England had its commencement and its end with your mother,” and vowed to write the true history of her death “to afford consolation to the godly.”
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John Foxe went several hundred steps further in the monumental
The Acts and Monuments of the Church
(better known as the
Book of Martyrs
), the 1563 edition of which (one of the four that Foxe revised and enlarged over his lifetime) was dedicated to Elizabeth. An earlier tribute to Anne, printed in 1559, had praised her beauty as well as her “many great gifts of a well instructed spirit: gentleness, modesty and piety toward all (particularly toward those who were in dire poverty) and most especially, a zeal for sincere religion.”
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In the 1563 version, Foxe credits Anne with much more, asserting that papal power in England “began utterly to be abolished, by the reason and occasion of the most virtuous and noble lady, Anne Bullen . . . by whose godly means and most virtuous council, the king’s mind was daily inclined better and better,” and detailing Anne’s charitable activities and support of reformist authors, including her introducing Henry to Simon Fish’s
Supplication for the Beggars.
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Ironically, the Protestants and Catholics were in agreement with regard to the significance of Anne’s influence in what Protestants called “the English Reformation” and Catholics called “the Anglican Schism.” But after the emphasis on her important role all agreement ends. The difference between “reforming” and fomenting a “schism” pretty much tells it all. Where Foxe (and William Latymer, Anne’s chaplain, whose own work in praise of Anne provided much of Foxe’s information) saw Anne’s efforts as a heroic accomplishment for which she paid with her life, Catholic polemicists such as Nicholas Sander saw her as a harlot and seductress who led Henry into heresy, filled the court with fellow heretics, and gave birth, both literally and metaphorically, to the most monstrous heresy of all: Elizabeth. Sander’s book,
Schismatis Anglicani (The Rise and Growth of the Anglican Schism),
which was written expressly to provide a counterhistory to Foxe’s account of Henry’s and Mary’s reigns, is especially important to the creation and international spread of some of the most enduring myths about Anne. Although originally published in Latin (1585), it had a lively, colloquial style bursting with salacious tales about the Tudor royalty and colorful analogies to well-known Bible stories; and it was quickly translated into French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, and Spanish. Described as “the basis of every [subsequent] Roman Catholic history,” it was even turned into a school play (called
Henricus Octavus!
), which was performed in Louvain (the home of Sander and many other self-imposed exiles from Elizabeth’s England) in 1624.
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Unlike Chapuys, whose letters to Charles had shied away from explicit references to Anne’s sexuality and physical appearance, Sander, as we’ve seen, wallowed in descriptions of Anne’s body as the deformed but alluring gateway that ensnared Henry and led him through the doors of heresy. Of course, “monster Anne” was a fantasy. It would have been unthinkable for Henry to have taken as his queen a woman whose beauty was so “corrupted” by deformity—or as promiscuous as Sander, who confuses Anne with her sister, makes her out to be. Whether Mary’s reputation was deserved or not (and Alison Weir has claimed, recently, that it was not), it was Mary Boleyn, not Anne (as Sander has it), who was nicknamed the “English mare”—according to the gossip—for having been mounted so often while at the French court. But for Sander, the entire tribe of Boleyn women was a spreading miasma of shameless sexuality. Anne, he claims, was actually the offspring of her mother and Henry VIII! (“A claim,” comments one contemporary critic, “that must have startled even the most cynical Catholic reader.”
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)

Sander’s influence on ideas about Anne has been deep and wide, providing a blueprint for dozens of later representations, even in portrayals that are more sympathetic to Anne, in no small part because they strike an archetypal chord. The idea that she had black hair, which has its origins in Sander, has persisted, in cartoons and contemporary art, and in other imaginative depictions. (In
The Tudors
shooting script, Anne is described as “a very beautiful woman with jet-black hair.”
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) And the sixth finger has been pretty firmly established in popular lists of historical trivia. In Spain, Sander’s influence has been especially enduring. For hundreds of years the annual Corpus Christi festival in Toledo featured a float with a
tarasca
(or monster) represented by a small female figure known as “Ana Bolena.” Spanish playwright Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s 1627 drama,
The Schism in England
, which takes all its main ideas about Anne from Sander, portrays Henry, at the end, railing against Anne: “That woman, that fierce animal, that blind enchantment, false sphinx, that basilisk, that poisonous serpent, that enraged tigress, Anne Boleyn, arrest her!”
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In Spain, Katherine remains the legitimate wife and protector of the true religion; Anne the heretical usurper.

The first prominent Protestant response to Sander came from George Wyatt, grandson of the poet, who begins his defense of Anne with an all-out attack on the “see of Rome” in the “full tide of all wickedness,” “outrageous corruptions and foaming filth”—and goes on to celebrate “the bright beams of [Anne’s] clearness,” in trying to further “the blessed splendor of the Gospel.”
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The point of his book, he tells the reader, is to dispel the “black mists of malice . . . instructed to cover and overshadow her glory with their most black and venomous untruths.”
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As we’ve seen, he challenges Sander’s physical descriptions of Anne point by point, admitting when there was a small basis in fact—such as Anne’s vestigial nail—and, like Foxe, he praises Anne for her numerous virtues, including her support for reformist writing and activity,
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and exonerates her from all charges of adultery and treason, declaring them “incredible” and “by the circumstances impossible” (which was true).
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Unfortunately, the circulation of Wyatt’s counter-Sander manuscript, unlike Sander’s book, was highly limited until the beginning of the nineteenth century, when it was printed along with the first published edition of Cavendish’s
The Life of Cardinal Wolsey.
The latter had been written in 1641, during Mary’s reign, but was widely circulated before that in manuscript form, contributing in its own way to the anti-Boleyn mythology. Cavendish was more intent on praising his former master’s life than he was on smearing Anne, but smear Anne he did, blaming Anne for Wolsey’s downfall and portraying her as the “instrument” of Venus, a beautiful temptress who was relatively innocent in the beginning, but grew hungry for jewels and power once she realized “the great love that [the king] bare her in the bottom of his stomach.”
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