The Creation of Anne Boleyn (40 page)

It’s Gregory’s insistence on her meticulous adherence to history that most aggravates the scholars.
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Both Margaret George and Hilary Mantel, in contrast to Gregory, make the fictional status of their novels clear. George includes a guide to what is factual and what is invented in her books. “Readers seem to really want that—they need to know whether this or that scene really happened, or where certain information came from. I think more and more writers are asking that it be included.”
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Mantel, in an e-mail exchange with me, described
Wolf Hall
not as “history” but as “part of a chain of literary representation.”
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In an author’s note to
Bring Up the Bodies,
her sequel to
Wolf Hall,
Mantel describes that book as “making the reader a proposal, an offer” of “how a few crucial weeks might have looked from Thomas Cromwell’s point of view.”
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She warns the reader against taking her as “claiming authority.” Gregory’s website, in contrast, intones the mantra that the hallmarks of her writing are “her love for history and commitment to historical accuracy.”
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“I’m passionate about getting things right,” she says in a 2008 interview.
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(The example she gives: a “long investigation of precisely when riding sidesaddle first became known in England.”
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) On closer inspection, however, it seems as though her research isn’t all that extensive. She (rightly) derides those who rely on Wikipedia and considers herself someone who has “all the complexity of having read twenty different sources.” But twenty sources, for someone writing history, would barely make a dent in the “complexity” she brags she’s achieved. I’m a relative newcomer to this Tudor world, and I have hundreds of books in my office, hundreds more articles in my filing cabinets, and a computer desktop that’s so crowded with Tudor documents and pictures that I need the biggest iMac just to have the room to write my book.

I wouldn’t be hammering away at Gregory if it were only her arrogance at issue. But the fact is that many of her readers take her at her word and consider
The Other Boleyn Girl
to be a historically accurate re-creation of events that actually happened. I’ve gotten plenty of direct evidence of this from audiences at my talks when I ask the opening question: “What do you know about Anne Boleyn?” “Six fingers” comes first (one myth Gregory isn’t responsible for). Then: “She slept with her brother.” “She gave birth to a deformed child.” Sometimes people will argue with me over the “facts” that they’ve learned from the book. As a Tudor blogger wrote, “The novel’s portrayal of Anne as promiscuous, immoral and thoroughly nasty, I think, is what most people came away from TOBG assuming must have been more or less true . . . [P]eople find it impossible or improbable that a novelist would claim historical credibility but would then make up SO much about one of the most famous women in British history.”
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Even members of my Facebook page—unusually well educated in things Tudor—frequently admit that before they began to delve deeper into the history, Philippa Gregory was their authority.

I completely took TOBG as fact when first reading it in tenth grade! I had no real background knowledge on Anne before reading it, so I took what the book said as fact, especially after reading the author’s note. Ms. Gregory is a very good and CONVINCING author, and it took me reading some other books afterwards to “detox” Gregory’s Anne from my mind!
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This reader eventually got “detoxed” and learned “not to take historical fiction at face value.” And to be fair to Gregory, she often does “bring history to life” for many readers, sparking interest in the periods she writes about and inspiring further research. Parents praise Gregory for luring their teenaged daughters out of the mall and into an appreciation for history, and teachers credit her novels with humanizing historical figures for their students.

One learns to put themselves in their shoes and start asking hard questions about the people, the times, and about themselves. Ultimately, historical fiction creates an interest in the actual events, and a need to learn more. I have done more research, just out of curiosity, after reading a novel than I would have ever thought. Reading historical fiction has caused me to become a more informed person, and a great success at trivia games. As a teacher, I love them as a way to spark enthusiasm in my students. They make the facts come alive.
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The problem with “the facts coming alive” in Gregory’s books, however, is that her most ardent fans do not distinguish between well-researched trivia of the sort that can give you an advantage in board games and the lively—and perhaps “humanizing” but inaccurate—“facts” about what the characters said and did. Neither, it appears, does Gregory, who seems to believe that knowledge about manners, dress, food, or the bad breath of the pretoothpaste Tudors is enough to keep her novels grounded in historical fact. Sometimes Gregory’s training in literature sneaks up on her, and she suddenly becomes more seemingly aware of the dangers of verisimilitude. I was surprised when I read a recent scholarly piece by Gregory to find her decrying “putting a convincing lie on the record.”
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“A convincing lie,” she writes, “is a wicked thing because it replaces the truth. If a lie is told with conviction and accepted as the sound coin of fact then no one will question it. It becomes something we all think that we know. It becomes something we rely on. It becomes the self-evident fact.”
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It’s a thoughtful comment—but it’s very puzzling that Gregory does not see that her own work is guilty of that.

The seductions of the “convincing lie” have become even more acute in our media-dominated, digitally enhanced era in which people are being culturally trained to have difficulty distinguishing between created “realities” and the real thing. If the created reality is vivid and convincing enough (whether it is a flawless computer-generated complexion or a “spin” on events), it carries authority—and that’s the way advertisers and politicians want it. The movies, which are often extremely attentive to historical details, creating a highly realistic texture for the scaffolding surrounding the actions of the characters, make it even harder for audiences to draw the line. Directors, who are, after all, focused on entertaining rather than educating, may not
want
audiences to draw that line. Critic Thomas Sutcliffe describes Peter Morgan as “brilliant at sidestepping the usual shrieking reflex of anxiety about mixing fantasy and truth.”
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The novelists I interviewed would agree that too much “anxiety” about the fact/fiction divide would make the work of historical fiction impossible. Margaret George laughingly told me about overhearing someone say, about her
The Autobiography of Henry VIII,
“This is just a lie! Henry VIII never wrote an autobiography!”
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But George also expressed concern that in an age when most people get their history from TV and movies, we are losing our collective sense of “what really happened.” As I write this, a controversy about this loss has been freshly stirred up by Roland Emmerich’s movie
Anonymous,
which suggests that Edward de Vere, the seventeenth earl of Oxford, was the real author of Shakespeare’s plays. Although among most Shakespeare scholars “the idea has roughly the same currency as the faked moon landing does among astronauts,” former English literature professor Stephen Marche worries that thanks to the movie, “undergraduates will be confidently asserting that Shakespeare wasn’t Shakespeare for the next 10 years at least, and profs will have to waste countless hours explaining the obvious.”
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For thoughtful creators of fiction (whether written or cinematic), “shrieking anxiety” and “anything goes” are not the only alternatives. There’s the responsible middle ground of recognizing that there is an unavoidable tension between the demands of history and the requirements of fiction. As Hilary Mantel puts it:

You have to think what you owe to history. But you also have to think what you owe to the novel form. Your readers expect a story. And they don’t want it to be two-dimensional, barely dramatized. So (and this is queasy ground) you have to create interiority for your characters. Your chances of guessing their thoughts are slim or none; and yet there is no reality left, against which to measure your failure.

Fiction is commonly more persuasive than history texts. After
Wolf Hall
was published, I was constantly being asked, “Was Thomas More really like that? We thought he was a really nice man!” I could only answer, “I am trying to describe how he might have appeared if you were standing in the shoes of Thomas Cromwell, who, incidentally, did not dislike him.” But of course what I was really up against was
A Man for All Seasons
: the older fiction having accreted authority, just by being around for two generations. When I say to people, “Do you really think More was a 1960s liberal?” they laugh. “Of course not.” But (again, for the sake of honesty) you constantly have to weaken your own case, by pointing out to people that all historical fiction is really contemporary fiction; you write out of your own time.
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The Return of Chapuys’ Anne

“All historical fiction is really contemporary fiction.”
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Mantel’s remark is also a premise of this book. But historians and biographers write “out of their own time” too. And although it may be more subtly done, some of the most popular historians of our own time are not all that far from Gregory’s perspective on Anne as a ruthless human predator. I earlier quoted David Starkey, whose bloodthirsty Anne hunts down all enemies and rejoices at their deaths. More recently, perhaps influenced by the more balanced assessments of Eric Ives, Suzannah Lipscomb, David Loades, and others, Starkey has been making Anne-friendly comments in his public lectures. But even as late as the 2009 documentary
Henry VIII: The Mind of a Tyrant,
Starkey goes as far as to credit Anne with having turned Henry from a gentle, poetry-loving Renaissance prince into “something colder, harder, and more brutal.” (This incredible theory, which Starkey also puts forward in his
Six Wives
[2003]
,
makes Anne, in a sense, responsible for her own death, since she was the one who turned Henry into the tyrant who ordained it.) In the documentary, a pair of dark, scheming eyes flashes on the screen—no face, just eyes—when Starkey discusses Anne while Katherine is represented by an open, sweet, smiling face.

Alison Weir, too, is not above using dramatic but unfounded stereotype and rumor to spice up her portrait of Anne. In her 1991
The Six Wives of Henry VIII,
she describes Anne as “an ambitious adventuress with a penchant for vengeance”
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who “handled [Henry] with such calculated cleverness that there is no doubt that the crown of England meant more to her than the man through whom she would wear it.”
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No doubt? Really? We don’t have Anne’s letters or, indeed, much of anything said or written by her that has not been filtered through the colored perspectives of her contemporaries. I would say that under such circumstances there isn’t much about which there is “no doubt” except for the recorded events of the birth of Elizabeth and Anne’s execution.
The Lady in the Tower
—by far Weir’s most compelling book—is focused less on assessing Anne’s character than in detailing the plot against her, but even so, there are moments when the “ambitious adventuress with a penchant for violence”
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makes an appearance: “She had hounded Wolsey nigh unto death; she had repeatedly urged Henry to send Katherine of Aragon and Mary, his own daughter, to the scaffold; she had been ruthless against her enemies. Five years earlier, rumor had placed her faction behind an attempt to poison John Fisher . . . and only a couple of months ago, it had been bruited that Katherine of Aragon had been poisoned, and that Anne was the culprit.”
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Weir, like Starkey, has become more Anne-friendly in the last few years. In a 2008 interview, she says that had Anne lived, “she would have gained a reputation as the matriarch of the English Reformation.”
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She credits the reputation Anne has as “the Other Woman in an eternal triangle” as the result of Boleyn’s history being “what it was.”
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By that I assume she means that Anne deserved her reputation. However, it’s not “history” but those who have reported it who have made Anne the disreputable “Other Woman” rather than the mother of the English Reformation, and Weir is hardly blameless. Her own 1991 book—unlike, for example, Eric Ives’s
The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn
(2004)—does not devote more than a few passing references to Anne’s reformist activities and religious sympathies. Then, in her more recent book,
Mary Boleyn
(2011)
,
she revives the old Chapuys-originated rumor that Anne had been sexually “corrupted” at the French court, with no more evidence than Chapuys himself presents—namely, an uncorroborated private conversation he reports having had with Henry
after
Henry had already turned against her. It’s an old story, first retold in Paul Friedmann’s 1884 biography of Anne and having about as much credibility as Henry’s claim (again, reported by Chapuys) that Anne had “criminal connexion” with “upwards of 100 gentlemen” after she had become queen.
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Yet Weir presents it as a bombshell, a freshly researched “discovery.”
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And while she acknowledges that there isn’t any “solid evidence” of the corruption (whatever it entailed, which isn’t specified), she has a handy explanation. “Anne was discreet and clever enough to ensure that barely a soul knew of these early falls from grace.”
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