The Creation of Anne Boleyn (5 page)

Nowadays we would regard someone like Chapuys as a noncredible witness by virtue of his hostility, and his reports little more than hearsay. The most responsible historians, such as Eric Ives and David Loades, take Chapuys’ insistence that Anne was out to murder Katherine and Mary with a large dose of skepticism. They acknowledge that perhaps Anne said such things—although we have no corroborating evidence. Even so, they read more like the incautious, emotional outburst of a frustrated, furious (and then pregnant) woman whose own daughter’s rights were at stake than a real plan to commit murder. If Anne actually had such a plan in mind, why on earth would she announce it at court, especially in earshot of those who might report it to Chapuys, whom she knew to be her adversary?

I came to my research for this book not only as a cultural historian, but as a skeptical reader of texts. As such, I was amazed to discover the degree of reliance on Chapuys for information about Anne’s character and behavior—along with an almost total lack of cautionary qualification, or even clarity, when presenting his version of events. True, Starkey (for example) usually puts quotation marks around Chapuys’ exact words and notes that “Chapuys reported” or “Chapuys discovered” such and such. However, those quotations are so smoothly incorporated into Starkey’s own narrative—Chapuys’ voice blends seamlessly with Starkey’s—that the reader is given no reason to be skeptical of their construction of events. Here, for example, again from the popular
Six Wives
, he describes Anne’s reaction to Henry’s installation of himself as “Supreme Head on Earth of the Church of England”:

When [Anne] heard the news, Chapuys discovered, “[she] made such demonstrations of joy as if she had actually gained Paradise.”
⁵⁰

How are we to take the phrase “Chapuys discovered”? It sounds less like the offering of one observer’s impressions than the reporting of established fact. “Discoveries” unearth what is
there,
after all. And with Anne so vividly “hunting” and “stalking” her prey throughout Starkey’s narrative, a not-very-historically-informed reader—that would be most of Starkey’s readers, as he is not interested in courting the academics but rather the general audience—probably doesn’t even notice that Starkey’s predatory Anne is largely based on Chapuys’ dispatches.

Starkey is hardly alone here. It’s virtually standard operating procedure for historians to warn the reader, in an introduction or the beginning of a chapter, about Chapuys’ biases and tendencies to believe the most vicious court gossip about Anne, and then go on to use him liberally and without qualification all the same. Sometimes there is a barely noticeable hedge, as in the popular histories of Alison Weir:

If Chapuys is to be believed—and it was a constant theme in his dispatches—Anne had “never ceased, day and night, plotting against” Mary, and had relentlessly, but fruitlessly, urged Henry to have his daughter and her mother executed for their defiance under the provisions of the Act of Supremacy of 1534. The ambassador heard that she had repeatedly threatened that, if the King were to go abroad and leave her as regent, she would have Mary starved to death, “even if she were burned alive for it after.”
⁵¹

But
is
Chapuys to be believed? Barely six pages earlier, Weir warns that for generations historians have relied “perhaps too trustingly” on Chapuys’ diplomatic reports.
⁵²
Weir acknowledges that he hated Anne, was a “crusader in the cause of Katherine and Mary,”
⁵³
was “unable to view affairs from any other viewpoint,”
⁵⁴
and often repeated gossip or rumor (which swirled a great deal around court) as fact. Yet she herself takes many of his reports at face value—for example, his claim that Anne had repeatedly urged Henry to send Katherine and Mary to the scaffold (we only have Chapuys’ word on this). And, when it helps to fill out her own narrative, Weir does not hesitate to rely on Chapuys’ descriptions of what Henry did and felt.

In 1536, a disillusioned Henry told Chapuys in confidence that his wife had been “corrupted” in France, and that he had only realized this after their marriage.
⁵⁵

It’s easy for the reader to overlook the fact that Weir only “knows” that Henry was “disillusioned” about Anne’s “corruption” because Chapuys says so. Conveniently for Chapuys (and Weir), Henry told him this “in confidence,” so there’s no way of fact-checking. And even if Chapuys was being truthful, there’s a good possibility that
Henry’s
information was not trustworthy. This was a period, very near to Anne’s fall, when outlandish rumors and malicious plotting swirled unchecked in court, and Henry’s paranoid imagination seemed inflamed beyond concern for proof; in another letter written during this period, Chapuys reports that Henry told him that “upwards of 100 gentlemen have had criminal connexion”
⁵⁶
with Anne. These bits and pieces of lurid gossip have to be read skeptically.

Instead, the slippage that turned this unsubstantiated report into the grammar of fact has gathered steam. In her more recent biography of Anne’s sister, Mary, Weir cites what she now calls Henry’s “revelation” that Anne had been corrupted in France as
evidence
that Anne had, in fact, been sexually active at the French court. If this is so, then why don’t we have more documentation about her scandalous behavior there? Weir’s explanation: “Evidently Anne was discreet and clever enough to ensure that barely a soul knew of these early falls from grace.”
⁵⁷
In other words, Anne Boleyn’s “corruption” in France, told to Chapuys “in confidence” and (because Anne was so very discreet and clever) witnessed by no one, is uncorroborated from beginning to end.

Multiply this slippage by a hundred of its like and you can see why you shouldn’t believe everything you’ve heard about Anne Boleyn.

2

Why Anne?

W
HEN HENRY BEGAN
divorce proceedings in 1527, many (including the pope) saw Henry’s seemingly sudden qualms about the legitimacy of his first marriage, based on a passage in Leviticus declaring it to be an “impurity” if a “man shall take his brother’s wife,” to be a ruse, putting a pious spin on what was really just lust.
¹
In 1510, Pope Julius II had granted Henry dispensation to marry Katherine despite the consanguinity of their relations. Now Henry wanted that dispensation declared invalid. It seemed all too conveniently timed. In 1526, Henry began to wear a provocative new motto on his jousting costume: “
Declare je nos
” (Declare I dare not), with a heart engulfed in flames embroidered about the words. The woman who had set his heart ablaze was Anne Boleyn. By 1527, he was writing her letters describing being “stricken with the dart of love” for more than a year.
²
The signature of these letters was sometimes accompanied by a tiny heart. The manly king—thirty-six years old, vigorous, physically imposing, brilliant, and charismatic—had become a trembling schoolboy passing notes to an imperious crush.

It’s unlikely that many at court, in 1526, saw marriage on the horizon. Anne was not the daughter of royalty; although her mother, Elizabeth Howard, came from an illustrious family, her father, Thomas Boleyn, the son of an alderman, had achieved a place at court by virtue of his skills as a courtier and linguist. Anne’s older sister, Mary, thought by many to be the prettier of the two, had already been courted and discarded by the king. And the still youthful Henry had indulged in other infatuations over the years. But a year later, it was clear that Anne was hovering in the background of the divorce proceedings, as Henry’s longtime adviser and Lord Chancellor, Thomas Wolsey, anxiously assured the pope that he would stake his own soul that the king’s “conscience is grievously offended” by living in a marriage that was contrary to God’s law and that his “desire is grounded in justice” rather than displeasure with the queen or “undue love to a gentlewoman of not so excellent qualities.”
³
Covering all his bases, though, Wolsey then went on to praise Anne for the “purity of her life, her constant virginity, her maidenly and womanly pudicity, her soberness, chasteness, meekness, humility, wisdom, descent of right noble and high through regal blood, education in all good and laudable [qualities] and manners, aptness to procreation of children with her other infinite good qualities, more to be regarded and esteemed than the only progeny.”
⁴
Except for the good education, these are not exactly the qualities that we associate with Anne Boleyn. Tudor statesmen and diplomats, much like politicians today, were bald-faced spinmeisters, and at this point, Wolsey was spinning madly for Henry.

It’s true, though, that Henry had been thinking about a divorce from his first wife long before Anne Boleyn entered the picture. During the first four years of their marriage—from 1510 to 1514—Katherine had given birth to three stillborn infants—one girl and two boys—and a boy who lived for less than two months. It was beginning to look as though the couple’s chances of producing a healthy child were grim. By as early as August of 1514, it was rumored in Rome “that the King of England means to repudiate his present wife, the daughter of the King of Spain and his brother’s widow, because he is unable to have children by her, and intends to marry a daughter of the French Duke of Bourbon.”
⁵
But then, in 1516, Princess Mary was born, and Henry’s hopes were revived. “We are both young; if it was a daughter this time, by the Grace of God the sons will follow,” he is reported to have said.
⁶
But the next child was stillborn, and Henry began wondering once again whether he had offended God by marrying his brother’s wife. Leviticus declares that such a union will be childless, which Henry and Katherine were not, but Henry, whose religious conscience was always filtered through his dynastic concerns, didn’t see Mary as “counting.” It wasn’t so much that, as a woman, she was seen as unfit to rule, but, as a woman, she would have another “ruler” herself—her husband—and this raised dangerous possibilities for the continuance of Tudor supremacy. If she married a foreign prince, English autonomy could be threatened; if she married an English subject, internal dissension could result. Only a male heir would keep the Tudor reign intact and secure.

It’s not clear why there isn’t any mention of other pregnancies after the last stillbirth. The official word was that Katherine was “of such an age” that pregnancy was no longer possible—which is believable by 1525, when she was forty, but seems unlikely in 1519. Katherine had no trouble conceiving before then, and in 1519 she was only thirty-four. Her stillbirths, in an age when shutting the queen up in a hot, dark room for a month was the extent of “prenatal care” and when more children died than lived through infancy, are not remarkable. When he later appealed to the pope for the divorce, Wolsey referred to “certain diseases in the Queen defying all remedy” that prevented the king from living with her “as his wife.”
⁷
Wolsey would not say what those “diseases” were, but the truth may be that Henry had stopped having regular sex with her long before she actually entered menopause. Katherine was eight years older than he was, which probably was exciting when he first married her, as Henry was then virtually a boy and, as the precious “spare” heir, had been sheltered like a princess after Arthur died. But by 1520 he was “in the flower of his age,”
⁸
while Katherine, at thirty-five, was middle-aged by the standards of the time. Also, in 1519 Henry had gotten decisive proof that a male child was possible with a woman other than Katherine when his mistress, Elizabeth Blount, had a boy.

Why did Henry, if he had given up on the marriage by 1520, hang on with Katherine for seven more years? There is widespread historical belief that about this time Henry began a four-year-long affair with Mary Boleyn, Anne’s older sister, and possibly this affair took the pressure off his marriage to satisfy his sexual and emotional needs. But Katherine was also not someone to discard lightly. Just as her marriages to Arthur and then Henry were intended to solidify relations with Spain, a divorce would destabilize them. And Katherine was extremely popular with the English people. Regal, dignified, and unfalteringly virtuous in all her daily habits (which involved much time at prayer), she was everything a queen was supposed to be; Venetian ambassador Ludovico Falieri describes her as “more beloved by the Islanders than any queen that has ever reigned.”
⁹
Henry was aware of this, and he probably also knew, as others did not, how proud and stubborn she could be.