At Elizabeth’s coronation that year, the Gracechurch Street pageant showed that Anne Boleyn’s image was no longer to remain hidden or forgotten. It was now permissible to speak her name, and to speak it with honor.
One of the first of Anne’s early defenders was an anonymous author who had known her and was writing a defense of her between 1563 and 1570; his work—if it were ever finished—does not survive, and is only known through a reference to it by John Foxe in the 1570 edition of his History of the Acts and Monuments of the Church (popularly known as Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, first published in 1563, and dedicated to Queen Elizabeth). Foxe wrote of Anne: “Because more is also promised to be declared of her virtuous life (the Lord so permitting) by other who were then about her, I will cease in this matter further to proceed.”
John Foxe himself, who once enjoyed the patronage of Mary Howard, Duchess of Richmond, one of Anne’s ladies, was one of the first to refer to Anne as a “godly” woman, “for sundry respects, whatsoever the cause was or quarrel objected against her.” Numbering her among the English martyrs, he wrote that an impenetrable mystery surrounded her fall, but because he expected that to be examined in the work to which he had referred, he did not elaborate himself upon it.9
First, her last words declared no less her faith in Christ than did her modesty utter forth the goodness of the cause, whatsoever it was. Besides that, this also may seem to give a great clearing unto her, that the King, [being] married in his whites [wedding clothes] unto another [so soon after her death] represented a great clearing of her. Certain this was, that for the singular gifts of her mind, so well instructed and given toward God, joined with like gentleness and pity towards men, there hath not been many such queens before her borne the crown of England. Principally, this commendation she left behind her, that during her life the religion of Christ had a right prosperous course. What a zealous defender she was of Christ’s Gospel all the world doth know, and her acts do and will declare to the world’s end. I marvel why Parliament, after the illegitimation of the marriage [was] enacted, should further proceed and charge her with such carnal desires as to misuse herself with her own natural brother, Lord Rochford, and others, being so contrary to all nature that no natural man will believe it.
Nor did the Elizabethans believe it. To them, Anne was a virtual saint. Although she died in the orthodox Catholic faith, she had given impetus and encouragement to the cause of reform, and for this, succeeding generations brought up in the Anglican tradition were prepared to forgive her less endearing deeds. The Protestant scholar John Aylmer, famous as the tutor of Lady Jane Grey, was voicing the new received wisdom when he posed the question, “Was not Queen Anne, the mother of the blessed woman, the chief, first and only cause of banishing the Beast of Rome with all his beggarly baggage?”
“She was a comforter and aider of all the professors of Christ’s Gospels,” George Wyatt wrote. Her charities, benefactions, good works, alms, and “the heavenly flame burning in her” became the chief things that were remembered of her, and he concluded that “this princely lady was elect of God.” It is not surprising, therefore, that Elizabethan chroniclers such as John Stow tended to omit the unpleasant details of Anne’s fall. Instead, she and Henry VIII were portrayed as the righteous victims of Fortune or of unscrupulous, malicious schemers. These views would prevail in England right through the seventeenth century and into the eighteenth, a period during which Elizabeth I’s accession day was celebrated as a national holiday.
William Shakespeare makes no mention of Anne’s fall in his play All is True, or Henry VIII (now thought to have been a collaboration with John Fletcher), which was written around 1613, in the reign of James I, Elizabeth’s successor, and focuses on Henry’s love for “Anne Bullen,” her “gentle mind and heavenly blessings,” her coronation and the triumphant birth of the future Queen Elizabeth. However, when Francis Bacon did touch on the controversial aspects of Anne’s life in The Tragedy of Anne Boleyn, a play that dates probably from the late 1580s, he thought it best to write in cipher. The first part of Bacon’s play is very like Shakespeare’s, but he goes boldly beyond the scope of Henry VIII, portraying Henry’s disappointment in Elizabeth’s sex, his fickle and changeable nature and how it prompted the false charges against Anne, the travesty of her trial, in which scene she is seen conducting herself nobly, and her cruel death.
Bacon wrote several other works in code, but there can be no doubt that this play—which was not deciphered until 1901—was written in that manner because of its sensitive content, which might have offended Elizabeth I, and that it was never actually performed. Clearly, Bacon understood that the matters it dealt with were not to be spoken of. He wrote that such works would “perchance remain in hiding until a future people furnish wits keener than those of our own times to open this heavily barred entranceway and enter the house of treasure. Yet are we in hourly terror lest the Queen, our enemy at present, although likewise our mother, be cognizant of our invention.” All the same, Bacon’s depiction of Anne is sympathetic and in keeping with the Elizabethan tradition. “Every act and scene is a tender sacrifice,” he wrote, “and an incense to her sweet memory.”
It was not until 1720 that modern historical research into the subject of Henry VIII’s wives began. That was when the antiquarian John Strype embarked on the vast task of collecting, collating, and preserving many important contemporary documents. This instituted a new tradition in historical study, which prompted independent analysis that was free—to a decreasing degree—of religious bias. From that time forward, public sympathy for Anne Boleyn began to burgeon, and one can detect in the works of eighteenth-century historians a certain antagonism toward Henry VIII, who was beginning to be regarded as an authoritarian bigot and a cruel lecher.
In the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the developing romantic movement in literature and the arts saw Anne Boleyn elevated to the status of tragic, wronged heroine, as she appears in Gaetano Donizetti’s historically wildly inaccurate opera Anna Bolena (1830), in which she is portrayed as the tragic victim of treasonable intrigues at court and finally goes mad in the Tower. Jane Austen vilified Henry as a vile fornicator and sadist, and bitterly bewailed the fate of his unfortunate wives. Here again, a new, emotive, and subjective tradition emerged, and it was in such a climate that Agnes Strickland wrote her celebrated Lives of the Queens of England, a landmark work in itself and the product of much original research, but heavily influenced by Victorian moral and social codes. She too wrote of Anne Boleyn in the romantic tradition, and clearly viewed Henry VIII as unspeakably wicked. Nevertheless, her work, much enjoyed by Queen Victoria (to whom it was dedicated), heralded a revival of interest in the Tudor queens.
From about 1850 on, we move into the great period of historical research, when a large number of documents were collated and published, many under the auspices of the Master of the Rolls. The monumental Letters and Papers of the Reign of Henry VIII was compiled, as were the foreign diplomatic calendars and the Tudor state papers, sources that are essential to our understanding of the period. This research prompted the publication of many history books with a fresh and analytical approach. The works of James Anthony Froude and Martin A. S. Hume achieved a more rational assessment of the history of Henry VIII’s wives, while Paul Friedmann’s Anne Boleyn: A Chapter of English History (1884) debunked many of the romantic legends about its subject and portrayed her as a scheming adventuress.
Froude felt that the unanimous verdict given by the peers and the grand juries proved that Anne must have committed at least some of the offenses with which she was charged. Friedmann was of the opinion that Cromwell was speaking the truth when he referred to Anne’s coaccused confessing to things “so abominable that a great part of them were never given in evidence, but clearly kept secret,”10 and was “by no means convinced that Anne did not commit offenses quite as grave as those of which she was accused.” He thought it possible that she was guilty “of crimes which it did no
t suit the convenience of the government to divulge.” He added that this was hinted at during her trial,11 “and although proof was not adduced, they were likely enough to have been true.” It is an interesting theory, and would explain why the evidence against Anne was destroyed, as Friedmann believed, and why the charges in the indictment seem so obviously contrived. It would also explain the odd remark Anne made when she was told by Kingston that she would not be held in a dungeon but in the Queen’s lodgings—“It is too good for me”—and her final confession, in which she declared she had never offended against the King with her body. Had she offended against him in some other way?
Yet what abominable offense could Anne have committed that had at all costs to be kept secret? Could it have been something that touched not only her honor but the King’s too? Even if it had, Cromwell, that master of spin, could surely have turned it to Henry’s advantage. If it was not a sexual offense, as Anne’s last confession would appear to make clear, what other crime could her coaccused have disclosed? There is no evidence of any, and given that the charges against Anne were sensitive enough in their nature, and that Cromwell’s reference to secret abominations was probably meant to convey nothing more than unmentionable sexual depravity, we can only conclude that Friedmann’s theory does not bear close scrutiny.
The twentieth century witnessed an ever more impartial approach to research and historical interpretation, and the growth of post-Freudian analysis, with the historian evolving into a psychologist rather than a judge, which in itself led to some new conclusions, such as the theory that because of the executions of her mother and Katherine Howard, Elizabeth I grew up equating marriage and sex with death, and consequently was too fearful to take a husband. Today, in the twenty-first century, a more rational and balanced approach prevails, yet it is rare to find a commentator who is devoid of all prejudice or preconception.
Because of the extreme polarity of Catholic and Protestant views of Anne Boleyn, the bias with which her contemporaries wrote of her, the romantic tradition, and the frustrating gaps in the source material for her life, she remains a controversial subject to this day. Rarely are historians entirely impartial about her. She is either a saint, a sinner, a wronged heroine, the feisty temptress beloved by filmmakers, or—more recently—the prime cause and mover of the Reformation, a view that would have been unthinkable forty years ago, and can be sweepingly overstated. Modern biographers increasingly tend to buy into the Protestant hagiographic view of Anne, a view supported only to a degree by contemporary evidence, and even now a religious bias is occasionally evident, as in the late Joanna Denny’s anti-Catholic biography of her.
For centuries Anne’s partisans have seen her as a wronged woman whose wicked husband had her murdered in order to marry her handmaiden. Of course, this is only half the picture, but it underpins many perceptions of Anne even today. In 2005 a former Battle of Britain veteran who had “fallen in love” with the Queen during history lessons at school, tried unsuccessfully to persuade the Home Secretary either to pardon her or, preferably, declare her innocent.
Serious historians are now fairly united in believing Anne guiltless of the crimes for which she died. John Scarisbrick found it “difficult to believe that she was ever guilty of adultery or incest.” Professor Ives wrote stridently that “to substantiate nymphomania, incest, and quadruple adultery, there is no evidence worth the name,”12 while Anne Somerset has called Anne the victim of “a deadly combination of court intrigue and royal disfavor.”13 Professor Loades is almost certainly correct in saying that she fell “because of the dynamics of court politics, and the fact that her power over the King was based on nothing more durable than sexual chemistry.”14
There are few who have disagreed with this view. Back in 1902, A. F. Pollard felt that there must have been some “colorable justification” for the charges, but Professor Bernard is now virtually alone in suggesting that Anne was quite possibly guilty, yet perhaps not of all the crimes of which she was accused, and not with all the men alleged to have been her lovers. Ives, however, concedes that the case against her must have been plausible enough to convince those ninety-five jurors of her guilt.
In assessing Anne’s character and impact on history, we should ask ourselves how she would be viewed today if she had not perished on the scaffold. Her end was one of the most dramatic and shocking episodes in English history, her last days the best documented period of her life, vividly described in the sources, while that powerful image of her on the scaffold, courageously facing a horrible death, has overlaid all previous conceptions of her.
Had Anne survived into old age—setting aside all other ramifications of that “what if”—she might now be remembered merely as a ruthless “other woman” who got her man and proved to be a none too popular queen. Had she borne the King no son, and lived to see her daughter succeed—probably in the late 1540s, when Anne herself would have been in her own late forties—something approaching the hagiographic Protestant view of her, as the lauded Elizabeth’s mother, would certainly have prevailed, at least in England. But it is virtually certain that, dying in her bed, she would not have enjoyed the charismatic, romantic posthumous reputation that is hers today.
Conversely, Henry VIII’s reputation has undoubtedly suffered as a result of his treatment of Anne Boleyn, and there is a popular misconception—even among some serious historians—that he had her “murdered,” even though she was executed in accordance with the law as it then stood. Sir Patrick Hastings, the former Attorney General, writing in 1950 about Anne Boleyn’s “appalling trial,” called Henry “one of the most unutterable blackguards who ever sat upon this or any other throne.” Jane Dunn sees him as a “grotesque failure as a husband and father;” Linda Porter calls him “a wife murderer,” and refers to the “obscene charade” of Anne’s fall. Karen Lindsey, in her overimaginative feminist perspective on Henry VIII’s wives, asserts that Henry needed to kill Anne simply because he loathed her.
Eric Ives rightly draws attention to the oft-stated—and simplistic—view that if Anne was innocent, then Henry VIII, Cromwell, and many members of the Tudor establishment “contrived or connived at coldblooded murder.”15 We have to remember that she was executed according to the due process of the law as it then stood. Virtually the whole of the establishment—the King, the Privy Council, the two grand juries, the twenty-six peers who sat in judgment at the trial, and the judges—not forgetting Parliament itself—all played their proper parts, and it may even be that the law was allowed to take its course without undue influence being brought to bear upon it. Certainly care was taken that the case be heard in public, and that some records of it were preserved for posterity to see. Because the depositions are missing, the Crown’s case looks weak and contrived to modern eyes, but we can be certain there was more to it than the surviving sources reveal. According to Cromwell, some of the evidence was so “abominable” that it did not bear repetition in court, doubtless for the sake of the King’s honor; he may have been exaggerating, but we just do not know. It is this lack of documentation that hampers our understanding of why Anne Boleyn was condemned. Above all, there is no evidence that Henry VIII did not believe in Anne’s guilt, and it is barely credible that he sent six victims unnecessarily to the scaffold merely to satisfy “a lust for superfluous butchery,” as N. Brysson Morrison put it.
David Loades believes that Henry was able to deceive himself into believing the charges, and that in the momentous events of 1536, he demonstrated for the first—and certainly not the last—time that his self-deception was “capable of taking the form of a monstrous and amoral cruelty.”16 Yet if one accepts the case for self-deception, one also has to accept the populist modern view of Henry as Starkey’s “great puppet” who was easily manipulated by clever advisers, a view effectively demolished more than thirty years ago by Lacey Baldwin Smith.17 It is also worth remembering that Henry did not immediately accept at face value what his councillors told him about Anne’s conduct, but insisted th
at they investigate further.
Yet Professor Loades makes a valid point in response to Henry’s detractors who accuse him simplistically of sending Anne to the scaffold on trumped-up charges merely because she no longer pleased him: had this been the case, why hadn’t he meted out the same punishment to Katherine of Aragon, who defied him and was a constant thorn in his side for nine aggravating years?18 His life would have been far less complicated with Katherine safely dead. Of course, she had powerful relations abroad, while Anne had no one to fight for her. Nevertheless, Katherine could legitimately have been accused of inciting the King’s subjects to rebellion, or her nephew—the Emperor—to make war on him, and charges of high treason could easily have been made to stick. No one could have complained about that, given that Katherine was betraying the man whom she staunchly insisted was her husband and her sovereign lord. This argues that Henry VIII did not lightly stoop to subverting the law to follow his own desires, and also that whatever evidence about Anne was laid before him, it must have been convincing.
Alison Weir Page 42