by Susan Bordo
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?
WHEN 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 e
ver reigned.”9 Henry was aware of this, and he probably also knew, as others did not, how proud and stubborn she could be.
But then Anne entered the picture. We don’t know for certain when he first became attracted to her or what the circumstances were, in large part because the available sources only begin to speculate about her when the king’s interest was publicly known, and by the time that happened, in 1527, people were more interested in the divorce and scandal of it all than how it had begun. All later accounts of Henry and Anne’s meeting are retrospective. George Cavendish, Wolsey’s gentleman usher, writes (thirty-five years after the event) that “the King’s love began to take place” when, after her return from France, Anne was made one of Katherine’s ladies-in-waiting, “among whome, for her excellent gesture and behaviour, she did excel all other; in so much that the Kinge began to grow enamoured with her; which was not known to any person, ne scantly to her owne person.”10 Agnes Strickland, citing Gregorio Leti, whose seventeenth-century Life of Elizabeth I includes many colorful but uncorroborated anecdotes, relates that:
[T]he first time Henry saw her [Anne] after her return to England . . . [was] in her father’s garden at Hever, where . . . admiring her beauty and graceful demeanor he entered into conversation with her; when he was so much charmed with her sprightly wit, that on his return to Westminster he told Wolsey, “that he had been discoursing with a young lady who had the wit of an angel, and was worthy of a crown.”11
Cavendish and Strickland/Leti disagree sharply on Wolsey’s reaction. Strickland, citing Leti, describes Wolsey as so eager to get power in his own hands that he was “glad to see the king engrossed in the intoxication of a love affair” and delighted that it was Anne, whom he had first recommended to be one of Katherine’s ladies.12 But Leti was a devoted Elizabethan Protestant and harsh critic of Wolsey. Cavendish, in contrast, was Wolsey’s faithful admirer and servant, and pre- sents Wolsey as only “acting on the King’s devised commandment” in breaking up Anne’s relationship with Henry Percy so that Henry could get his hands on her.13 Wolsey’s interference, according to Cavendish, “greatly offended” Anne, who “promis[ed] if it ever lay in her power, she would work much displeasure to the Cardinal” (which, according to Cavendish, “she did in deede” by goading Henry to turn against Wolsey).14 Cavendish goes on to show that he clearly belongs to the “greedy Anne/patient Katherine” school of thought: “After [Anne] knewe the kings pleasure, and the bottom of his secret stomacke, then she began to look very haughty and stoute [arrogant], lacking no manner of jewells, or rich apparel, that might be gotten for money,” while Katherine accepted all this “in good parte,” showing “no kinde or sparke of grudge or displeasure.”15
With historical sources leaving no clear record, the imaginations of biographers, novelists, and screenwriters have followed their own fantasies—or those that they felt would appeal to audiences. Many of them, in one way or another, have Henry being struck by the thunderbolt of love at first sight. William Hepworth Dixon, in his 1874 pro-Protestant biography of Anne, describes Henry as “taken by a word and smile. A face so innocently arch, a wit so rapid and so bright, a mien so modest yet so gay, were new to him. The King was tiring of such beauties as Elizabeth Blount; mere lumps of rosy flesh, without the sparkle of a living soul . . . He fell so swiftly and completely that the outside world imagined he was won by magic arts.”16 In Anne of the Thousand Days, Henry sees Anne dancing at court, is immediately smitten, and instructs Wolsey to “unmatch” Anne and Percy, and then send her packing back to Hever. Henry then takes off himself (on a “hunting” trip, as he tells Wolsey) for Hever, where he tells Anne that he will have her “even if it breaks the earth in two like an apple and flings the halves into the void.”17 In the movie The Other Boleyn Girl, Henry picks Anne (Natalie Portman) out of the Boleyn family lineup with nary a glance at Mary (Scarlett Johansson); he takes up with Mary first only because Anne humiliates him by being a more expert rider than he. The Tudors has Anne and Henry locking eyes in the tower of Château Vert, where Henry, as the shooting script tells us, “comes face to face with his destiny—with a sharp intake of breath, like an arrow through his heart. A very beautiful, 18-year-old young woman with jet-black hair and dark, expressive, exquisite eyes looks back at him.”18 Later, after the dancing begins, “he stares at Anne as if suddenly rendered incapable of speech . . . ‘Who are you?’ he asks, when the steps of the dance bring them eye to eye. And she whispers back, ‘Anne Boleyn.’”19
Anne Boleyn did make her debut at court at the Château Vert pageant, an extravagant affair complete with a triple-turreted, shining green minicastle created especially for the occasion. The pageant was supposed to be a celebration of courtly love. The players, both male and female, each represented one of the chivalric ideals—Nobleness, Loyalty, Gentleness, Attendance, Constancy, Honor, and so forth. (Anne was Perseverance—very apt, as it later turned out.) But the eight female players, masked and dressed in white and yellow satin with headdresses of gold, made little beyond a pretense of maidenly resistance when eight dashing masked courtiers, announced by a cannon blast and led by the king, stormed the castle with dates, oranges, and “other fruits made for pleasure,” and carried the damsels off for a night of dancing. When the dancing was over, the masks were removed and all sat down to a lavish banquet.
We do not know which lady the king carried off from the Château Vert to be his first partner for that night’s dancing, but it was unlikely to have been Anne, and it certainly wouldn’t have happened as depicted in The Tudors. Anyone who has even the slightest actual knowledge of Tudor history is aware that the Anne who could turn men to jelly at first sight is a myth—or perhaps more accurately, a reflection of the limits of twentieth-century conceptions of attraction, fixated as they are on the surface of the body. It’s hard for us to imagine a woman for whom a king would split the earth in two who is anything less than ravishing. But in her own time, Anne’s looks were not rated among her greatest assets. “Reasonably good-looking,” pronounced John Barlow, one of Anne’s favorite clerics.20 “Not one of the handsomest women in the world,” reported the Venetian diplomat, Francesco Sanuto: “[S]he is of middling stature, swarthy complexion, long neck, wide mouth, bosom not much raised, and in fact has nothing but the English King’s great appetite, and her eyes, which are black and beautiful, and take great effect on those who served the Queen when she was on the throne.”21
Sanuto was not a fan, but George Wyatt, grandson of one of Anne’s early admirers, the poet Thomas Wyatt, was. In 1623, he gave his nephew a manuscript that he had apparently written some twenty-five years earlier, in which, drawing on the reports of relatives and friends who had known Anne, he writes that although Anne was a “rare and admirable beauty,” she was not without flaws: Her coloring was “not so whitely” as was then esteemed and she had several “small moles . . . upon certain parts of her body.”22 Wyatt also writes that “[t]here was found, indeed, upon the side of her nail upon one of her fingers, some little show of a nail, which was yet so small, by the report of those that have seen her, as the workmaster seemed to leave it an occasion of greater grace to her hand, which, with the tip of one of her other fingers might be, and was usually by her hidden without any least blemish to it.”23
None of Anne’s “flaws,” in our multiracial, post–Cindy Crawford age, seems particularly significant. Some, such as Anne’s olive skin, boyish physique, and wide mouth—not to mention the well-placed moles—could put her in contention for America’s Next Top Model. But in Anne’s own time, beauty spots were not yet a fashion accessory, and even so slight a deformity as a “little show” of extra nail, despite Wyatt’s courtly spin, could raise questions about Satan’s influence on Anne’s conception. Snow-white skin, which women (including Anne’s famous daughter, Elizabeth I) would try to simulate using makeup, was a requisite of English beauty and remained so for hundreds of years, overdetermined by racial, class, and moral meanings distinguishing the leisured classes from their “coars
e and brown inferiors” and thought to be the outward manifestation of a “fair and unspotted soul.”24 And fair hair, which Anne’s predecessors (both legal and extramarital) apparently enjoyed, reigned in the Tudor hierarchy of beauty. Both the Virgin Mary and Venus (most famously in Botticelli’s 1486 painting) were always pictured as blondes. So were all the heroines of the literature of courtly love, from Iseult to Guinevere: “Gallant knights, poets and troubadours celebrated their love of blondes with much eager serenading” and “felicitous poems and romantic tales bursting with golden-haired heroines poured from the pens of passionate lovers.”25 Light-haired women were also considered to be more “cheerful and submissive” (very desirable). Within a century or so, the generous, sweet, needing-to-be-rescued blonde heroine would become an essential ingredient of every successful fairy tale.
“Look for a woman with a good figure and with a small head; Hair that is blond but not from henna; whose eyebrows are spaced apart, long and arched in a peak; who is nice and plump in the buttocks,” advised fourteenth-century poet and priest Juan Ruiz. “A Lady’s hair should be fine and fair, in the similitude now of gold, now of honey, and now of the shining rays of the sun,”26 wrote another courtier in 1548.27 Today, evolutionary psychologists would argue that these preferences are hardwired into male brain circuitry, as both fair skin and curvaceous bodies signal youth, health, and a high estrogen load. If so, “swarthy,” slender Anne Boleyn was a perverse choice for Henry to make in his attempt to secure an heir.28 Her moles were an even bigger problem, because birthmarks were often seen as ominous signs. The medievals, whose notions about the human body often lingered into the Renaissance, believed that a mother’s imagination while pregnant could rupture the skin, and they read birthmarks the way later generations would decipher bumps on the skull. A mole on the throat (where several observers report Anne’s to have been) predicted a violent death. One on the upper lip meant good fortune for a man—but debauchery for a woman. If it was just above the left side of her mouth, “vanity and pride, and an unlawful offspring to provide for.”29 Fifteenth-century witch hunter Lambert Daneau saw moles as witch’s marks. Daneau and other “witch-prickers” would stick pins in the moles to find the bedeviled ones; when the suspect registered no pain (hard to imagine), it indicated Satan’s handiwork.30