by Susan Bordo
It’s full of clever, deceptive strategies for seduction, from ostentatiously “burning sighs” and “abundant tears,” to singing outside her house at night, to consulting books teaching men “how women are to be duped in these matters.” How could any girl escape such an onslaught of “snares,” Castiglione wonders (through one of the characters in his fictional conversations about the virtues and conduct of the ideal courtier). “I could not in a thousand years rehearse all the wiles that men employ to bring women to their wishes, for the wiles are infinite . . .”30 Castiglione’s jaded, ironic tone makes it clear how he regards these practices: as a kind of socially sanctioned harassment (he didn’t have the word, but he sure gets close to the concept) in which it was acceptable to dissemble, badger, and lie in order to connive the woman into falling in love with her suitor. Among the more cynical tactics recommended was the fictional suspension of the social positions of lover and beloved. Ignoring actual rank, swearing total allegiance, the lover is advised to address the beloved with deep humility, to be abject before her and totally submissive. But it’s all a ploy designed to take advantage of the woman’s vanity and gullibility. Or, if she was cleverer or more cynical, to engage her in a pleasurable fiction.
Scholars are in dispute about just how widely practiced “courtly love” was. Some insist that it was just a literary tradition, spread throughout Western Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries largely via the troubadours of southern France, that had little impact on actual courtship practice. This is almost certainly true for most classes in medieval and Renaissance England, but when it came to the better-educated class, the line between “literary” and “actual” is harder to maintain. Poetry, music, and pageants celebrating courtly love were regular entertainments at Henry’s court, and both Henry and his best-educated courtiers (those who could read Italian) eagerly sought copies of The Book of the Courtier when it was published in 1528. Such published treatments of courtly love were, moreover, based on actual court behavior (in the case of Castiglione, that of the Duke of Urbino; in the case of Andreas Capellanus’s The Art of Courtly Love, Queen Eleanor’s court at Poitiers). It is highly likely that whether or not Henry actually read Castiglione, he was familiar with the practices Castiglione describes.
Earlier treatises, such as The Art of Courtly Love, had treated love, in true Platonic fashion, as a god who seizes and obsesses the lover, putting his soul in a state of turmoil. (“When a lover suddenly catches sight of his beloved his heart palpitates”; “Real jealousy always increases the feeling of love”; “He whom the thought of love vexes eats and sleeps very little”; “A true lover is constantly and without intermission possessed by thought of his beloved.”31) The beloved, on his or her part (depending on whether it’s Plato or Capellanus), is more detached, cool, and inclined to play hard to get. Overheated and possessed, the lover must then learn how to manage his passion so it will not self-destruct in rash action, jealousy, or carnality. Castiglione, in contrast, is less concerned with the state of the lover’s soul than honing his skill at seducing the beloved. It is she who is to be “managed,” not the lover’s tumultuous passions. And in the service of that goal, all manner of deception and manipulation is permitted.
There were plenty of critics of this degeneration. Even for Sir Thomas Malory, whose Le Morte d’Arthur, published in 1485, was the chief basis for the English version of the Arthurian legend, the “fresh and temperate” love of Lancelot for Guinevere, which lasted for years, was the stuff of fairy tales. (“Today,” Malory writes, “men cannot love seven nights but they must have their desires.”32) But it was a fairy tale that still could inspire. By the time Thomas Wyatt wrote his poem “Of the Courtier’s Life” (1539), he has nothing but cynicism for the possibility of living an honorable life at court.
I cannot frame my tongue to feign,
To cloak the truth, for praise without desert
Of them that list all vice for to retain.
I cannot honour them that set their part
With Venus, and Bacchus, all their life long;
Nor hold my peace of them, although I smart.
I cannot crouch nor kneel to such a wrong;
To worship them like God on earth alone,
That are like wolves these sely lambs among.
I cannot with my words complain and moan,
And suffer nought; nor smart without complaint:
Nor turn the word that from my mouth is gone.
I cannot speak and look like as a saint;
Use wiles for wit, and make deceit a pleasure;
Call craft counsel, for lucre still to paint.33
Wyatt’s poem is not only a protest against pragmatic deception to achieve worldly advancement, it also expresses disgust at those who “set their part with Venus, and Bacchus”—that is, those for whom love has become a game of pleasure rather than the driving force behind honorable actions and spiritual striving. In Europe, Francis’s court had the worst reputation for dissolute courtly behavior, but Wyatt, whose most famous poem wrenchingly laments the executions of the men with whom Anne had been accused and condemned, which he watched from a window in the Bell Tower, had lost whatever faith he had in the English court to behave more honorably. “These bloody days have broken my heart,” he wrote; a world had been shattered for him.34
Where does Henry stand in all this? We find him somewhere between Arthurian honor, which served and protected women as one of its highest goals and for which a king stood nobly and patiently by while his best knight and his wife engaged in a long affair, and a coup d’état that ruthlessly sent a queen and several of the king’s best buddies to their deaths without hard evidence of any sort. Raised on the romance of one set of ideals, he was capable of setting aside his dislike of letter writing to pen seventeen love letters to Anne, throbbing with longing for her presence, agony over her absence, and full of declarations of submission and obedience to her wishes, as in this one, in which Henry offers to make Anne his maîtresse en titre (official mistress—a form of extramarital monogamy).
On turning over in my mind the contents of your last letters, I have put myself into great agony, not knowing how to interpret them, whether to my disadvantage, as you show in some places, or to my advantage, as I understand them in some others, beseeching you earnestly to let me know expressly your whole mind as to the love between us two. It is absolutely necessary for me to obtain this answer, having been for the whole year stricken with the dart of love, and not yet sure whether I shall fail or find a place in your heart and affection, which last point has prevented me for some time from calling you my mistress; because, if you only love me with an ordinary love, that name is not suitable for you, because it denotes a singular love, which is far from common. But if you please to do the office of a true loyal mistress and friend, and to give up yourself body and heart to me, who will be, and have been, your most loyal servant (if your rigour does not forbid me) I promise you that not only the name shall be given you, but also that I will take you for my only mistress, casting off all others besides you out of my thoughts and affections, and serve you only. I beseech you to give an entire answer to this my rude letter, that I may know on what and how far I may depend. And if it does not please you to answer me in writing, appoint some place where I may have it by word of mouth, and I will go thither with all my heart.
No more, for fear of tiring you,
Written by the hand of him who would willingly remain yours,
H.R.35
“I beseech you,” “if you please to do,” “fear of tiring you,” “your most loyal servant,” “serve you only.” Certainly sounds as if she has him wrapped around her extra little finger. But even at this stage of the relationship, with Henry still besotted with his as-yet-unconquered prize, he was an instrumental thinker—and had been from the beginning of his reign. One of his earliest acts, after he became king, had been to execute two of his father’s ministers on fictitious charges of treason, purely in the interests of en
hancing his own PR with the people and projecting the image of a new broom sweeping clean. When newly married to Katherine, he had written to her father, King Ferdinand II of Aragon: “Day by day, her inestimable virtues shine forth, flourish and increase, so that even if we were still free, it is she that we would choose.”36 This statement, claims Starkey, proves that Henry was actually in love with Katherine, and not simply—as Anne of the Thousand Days puts it—that “England married Spain.” But . . . this letter was to King Ferdinand! Katherine’s father! Henry’s father-in-law! If that isn’t enough to raise doubts about the candor of the sentiment, we’ve got Henry, some years later, using exactly the same rhetorical flourish to prove to Rome that his motives for divorce from Katherine were pious. Were it not for his grievous doubts that the marriage had been against divine law, he assured Campeggio, he would with great joy marry Katherine all over again.
And as touching the Queen, if it be adjudged the law of God that she is my lawful wife, there was never thing more pleasant nor more acceptable to me in my life, both for the discharge and clearing of my conscience and also for the good qualities and conditions the which I know to be in her. For I assure you all, that beside her noble parentage of which she is descended, she is a woman of the most gentleness, of most humility and buxomness, yea and of all good qualities appertaining to nobility, she is without comparison, as I this twenty years almost have had the true experiments, so that if I were to marry again, if the marriage might be good I would surely choose her above all other women.37 [Emphasis mine.]
This is pretty difficult to buy, as in 1527 he was already writing his beseeching letters to Anne Boleyn, describing being “stricken with the dart of love” for more than a year, begging her to give herself up “body and heart” to him, and sending her charming love tokens such as a freshly slaughtered buck, “hoping that when you eat of it you may think of the hunter.”38 But whether rhetorical or deeply felt, or some combination of both, one thing is clear, which is that at a certain point he was assured that his feelings for Anne were reciprocated, and from that moment on, the two were united in the effort to obtain a divorce.
Reprinted among Henry’s love letters to Anne is a “joint production” by the two of them that supports this view. It was sent to Wolsey after Anne had recovered from the sweating sickness and rejoined Henry at court to anxiously await the long-delayed Campeggio. The main letter is by Anne, followed by a postscript from Henry. Popular representations, following Cavendish’s reports, have tended to portray Anne’s relationship with Wolsey as one of all-out hostility, with Anne harboring a long-standing resentment over Wolsey’s ending of her romance with Henry Percy, after which (according to Cavendish) she had vowed to destroy Wolsey at the earliest opportunity. In fact, however, relations between Anne and Wolsey were extremely cordial—about as warm as Tudor relations were capable of being—until the end of 1528, when both she and Henry began to reach the limit of frustration with Wolsey’s faltering strategy (not his fault, but that fact was irrelevant to Henry) to achieve the divorce. This letter was written, apparently, during the period of still-amicable relations with Wolsey, but right on the cusp of their breakdown. Anne and Henry had been waiting for months for Campeggio to arrive from Rome and (as they hoped at the time) settle the “great matter”; travel and health difficulties had caused delay after delay, and Henry, as we see from his postscript, was losing patience.
Anne to Wolsey:
My Lord, in my most humblest wise that my heart can think, I desire you to pardon me that I am so bold to trouble you with my simple and rude writing, esteeming it to proceed from her that is much desirous to know that your grace does well, as I perceive by this bearer that you do, the which I pray God long to continue, as I am most bound to pray; for I do know the great pains and troubles that you have taken for me is never likely to be recompensed on my part, but alone in loving you next unto the king’s grace, above all creatures living. And I do not doubt but the daily proofs of my deeds shall manifestly declare and affirm my writing to be true, and I do trust you to think the same.
My lord, I do assure you, I do long to hear from you news of the legate; for I do hope, as they come from you, they shall be very good; and I am sure you desire it as much as I, and more, an it were possible; as I know it is not: and thus remaining in a steadfast hope, I make an end to my letter.
Written with the hand of her that is most bound to be
Your humble servant,
Anne Boleyn.39
Postscript by Henry:
The writer of this letter would not cease, till she had caused me likewise to set my hand, desiring you, though it be short, to take it in good part. I ensure you that there is neither of us but greatly desireth to see you, and are joyous to hear that you have escaped this plague so well, trusting the fury thereof to be passed, especially with them that keepeth good diet, as I trust you do. The not hearing of the legate’s arrival in France causeth us somewhat to muse; notwithstanding, we trust, by your diligence and vigilancy (with the assistance of Almighty God), shortly to be eased out of that trouble. No more to you at this time, but that I pray God send you as good health and prosperity as the writer would.
By your loving sovereign and friend,
H.R. 40
Pray that you never have so “loving” a friend as Henry VIII. For just a little more than a year later, and without a glance backward, Henry had stripped Wolsey of his office of Lord Chancellor and all his accumulated treasures, a culmination of events that many scholars blame on Anne (“Anne and her faction did their work thoroughly,” writes Weir 41), ignoring that it was Henry’s pattern, way before he met Anne, to blow hot then ruthlessly cold when things weren’t going as he wished. Both Weir and Starkey see Anne as engineering Wolsey’s downfall, with Henry the gullible, lust-driven fool skillfully played by her. But there was nothing gullible about Henry; indeed, he was among the most watchful, even paranoid, of rulers. And he was creepily unflinching in neutralizing perceived enemies, including those who had been lifelong friends and mentors, such as Wolsey and More. Nowadays, we might diagnose him as a sociopath due to the ease with which he dispatched death to his former buddies and lovers. But then again, kings at that time were trained in royal sociopathy, learning to put their emotions out of reach in the service of “the crown,” and Henry, it seemed, became better and better at it with each passing year.
As to Anne, even if she matched Henry’s political pragmatism (to put it in the most generous terms), it is unlikely that she had to “wheedle” Henry, as Starkey puts it, into getting rid of Wolsey,42 just as in this jointly written letter they are of one mind about the need to gently urge him on. It is Henry who supplies the one chilling note, qualifying his expressions of faith in Wolsey with the admission that the delay of Campeggio “causeth us somewhat to muse.”43 (I’m sure Wolsey was quite aware that, Henry’s praise for his diet aside, the ominous “musing” was the point here.) Weir describes Anne as having “nagged” Henry to add the postscript, an ungracious choice of words that nonetheless acknowledges that this is no exchange between a besotted courtier and his lady but a domestic snapshot. We can imagine Henry and Anne together, bent over a desk, shoulder to shoulder. Perhaps she’s caught at his robe and pulled him over to her as he paced the room, restlessly waiting for her to finish tinkering with her letter so they could go off to hunt or dine or dance, perhaps he’s been looking over her shoulder the whole time, poking her in the ribs over this or that turn of phrase. Perhaps she has “nagged,” but perhaps she has persuaded him with argument, reminding him that only Henry’s seal of approval would get Wolsey to take her seriously. Whatever scene one imagines, this joint letter is one of the very rare moments when we actually get to “hear” Anne and Henry in a kind of conversation with each other, unfiltered by the biases of the various court reporters—and it suggests an intimacy, affection, and shared purpose that doesn’t fit at all with Starkey and Weir’s “plotting Anne/manipulated Henry” telling of the story.
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sp; Of course, everything I’ve concluded is highly interpretive. That is unavoidable when trying to make sense of what is, in the end, elusive material—and much more complicated than simply an expression of Henry’s “softer side” or passionate nature. For not only was the culture in transition, moving from one paradigm of human experience, one set of human ideals, to another, but Henry VIII was himself a barometer of that transition writ large. He was schooled in Arthurian honor, which served and protected women as one of its highest goals. But he could never abide by anything except his own supremacy. He was also an instrumental thinker for whom the ends ultimately justified all means, and he lived in a time when kingly authority—not knighthood—was in flower. Raised on the romance of one set of ideals, he was capable of setting aside his dislike of letter writing to pen seventeen love-stricken letters to Anne. But we are mistaken if we take what he says in those letters too literally. He wanted her, yes. But he was never her servant—not even emotionally—and even in these letters, he never forgot that.
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