The Creation of Anne Boleyn

by Susan Bordo

  If we want to go beyond the phenomenology of Henry’s “splitting” to causal explanation, we could find it in his childhood, which was itself split between the “cosy feminine world” of his mother and sisters and the cold indifference, then hostile domination, of his father. “As the only boy in the royal nursery,” writes Robert Hutchinson, Henry “was thoroughly spoilt and tenderly protected from the hard knocks and bruises of childhood misfortune. The toddler prince was cosseted, his grumpiness and tears sweetly cooed away, and his every whim swiftly fulfilled by the doting matronly ladies who cared for him.”25 It’s not clear, however, that naturally energetic Henry was entirely happy with all this “doting,” which, after Arthur’s death, kept him “as locked away as a woman” out of fear that the precious spare heir would also be lost.26 But the masculine attentions of his father came with a high price too. Until Arthur’s death, his father had virtually ignored Henry, leaving him to the care of the women; after Arthur died, however, he became obsessively focused on preparing Henry for the throne, and in the process, Henry became subject to his father’s famous rages when he didn’t do exactly as was required of him. Henry VII was so strict with the child that he gave the impression to Reginald Pole, Henry’s contemporary, that he had “no affection or fancy unto him.”27 You don’t need to venture into contemporary developmental theory to imagine Henry growing up with the belief that relationships were an either/or business, defined by gender: You could be extravagantly loved but smothered by women (perhaps part of the reason why he was initially drawn to both Katherine and Anne, and later to Katherine Parr, all of whom were strong-minded women whose strengths he came to resent). Or you could excel in the competitive world of men, where you might exercise power and command fear but never achieve the unconditional adoration you crave. Perhaps this intense desire for male love, in addition to the freedom from the restrictions of his childhood, helps to explain both his attraction to a father figure such as Wolsey, and also why Henry was at his happiest, most generous, and most exuberant among the young men he hunted and cavorted with. But in the end, everyone—with the exception of Charles Brandon and Katherine Parr, the two “survivors” of life with Henry—was bound to fail him. And they, too, walked a precarious tightrope in keeping Henry’s favor. Brandon was exiled from court for a time when he married Henry’s sister without the king’s permission. And Katherine came very near to arrest for her Protestant sympathies, managing to talk Henry out of it at the last moment by humbling herself before him and begging his tolerance for her “womanly weaknesses and natural imperfections.”28

  Whatever the origins of Henry’s personality, his problems were vastly exacerbated by the fact that he was, after all, king. As such, he was continually flattered and pampered, his every whim indulged, his grandiosity rarely challenged, his illusions carefully maintained. All of this encouraged his sense of omnipotence. “When you believe in yourself as morally superior, and at the same time do not scrutinize yourself,” writes Francis Hackett in his perceptive biography, “when you dispense with this scrutiny because you are Defender of the Faith, A Knight of the Garter, Knight of the Golden Fleece, and a vast number of other distinguished things make you an automatic gentleman, you do not descend from the height of your scruples, even though they are spavined, to the level of mother earth. You are knighted for all time.”29 The closest comparison from our own time might be to the cult of the sports superhero, who not only gets away with abuse—and sometimes, like O. J. Simpson, murder—but remains immune to any sense of guilt or regret. Neither Simpson nor the high-school athletes who raped a mentally handicapped girl in the basement of one of their homes, then had the whole town rally round them in support, were born without a conscience; their senses of absolute entitlement were conferred on them through years of adulation and “getting away” with bad behavior.

  Henry’s inability to see himself as in the wrong made it all the riskier for those around him to show anything less than absolute allegiance. And proving allegiance, even obedience, put one at risk, ironically. For Henry wasn’t a fool; he knew those around him were afraid, and so never fully trusted anyone. When he was young, he sought out people such as More and encouraged them to be honest with him, seeking some solid ground on which to base a relationship. But it was a zero-sum game; when More ran up against Henry’s need to be the center of the universe, More’s once-cherished independence of mind became worse than “nothing” in Henry’s “all or nothing” demands on relationships.

  It’s hard to know exactly what threw the switch with Anne. Her final miscarriage may have convinced him that God was not on the side of their relationship. He may have believed in the charges of adultery—although his exaggerated estimates of her infidelities make me less rather than more likely to believe that; if he truly believed she had slept with five men, including her own brother, surely that would have been enough to “justify” his outrage without dragging half the men in court into her bed. Or the humiliation of hearing that Anne gossiped about his lack of sexual prowess may have been all that was needed. We will never know, and it really doesn’t matter. It was sufficient, whatever it was, to shut off any currents of empathy, memory, and attachment that Henry felt for Anne. This is where Anne of the Thousand Days has it so wrong. The play and movie both open with Henry tormented by the decision whether or not to order Anne’s execution. In Maxwell Anderson’s play, which is written in verse, Henry muses:

  This is hard to do

  when you come to put pen to paper.

  You say to yourself:

  She must die. And she must—

  If things are to go as planned.

  Yes, if they are to go at all.

  If I am to rule

  And keep my sanity and hold my England off the rocks . . .

  Go back to it, Henry, go back to it.

  Keep your mind

  On this parchment you must sign.

  Dip the pen in the ink; write your name . . .

  It’s only that a woman you’ve held in your arms

  And longed for when she was away,

  And suffered with her—no, but she promised you an heir.

  Write it down—

  Write Henry Rex, and it’s done.

  And then the headsman

  Will cry out suddenly, “Look, look there!”

  And point to the first flash of sunrise,

  And she’ll look,

  Not knowing what he means, and his sword will flash

  In the flick of sun, through the little bones of her neck

  As she looks away,

  And it will be done.

  It will be done.30

  It’s romantic and moving, and beautifully written. But it is not, I believe, the poetry of Henry’s reality. In that reality, they handed him the parchment. He dipped the pen in the ink. He signed his name: Henry Rex. And it was done.

  PART II: Recipes for “Anne Boleyn”

  7

  Basic Historical Ingredients

  CHAPUYS EXULTED OVER Anne’s fall: “I cannot well describe,” he wrote Charles, “the great joy the inhabitants of this city have lately experienced and manifested, not only at the fall and ruin of the concubine, but in the hope that the Princess will be soon reinstated in her rights.”1 Yet even in letters written in the hours immediately after her execution, qualifications creep into his reports: “[A] few” people, he admits, “find fault and grumble at the manner in which the proceedings against her have been conducted, and the condemnation of her and the rest, which is generally thought strange enough.”2 Moreover, people have begun to question the king’s role in all this, a “slander” that Chapuys fears “will not cease when they hear of what passed and is passing between him and his new mistress, Jane Seymour.”3 They have heard that Henry has been out making merry on his barge at night, showing “joy and pleasure” at what Chapuys compares to the anticipation of “getting rid of a thin, old, and vicious hack in the hope of soon getting a fine horse to ride.”4 Despite the snide remarks and
reassurance of the people’s “joy,” it seems from this letter that even Chapuys is beginning to have his doubts about Anne’s guilt. “No one ever shewed more courage,” Chapuys admits, than the used-up, scraggly mare in the face of her execution.5 And then, too, there is the disquieting fact—relayed to Chapuys by “the lady” attending Anne in prison who had been secretly reporting her every word to him—that both before and after receiving the Sacrament, Anne “affirmed, on peril of her soul’s damnation, that she had not misconducted herself so far as her husband the King was concerned.”6

  Chapuys knew, as we’ve seen, about Cromwell’s duplicity regarding Anne, as he himself had been encouraged to do everything he could to turn the king against her, and had done so with relish. (When he heard that Anne blamed him for her ruin, he told his friend Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle that he was “flattered.”7) Yet it seems that he did not expect it to happen by means of invented charges. Cromwell, on the other hand, bragged to Chapuys, in June, that because of the “displeasure and anger” he had incurred with the king after his diplomatic efforts had failed, he had “set himself to arrange the plot (a fantasier et conspirer led. affaire)” against Anne.8 It had “taken a great deal of trouble” but now that Anne was dead, he assured Chapuys, “matters would be more easily arranged than before.”9 Chief among those “matters” was the reinstating of Princess Mary. Chapuys was doubtful, still fearing “the obstinacy of the King towards the Princess.”10 And indeed, Chapuys’ instincts were better than Cromwell’s on this score (or, more likely, Cromwell was spinning things in the best light for Charles’s consumption). For even with Anne dead, Henry continued to demand that Mary accept the invalidity of his marriage to her mother and warned Jane Seymour, when she expressed sympathy with the Catholic rebels who, among other things, were Mary’s champions, that her predecessor had died “in consequence of meddling too much with state affairs,” implying that she should take care that the same thing not happen to her.11 Insisting that others bow to his will, clearly, had become more important to Henry than personal history, blood relations, emotional bonds, or even international alliances. Perhaps it had always been that way for him. Or perhaps—I believe this to be more likely—he was feeling greater and greater need to bolster his authority, which was no longer ensured by the free love of his subjects, but had to be bolted down through absolute submission. He was no longer the dashing and generous young king, bringing learning, light, and intellectual freedom into the realm, but a destroyer of two wives, a callous father, and a plunderer of monasteries who could not endure any dissent from his wishes and decrees. The less love he felt from his subjects, the more he needed the oaths and genuflections to his authority; the more acts of tyranny that followed, the less he was loved—a vicious circle.

  In private, people had begun to doubt the justice of what had been done to Anne, George, Norris, Brereton, Weston, and Smeaton. Alexander Ales, a Scottish Protestant theologian and friend of Cranmer’s, who resided in court at the time but who could not bear to go to the executions himself,12 had dinner with his landlord and some of the spectators the night of Anne’s beheading. The charges, evidence, and outcome were being discussed; it had become the hot topic of the day, as the verdict of the O. J. Simpson trial was among twentieth-century observers. Charge by charge, the dinner guests took apart the evidence and found it lacking, concluding that “no probable suspicion of adultery could be collected; and that therefore there must have been some other reason which moved the king”—the desire for a male heir, Anne’s interference in negotiations with Spain and Germany,13 his fear that the Catholic princes of Europe would band together against him, and so on. None of them knew yet about Jane Seymour.14 In the middle of the conversation, a servant of Cromwell’s arrived, and when asked for news, he replied cynically that just as the queen had betrayed the king by “enjoying herself with others” so now “while the Queen was being beheaded, [the king] was enjoying himself with another woman.”15 The other dinner guests were shocked and disbelieving—but, of course, they soon found out that it was true, for even as they dined, the king was already betrothed to his third wife.

  Ales, who was sympathetic to Anne because of her reformist activities, recounted this story in a 1558 letter to Anne’s daughter, Queen Elizabeth, and was one of the first to speak openly (and, due to Elizabeth’s accession, quite safely) of his high regard for Anne. By then, Ales was convinced that Anne had been the victim of a conspiracy of papists (Chapuys as well as various bishops) who were responsible for all “the hatred, the treachery, and the false accusations laid to the charge of that most holy Queen, your most pious mother.”16 Ales was not exactly right about this. Although the hostility (and in Chapuys’ case, machinations) of papists certainly contributed to Anne’s fall, it is now generally agreed that it was Cromwell who engineered the coup, with or without the instigation of the king. Cromwell was a reformist, and he and Anne had once been collaborators of a sort in bringing reformist ideas to court. But Cromwell was a pragmatist, raised in the school of very hard knocks, and he looked after himself above all else.

  Whomever one thought responsible for the plot, once the facts were assembled, it required a defiance of reason to believe in Anne’s guilt. Reason, however, has never played a very large part in attitudes toward Anne. Henry’s first successor (Edward VI, his son by Jane Seymour), no doubt influenced by his father’s version of things, bitterly described Anne as “more inclined to couple with a number of courtiers rather than reverencing her husband.”17 Edward may have sincerely believed this, but he and his chief minister, John Dudley, also had political motives. Because they were intent on skipping over Mary and Elizabeth in the line of succession,18 it suited their purposes that Elizabeth’s mother remain the Great Whore in people’s eyes.

  When Edward’s appointed successor (and very Protestant) Lady Jane Grey was executed, in a coup d’état even more staggeringly swift and brutal than Cromwell’s against Anne, and with the aggressively Catholic (and still resentful) Mary Tudor on the throne, there was little chance that Anne’s reputation would be rehabilitated. Mary had been badly treated by Anne—while awaiting her death, Anne confessed that this was the one thing that she repented of and wished to apologize for—and had seen her mother and her mother’s religion moved from an unassailable position in her father’s life to an obstacle in the way of his authority and his love life. Virtually abandoned by her father, forbidden to see her mother, she had formed close bonds with Eustace Chapuys, who brought her his own version of events, which cast Anne as Mary’s would-be poisoner. According to Jane Dormer (a lady-in-waiting to Mary when she was queen), Mary never stopped believing that this had been the case, and she also was convinced—or at least, made a great public show of insisting—that Elizabeth was the daughter of Anne and Mark Smeaton. Mary’s eventual husband, Philip II of Spain, came from a country that was not only devoutly Catholic but fiercely anti-Anne. Fed by Chapuys’ portrait of the satanic schemer who spent half her time thinking of ways to get rid of Katherine and Mary, and the other half of her time plotting to spread the Lutheran heresy throughout the world, the Spanish saw Anne as a militant offender against church and state, with Mary as the great avenger of her mother and defender of the faith. It was likely that Mary hated Anne to her dying breath, and it was thus prudent for those who had a different view to remain silent during her reign.

  Elizabeth’s ascension to the throne brought Anne’s Protestant defenders out of the closet, determined not just to exonerate her of the charges that brought her down, but also to create a new martyr to their cause. Alexander Ales, who wrote to Elizabeth about the dinner-table discussion and who in the same letter tells a memorable story about Anne and Henry quarreling near the end, with Elizabeth in her “sainted mother’s arms” as Anne beseeched the immovable Henry for sympathy, declared that “True religion in England had its commencement and its end with your mother,” and vowed to write the true history of her death “to afford consolation to the godly.”19 John Foxe went
several hundred steps further in the monumental The Acts and Monuments of the Church (better known as the Book of Martyrs), the 1563 edition of which (one of the four that Foxe revised and enlarged over his lifetime) was dedicated to Elizabeth. An earlier tribute to Anne, printed in 1559, had praised her beauty as well as her “many great gifts of a well instructed spirit: gentleness, modesty and piety toward all (particularly toward those who were in dire poverty) and most especially, a zeal for sincere religion.”20 In the 1563 version, Foxe credits Anne with much more, asserting that papal power in England “began utterly to be abolished, by the reason and occasion of the most virtuous and noble lady, Anne Bullen . . . by whose godly means and most virtuous council, the king’s mind was daily inclined better and better,” and detailing Anne’s charitable activities and support of reformist authors, including her introducing Henry to Simon Fish’s Supplication for the Beggars.21

  Ironically, the Protestants and Catholics were in agreement with regard to the significance of Anne’s influence in what Protestants called “the English Reformation” and Catholics called “the Anglican Schism.” But after the emphasis on her important role all agreement ends. The difference between “reforming” and fomenting a “schism” pretty much tells it all. Where Foxe (and William Latymer, Anne’s chaplain, whose own work in praise of Anne provided much of Foxe’s information) saw Anne’s efforts as a heroic accomplishment for which she paid with her life, Catholic polemicists such as Nicholas Sander saw her as a harlot and seductress who led Henry into heresy, filled the court with fellow heretics, and gave birth, both literally and metaphorically, to the most monstrous heresy of all: Elizabeth. Sander’s book, Schismatis Anglicani (The Rise and Growth of the Anglican Schism), which was written expressly to provide a counterhistory to Foxe’s account of Henry’s and Mary’s reigns, is especially important to the creation and international spread of some of the most enduring myths about Anne. Although originally published in Latin (1585), it had a lively, colloquial style bursting with salacious tales about the Tudor royalty and colorful analogies to well-known Bible stories; and it was quickly translated into French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, and Spanish. Described as “the basis of every [subsequent] Roman Catholic history,” it was even turned into a school play (called Henricus Octavus!), which was performed in Louvain (the home of Sander and many other self-imposed exiles from Elizabeth’s England) in 1624.22