The Creation of Anne Boleyn

by Susan Bordo

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  Jane Austen on Anne and Henry (from Her Playful The History of England, Composed in 1791, When Austen Was Sixteen)

  “It is . . . but Justice, & my Duty to declare that this amiable Woman was entirely innocent of the Crimes with which she was accused, of which her Beauty, her Elegance, & her Sprightliness were sufficient proofs, not to mention her solemn protestations of Innocence, the weakness of the Charges against her, & the King’s Character . . . The Crimes & Cruelties of this Prince, were too numerous to be mentioned, (as this history I trust has fully shown) & nothing can be said in his vindication, but that his abolishing Religious Houses & leaving them to the ruinous depredations of time has been of infinite use to the landscape of England in general, which probably was a principal motive for his doing it, since otherwise why should a Man who was of no Religion himself be at so much trouble to abolish one which had for ages been established in the Kingdom.”6

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  Although Anne may have served larger political and religious causes in Vertue Betray’d, the play also made her—for the first time in the English-speaking world—a subject with a story in her own right, and not just Henry’s Helen of Troy, or martyr for the cause of reform, or second in a series of wedded and dead/discarded wives. But Elizabeth Benger’s 1821 Memoirs of the Life of Anne Boleyn, Queen of King Henry VIII was an even more significant contribution. At first glance, Benger’s novel, the first full-length book devoted entirely to Anne, doesn’t seem that different, in its politics, from Foxe, Wyatt, or Banks. Benger believed the Protestant Reformation to be a glorious achievement, and she credited Anne with significant influence in bringing it about. She also emphatically disputes the notion that Anne was sexually manipulative and power hungry: “She had employed no artifice to obtain pre-eminence in the King’s regard . . . and rejected his passion with disdain, till it assumed the character of honorable love. Even after Henry approached her with a legitimate object, she is said to have expressed repugnance to the idea of supplanting her Queen.”7 This kind of refutation of Anne’s bad reputation was pretty standard stuff for pro-Protestant texts, which were still wrangling with Sander’s slander. Where Benger breaks new ground, however, is not only in the historical detail that she draws on, but also in her explicit—and surprisingly sophisticated—analysis of the role played by gender expectations in the breakdown of Anne and Henry’s relationship.

  Benger begins by challenging any expectation that Henry, the proud and domineering monarch, was someone who could “scarcely tolerate any superiority in a woman.”8 This assumption would be a mistake, for when he met Anne, “he had not entirely lost the sensibilities of his youth, [which] had been favorable to the female character.”9 The examples of the women who brought him up, as well as other “distinguished women of that age” such as Margaret of Austria and Marguerite de Navarre, had taught him to admire “individuals who might sanction the pretensions of their sex to intellectual equality.”10 Benger was clearly not an “essentializer” of men, and was capable of appreciating the qualities in Henry that drew him to Anne’s intellect and ambition. She also credits Henry as admiring Anne’s boldness, as well as her “gaiety” and “softness”—an appealing mix of masculine energies and feminine charms that made her a perfect match for Henry, then in the prime of his life and no longer stimulated by Katherine’s more conventionally queenly strengths.11 Katherine was a powerful woman—much more forceful than she is made out to be in most depictions of her—but she did not engage in courtly fun and games, and generally kept her views to herself and her close advisers. Anne’s upbringing, being both courtly and French, had taught her that being flirtatious and intellectually challenging was not outside the rules of appropriate behavior. Henry was refreshed by her, desired her, respected her, and fought for her.

  However, Henry was also accustomed to the “unbounded indulgence of [his] imperious will” and little able to “brook the necessity of submitting to privation or restraint.”12 And Anne, as Benger argues, changed as she developed as a women and a queen.

  Her mind expanded, her character developed; instead of being merely the private gentlewoman, whose highest ambition was to attract or please, she was become the partner of the throne, the generous queen, who aspired to be a true and affectionate mother of the people.

  The enthusiasm she delighted to inspire was far from pleasing to Henry, now that the fervor of passion had subsided, and that he no longer required talents or courage, but unwearied adulation and unconditional obedience. To a jealous egotist her best qualities had, perhaps, the effect of diminishing her attractions; by the zeal with which she carried into effect her plans of reformation, she must have offended one accustomed to consider himself as the sole and exclusive object of attention. It was, perhaps, fatal to her safety, that, in the first transports of affection, Henry had admitted her to full participation of all the honor and sovereignty formerly conceded to Katherine, and that he not only caused her to be proclaimed Queen Consort of England, but Lady of Ireland. When love declined, it might be suggested that he had sacrificed dignity, and even hazarded security, by this prodigal dispensation.13

  And then came Jane Seymour. Here, Benger stresses that Jane had none of Anne’s graces or sensibilities, and appealed to Henry for that very reason. For, having “lost his youthful susceptibility of imagination, and perhaps original delicacy of taste . . . it is probable that the inferiority of Jane’s mental attainments . . . contributed to turn the balance in her favor.”14

  Whether or not you accept this analysis of Anne’s fall from favor with Henry, the interpersonal dynamics that Benger focuses on are strikingly “gendered.” Without accusing Henry of being born a possessive, macho tyrant, Benger does argue that Anne’s strength and independence did eventually become a psychological (and possibly political) threat to him. At that point, the king becomes vulnerable to the charms of a younger, less formidable female. Starkey might dismiss this analysis as “soap opera,” but some version of it has become a staple of twentieth-century histories of Henry VIII, including Starkey’s. Here he considers why Henry might have fallen for Jane, a woman of “no family, no beauty, no talent.”

  But maybe Jane’s very ordinariness was the point. Anne had been exciting as a mistress . . . But [now] Henry wanted domestic peace and the quiet life. He also, more disturbingly, wanted submission. For increasing age and the Supremacy’s relentless elevation of the monarchy had made him ever more impatient of contradiction and disagreement. Only obedience, prompt, absolute and unconditional, would do. And he could have none of this with Anne. Jane, on the other hand, was everything that Anne was not. She was calm, quiet, soft-spoken (when she spoke at all) and profoundly submissive at least to Henry. In short, after Anne’s flagrant defiance of convention, Jane was the sixteenth-century’s ideal woman (or at least the sixteenth-century male’s ideal woman).15

  It’s often been the case in the history of “history” that when women do something, it’s considered tangential and trivial, while when men do it, it’s labeled a breakthrough of decisive historical importance. Male historians disdained Benger, along with Agnes and Elizabeth Strickland and other biographers of famous women who began to produce their “memoirs” and “lives” during the Victorian era. They were derided as “sentimental,” “gossipy,” “minute,” “trifling,” “twaddling,” “amusing,” and “tiddle-tattle,” and charged with a chief interest in frivolous matters such as dress, diet, education, and manners—in other words, the stuff of what we nowadays call “social and material history.” Some prominent male historians, including Thomas Babington Macaulay (The History of England, 1848), were enthusiastically praised for tackling “domestic and everyday life” and “the revolutions which have taken place in dress, furniture, repasts, and public amusements.”16 But Macaulay’s social history was viewed as “general” interest and an expansion of the proper domain of the historian, whereas attending to a woman’s “sphere”—even that of royalty—was seen as a specialized, miniatur
izing focus.17 In the twentieth century, philosopher Simone de Beauvoir gave us a concept—the woman as “other”—that aptly describes this dualism: What men do is “essential,” representative of the interests of “human beings,” and what women do is seen as particular to their sex. As such, all women writers, from the extremely sophisticated Benger, whose details of the everyday worlds of the French and English courts are always of social significance, to a trifle such as the Countess of Blessington’s 1848 Book of Beauty, or Regal Gallery, which is more a prescription for decorous female conduct than a biography of Anne, were lumped together as the work of “literary ladies.” Often, the books themselves were materially linked to women’s sphere: Francis Palgrave, in an 1843 review of Mrs. Forbes Bush’s Memoirs of the Queens of France, wishes the writer would have remained content with “marking pinafores and labeling pots of jam.”18 Margaret Oliphant, a fellow author, derides the Stricklands’ Lives of the Queens of England as “a shower of pretty books in red and blue, gilded and illustrated, light and dainty and personal, that fall upon us from [their] hands.”19

  The Stricklands can make one squirm, but it’s not because they deal with the details of clothing and court manners. Those passages, in fact, are among the most interesting (and often plundered by male historians looking for colorful detail to enliven their own work). And the books are far from “light and dainty” in their heavy moralizing, done in the typically prudish language of instruction in proper feminine comportment. Anne “lacked the feminine delicacy which would make a young and beautiful woman tremble at the impropriety of becoming an object of contention between two married men.”20 Not only had she “overstepped the restraints of moral rectitude” simply by flirting with the king but at the very “hour that Anne Boleyn did this, she took her first step towards a scaffold, and prepared for herself a doom which fully exemplified that warning, ‘Those who sow the whirlwind, must expect to reap the storm’ [emphasis mine].”21 In the service of (their own or the reader’s) “delicacy,” they also eliminated some historically irrefutable facts, such as Anne’s sleeping with Henry before their marriage. After all, as Jane Hunter describes in How Young Ladies Became Girls, “measured reading of improving texts [that is, texts aimed at instilling virtue in the reader] was part of the regimen of many Victorian girls.”22 And “the reading of history was especially praiseworthy.”23 It was important that reading not degenerate into a salacious vice, corrupting young women with tales of extramarital sex between kings and their female subjects.

  But prudishness with regard to Anne and Henry’s sex life was not limited to female writers; virtually no Victorian historian, male or female, mentioned it. (Elizabeth, it was either stated or implied, was very premature.) And idealized “feminine” descriptions, mostly of Katherine but sometimes of Anne, too, blossomed in all their sticky sweet fragrance on the pages of male writers as well. Tom Taylor’s popular 1875 play, Anne Boleyn, gives us an Anne who is haunted by the plight of “that poor Queen whose place I took”24 and whose love for the king is so virtuous that when she sees what a mess their romance is causing, she reminds him that “It’s not yet too late for pausing. Think, my lord, if you repent, there’s no harm done—’tis but to chase me from you, to look back on a four years’ golden dream.”25 The king refuses; it’s his lust, not Anne’s connivance, that moves events forward. Even more striking—and probably more influential—in creating a popular image of Anne as the romantic victim of Henry’s tyranny were two paintings: Anne Boleyn in the Tower (Edouard Cibot, 1835) and an 1838 depiction of Anne saying a final farewell to Elizabeth by Gustave Wappers. If the Victorians “feminized” history, it had more to do with a gender ideology that men and women shared rather than which sex held the pen (or the brush).

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  What Victorian Kids Were Taught About Anne Boleyn

  From Oliver Goldsmith’s The History of England (1771):

  “It happened that among the maids of honour, then attending the queen, there was one Anna Bullen, the daughter of Sir Thomas Bullen, a gentleman of distinction, and related to most of the nobility. The beauty of Anna surpassed whatever had hitherto appeared at this voluptuous court; and her education, which had been at Paris, tended to set off her personal charms. Her features were regular, mild, and attractive, her stature elegant, though below the middling size, while her wit and vivacity exceeded even her other allurements. Henry, who had never learned the art of restraining any passion that he desired to gratify, saw and loved her; but after several efforts to induce her to comply with his criminal desires, he found that without marriage, he could have no chance of succeeding. This obstacle, therefore, he hardily undertook to remove; and as his own queen was now become hateful to him, in order to procure a divorce, he alleged that his conscience rebuked him for having so long lived in incest with the wife of his brother . . .

  “. . . Anna Bullen, his queen, had always been a favourer of the reformation, and consequently had many enemies on that account, who only waited some fit occasion to destroy her credit with the king; and that occasion presented itself but too soon. The king’s passion was by this time quite palled with satiety; he was now fallen in love with another, and languished for the possession of Jane Seymour, who had for some time been maid of honour to the queen . . .

  “. . . The queen and her brother were tried by a jury of peers . . . Part of the charge against her was, that she had declared to her attendants that the king never had her heart; which was considered a slander upon the throne, and strained into a breach of a law-statute, by which it was declared criminal to throw any slander upon the king, queen, or their issue. The unhappy queen, although unassisted by counsel, defended herself with great judgement and presence of mind . . . but the king’s authority was not to be controlled; she was declared guilty . . .

  “. . . She was beheaded by the executioner of Calais, who was brought over, as much more expert than any in England. The very next day after her execution, Henry married the lady Jane Seymour, his cruel heart being no way softened by the wretched fate of one that had been so lately the object of his warmest affections.”26

  From Charles Dickens’s A Child’s History of England (1854):

  “We now come to King Henry the Eighth whom it has been too much the fashion to call ‘Bluff King Hal’ or ‘Burly King Henry’ and other fine names but whom I shall take the liberty to call, plainly, one of the most detestable villains that ever drew breath . . . He was a big, burly, noisy, smelly, small-eyed, large-faced, double-chinned, swinish looking fellow in later life (as we know from the likenesses of him, painted by the famous Hans Holbein), and it is not easy to believe that so bad a character can ever have been veiled under a prepossessing appearance . . . He was a most intolerable ruffian, a disgrace to human nature, and a blot of blood and grease upon the History of England.

  “. . . All this time [while Henry was trying to divorce Katherine], the king and Anne Boleyn were writing letters to each other almost daily, full of impatience to have the case settled; and Anne Boleyn was showing herself (as I think) very worthy of the fate which afterward befell her.”27

  From Lady Maria Callcott’s Little Arthur’s England (first published in 1835 and widely used in home schooling):

  “I told you Anne Boleyn was very young and beautiful. She was also clever and pleasant and I believe really good. But the king and some of his wicked friends pretended that she had done several bad things; and, as Henry had become very cruel as well as changeable, he ordered poor Anne’s head to be cut off. On the day she was to suffer death she sent to beg the king to be kind to her little daughter Elizabeth. She said to the last moment that she was innocent; she prayed God to bless the king and the people, and then she knelt down, and her head was cut off.”28

  From Samuel Gardiner’s English History for Students (1881):

  “After Henry had been married for some time he grew tired of his wife, Queen Catharine, and wanted to marry a sparkling beauty named Anne Boleyn. He suddenly discovered that he had
done wrong in marrying his brother’s widow . . . Anne brought him a daughter Elizabeth, who was to be more famous than any son could be . . . Her mother was suddenly accused of the vilest misconduct to the king her husband. Whether she was guilty or innocent cannot now be known.”29

  From Lydia Hoyt Farmer’s The Girl’s Book of Famous Queens (1887):

  “On the day of Catharine’s burial, King Henry wore mourning, but Anne Boleyn clothed herself and all her ladies in yellow, exclaiming ‘Now am I queen!’ . . . Neither King Henry’s arrogant power nor Anne Boleyn’s pernicious influence could prevent the widespread and lasting effect of the Christian death-bed of Catharine . . . And now Anne herself was to suffer the penalty of her wicked ambition.”30