The Creation of Anne Boleyn

by Susan Bordo

  Meyers, apparently, called quite a few of the shots here. He refused, for example, to gain weight—or to wear prosthetics—as the series went on. Both Hirst and Meyers have tried to justify this. Hirst has given a few different explanations. In a 2008 interview, he said that he didn’t want people to say, “Oh, look. That is Henry VIII. We wanted to get closer to the spirit of the thing, to a kind of reality. And the reality was that Henry was young, virile, very charismatic, very dangerous.”16 In his 2011 interview with me, he began by saying that a “big body suit” would have looked ridiculous on Rhys Meyers’s “small head,” and he “never wanted to go down the line of a slightly comical Henry.”17 Eventually, however, Hirst admitted to me that “we simply couldn’t have gotten Jonny to do it. He would not have been able to tolerate looking grotesque.”18 Rhys Meyers has tried to justify his refusal in commercial terms. “Listen,” he told the Sunday Times when the show aired in the U.S. in 2007, “you’re trying to sell a historical period drama to a country like America—you do not want a big, fat, 250-pound, red-haired guy with a beard. It doesn’t let people embrace the fantastic monarch he was, because they’re not attracted to the package. Heroes do not look like Henry VIII. That is just the world we live in.”19 Of course—setting aside the insult to redheads and Americans—Henry didn’t become fat overnight, and by the time that he did, he was hardly a “hero.” In another interview, Rhys Meyers admits that “I just didn’t want to be Fat Henry.”20 That seems to have been the bottom line.

  Natalie Dormer, the twenty-six-year-old actress who was chosen to play the role of Anne Boleyn, approached her assignment very differently. A longtime British history buff who had, in fact, hoped to study history at Cambridge (she misunderstood a question on her A-level exams and failed to get the necessary grade for acceptance), Natalie has strong opinions about the real Anne, and when she got the role, she was excited over the prospect of embodying her as accurately as possible. “I didn’t want to play her as this femme fatale—she was a genuine evangelical with a real religious belief in the Reformation.”21 Dormer also came to the role well aware of the stereotypes and gender biases that had dogged Anne, both in her lifetime and in later representations.

  “Anne really influenced the world behind closed doors,” she told me in our 2010 interview. “But she’s given no explicit credit because she wasn’t protected. Let’s not forget, too, that history was written by men. And even now, in our postfeminist era, we still have women struggling in public positions of power. When you read a history book, both the commentary and the firsthand primary evidence, all the natural gender prejudices during the period will certainly be there.

  “Anne was that rare phenomenon, a self-made woman. But then, this became her demise. The machinations of court were an absolute minefield for women. And she was a challenging personality, who wouldn’t be quiet and shut up when she had something to say. This was a woman who wasn’t raised in the English court, but in the Hapsburg and French courts. And she was quite a fiery woman and incredibly intelligent. So she stood out—fire and intelligence and boldness—in comparison to the English roses that were flopping around court. And Henry noticed that. So all the reasons that attracted [Henry] to her, and made her queen and a mother, were all the things that then undermined her position. What she had that was so unique for a woman at that time was also her undoing.”22

  I was extremely lucky to meet Natalie after her contract with Showtime was over and she felt free to cease acting as a spokesperson for the show and to speak her mind. We arranged to meet in a small boutique hotel in Richmond upon Thames, where she lived at the time. When she arrived (I had been there for a half hour, the only woman in the room without a hat, nervously checking my recording equipment), the staff immediately sprang into action to make things comfortable for us in the bar; she clearly is the town celebrity. But, except for her dramatic expressiveness and striking beauty, which singled her out from everyone else at the bar, there was no aura of celebrity about her. Despite her success and the legions of fan clubs devoted to her, she regards herself as very much at the start of her career and seemed genuinely excited to talk to someone else who was waist-deep in the world of Anne Boleyn, a place that she had occupied with intensity and dedication over the last several years. We were in sync from our first exchange, and for over an hour and a half, nestled like longtime girlfriends in the corner of the bar. Accompanied by her younger sister, Samantha, we shared our love of Anne and her story, lamented how it had been misrepresented both in Anne’s time and our own, discussed Tudor history, and reflected on the struggle of Anne, women actors, and young women today to escape the limitations and expectations placed on them. It was in this interview that Natalie revealed, for the first time, just how hard she had struggled to “not betray” Anne, as she put it, in the series.23

  The first challenge came almost immediately. Natalie had auditioned in her natural hair color, which is blonde, fully expecting that if she got the role she would play Anne as a brunette. She knew her history, and it never occurred to her that the executives at Showtime would have anything else in mind. She was concerned, in fact, that her strong physical differences from Anne—including her blue eyes—would disqualify her for the part. She reassured herself about the eyes—“They aren’t the right color, but just like Anne, I’ve been told they are my most becoming feature.” (Actually, there’s not a feature on Natalie’s face that isn’t dazzling.) But she knew the hair would have to be changed. So after she received the phone call telling her she’d won the part—largely on the basis, Hirst told me, of the “physical chemistry” between her and Rhys Meyers (Natalie describes it as “a lot of heaving bosom stuff”)—she became “hysterical with joy” and then immediately dyed her hair.24

  When she arrived on set, Dee Corcoran, chief of the hair department, who won an Emmy for her work on the show and was “almost like an Irish mother” to Natalie, took her aside. “Okay, we’ve got a really serious problem—you dyed your hair. They are really unhappy. Really unhappy.”25 “They” were the Showtime execs.

  “So they sent me back to the hairdresser and they tried to dye blonde back in. But any hairdresser will tell you that it doesn’t work to put peroxide blonde on jet black. I looked like a badger! I was terrified that I’d lose the role. I mean, what did they have planned, now that I was multicolored—to put me in a blonde wig?” Dormer wasn’t sure she could accept that. “Anne’s hair color is such an important detail! For one thing, it was the basis of a lot of nasty labels—Wolsey calling her the ‘night crow’ and so on. And also, in being a confident brunette she was defying the ideal of what it meant for a female to be attractive at that time.26

  “So we’re all barely cast, and I went to Bob Greenblatt with my heart in my mouth and told him how important it was that Anne be dark. ‘Bob, I have to play her dark. It’s so important. You have to let me play her dark!’ Some might say I was being melodramatic and self-important. But I thought it would just be a direct betrayal of Anne. Of her refusal to step into the imprint of the acceptable norm at the time.27

  “Greenblatt, who is a very shrewd man, just said, ‘I’ll think about it.’ I assumed I’d lost the job. I felt completely and utterly depressed. But then I got a phone call a few days later, telling me that Bob had decided I could be dark.”28

  Natalie didn’t try to hide her pride and pleasure from me. “It was a major coup at the time! A major coup!”29 It was clear that by “coup” Natalie didn’t mean that she had bested the executives with a power play, for she was well aware that they called the shots and that her casting had hung precariously in the balance. It was, rather, a victory for the values that she hoped would be brought to the series—authenticity, a recognition of what was unusual about Anne, and a willingness, on the part of those in charge, to listen and learn.

  But there were more challenges ahead. Michael Hirst freely admitted to me that when he wrote the first season of The Tudors, he wasn’t all that interested in Anne Boleyn. “I didn’t
even know if we’d be picked up for a second season at that point, and Anne was one of many people swimming in the ether. Wolsey and More—and, of course, Henry—were the more dominant figures.”30 His ultimate goal was to introduce television viewers to the tumultuous events behind the English Reformation. But he knew that history-as-entertainment was “a giant leap” for most viewers, and he wasn’t afraid to make use of—some would say, invent—the sexier side of the story. He had wanted Natalie Dormer for the role of Anne largely because of the sparks between her and Jonathan Rhys Meyers, and felt that to win audiences over to a historical drama they “had to push the boundary” when it came to sexuality. But, he insists, “It wasn’t entirely cynical.”

  I did want to show, unlike high school history, that there was a lot of sex at the time. All the courts of Europe were run by people in their teens and twenties . . . that’s why they were so crazy. We have this image now that the court is always middle-aged, but it wasn’t true. You know, Henry was eighteen when he became king, and I thought it was ridiculous that people were telling me he was really rather prudish and there was no sex because there was no heating in the palaces. But it’s quite true that it was also a way of gaining an audience for something that wouldn’t otherwise have been watched. Once I had my audience, I could develop more complicated issues.31

  Some members of the cast, however, did not apparently care much about those “complicated issues.” Sam Neill, who played Cardinal Wolsey, described the series as “above all, about sex. Sex drives everything, including Wolsey, who had a mistress. The vow of celibacy didn’t mean a lot to the good cardinal. Yes, sex drives everything. That’s what makes [the series] such fun.”32 Amazingly enough, this view of the period did not hamper Neill from doing a pretty fair job as Wolsey.

  Today, Hirst admits that he may have gone too far. “We probably had a little too much sex in the beginning,” he conceded.33 I certainly thought so, not for reasons of prudishness but because the sexual overkill was ludicrous, historically inaccurate, and turned all the women, save hair-shirted Katherine, into mindless tarts. The debut of the series coincided with the beginning of my own research for this book, and I had the passion of a new convert to the cause of “the real” Anne and Henry. Their sex lives are not so easy to uncover, of course, but partly that’s because they were so much more discreet than the out-in-the-open antics of The Tudors. “They were much more sexually gregarious in the sixteenth century than they are today,” Rhys Meyers claims; how he knows that is a mystery, but even if it were true, Henry would not have paraded his adventures in view of the court.34 That much we can say with certainty. Beyond that, there is speculation. Henry, many scholars believe, may not have been the most expert of lovers; some think he was plagued by intermittent impotence. There’s no proof of either of those claims; it all depends on whether you believe that Anne was speaking truthfully (and not merely spitefully) when she told Jane Rochford that the king had neither skill nor vigor in bed. But one thing upon which most historians agree is that Henry was not especially promiscuous and took relatively few mistresses—when compared, say, to Francis. For Francis, affairs were a sport; for Henry, they were mostly confined to the periods when his wives were pregnant—or when he had truly soured on his current mate (as happened with both Katherine and Anne). If there were indeed as many beddings as shown in The Tudors, we don’t know about them precisely because he was so careful to keep them private.

  This was a man, too, we should remember, who apparently kept himself chaste for six years while he waited for Anne to become available, a restraint that some scholars believe was Henry’s idea, not Anne’s. It does make sense that having settled on Anne as queen, Henry would not have wanted to jeopardize the scenario he hoped for—marriage and then an indisputably legitimate male heir—with an illegitimate child by her or any other woman. Hirst retains the notion that Henry waited for Anne (showing Henry masturbating in a little pot held by a manservant to get some release). But a Henry who would have been capable of such restraint doesn’t square very well with the rambunctiously horny Henry of previous episodes, who merely has to wink at one of his boys and nod in the direction of a pretty wench in order to have her delivered to his rooms that night. In the very first episode, he spends all of four minutes discussing the pros and cons of war with France before he declares that “it’s time to play” and goes off to have cinematic sex with his mistress, Elizabeth Blount. Blount was his mistress, and the mother of Henry’s illegitimate son, Henry Fitzroy, so there’s some justification for introducing her early on. But later on in the same episode—it seems to be the next day—he invites another maid—a “Lady Jane,” unknown to the historical record—to his bedchamber. And on it goes, until Henry is struck with the dart of love for Anne. In these pre-Anne romps, Henry is such an expert undresser, buttocks-slapper, muff nibbler, and nipple stroker that it’s hard to believe the man was raised in a Catholic household, let alone suffered from any confidence problems.

  None of this stopped me from becoming addicted to the series. And none of it truly offended me until, in the third episode, Francis’s sister Marguerite de Navarre, the intellectual light of Francis’s court, a critic of male sexual aggression, and a deep believer in platonic love between men and women, appears as a visitor to the English court, bosom spilling out of her dress, casting hot glances across the dining hall at Henry as both of them bite into their roasted thighs and wings, Tom Jones fashion. The liaison gets arranged effortlessly, and later that night, we see two guards stoically keeping watch while Henry and Marguerite grunt and moan behind his bedroom door. Most viewers would not have realized that a distinguished historical figure—Marguerite is often called “the mother of the Renaissance”—was being turned into a trollop for the sake of ratings, but for those of us who know something about the period, it seemed not merely gratuitous (as “Lady Jane” had been) but nasty. Having talked to Michael Hirst at length, I know he is neither nasty nor disrespectful of women. But doing The Tudors, as he admits, was a learning curve for him when it came to the intellectual and religious role of the female players in the larger historical drama. And at this point along the curve, someone such as Marguerite would have been even farther out “in the ether” than Anne. I suspect he just assumed that Francis’s sister would have had the same proclivities as her brother.

  Hirst, in his zeal to make the series deliciously digestible to prime-time viewers, did not initially do justice to Anne either. Although, in his interview with me, he described her as “one of the heroines of English culture . . . who did a great deal to support and foster the advancement of the Protestant faith,” but whose “name has been blackened because she was the Other Woman who came between Henry and his rightful queen,” the Anne of the first season of The Tudors (and partway into the second) did not do much to disrupt that “blackened” image.35 Throughout that first season, Anne entices, provokes, and sexually manipulates her way into the queenship, allowing Henry to get to every base except home, driving him mad with pent-up lust. “Seduce me!” she orders Henry, and a moment later we see her stark naked36; a few episodes later, she taunts him to find a piece of ribbon that she has apparently hidden inside her vagina. In the last episode of the season, they ride into an appropriately moist and verdant forest, tear at each other’s clothing, and just about do it before Anne pulls herself away from the embrace, leaving him to howl in frustration—and reminding me, unpleasantly, of high school. (We’re told, early in the second season, that Anne had become acquainted, while a teenage resident at the French court, with the hand job. Why didn’t she make use of it? It would have spared Henry and viewers alike some agony.) At the beginning of season two, it is also suggested that while at the French court, Anne slept with half the courtiers and possibly the French king. When Henry presents her, newly anointed as the Marquess of Pembroke, to Francis and his court, she performs a Salome-style dance that makes one wonder just which historical series one is watching. At home, her bold flirting, confiding, and cuddlin
g with Mark Smeaton makes the later charges of adultery with him quite plausible—and completely out of character with Anne, who was obsessed with being accepted as queen and would never have condescended to treat a court musician in such an openly familiar fashion.

  The show premiered in the United States in April 2007. The first reviews were neither outraged nor particularly enthusiastic. Alessandra Stanley, in the New York Times, called it “enjoyable but not exhilarating, engaging but not hypnotic.”37 Ted Cox, in the Daily Herald, asked: “What do bare breasts and rampant sex scenes add to the life of Henry VIII?” and concluded that while “history certainly goes down easier when it’s being mixed with bodice-ripping romps in bed,” the show “never really ignites dramatically.”38 Ginia Bellafante, in a later review, referred to the first season as “somnolent.”39 A lot of viewers, apparently, didn’t agree; the preview episode gave Showtime its highest viewing figures for a series debut in three years.

  It was when the show premiered on BBC six months later that the steam hit the fan, as the British reacted to the marathon sexuality and what in virtually every review was described as the gross, pandering “Americanization” of English history. “Perfectly preposterous. There are so many pouting babes and dashing blades in Henry’s court, The Tudors looks like a CSI: Miami pool party with ruffles”40; “a Wikipedia entry with boobs”41; “sexed up” and “dumbed down” for American audiences42; “a porno-style historical semi-drama quite obviously not aimed at the serious television watcher”43; “Entourage goes historical”44; “if Jackie Collins wrote a dramatic version of Simon Schama’s History of Britain, it might come across like this.”45