The Creation of Anne Boleyn

by Susan Bordo

  When the historians got in on the action, criticisms of the historical inaccuracies were added to the complaints about the sex. Retha Warnicke, a historian who has advanced her own somewhat eccentric view of Anne’s fall, later incorporated in both The Tudors and The Other Boleyn Girl (a deformed fetus taken as a sign of witchcraft), “shuddered” at the conflation of Henry’s sisters, Mary and Margaret, into one person. “Truly dreadful,” she said of the merging of the two, which was done, according to Hirst, so that staff on location would not be confused when “Mary” was called to the set.46 Leanda de Lisle, who has written several well-regarded Tudor biographies, stated: “With inaccuracies in almost every sentence, the BBC is dumbing down the Tudor period.”47 Alison Weir compared the series to a Hollywood “fairytale.” “For a program to be made with integrity, it has to take account of the facts.”48 David Starkey (a self-confessed “all-purpose media tart,” who has created controversy in virtually every interview he has done) called the series “gratuitously awful” and “a Midwest view of the Tudors . . . made with the original intention of dumbing it down so that even an audience in Omaha could understand it.”49

  There were some exceptions. There were historians who pointed out that simply by igniting interest in the period the series had done a service to Tudor history. Tracy Borman, who writes about Anne in Elizabeth’s Women, while acknowledging that the show was often historically inaccurate, admitted to having become “strangely addicted” and praised it for “re-creating the drama and atmosphere of Henry VIII’s court, with its intrigues, scandals, and betrayals.”50 John Guy, who has written more than a dozen scholarly books about Tudor England, agreed. “The Tudors conveys brilliantly the claustrophobic atmosphere of Henry’s court; it’s a place where back-watching is second-nature, plotting endemic . . . If you value true and accurate history, this isn’t for you. But then, it isn’t meant to be. It’s a rumbustious romp through the life and times of ‘Horrible Henry and the Terrible Tudors,’ a fiction loosely based on fact, and when the facts get in the way, they’re ditched. If you can accept that, then watch and enjoy, for that’s what the real-life characters would have done. Thomas More, who always loved a comic turn, will be spinning in his grave if he’s watching this new series. But at least he’ll be smiling.”51

  Hirst had never claimed the series was 100 percent historically accurate, and to be fair to The Tudors, there’s not a film or television series—or play or novel, for that matter (and few biographies)—that can lay claim to that. “What?” a reader wrote in response to a critical Guardian story, “It’s NOT historically accurate?? Thanks goodness I know that Robin Hood is an American with a number 1 soundtrack, King Arthur is an old Scotsman, and the Americans single-handedly won the Second World War!”52 He makes a strong point. Anne of the Thousand Days, in addition to numerous other alterations of history, has that invented—yet somehow perfect—scene in the Tower between Anne and Henry. The Private Life of Henry VIII turns Anne of Cleves into a wisecracking cardsharp who is physically disgusted by Henry rather than (as history tells it) the other way around. A Man for All Seasons neglects to mention that Thomas More, besides being a witty intellectual, also burned quite a few heretics and was apparently not quite the devoted husband he appeared to be. The BBC production of The Six Wives of Henry VIII barely notes that there was a conflict of authority between Henry and the Church, beyond the issue of the divorce; it’s actually much more the wife-centered, “feminized” history that Starkey berates than The Tudors, which spends a lot of time on the more “masculine” (and for Starkey, historically central) end of things: diplomatic skirmishes, wars, and court politics. Hirst, in his interview with me, pointed out with some justice that while The Tudors got slammed for its gaps and inventions, Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall gets nothing but praise for its liberties with history. Wolf Hall, he says, is “complete fiction. But nobody says that. They all say: ‘What a wonderful book, what insights it brings to the Tudors.’ Isn’t that bizarre?”53

  Mantel’s quirky, magisterial portrait of Thomas Cromwell is a wonderful book, an imaginative tour de force that makes the precarious yet oddly cozy world of the Tudor court seem both completely familiar and utterly strange. Yet Hirst is right, it doesn’t shy away from tweaking the facts. Ignoring the fact that Cromwell and Anne had many of the same religious commitments for most of Anne’s reign, Mantel paints Anne through Cromwell’s eyes as a predatory calculator, brittle, anxious, and cold—a view that Cromwell is unlikely to have held during the period that Wolf Hall takes place. Mantel’s 2013 sequel, Bring Up the Bodies, which deals with the chilling, sudden turnabout of Anne’s fortunes “as it might have looked from Thomas Cromwell’s point of view,”54 goes even further, presenting a “theory” about Anne’s fall that is quite different from what most historians now believe—namely, that Cromwell played the leading hand in cooking up the ruthless plot that cost Anne her life. Mantel’s Cromwell, less the master strategist of a political coup than the nimble, pragmatic servant of Henry’s fickle love life, has some fortunately timed gossip fall in his lap and simply follows the wind, never quite sure of the truth himself—and leaving the historically uninformed reader unsure as well. “What is the nature of the border between truth and lies?” Mantel has Cromwell musing as the bits and pieces of rumor pile up. “It is permeable and blurred because it is planted thick with rumour, confabulation, misunderstanding and twisted tales.”55 In Bring Up the Bodies, Mantel brilliantly re-creates that permeable and blurred experience (even Anne’s guilt or innocence remains undecided at the end of the novel), which is what makes her fiction remarkable. Yet it is as blurred with regard to the truth as the false rumors that swirled around Anne’s sexual behavior.

  It’s worth reflecting on our shifting standards with regard to the historical accuracy of fictional representations. Although historians complain about the distortions of history in The Tudors, the show actually sticks much more closely and in greater detail to the historical record than any other production. Ironically, that has made it more vulnerable to criticism. With the leisure of four seasons, the series is able to deal with much more of what actually happened; therefore, it has much more “data” to not get quite right or alter deliberately for dramatic purposes. And despite the condescending remarks of the British press, the show is actually intellectually far more demanding than The Six Wives of Henry VIII. Perhaps its chief offense is being “pop” rather than “literary.” I adored Wolf Hall (despite its nasty portrait of Anne), but I know a great deal about the period and have to wonder how many of those who praised it actually were able to follow it. It’s an extremely dense, demanding work of art, particularly for those who aren’t familiar with all the cultural references; even keeping all the Thomases straight is a challenge. Perhaps critics were afraid to question its fidelity to history because, like students in a high-theory college course, they were afraid of displaying their own ignorance.

  Among historians, what is seen as “dreadful” and what slides by is often a matter of whom and what you care about. As an Anne scholar and a feminist, I bristle most when she is dragged through the sexist muck, but devotees of David Starkey are oblivious to his stereotyping (and his work claims the status of “history”). Some depictions get away with nonsense because they were created long enough ago that they are viewed as dusty, cultural artifacts, and as such are not held to standards of factual accuracy. Television and movies, because they carry with them the illusion of verisimilitude—real bodies, real action, and often in highly realistic settings and costumes—are more likely to be criticized for historical inaccuracy no matter how often their creators, as Hirst does, insist that they are not meant to be entirely factual. If they comport themselves with enough dignity, however—like the BBC productions or A Man for All Seasons—they are off the hook. And then there is the post–Oliver Stone, “postmodern” problem: We no longer have much assurance that viewers or readers will be able to distinguish between fact and fiction, so special anxiety about the tran
sgressions of The Tudors or The Other Boleyn Girl is “justified” by virtue of a cultural milieu in which the created image (whether computer-generated visuals or concocted narratives) is consumed, without scrutiny, as “reality.”

  The Tudors’ chief offense, I believe, is not that it is “dumb” or especially riddled with inaccuracies, but that it exploits audience’s tastes for eye candy, cinematic sex, and soap-opera drama. If the series had aimed at more refined tastes, I believe, fewer historians would have found the Mary/Margaret conflation so outrageous. They would have been respectfully curious as to the reason for it, but they would not have so readily cried “shame!”—as though the Virgin Mary had been slandered. My most serious problem with the show’s pandering to soap-opera tastes is that it inevitably led to recycling the image of Anne Boleyn as the seductive, scheming Other Woman. That’s the classic soapy element of the story, after all: Sexpot steals husband from mousy, menopausal first wife. Hirst says he never intended this and attributes it less to the script than to “deep cultural projections.” He had initially seen Anne, he told me, as a victim of her father’s ambitions, and believed he was writing the script to emphasize that. He was surprised when “critics started to trot this line out: ‘Here she is, just a manipulative bitch.’ Well, actually I hadn’t written it like that. But they couldn’t get out of the stereotypes that had been handed down to them and that’s what they thought they were seeing on the screen. It didn’t matter what they were actually seeing. They had already decided that Anne Boleyn was this Other Woman, this manipulative bitch.”56

  I agree with Hirst about the power of the history of cultural images; but it’s odd that he would be so naïve about the way that the show’s own imagery reinforced them. Dormer believes it was indeed unconscious on Hirst’s part, that in capitalizing on the sexual chemistry between Henry and Anne, and while portraying Katherine as virtuous and long-suffering, he slipped into a very common male mind-set. “Men still have trouble recognizing,” she told me, “that a woman can be complex, can have ambition, good looks, sexuality, erudition, and common sense. A woman can have all those facets, and yet men, in literature and in drama, seem to need to simplify women, to polarize us as either the whore or the angel. That sensibility is prevalent, even to this day. I have a lot of respect for Michael, as a writer and a human being, but I think that he has that tendency. I don’t think he does it consciously. I think it’s something innate that just happens and he doesn’t realize it.”57

  Natalie was in a bind. “I had to reconcile the real person and the character of Anne Boleyn as created in the text. For the actor, the text is your bible. You can try to put a spin on the nuances, but in the end our job is to be the vehicle of the text.” Yet she often felt “compromised” by the way Anne’s character was written for the first season and got tired of “flying the flag of Showtime” in interviews, justifying the show’s hypersexuality and inaccuracies “when in the pit of my stomach, I agreed wholly with what the interviewer was saying to me. I lost many hours of sleep and actually shed tears during my portrayal of her, trying to inject historical truth into the script, trying to do right by this woman whom I had read so much about. It was a constant struggle, because the original script had that tendency to polarize women into saint and whore. It wasn’t deliberate, but it was there.”58

  At the point at which I spoke to Michael Hirst, after the last season of the show was completed, he had become much more aware of the long legacy of negative stereotypes of Anne, the tendency of fiction writers and some historians to simply recycle them, and his own complicity. But at the time of the first reviews, he was surprised when some critics “dismissed Anne as your typically manipulative, scheming bitch” and was distressed that “some of this criticism hurt Natalie very much.”59 But Natalie wasn’t about to let it rest with that. During a dinner with Hirst, while he was still writing the second season, she shared her frustration and begged him “to do it right in the second half. We were good friends. He listened to me because he knew I knew my history. And you know, he’s a brilliant man. So he listened. And I remember saying to him: ‘Throw everything you’ve got at me. Promise me you’ll do that. I can do it. The politics, the religion, the personal stuff, throw everything you’ve got at me. I can take it.’”60

  She told Hirst of her wish that audiences, when the series got to Anne’s fall, would empathize with her. Talking to me in Richmond upon Thames, Natalie was especially passionate about that subject.

  “It happened very shortly after she miscarried, remember. To miscarry is traumatic for any woman, even in this day and age. And to be in that physical and mental state, having just miscarried, and be incarcerated in the Tower! If only she’d had that child! It’s horrific to confront how much transpired because of terrible timing, and how different it could have been. It’s one of the most dramatic ‘ifs’ of history. And it’s why it’s such a compelling, sympathetic story. But I knew by the time we’d finished the first season that we hadn’t achieved it. That audiences would have no sympathy for her because the way she’d been written, she would be regarded as the other woman, the third wheel, that femme fatale, that bitch. Who had it coming to her.”61

  Hirst listened to her and took her seriously, and the result was a major change in the Anne Boleyn of the second season. Still sexy, but brainy, politically engaged and astute, a loving mother, and a committed reformist. Scenes were added, showing Anne talking to Henry about Tyndale, instructing her ladies-in-waiting about the English Bible, quarrelling with Cromwell over the misuse of monastery money. No longer was Anne simply a character “in the ether.” Rehabilitating her image became part of Hirst’s motivation in writing the script: “I wanted to show that she was a human being, a young woman placed in a really difficult and awful situation, manipulated by her father, the king, and circumstances, but that she was also feisty and interesting and had a point of view and tried to use her powers to advance what she believed in. And I wanted people to live with her, to live through her. To see her.”62

  The execution scene was especially important to Natalie: “By the end of the season, when I’m standing on that scaffold,” she told Michael, “I hope you write it the way it should be. And I want the effect of that scene to remain with viewers for the length of the series. I want the audience to be standing with her on that scaffold. I want those who have judged her harshly to change their allegiance so they actually love her and empathize with her.”63 However the scene was to be scripted, this would require a lot of Natalie, especially since the show was not filmed in chronological sequence and the execution scene was shot before the episodes that led up to it. At dawn, standing in the courtyard of Dublin’s Kilmainham Jail, the site of many actual executions, she had “a good cry” with Jonathan Rhys Meyers. “It was incredibly haunting and harrowing—I felt the weight of history on my shoulders.” But because she had “lived and breathed Anne for months on end” and had “tremendous sympathy for the historical figure,” it did not require a radical shift of mood to prepare herself for the scene. “I was a real crucible of emotions for those few days. By the time I walked onto the scaffold, I hope I did have that phenomenal air of dignity that Anne had.” Anne’s resigned, contained anguish did not have to be forced, because by then Natalie was in mourning for the character. “As I was saying the lines, I got the feeling I was saying good-bye to a character. And when it was over, I grieved for her.”64

  Hirst, too, recalls the heightened emotions of shooting that scene. “That was an amazing day. Extraordinary day. After, I went in to congratulate her. She was weeping and saying, ‘She’s with me, Michael. She’s with me.’”65

  The episode averaged 852,000 viewers, according to Nielsen, an 83 percent increase over the first season finale and an 11 percent increase over the season premiere, and for many viewers—particularly younger women—the execution scene became as iconic as Geneviève Bujold’s “Elizabeth shall be queen” speech.66 When I showed the episode to a classroom of historically sophisticated h
onors students, none of whom had watched the series, there were many teary eyes; among devoted Tudors fans, for whom it was the culmination of a building attachment to the character, the effect of the scene—whose last moments were both graphic and poetic, lingering on Anne postexecution, her now-lifeless face still bearing her final, sad, unbelieving expression, caught midair, suspended in space—was emotionally wrenching.

  I have watched many actresses walk to the scaffold as Anne Boleyn and I read every book I can get my hands on fiction or nonfiction about her and I have never seen anyone do it with the grace I believe that Anne had except Natalie. The scene where she is walking through the crowd and they are actually touching her, you can see in her eyes and her mouth and the way she breathes that she is trying to hold it together and stay calm. Episode 9 and 10 of season two are stunning due to Natalie.67

  Many viewers, in fact, watched the show listlessly after Dormer as Anne left; the rest of the story seemed anticlimactic to them. “Natalie Dormer basically ruled The Tudors!,” wrote one viewer. “Her performance was absolutely passionate, genuine, and convincing and that’s why I was devastated when her character died and she left the show.”68 The feelings of this commentator were shared by many. The following season’s finale had the show’s second smallest audience (366,000 viewers), and among those who stuck with it and continued to enjoy it (as I did) there remained a void where Natalie’s Anne Boleyn had been. The ads for the remaining two seasons were successively more sensationalizing—the third season depicting Henry sitting on a throne of naked, writhing bodies, the last season described (on the DVD) as a “delicious, daring . . . eight hours of decadence.”69 But “those of us who were glued to this sudsy mix of sex and sixteenth-century politics know the spark went out of the series when Dormer’s Anne Boleyn was sent to the scaffold,”70 wrote Gerard Gilbert in the Independent.