The Creation of Anne Boleyn

by Susan Bordo

  Looking at the portrait, I felt intensely protective. It was not unlike the feeling that sometimes floods me when I am talking to one of my eighteen-year-old students, and the nighttime cutter or purger is revealed to me behind the bravado of the belly-button piercing. And it called up my fears for my own daughter, Cassie, who from infancy was bolder, more independent, and more audacious than her peers. As I watched with admiration as she resisted the pink police throughout elementary school, I had come to feel—in my heart, not in my head, which knew it was nonsense—that Cassie, whom we adopted, had been cosmically entrusted to me. I was relieved that neither the culture nor her DNA had given me a girl like Diana, dreaming of the day her prince might come. But I worried—and still do, of course—how her unconventional behavior would be met, as she grew older, by peers and teachers. The young Anne, as I imagine her, was once as sturdy and unafraid as my daughter. I see them both on horseback, sure and free, challenging each other. Faster! Faster! The countryside is hilly and difficult, but these are fearless girls, who take each turn and jump with ease, laughing, thrilled at their own expertise.

  Cassie, then eight, was with me when I traveled to London during my first Boleyn-obsessed July, courtesy of a British conference invitation—ironically, on the topic of masculinity and pathology. By then, I had developed the spirit of an avenging mama. I was even angry at Hever Castle for devoting less space to Anne than to William Waldorf Astor’s seventeenth- and eighteenth-century antiques. At that point, having spent several months obsessed with Anne, I was hoping to find something grippingly authentic there that I hadn’t yet found in the books. But Astor and his wife, who had “combed the world” (through their agents) for paintings, furniture, carpets, and objets d’art “worthy” of the castle, had chased the ghosts of Anne and Henry from most of the house. Magnificent gardens, created in the early 1900s from marshland and rough meadows, frustrated my yearning to see and smell the natural surroundings of Anne’s childhood. They were gorgeous, but I didn’t want to see plush, satin-covered furniture and well-tended grounds; I wanted “Tudor” with everything wild and not-quite-civilized about it.

  I was especially annoyed to find, on the second floor of the castle, elaborately costumed figures created by the costumiers Angels of London arranged in scenes commemorating “Henry VIII and His Six Wives” and “Scenes from the Life and Times of Anne Boleyn.” Some of the figures are impressively lifelike and period appropriate, and the artist had lavished particular skill on the executioner. But Anne’s face seems to have been modeled with Miss America 1959 (was it Mary Ann Mobley?) in mind. Impossibly regular-featured and wide-eyed, she’s a Breck Girl, a Junior Miss, a mannequin stolen from a fifties window display on “What the Modern Girl Will Wear to School This Fall” and redressed in Tudor garb. And the executioner had an ax, not a sword! To me, full of the passion of the newly converted, this was a travesty. My daughter, however, found the execution scene “awesome” and could only be dragged away by a reminder that there was a display of torture instruments on the second floor.

  “What part of the body did they put those on?” my daughter asked excitedly, pointing to a particularly grisly pair of steel pincers. “How hard did they squeeze them? Did the person die, or could he live if they got him to a hospital in time?” She was pressed up against the glass, amazed that grown-ups had once been so creative with the nasty things that they did to one another’s bodies. “I bet if they got him to a hospital right away, he could still live.” Out of the corner of my eye I saw a pair of raised English eyebrows and pursed lips. “Historical education,” I said, trying to elicit a laugh that never came and attempting to shift Cassie’s interest to the suits of armor.

  There are very few reminders at Hever of the real events that played out here. One is a room containing Anne’s prayer books, under glass, where I stood spellbound for a few moments, staring at the inscription “le temps viendra” (the time will come) and indulging my belief in a mystical connection between Anne and me, which I now recognize as just the irrational mentality of the first stages of infatuation. Another is the room where Henry is said to have slept when he visited Hever. (He carried an enormous lock with him, which he had a locksmith affix to the bedroom door wherever he stayed during his progresses or as a visitor.) The massive bed is dated from about 1540—four years after Anne’s death—but it is easy to imagine Henry sleeping in one just like it. As I stared at Henry’s bed, mentally trying Charles Laughton, Robert Shaw, Richard Burton, and Jonathan Rhys Meyers on for size, I suddenly remembered that Cassie was wandering alone through the rooms of the castle. “Cassie, where are you?” I kept my voice down, trying not to fulfill the “loud American” stereotype, but my daughter, as usual, had slipped out of my sight. “Cassie?” The rooms are mazelike and there were countless canes and walkers to negotiate. "Cassie?" I finally found her searching, without any luck, for something interesting in a room with portraits. She was already chafing at the bit, eager to get to the gift shop, where we purchased a set of chocolates, seven in all, six wives and Bluff Hal in the middle.

  Later that night, in our hotel room, Cassie immediately grabbed the chocolates and claimed the king—“I want Henry!” I was briefly annoyed that what she had taken away from our trip to Hever was a greater admiration for Henry, the big male boss. But after all, why shouldn’t she want the centerpiece, the only one who was not, as the chocolates suggested, a part of a harem? I also knew that in her hands, Henry’s reign wouldn’t last very long. I secreted Anne away where no one could eat her. And Henry was devoured with dispatch by my daughter, the wrapper with his image crushed and discarded as soon as the chocolate was gone.

  I returned to England in the summer of 2010, excited about planned interviews with Natalie Dormer and Howard Brenton, and hoping to see some of the sites I had missed the first time. Cassie wasn’t with me this time (she was away at camp), so I wouldn’t have to deal with her restless hand tugging me away from boring historical stuff. By then, too, my rescue fantasy had been informed by the recognition that Anne Boleyn didn’t need me to save her. For what I had expected to be a steady historical onslaught of familiar stereotypes was, as I discovered in my years of research, a complex, varied, culturally revealing, and never-ending creation and re-creation. Yes, Henry had destroyed her fleshly life in real time, and many since had vilified her in the cultural “afterlife” that followed. But they didn’t succeed—not in any permanent sense. Anne the real woman may have been silenced by Henry, but her restless spirit refuses to remain quiet, as she uses our shifting fancies, fantasies, and anxieties to write and rewrite her story over the centuries.

  Still, there was a depressing gap between what I’d learned, digging deeply into things, and the more superficial, “official” representation. I loved Brenton’s play, although I was annoyed that Miranda Raison hadn’t been forced to dye her hair dark or wear a wig. (“Too uncomfortable,” Brenton told me.2) But the official sites, for one obsessed with Anne, turned out to be disappointing. Hampton Court, apparently determined to make the site tourist and family friendly, is scrubbed of everything ugly about Henry’s reign. “Bluff King Hal” rules—with Disney and Showtime cheering him on. In the gift shop, would-be warriors and princesses can buy plastic suits of armor and pink gowns available at any suburban mall. In the Information Centre, children can pick up activity booklets with titles such as Henry’s Palace (“Ever wondered how the royals used to rock? Step this way and discover how Henry created England’s most fabulous party venue”) and borrow mock-velvet cloaks for their visit. There are themed, costumed enactments, in which talented actors stage merry moments in the life of Henry VIII. Nothing frightening or tragic is permitted.3 And the guides don’t know how many H’s and A’s were left on the ceiling and walls of the Great Hall. It seemed that five hundred years later, Henry had gotten his way at Hampton Court.

  At the Tower of London4, where things went very bad for Anne and where the “Beefeater” guides delight in telling visitors anecdotes associat
ed with its famous prisoners, Anne is just one among many. On Tower Green she quietly shares a placid memorial with seven other men and women whose “jewelled names were broken from the vivid thread of life” on the Green, including her cousin Katherine Howard, Robert Devereux (Elizabeth’s Earl of Essex), and Lady Jane Grey, who was beheaded when she was just sixteen. In the Chapel Royal of St. Peter ad Vincula, where Anne is buried, her name is listed on a bronze plaque along with all the other famous prisoners entombed within (including Thomas More, who opposed Henry’s divorce from Katherine and would no doubt be squirming to know he shares a crypt with Anne). Anne’s tomb itself bears no indication of who lies within beyond the name “Anne Boleyn” not very prominently etched in the stone. You can spend an entire day at the Tower of London and leave without ever learning that the first queen ever executed in Britain, not to mention under such explosive and suspect circumstances, is entombed in this altar. The day I was there, the chapel was virtually empty, while long lines gathered at the armory to see the Crown Jewels.

  To add injury to insult, later that day I got hit by a bicycle while crossing a busy London street. Megadoses of Advil and the endorphin high from the pleasure of talking to Dormer and Brenton saw me through the interviews, but by the time we got to the National Portrait Gallery, I had used up my tolerance for pain and royal PR and was in a foul mood. I was determined, though, to see the one portrait of Anne that has the stamp of “official,” so I limped along, making my way to the Tudor rooms where I searched for a half hour, unable to locate the painting. There was Holbein’s famous towering sketch of Henry dominating all others. Many paintings of Elizabeth, showing the gradual emergence of the iconography of the Virgin Queen and her “golden age.” A huge painting of Thomas More and all his descendants. A brilliantly colored oil of Katherine Parr, Henry’s last wife. But no Anne. Finally, I turned to the two guides standing in the corner of the room, presumably available for expert information about the gallery. “Isn’t the portrait of Anne Boleyn supposed to be here?” I asked. They look baffled for a moment, taken off guard. Hadn’t anyone else asked this question?

  “Hmmm. I think it’s around somewhere.”

  “No. I’ve looked everywhere—several times.”

  “Oh, wait, I think . . . Wasn’t she loaned out somewhere?”

  “Yes, that’s right!” said her partner. “She’s on loan. But I’m not sure where. If you go online downstairs, you probably can find out.”

  I must have looked crestfallen, so the guide tried to cheer me up with a joke. “Well, you know, the wives have to take their turns!” I didn’t find it funny. “He never has to take a turn, does he?” I said, pointing to the mammoth Holbein Henry.

  Henry’s effort to erase Anne seemed to have been successful, at least at the National Portrait Gallery. But later, after I returned to the United States, I found out that Anne’s portrait, which had deteriorated badly, was not, in fact, loaned out, as the guides had said, but was down for restoration, and a massive fund-raising effort was being undertaken to finance the work. Natalie Grueninger had started a second Facebook page, with endorsements from Alison Weir and Natalie Dormer, devoted to “help save Anne’s portrait,” and the money was coming in. My daughter, picked up from camp, seemed to have grown several inches in height and immeasurably in stature, in her own eyes anyway. I longed for a melting hug. But that was one of the small sacrifices I have to pay for having such a formidable, strong-minded daughter.

  In the British papers, which I now was reading regularly online, theatre reviewers, initially taken aback by Howard Brenton’s complex “revisionist” Anne, were raving about the play. But, as throughout history, the old dualities were still irresistible to some. HARLOT OR HEROINE? WAS SHE A SCHEMING SEXUAL PREDATOR, OR A BRAVE REFORMER WHO CHANGED BRITAIN FOREVER? THE JURY’S BEEN OUT FOR THE PAST 500 YEARS—NOW A NEW PLAY AIMS TO SET THE RECORD STRAIGHT.5 That was the Daily Mail’s headline for its review of Brenton’s play. The historical Anne, who was able to make bitter jokes even as she was hours away from death about the labels history would pin on her, would have laughed. So would have Brenton’s Anne. At the very end of the play, she speaks to the audience, the godless “demons of the future.” “You’re so strange to me, as I must be strange to you,” she says.6 “Beware of love,” she tells the audience as she says her good-byes.7 But she doesn’t mean it. “No, don’t! We must all die, so die greatly, for a better world, for love.”8 But the preachy mood passes too. “Good-bye, demons. God bless you all,” she says.9 And then, ever the elusive flirt, she blows us a kiss.

  Acknowledgments

  In the spring of 2007, I was working on a novel when I got an e-mail from the British writer and journalist Matt Shoard with an idea for a collaborative project on famous female rebels. Although I didn’t know it at the time, the intense, intimate, and incredibly enjoyable months of exchanged e-mails and trial-balloon proposals that followed were the beginnings of this book. As the original idea gradually changed from many female subjects to one and a collaborative project to a singly authored book, Matt remained a generous, creative adviser and friend. It’s a noninflated fact to say that this book would not have happened without him.

  Since my fascination with Anne emerged unexpectedly in the middle of another writing project (which immediately was put on hold), this book required more help “finding itself” than my others had. With the help of Matt, Marilyn Silverman, my amazing writing group—Janet Eldred, Kathi Kern, and Ellen Rosenman—and my agent, Sam Stoloff—a man who has brought intelligence, kindness, pragmatism, and sanity to every stage of this process—I went through at least a half-dozen different conceptualizations over the next four months.

  I also talked to several editors, who were enthusiastic about my final proposal but uncertain about the broad appeal of a book about Anne Boleyn. (This was midway through the first season of The Tudors, and Tudormania was not yet in full flower.) Some were confused about what I planned to do in the book—understandably, because I still wasn’t sure myself. Then, the cosmic matchmaker of authors and editors stepped in, and I had my first conversation with George Hodgman. From the moment he guessed my first idol (Pauline Kael) to the day, a year later, when he told me to stop thinking like an academic, to put my books down, and to call Geneviève Bujold for an interview, George was the editor I had dreamed of finding: brilliant, inspired, demanding, and—unexpected bonus—hilariously funny. I was blessed to have George Hodgman mentor this book; he wanted a lot from it; he wrestled with me until he got it—and I will be forever grateful for his guidance, humor, and wonderful mind.

  Thanks to a generous endowed professorship from the University of Kentucky, I was lucky to have two splendid research assistants. Michelle Del Toro, my staff assistant and go-to for popular culture information and insight, also read through a draft of the manuscript and told me where more information and background was needed for the “general” reader. Natalie Sweet did endless hours of research into the original documents, delved fearlessly and knowledgeably into the thorniest of historical controversies, prepared the citations for the book, made sure that I had committed no huge historical blunders, and offered advice at every stage of the process. Natalie also came up with the inspired idea of creating a Facebook page for the book, a site that became home base for interviews and discussion with other Tudorphiles and scholars. She continues to co-manage this page with me, as well as a website that she designed and administers.

  This project turned an important corner when, on George Hodgman’s urging, I contacted Geneviève Bujold, Natalie Dormer, and Michael Hirst, all of whom, to my amazement and delight, granted me lengthy candid interviews—as did Howard Brenton, who met with me in the cafeteria of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre just after the opening of his acclaimed play, Anne Boleyn. I am also grateful to the novelists and historians who spoke to me on the phone or via e-mail—Robin Maxwell, Hilary Mantel, Margaret George, David Loades, Alison Weir, Suzannah Lipscomb, and Nell Gavin—and to those leading lights of the
Tudor Facebook “community” who provided support, enthusiasm, and shared their stories with me: Sue Booth, Lara Eakins, Claire Ridgway, Barbara Conn Alexander, Natalie Grueninger, Sylwia Sobczak Zupanec, Jessica Prestes, Sarah Morris, and Sarah Bryson.

  It’s impossible to adequately describe or enumerate the contributions of the members of The Creation of Anne Boleyn Facebook page. Special thanks go to Rhys Tudor, Jéssica Prestes, and Cris Gomes, who helped me trace the beautiful portrait on the cover of this book and contact the artist, Alexandre Jubran. Many thanks also to the page members who responded to an e-mail questionnaire about the appeal of Anne Boleyn to younger women: Raven Allen, Karissa Baker, Iliana Begetis, Haven Carlson, Makenzie Case, Sara Compton, Jessica Crowley, Memory Michelle Gargiulo, Cris Gomez, Brittani Hall, Robyn Heisel, Cailin Humphrys, Kayla Johns, Michelle Kistler, Angel Marks, Ilana Redler, Helen Reeves, Chrystina Rice, Elizabeth Schulz, Lynn Seitadi, Simone Shahid, Katherine Stinson, Marlessa Stivala, Elle van Petersen, Sophie Walker, Nicole Wheeler, and Casey Wilson. With advance apologies for those I am certain to miss, I’d also like to single out some of the earliest supporters and most frequent contributors to the page: Jan Abraham, Valerie Abrams, Valerie Adams, Ingibjörg Ágústsdóttir, Tammy J. Banks, Toni Frazer Barber, Lois Bateson, Anne Barnhill, Courtney Beatty, Claire Biggs-Tandy, Charna Baronoffsky Blumberg, Felicity Kate Boardman, Bollie Smit-Bolhuis, Sue Booth, Sarah Bryson, Susan Buffano, Becky Bunsic, Sarah Butterfield, Daphnée Diane Callas, Marina Camp, Bess Chilver, Cate Clement, Jessica Crowley, Howard Dalton, Holly Davis, Lisa Davis, Adrienne Dillard, Cynthia Carlin Drake, Cheryl Esselman, Donna Fagan, Isabelle Fallon, Emma Fuery, Jilly Fullerton-Louth, Cris Gomes, Clare Hancock, Denise Hansen, Susan Higginbotham, Lesley Holmes-Gurney, Fran Jablway, Cynthia Jokela, Pamela Kapustka, Binnie Klein, Ralphine L. Lamonica, Karissa Larsen, Linda Lofaro, Angel Marks, Jasmine Marrero-Pratt, Clive Morgan, Samantha Morris, Sarah Morris, Joanna Moore, Vicki Munden, Eliza Na, Fiona Orr, Robert Parry, Opal Crews Phelps, Jéssica Prestes, Tiffany Reddy, Krystel Marie Rivera, Jessica Rodriguez, Gareth Russell, Sandi Teresa Salas, Jessica Scarlett, Libby Schofield, Heidi Smith, Danielle Stasko, Katherine Stinson, Matthew Sweet, Sara Thornton, Lisa Tecoulesco, Rhys Tudor, Elle van Petersen, Sophie Walker, Emma Watson (with special thanks for the beautiful Anne scrapbook), Samantha Weber, Hope Olivia Elizabeth Wells, and Jenny Zeek-Schmeidler.