The Creation of Anne Boleyn
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5. Cressy 2002, 46.
6. Sohn 2011.
7. Ibid.
8. Michael Hirst, interview with author, telephone, Lexington, KY, April 28, 2011.
9. Wilson 2003, 53.
10. Walker 2005, 7.
11. Ibid., 6.
12. Ibid., 11.
13. Ibid., 13.
14. Tremlett 2010, 357.
15. Wilson 2003, 217.
16. Boker 1850, 133.
17. Smith 1971, 25.
18. Erickson 1980, 287.
19. Longford 1989, 210.
20. Howard Brenton, interview with author, London, England, July 30, 2010.
21. Kreisman and Straus 1989, 10.
22. Smith 1971, 68.
23. Wilson 2003, 256.
24. Smith 1971, 82.
25. Hutchinson 2011, 15.
26. Erickson 1980, 50.
27. Ibid., 51.
28. Withrow 2009, 45.
29. Hackett 1945, 181. When doubts about his actions did arise (as they often did with Henry, whom Lacey Baldwin Smith describes as something of a “spiritual hypochondriac” who was constantly taking the temperature of the state of his soul), his tendency was to wall them out by placing the blame on others. If Katherine could not produce a male heir, that was her fault, not his. Although Henry may have genuinely believed the “sin” (of marrying one’s brother’s wife) was shared, he felt the remedy did not require any contrition on his part; he just got rid of the wife.
30. Anderson 1977, 8–9.
7. Basic Historical Ingredients
1. Pascual de Gayangos (editor), “Spain: May 1536, 16–31,” Calendar of State Papers, Spain, Volume 5, Part 2: 1536–1538, British History Online, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=87961.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Pascual de Gayangos (editor), “Spain: May 1536, 16–31,” Calendar of State Papers, Spain, Volume 5, Part 2: 1536–1538, British History Online, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=87961.
8. James Gairdner (editor), “Henry VIII: June 1536, 6–10,” Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Henry VIII, Volume 10: January–June 1536, British History Online, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=75436.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. James Gairdner (editor), “Henry VIII: December 1536, 1–5,” Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Henry VIII, Volume 11: July–December 1536, British History Online, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=75489.
12. Norton 2011, 241. Ales had a terrifying dream the night before Anne’s execution, in which he saw Anne’s severed head, with all the veins, nerves, and arteries exposed. He didn’t know that Anne was to be executed that day, but shortly found out from the Archbishop of Canterbury, who—according to Ales—burst into tears: “She who has been the Queen of England upon earth will today become a Queen in heaven.”
13. Anne had encouraged Henry to send a delegation to seek the support of Lutheran Germany for the divorce.
14. Norton 2011, 242.
15. Ibid., 243.
16. Ibid., 239.
17. Weir 2010, 330.
18. Edward and Dudley’s motives differed, but fell in line with each other. Edward was worried that Mary would bring Catholicism back as the religion of the realm, and it was impossible to make a legal argument for Elizabeth but not Mary. Edward passed over both of them to name the sons of his remaining female relatives. None of those sons were born yet, however, so Dudley, to serve his own personal ambitions, had Jane Grey—who stood second in Edward’s line of succession—marry his own son. The plan: Jane and Guilford Dudley’s eventual son would be the next ruler of England. Unfortunately for Dudley (and hapless Jane Grey), he did not reckon on Mary’s huge popular support among the people. Her “rebel” army ultimately numbered nearly twenty thousand, and Dudley’s own garrison of sailors defected to her cause—a mutiny that dramatically showed which way the wind was blowing and led to the Privy Council shifting allegiance and proclaiming Mary queen.
19. Norton 2011, 239–45.
20. Freeman 1995, 799.
21. Foxe 1857, 58.
22. Lee 1909, 750.
23. Highley 2006, 158–59.
24. Hirst 2007, 161.
25. Levin 2008, 115.
26. Norton 2011, 16–24.
27. Ibid.
28. Wyatt tells virtually the same anecdote that Foxe does about Anne’s showing Henry Supplication for the Beggars, but in Wyatt, it is Tyndale’s The Obedience of a Christian Man, not Fish’s book, that Anne shows Henry. They were both “hot” reformist tracts, so it’s not surprising that in retrospective books written on the basis of the accounts of others, they may have gotten mixed up.
29. Norton 2011, 16–24.
30. Cavendish 1905, 34–35.
31. Ibid., 34.
32. Norton 2011, 17.
33. Ibid., 18.
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid.
36. Ibid.
37. Miller-Tomlinson 2008.
38. Banks 1981, 74. Modern spelling applied.
39. Ibid., 68.
40. Ibid.
8. Anne’s Afterlives, from She-Tragedy to Historical Romance
1. Banks 1981, 9. Modern spelling applied.
2. Ibid., 38.
3. Hutchinson 2011, ix.
4. Allen 2009.
5. Ibid.
6. Austen 1993, 12–14.
7. Benger 1821, 21–22.
8. Ibid., 98.
9. Ibid., 98–99.
10. Ibid., 99.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid., 45–46.
13. Ibid., 198–99.
14. Ibid., 201–2.
15. Starkey 2004, 585.
16. Macaulay 1849, 3.
17. Women historians willingly accepted, and even promoted, the idea that they were doing something different from “general history”—writing “memoirs” or “lives” to create a place for themselves that would not be seen as “encroaching upon the province” male historians had carved out for themselves and were unwilling to share. See, for example, the Stricklands’ insistence that their own “unambitious pages” “will not admit of launching into the broad stream of general history.” (Maitzen 1998, 36.)
18. Maitzen 1998, 33.
19. Oliphant 1855, 437.
20. Strickland and Strickland 1864, 198.
21. Ibid.
22. Hunter 2002, 71.
23. Ibid.
24. Taylor 1877, 402.
25. Ibid., 373.
26. Goldsmith 1771, 353–54, 377–78, 384–85. Modern spelling applied.
27. Dickens 1854, 20–21, 59, 37.
28. Callcott 1856, 133.
29. Gardiner 1881, 142, 149.
30. Farmer 1887, 154–55.
31. Herbert 1856, vi, 310.
32. Ibid., 336.
33. Ibid., 317.
34. Ibid., 323–24.
35. Ibid., 324.
36. Worn, Herbert claims elsewhere, because it is “the color which best becomes a brunette”! (Ibid., 217.)
37. Ibid., 300–301.
38. See, for example, William Hepworth Dixon (History of Two Queens: Catharine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn, 1873) and James Anthony Froude (The Divorce of Catherine of Aragon, 1862) for critical discussions of Chapuys.
39. Weir 2010, 334.
40. Froude 1891, 324, 167.
41. Ibid., 280.
42. Ibid., 277.
43. Friedmann 1884, 265.
44. Pollard 1919, 345–46.
45. Ibid., 192.
46. Bradley 1912, 246–48.
47. Ibid, viii. Bradley met her husband, a lawyer, big-game hunter, traveler, and explorer, while doing research in England for The Favor of Kings. They traveled the world together, collecting specimens for zoos and museums. In addition to writing many books and short stories, Bradley also was a war corr
espondent for Collier’s magazine and wrote a series of articles on the Holocaust.
48. Ibid., viii.
49. Ibid., viii–ix.
50. Ibid., 22–23.
51. Drew 1912, 14.
52. Hunter 2002, 392.
53. Bradley 1912, 220.
54. Ibid., 26.
55. It’s her pride, too, in Bradley’s version, that is behind her antipapalism. “What is a priest to tell me what I must and must not read? A priest is but a petticoated man whom you would not trust with your kitchen wench. Have I not a soul as clean and a brain as shrewd as a priest? Can I not see with as good eyes, think with as keen wits, feel with as fine sensibilities?” And even as Anne is escorted into the Tower, Bradley provides her with a defiant spin on her famous remark to Kingston, when he informs her she will be lodged in the same room she stayed in the night before her coronation: “A bitter smile parted Anne’s lips. ‘It is too good for me, is it not?’” The “is it not?” added by Bradley turns a wail of despair into a mocking, sardonic one-up on the hypocrisy of her accusers.
56. Bradley 1912, 68.
57. Ibid., 79.
58. Ibid., 111.
59. Ibid.
60. Hackett 1939, 446.
61. Barrington 1934, 281–82.
62. Ibid., 156.
63. Barrington also slips a bit of fairly militant feminism into her critique of marriage: “Who cared for women? What were they on the throne?” she has Anne thinking, but then inserts her own comment: “It was true that Anne herself with others were unconsciously building a far different world where women would set their feet on men’s necks and rule. But that was in the future.” (Ibid.)
64. Rival 1971, 105.
65. Ibid., 141.
66. Hackett 1939, 118.
67. At the end of the book, Hackett included an essay called “History in This Novel” in which he enumerates what he has invented in the novel, where his Anne departs from “the tradition,” why that tradition requires revision, and why he chose to write a novel rather than a history.
68. Greco 2004, 61.
9. Postwar: Domestic Trouble in the House of Tudor
1. All About Eve is another notable example.
2. Barnes 2008, 5–6.
3. Ibid., 100.
4. Ibid., 101.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid., 157.
7. This alienation becomes fatal after Anne tells him, in a fit of fury over Jane Seymour, that she had never loved him and that she was no virgin when she met him.
8. Barnes 2008, 296–98.
9. Ibid., 335.
10. Lofts 1963, 81.
11. Ibid., 233.
12. Ibid., 236.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid., 237.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid., 374.
17. Atkinson 1948.
18. The scene immediately became a cultural icon, and newspapers published tips on “how to eat à la Charles Laughton.”
19. Anderson 1977, 12.
20. Eventually, after he moved to Hollywood, Ernst Lubitsch became famous for his own glamorous “touch.” But when he made Anna Boleyn, he was still in Germany under the influence of the dark, anxiety-soaked Expressionist movement in German film. The cover of the DVD captures the mood of the film precisely, as a predatory Henry (Emil Jannings) has a terrified deerlike Anne in his clutches, both of them starkly shadowed.
21. Korda hired Oberon, who was later to become his wife, to fill the role of the “exotic” in his stable of starlets.
22. Hackett 1945, x.
23. And Hackett, in my opinion, succeeds. A well-known journalist and book reviewer who wrote for the New Republic from 1914 to 1922, he spent more than six years in England researching “Henry the man,” resulting in a book that is both psychologically astute and historically quite (which is to say mostly) accurate. Although it has now regrettably disappeared from the corpus of Henry biographies, it was extremely successful at the time it was published; translated into fourteen foreign editions, it had sold more than 650,000 copies by 1949.
24. Hackett 1945, 167.
25. Hackett planned to turn his Queen Anne Boleyn into a play, and apparently a script was written and circulated. But the play was never produced. When Anne of the Thousand Days opened on Broadway nine years later, Hackett claimed in the New York Times that Anderson had plagiarized his books. Having read both his books as well as Anderson’s play, I can see why Hackett was angry. His conceptions of the personalities of Henry and Anne—as well as his “personal” approach to history—are strongly echoed in the play. But “humanizing” historical figures is not exactly an approach that one can copyright. Anderson filed a libel suit, which was settled out of court.
26. Anderson 1977, 23. She hasn’t slept with him yet. Her knowledge of his sexual style comes from the fact that it was her “doubtful pleasure once to sleep in Mary’s room—or to lie awake when you thought me asleep, and observe the royal porpoise at play.”
27. Ibid., 30.
28. Ibid., 47.
29. Ibid., 48.
30. Ibid., 48–49.
31. Plato was the first to “theorize” this kind of dilemma, as illustrated in The Symposium, in which every relationship consists of a passionate, pursuing “lover” and a more emotionally detached “beloved.” The instability inherent in these roles is that while the fierce desire of the lover is to conquer the beloved and he does everything he can to achieve this—for love wants what it doesn’t have—the moment the beloved is conquered, she is no longer as desirable. So for Plato, the only way to achieve any constancy in life is to transfer the desire for a mortal person to the pursuit of immortal, timeless Beauty, which always tantalizes and enchants, and never gives itself over entirely. But Anne and Henry, in Anderson’s play, are not about to elevate their love in that way.
32. Lofts 1963, 233.
33. Ibid.
34. Krutch 1948.
35. Anderson 1977, 70.
36. Ibid.
10. It’s the Anne That Makes the Movie: Anne of the Thousand Days
1. Wallis and Higham 1980, 171.
2. Ibid., 163.
3. Ibid.
4. Munn 2008, 174–75.
5. Wallis and Higham 1980, 167.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid., 168.
9. He brought less concern for historical detail to the casting of Irene Papas, who was Greek and very, very dark (the universal movie code, it seems, for “Spanish”).
10. Geneviève Bujold, interview with author, telephone, Lexington, KY, June 21, 2010.
11. Ibid.
12. Hackett 1945, 248.
13. Walker 2003, 71. Laughton maintained, incredibly, that the film, whose liberties with history run rampant (and rollicking), was true to historical fact. When the film was lambasted by some of the British press for presenting a “disrespectful” view of imperial history, Laughton insisted on its authenticity. “Most of the dialogue was copied straight from contemporary records of Henry’s actual words,” he claimed, a bald-faced lie that mattered little to viewers or most critics, most of whom were swept away not by the film’s accuracy, but by the entertaining life it breathed into Henry as a personality.
14. Hackett 1945, 248.
15. Anderson 1977, 74.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid.
19. Although nowadays pop culture tends to call the shots on “reality,” it used to be that it took awhile for movies to catch up with events in the real world. In 1969, Women’s Liberation groups were forming all over the country. But it would be another five years or so before films such as Martin Scorcese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and Paul Mazursky’s An Unmarried Woman would bow, gently, in the direction of a “new woman.” It wouldn’t be until Thelma & Louise (1991) that the deepest gender conventions would be challenged. In Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and An Unmarried Woman, the independence of the heroines (Ellen Burstyn and Jill Clayburgh)
is tempered by the presence of two gorgeous, really nice guys (Kris Kristofferson and Alan Bates, each at the height of his appeal) who, it is implied, will remain in the women’s lives, providing support and great sex while the heroines pursue their careers. In Thelma & Louise, in contrast, even the nicest male characters are impotent; despite every attempt, they cannot alter the tragic course of events. The women have chosen, and they—like the rebel males of the earlier films—will have to pay the price.
20. Comment on The Creation of Anne Boleyn Facebook page, August 2, 2011, www.facebook.com/thecreationofanneboleyn. Bujold admits that she was also “telling off” Elizabeth Taylor when she filmed that scene. After hearing rumors about Burton’s interest in Bujold, Liz had unexpectedly shown up on the set that day. “It was all rubbish,” Burton told his biographer, Michael Munn, but it was a “problem for Gin, because she had Elizabeth training her sights on her.” (Munn 2008, 177.) When Taylor showed up on the set, Bujold, as Wallis relates in his autobiography, “was fighting mad” and “flung herself into the scene with a display of acting skill I have seldom seen equaled in my career. Then she stormed off the set.” (Wallis and Higham 1980, 169.)
21. Cate Clement, interview with author, e-mail, Lexington, KY, 2011.
22. Sir William Kingston to Lord Cromwell, in Norton 2011, 245. Modern spelling applied.
23. Ibid. Modern spelling applied.
24. Ibid., 246. Modern Spelling applied.
25. Ibid., 248-49. Modern spelling applied.
26. Canby 1970.
27. Ibid.
28. Simon 1970.
29. “Cinema: The Lion in Autumn,” 1970.
30. Ibid.
31. Harmetz 1970.
32. Solanas 2005, 175.
33. Anne—played by Vanessa Redgrave—is on screen for just a moment, to give Henry a breathless, adoring kiss.
34. Geneviève Bujold, interview with author, telephone, Lexington, KY, June 21, 2010.
35. Ibid.
36. Internet Movie Database n.d.
37. Holleran 2007.
38. Ibid.
39. Geneviève Bujold, interview with author, telephone, Lexington, KY, June 21, 2010.