Threads: The Reincarnation of Anne Boleyn

by Nell Gavin

  Her most famous quote was spoken prior to her execution when she was amiably chatting to someone about her executioner. Reassuring the friend (and probably herself) that all would go well, she said, "I hear he’s quite good. And I have a very small neck!" Then she touched her neck and laughed "greatly". She also referred to herself in the tower as "Queen Lackhead". She was said to always enjoy a good laugh even, it would seem, at her own tragic end.

  The Health of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn

  There are some theories about the health of Henry VIII. One was that he had scurvy because of his notoriously meat-heavy diet. Another is that he, his siblings and his offspring, suffered from diabetes. Still another was that he suffered from syphilis. His body was last exhumed in 1812 before any conclusive tests were available. However, there was an epidemic of syphilis in Europe during the 1500’s, and the symptoms of syphilis listed by The New Complete Medical and Health Encyclopedia (published by Lexicon) somewhat match the health ailments Henry VIII experienced in his lifetime. In particular, the changes in his personality and mental state from the start to the end of his reign make syphilis possible. Katherine of Aragon, his first wife, was known to have suffered from a "mysterious female ailment" that might possibly have been related to infection. In addition, infants born to infected mothers can be stillborn, die shortly after birth, or suffer health ailments that can lead to death years later. Henry VIII admittedly had some trouble fathering viable infants, and produced children with all of the aforementioned results. Syphilis is one possible cause. However, there is nothing more substantial than speculation to support this theory at the present time.

  Modern speculation superficially provides a plausible, very convincing case for diabetes and strokes. While the diagnosis of diabetes and its symptoms appears to me personally to be the most likely overall, there is nothing to prevent a person from suffering from two or more of these ailments at once.

  The "sweating sickness" referred to in Threads is not bubonic plague, as was suggested on some Internet sites. Karen Lindsey noted that it was a "bizarre illness" sometimes called "the English disease" because only the English seemed to have developed no immunity toward it when it spread across Europe. Eric W. Ives wrote that it was highly contagious, frequently fatal, and may have been related to the Spanish influenza that killed millions in 1918.

  Even the experts are not certain what the sweating sickness was - or is. Scientists are examining the remains of Arthur Tudor, older brother to Henry VIII, in hopes of further identifying the illness, which they suspect was the cause of his death.

  Anne contracted this illness during the sweating sickness epidemic of 1528, and her sister's husband died from it. Henry was distraught while Anne was ill, but could not see her himself since he had to stay at a distance from infection. Instead, he sent his second best surgeon to attend to her (he kept his best surgeon for himself). By the time the surgeon arrived, Anne, who was always very healthy, was already on the mend.

  Her Trial and Execution

  According to Eric W. Ives, Anne said to Henry in 1530, "It is foretold in ancient prophesies that at this time a queen shall be burnt. But even if I were to suffer a thousand deaths, my love for you would not abate one jot." Henry almost had her burnt at the stake, then changed his mind and allowed her to be executed instead. He even allowed her to be executed with a sword rather than an axe, and gave her a choice in who would perform the deed. Anne chose a French executioner who was said to be very skilled.

  Henry VIII forced Anne's former lover, Henry Percy, to sit on the jury that found Anne guilty of adultery. Since Percy was one of those accused of having committed adultery with Anne, he had to also submit to interrogation. When the verdict was announced, Percy collapsed and had to be carried from the courtroom.

  The king dismissed Anne's servants and disbanded her household before her trial leaving no serious question as to his intentions. While one or two sources suggested that the trial was "fair", common sense leads you to wonder how Henry could know Anne would no longer need her household unless he was certain of the outcome of the trial before it was even conducted.

  Shortly before the execution, he also annulled their marriage. Common sense also makes you wonder how Anne could have committed adultery when she was never married to Henry in the first place.

  According to Eric W. Ives, her executioner was so taken by Anne that he was shaken, and found it difficult to proceed with the execution. In order to distract her, he shouted, "Where is my sword?" just before killing her so that Anne could die thinking she had a few seconds more to live.

  After her death

  Henry VIII lived another 11 years after Anne Boleyn died, and married four more times. Jane Seymour died after giving birth to Prince Edward (who outlived his father, but not for long). Henry then was betrothed to Anne of Cleves on the basis of a flattering portrait, but upon seeing the woman herself, was appalled and repelled by her unattractiveness and quickly arranged for a divorce without ever consummating the marriage. Next was a young girl (reports of her age vary between 15 and 21), Katherine Howard, who had a very poorly-hidden, ill-advised affair with her young lover, and was subsequently beheaded. Last was Katherine Parr, who gathered up all of Henry’s children, brought them to live with their father, and acted as a kindly mother toward all of them. She also acted in the unenviable capacity as nurse to Henry who, toward the end of his life was enormously obese and covered with oozing sores that emitted a foul odor. A tour guide at Hampton Court Palace noted that you could smell Henry before you saw him.

  Within one or two years after Anne died, both her parents died as well, so Hever Castle became the property of the Crown. Henry VIII gave it as a divorce gift to Anne of Cleves, who lived in it thereafter. It then passed through other hands, and was in a state of abandoned disrepair until the early 1900’s when William Waldorf Astor purchased it, renovated it, and essentially saved it. It now has an Italian garden, two mazes, and a little village of Tudor-style cottages. It is open to the public and a visit is enthusiastically recommended.

  Hever Castle has Anne’s prayer book encased in glass and opened to a page where Anne wrote, "Remember me when you do pray that hope doth lead from day to day." Her handwriting was even, graceful and without many flourishes. When signing her name to the passage, she wrote: "anne boleyn", and did not capitalize the "A" or the "B".

  In another prayer book, she cryptically wrote, "The time will come" in French. The page with this notation displays a picture of the Resurrection of the Dead, illustrating corpses preparing to climb out of their graves.

  In Threads, the Anne Boleyn I offer to you is the one I kept seeing in each of her biographies, whatever facts they presented or how those facts colored her, the Anne who was always described as an "enigma". I think that term applies to anyone who has a difficult personality, but whose character is essentially good.

  Folklore has always given Anne six fingers. There isn’t much evidence to support this legend, or to suggest that she really had a huge “wen” on her neck. All her biographies concluded that she probably did not have either one but there is no solid proof either way.

  There is no proof of the order in which the Boleyn (or “Bullen”) siblings were born. Various references each prefer a different birth order, and no two agree. The most supportable and convincing evidence, noted in “Anne Boleyn” by E. W. Ives, favored a birth order of Mary, then Anne, then George. (There were two additional Boleyn infants who died.) This book also favors a birth year of 1501 (versus 1507), a date that is further supported by an example of Anne’s handwriting in 1514 (shown in “The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn” by Retha M. Warnicke). The handwriting sample is unmistakably that of a young adult because it has small, tightly controlled and evenly formed letters. A child of seven, no matter how intelligent, would only have the mechanical ability to write in a large, uneven scrawl.

  There was a rumor (unverified) that Anne Boleyn was raped by one of her father’s officers at Hever when she was sev
en (I placed the rape in France instead, to make the situation more traumatic for her). Only Alison Weir even mentions this in passing, but she then dismisses the rumor as untrue. There has never been any hard evidence, even in the midst of rampant speculation and very close scrutiny, that Anne was ever intimate with anyone but her husband. Despite this, considering the times, premarital chastity was highly improbable. What is known about Anne is that she a) was not a virgin when she married (only Karen Lindsey suggested she was), b) conceived immediately after commencing relations with Henry and, c) was regularly pregnant thereafter. Her obvious fertility would not have allowed for much illicit premarital sex leaving the child molestation theory still open to explain her lost virginity, particularly for a work of fiction. The two men she was most likely to have been with, Lord Henry Percy and Sir Thomas Wyatt, both survived the accusations and the interrogation prior to her execution for adultery. Whether this is because they were innocent or useful to the Crown is unknown.

  Anne Boleyn was not listed as a passenger on the ship that carried Mary Tudor and her entourage to France. “Mistress” Boleyn was. There are three possible explanations. One is that “Mistress” pertained to the older Boleyn sibling, while the younger sister was insignificant and not worthy of mention on the ship’s passenger list. Another was that it was simply an oversight. The last was that Anne went directly from the Netherlands (where she had been living) to France by land. This last explanation is most plausible. However, I preferred the first explanations after seeing the size of Anne’s bedroom at Hever Castle, and because I had reason to want to make her arrival in France a bleak one.

  Anne Boleyn’s love affair with Lord Henry Percy is recorded as having been kept secret, whereas in "Threads", it was more or less carried out in public. In addition, their “goodbye” meeting is entirely fictitious (unless something of the kind was done in secret, as in the story). The king did not allow them to say goodbye, in fact, Alison Weir mentions that Anne’s parents locked her in her room to prevent her from trying to contact Percy, as she was frantic to do. I let them say goodbye primarily to develop Hal’s character and to explore the effect King Henry’s decision had on the couple. Percy did send a note to Anne begging her to never love anyone else, and history suggests she gamely made the effort, as Henry soon found out. How soon is another matter open to conjecture. Some references suggest that he did not openly pursue Anne for as long as one to four years after her betrothal to Percy was broken. Others mention that they had had a courtly flirtation for years, and that it may have grown serious from Henry’s perspective even as he kept Anne’s sister Mary as his mistress. However, exact dates are unknown.

  According to Karen Lindsey, only one person suggested that the betrothal of Percy and Anne Boleyn was broken at Henry’s command rather than Wolsey’s (as noted by the official version). However, that one person was a close and trusted servant of Wolsey, and a reliable source. Lindsey states it would have been in keeping with Henry’s personality to take measures to shift the blame to Wolsey in order to deflect Anne’s resulting anger.

  Other information is speculative, and could be true, but probably isn’t. According to legend, Henry VIII wrote the song, “Greensleeves”. However, some Encyclopedia sources place the date of the song’s composition somewhere in the 17th century, perhaps 100 years after he died. Other references claim it was first printed in 1580 by Richard Jones, who specialized in ballad printing. Some sources point out that the song contains elements that were not popular until later in the 16th century, about the time of the first printing and years after the death of Henry VIII. Either way, it was noted that Henry VIII, while being a most enthusiastic musician, primarily made small changes to existing songs, then claimed them as his own. Most of his own songs sound very much alike (and nothing at all like Greensleeves), and he is not viewed historically as someone who had the talent to write a song of that caliber. Historical references suggest that Anne Boleyn, by all accounts, did have that kind of talent. I wanted to make the strong point that Anne lost everything, even credit for her talent and creativity, when she married Henry VIII. I do not know–or presume–that she wrote Greensleeves.

  To the best of my knowledge, none of Anne’s songs survive, except for one, “O Death, Rock Me Asleep”, with music written by her chaplain after her death. However, the source of both the lyrics and the music is in question. It is only known that the poem was found in the Tower immediately after Anne’s death, and that it was later put to music.

  Anne had a fourth pregnancy I didn’t mention in the book, resulting in another stillbirth.

  There are some theories about the health of Henry VIII. One was that he had scurvy because of his notoriously meat-heavy diet. Another is that he, his siblings and his offspring, suffered from diabetes. Still another was that he suffered from syphilis. His body was last exhumed in 1812 before any conclusive tests were available. However, there was an epidemic of syphilis in Europe during the 1500’s, and the symptoms of syphilis listed by The New Complete Medical and Health Encyclopedia (published by Lexicon) somewhat match the health ailments Henry VIII experienced in his lifetime. In particular, the changes in his personality and mental state from the start to the end of his reign make syphilis possible. Katherine of Aragon, his first wife, was known to have suffered from a "mysterious female ailment" that might possibly have been related to infection. In addition, infants born to infected mothers can be stillborn, die shortly after birth, or suffer health ailments that can lead to death years later. Henry VIII admittedly had some trouble fathering viable infants, and produced children with all of the aforementioned results. Syphilis is one possible cause. However, there is also nothing to prevent someone from suffering from two or more of these ailments at once, and nothing more substantial than speculation to support any theory at the present time.

  According to Eric W. Ives, her executioner was so taken by Anne that he was shaken, and found it difficult to proceed with the execution. In order to distract her, he shouted, “Where is my sword?” just before killing her so that Anne could die thinking she had a few seconds more to live.

  Additional information and resources about the Tudors are available at www.nellgavin.com.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  "The Six Wives of Henry VIII" by Alison Weir

  "Anne Boleyn" by Eric W. Ives

  "Mistress Anne" by Carolly Erickson

  "Divorced, Beheaded, Survived by Karen Lindsey

  The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn" by Retha M. Warnicke

  "Everyday Life in Renaissance Times" by E. R. Chamberlin

  "The Royal Palaces of Tudor England: Architecture and Court Life 1460-1547" by Simon Thurley

  "The New Complete Medical and Health Encyclopedia" published by Lexicon

  THE STORY BEHIND THE BOOK

  December 30, 2007

  I haven’t said anything up until now because I’ve been fascinated by the feedback I’ve received from readers. I didn’t want to spoil things by telling them how I wanted them to interpret Threads, or what I expected them to get from it. The emails I receive all focus on different aspects of the story and quote different passages as having meaning to the reader, indicating that people are seeing it differently and getting different things from it. That’s exactly as it should be. Once I put it out there I shouldn’t interfere with the reader/book relationship.

  Now that I’ve compiled enough emails and reactions, though, I’ve decided to be a bit more forthcoming. First of all, its genre is "Visionary Fiction", which comprises books of a meditative nature that contain a message or a lesson, and which usually employ a spiritual or paranormal vehicle to tell it. Examples of the genre include, "The Five People You Meet in Heaven", by Mitch Albom, "What Dreams May Come", by Richard Matheson, and "The Celestine Prophesy", by James Redfield. So it's a little different, and its intended audience is people who like a complex story with challenging, thought provoking concepts that require some introspective examination. (If you prefer sirens and car chases, try, "T
he Di Vinci Code.")

  The story is an allegory, or a kind of "fable". Allegory is a form of extended metaphor, in which objects, persons and actions in a narrative have meaning beyond the narrative itself. This underlying meaning has moral, social, religious, or political significance, and characters are often personifications of abstract ideas as charity, greed, or envy. Thus, an allegory is a story with two meanings, a literal meaning and a symbolic meaning.

  I wrote the book in layers. I’ve heard from people who saw all of them (Bravo!), and people who saw one but not the others. I also read the reviews and could make that distinction pretty easily.

  And I wrote it with two opposing timelines. The main story is in past tense, and progresses forward in time. The secondary story - the "other-worldly" one with Anne's past lives - is in present tense, and progresses backward. Each past life presents her with and emphasizes a point or a lesson Anne needs to learn about the situation she just examined in her lifetime as Anne Boleyn.

  In addition, as I constructed the story, I played on the tapestry theme, and wove the "threads" of little sub-stories from beginning to end throughout the lifetimes, and the book. If you skip or skim the beginning or the middle of a sub-story, you won’t understand or even notice its conclusion, or will miss clues that give you insight into some of the background relationships. For that reason, fortunately or unfortunately, Threads demands your undivided attention – or may require a second reading, if you'd like to catch everything.

  The story contains ample foreshadowing, so you should have a pretty good idea of where it's heading when it ends. The ending isn't an ending at all. It's a continuation, because in order to effectively follow the reincarnation theme the story can have no ending, just more up ahead.

  Anne Boleyn and Henry VIII are incidental to the story, which I could have written about any dysfunctional couple faced with forgiving (or committing) the unforgivable. I just liked the pair of them and the explosiveness of their relationship, and did my best to make their known history accurate. Their history in Threads is a melding of five notable biographies. None of them agree on what happened in Anne's life, so I was as careful as I could be, and listed the instances at the end of the book where I knowingly changed the facts.