The Creation of Anne Boleyn

Susan Bordo

• Publisher: Oneworld Publications
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781780744292
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Weltgeschichte

Part biography, part cultural history, The Creation of Anne Boleyn is a fascinating reconstruction of Anne's life and an illuminating look at her afterlife in the popular imagination.Why is Anne so compelling? Why has she inspired such extreme reactions? What did she really even look like?! And perhaps the most provocative questions concern Anne's death more than her life. How could Henry order the execution of a once beloved wife? Drawing on scholarship and popular culture Bordo probes the complexities of one of history's most infamous relationships.In her inimitable, straight-talking style Bordo dares to confront the established histories, stepping off the well-trodden paths of Tudoriana to expertly tease out the human being behind the myths.

PART I

Queen, Interrupted

One

Why You Shouldn’t Believe Everything You’ve Heard About Anne Boleyn

“FOR WEEKS ANNE, like the goddess of the chase, had pursued her rival. She bullied Henry; she wheedled; she threatened; and most devastatingly, she cried. Her arrows pierced his heart and hardened his judgement. It was how she had destroyed Wolsey. Now she would remove Katherine.”¹

Is this a quotation from Philippa Gregory’s novel The Other Boleyn Girl, with its desperate, vengeful Anne? Or perhaps a fragment from Catholic propagandist Nicholas Sander’s famously vitriolic portrait of Anne in The Rise and Growth of the Anglican Schism? Directions from the shooting script of an episode from the first season of The Tudors television series? No, the description was written by one of the twentieth century’s most respected and admired historians of the Tudor era, and it comes from a book that is categorized as “biography” and lauded, on the back cover, as “a masterful work of history.”

There’s no doubting David Starkey’s expertise or his ability to juice up the dry bones of the historical record with the narrative drive and color of a novel. It’s one of the main reasons his books like Six Wives (2004) are so popular; people enjoy them. They are less likely to recognize, though, that Starkey—writing for a popular audience—is building a story for dramatic effect, imagining what Anne thought, said, and did — and how her actions impacted on Henry. Starkey’s chief source of information about Anne “bullying” Henry is Eustace Chapuys, Anne’s sworn enemy; and his theory that the hardening of Henry’s character was due to Anne’s manipulation is just that — a theory. The idea that it was Anne who engineered Wolsey’s fall is speculation. The evidence for the portrait he paints would never pass muster in a modern court of law, for it is slender to begin with and is nestled in the gossip and hearsay of some highly biased sources. As such, Starkey might have legitimately presented it as a case that can be made. Instead, he appears to deliver Anne’s motivation, moral character, and effect on Henry to us as though it were established fact.

Starkey is hardly alone in mixing fact and fantasy in his accounts of the life and death of Anne Boleyn. Not everyone tells the same story. But few historians or biographers acknowledge just how much of what they are doing is storytelling. It’s unavoidable, of course, for writers not to string facts together along some sort of narrative thread that, inevitably, has a point of view. But when it comes to Anne Boleyn, the narrative threads are more like lawyers’ briefs that argue for her sinfulness or saintliness while (like any good lawyer’s argument) cloaked in the grammar of “fact.” In the old days, the arguments were up-front: Paul Friedmann, in his 1884 biography, boldly states: “Anne was not good. She was incredibly vain, ambitious, unscrupulous, coarse, fierce, and relentless.”² James Froude, who followed in 1891 with a pro-Protestant defense of Henry’s divorce proceedings, did not extend his sympathies to Anne, although she was much more devotedly anticlerical than Henry: “Henry was, on the whole, right; the general cause for which he was contending was a good cause … [but] [h]e had stained the purity of his action by intermingling with it a weak passion for a foolish and bad woman, and bitterly he had to suffer for his mistake.”³ Henry William Herbert charged Anne with responsibility for every death that occurred during the years she was Henry’s consort; with her ascension in Henry’s eyes, “Wolsey’s downfall was dated … [and] likewise may be dated the death-sentence of the venerable Fisher, bishop of Rochester, and of the excellent Sir Thomas More; for they had both given opinions adverse to the divorce, and although they continued to hold office, and even apparently to enjoy the royal favor, they were both inscribed on the black-list of the revengeful mistress, who never rested from her ill offices toward them, until their heads had fallen.”⁴ More current prosecutors rely more on rhetoric than bald statements such as these. Starkey, for example, never actually accuses Anne of murder, but he certainly paints her as capable of it. Here he describes Anne’s reaction to Henry’s beheading of Thomas More, which has left her craving the blood of Katherine and her daughter, Mary, too:

Anne undoubtedly rejoiced … But she wanted other, yet more distinguished victims … Would she get her way in this too?⁵

Throughout Six Wives, rhetorical flourishes such as these and the constant use of hunting metaphors paint a portrait of Anne as an evil huntress worthy of Greek mythology — or perhaps a vampire novel: “Anne’s first target was Wolsey,”⁶ “Anne had Mary in her sights,”⁷ “Anne had her own quarry, too: Wolsey,”⁸ “The hunting down of another of her old enemies offered some compensation,”⁹ etc.

Although, as we’ll see, it has been challenged by other narratives, this view of Anne as ruthless predator is one of the oldest and most enduring in our cultural stockpile of Anne Boleyn images. As recently as March 2012, journalist and novelist Vanora Bennett, having traipsed through a variety of contradictory perspectives on Anne in a piece devoted to the swelling of contemporary interest in Anne, cautions against sympathy for her.

She was vindictive. It wasn’t enough for her to persuade Henry to arrest her archenemy Cardinal Wolsey: it had to be her ex-admirer Henry Percy who made the arrest. Nor was it enough to usurp the position of Henry’s first wife; Anne also mercilessly bullied the little Princess Mary, who never saw her mother again … She harangued Henry about his flirtations with other women, blaming him for her miscarriages. She alienated her powerful uncle and protector, the Duke of Norfolk, by speaking to him in words that, according to one biographer, “shouldn’t be used to a dog.” And she fell out with Cromwell over foreign policy — whether England should be allied to France (her choice) or the Holy Roman Emperor (his) — something that was more his business than hers … No one was sorry to see her go.¹⁰

Let me say up front that I do not believe Anne Boleyn was the helpless innocent that some of her later defenders made her out to be. But Bennett, like many of Anne’s detractors, goes way too far. Can it possibly be that Henry VIII, who began his reign executing his father’s ministers, later declared himself the Supreme Head on Earth of the Church of England, and was miserably cruel to Princess Mary even after Anne’s death, became a pathetic wimp under the spell of this all-powerful temptress? I won’t begin, at this point in the book, to document all the factual errors and unjustified conclusions in this Anne-blaming, Henry-exonerating account. For now, I simply ask: Where did this view of Anne come from and how did it become so familiar, so accepted, that not only a journalist such as Bennett but also a respected historian such as David Starkey can treat it as established fact? The answer to that, it turns out, casts doubt on virtually all that we have taken to be certain about Anne’s brief reign.

Eustace Chapuys was just thirty years old when, in 1529, he was sent to replace Don Inigo de Mendoza as the ambassador of Emperor Charles V at the court of Henry VIII. Mendoza was known to be “hot-tempered” and “indiscreet,”¹¹ and Chapuys, a legal scholar and humanist enthusiast, was thought to be a better choice for Henry’s court. He was an erudite and clever diplomat, and devoted to those whom he loved and the causes he believed in. Queen Katherine fell into both categories, for the emperor was Katherine’s nephew, and Chapuys was fiercely pro-Catholic. He also hated all things French and later in his life would threaten to disinherit a niece who planned to marry a Frenchman.¹² It’s difficult to imagine someone who would be less disposed to the dissolution of Henry’s marriage to Katherine and more opposed to the marriage of Henry and Anne Boleyn, who was both sympathetic to reformist ideas and “more French than a Frenchwoman born.” And indeed, from his first dispatch home in 1529, in which he fervently wished that “[m]ay God remedy” the king’s affection for “La Bolaing,”¹³ to his delight, in May 1536, over “the fall and ruin of the concubine,” Chapuys was Anne’s sworn enemy and Katherine and Mary’s most passionate defender.¹⁴

Chapuys hated Anne with a passion that he didn’t even try to disguise, disgustedly referring to her in his official communications as “the concubine” and “that whore” — or, with polite disdain, “The Lady.” Accordingly, Elizabeth was “the little bastard.” He accused Anne of plotting to murder Katherine and Mary — without a shred of proof beyond a few reported outbursts of Anne’s — and was the first to advance the argument that she was responsible for Henry’s “corruption.” (“[I]t is this Anne,” Chapuys wrote, “who has put [Henry] in this perverse and wicked temper.”¹⁵) His biases are very clear. Yet, unfortunately, his lengthy, anecdote-filled letters home also offer the single most continuous portrait of the sixteen crisis-ridden years in which he served in his position, and despite his undisguised hatred of Anne — not to mention the fact that he did not view himself as writing history but skillfully adjudicating between Henry and Charles — biographers have relied on him heavily in their attempts to create a coherent narrative about the divorce from Katherine, the role of Anne Boleyn, and her relationship with Henry.

It’s easy to see why. History abhors a vacuum. Chapuys clearly loved to write, he did so often, and he had a taste for juicy detail. The frustrating fact is that without Chapuys and Cavendish — Wolsey’s secretary and later “biographer,” whose The Life of Cardinal Wolsey is the basis for the narrative that Anne hated Wolsey for breaking up an earlier romance — it would probably be impossible to construct a “story” at all in the sense in which popular histories require, in which events can simply be “reported” without the kind of constant qualification, caution, posing of questions, that authors fear will bore readers. If we were to acknowledge that the “history” of Anne Boleyn is largely written by the poisonous pen of hostile sources, the entire edifice of pop Tudor history would become quite shaky. Instead, it has been fortified by a foundation of titillating, crowd-pleasing mythology. Chapuys was not the sole architect of this mythology, but he was the first, the most respected, and the most influential. The fact is that it is Eustace Chapuys, Anne’s sworn enemy, who has most shaped our image of her. He has done so not directly, but via the historians and novelists who have accepted his reports as “biased” but accurate, and hardened them, over time, into history.

Most nonhistorians, before Showtime’s The Tudors introduced him to popular audiences, had never even heard of Chapuys. He plays virtually no role in previous media depictions of the reign of Henry VIII — or novelistic fictionalizations — and those audiences who came to know him through The Tudors got to know him largely as a warm, devoted friend of Katherine of Aragon and later, Princess Mary. In one scene, he does tacitly encourage an assassination attempt on Anne’s life, but the extent of his involvement in the court intrigues that led to Anne’s downfall is vastly underplayed, and most scenes feature him lavishing fatherly love and comfort on the abandoned and bereft queen and her daughter. The contrast the show draws is clear: On the one hand, we have warm, caring, ever-faithful Chapuys; on the other, narcissistic, fickle, ruthless Henry. Thanks largely to this sympathetic portrayal of Chapuys as Katherine’s comfort and Mary’s gentle confidant, he has gathered lots of fans. When I posted a piece on the Internet that was critical of his account of the failure of Anne and Henry’s marriage, I was amazed to find readers leaping to his defense: “I love Anne immensely and I know that Chapuys was not fair to her many times, but I hold a very special place in my heart for that man”¹⁶; “As a researcher I just really appreciate his letters and reports, they’re fantastic. I can’t blame him for how he felt about Anne and his support of Mary and his visiting Katherine at the end of her life is so moving”¹⁷; “I must admit to having a real affection for Chapuys as often when I’m trying to find something in the archives I’ll find what I’m looking for in his very detailed reports, bless that man! What would we do without him?!”¹⁸; “He always seemed like a kind and gentle man to me.”¹⁹

He always seemed like a kind and gentle man to me. The enmeshment of fact and fiction, of the real and the imagined in our collective history of the Tudors, could not be more succinctly captured. And it doesn’t begin with pop culture. Chapuys himself played a huge role in creating the collective fantasy of “virtuous, patient Katherine” versus “self-seeking, impatient Anne.” When you closely examine events, it’s clear that Katherine was as self-interested and stubborn a player as any other in the drama. She was, after all, the daughter of Queen Isabella and raised with a sense of royal privilege and entitlement from the day of her birth. She also believed, as Henry did about his own kingship, that her position was a manifestation of God’s will. When Henry proposed divorce, she was emotionally shattered, but also fiercely resistant and full of righteous indignation — and stayed so right up until her death in 1536. She simply wouldn’t let go, impervious even to the disastrous consequences for her beloved Catholic Church, as Henry’s position became more and more oppositional. When Cardinal Lorenzo Campeggio proposed the solution that she take the veil, giving Henry his freedom to remarry without putting Mary’s inheritance in question, she flatly refused, although it was, as historian David Loades puts it, a “simple and plausible” way to resolve things.²⁰

Katherine knew, as well as Henry did, that she would never bear him another child. She also knew, although she may not have sympathized with, his burning desire for a son. She was a deeply pious woman, and the religious life had appealed to her in the past. There would have been no question of dishonour, and no need to defend her daughter’s rights.²¹

Katherine not only refused the nunnery solution, insisting that “she intended to live and die in the state of matrimony, to which God had called her: that she would always remain of that opinion, and that she would never change it” but she also startled Campeggio with the intensity of her fervor; they ...