PART I
Queen, Interrupted
One
Why You Shouldnât Believe Everything Youâve Heard About Anne Boleyn
âFOR 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.â1
Is this a quotation from Philippa Gregoryâs novel The Other Boleyn Girl, with its desperate, vengeful Anne? Or perhaps a fragment from Catholic propagandist Nicholas Sanderâs 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 centuryâs most respected and admired historians of the Tudor era, and it comes from a book that is categorized as âbiographyâ and lauded, on the back cover, as âa masterful work of history.â
Thereâs no doubting David Starkeyâs expertise or his ability to juice up the dry bones of the historical record with the narrative drive and color of a novel. Itâs 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 Starkeyâwriting for a popular audienceâis building a story for dramatic effect, imagining what Anne thought, said, and did â and how her actions impacted on Henry. Starkeyâs chief source of information about Anne âbullyingâ Henry is Eustace Chapuys, Anneâs sworn enemy; and his theory that the hardening of Henryâs character was due to Anneâs manipulation is just that â a theory. The idea that it was Anne who engineered Wolseyâs 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 Anneâs 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. Itâs 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 lawyersâ briefs that argue for her sinfulness or saintliness while (like any good lawyerâs argument) cloaked in the grammar of âfact.â In the old days, the arguments were up-front: Paul Friedmann, in his 1884 biography, boldly states: âAnne was not good. She was incredibly vain, ambitious, unscrupulous, coarse, fierce, and relentless.â2 James Froude, who followed in 1891 with a pro-Protestant defense of Henryâs divorce proceedings, did not extend his sympathies to Anne, although she was much more devotedly anticlerical than Henry: âHenry 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.â3 Henry William Herbert charged Anne with responsibility for every death that occurred during the years she was Henryâs consort; with her ascension in Henryâs eyes, âWolseyâs 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.â4 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 Anneâs reaction to Henryâs 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 â or perhaps a vampire novel: âAnneâs first target was Wolsey,â6 âAnne had Mary in her sights,â7 âAnne had her own quarry, too: Wolsey,â8 âThe hunting down of another of her old enemies offered some compensation,â9 etc.
Although, as weâll 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 wasnât 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 Henryâs 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, âshouldnât be used to a dog.â And she fell out with Cromwell over foreign policy â whether England should be allied to France (her choice) or the Holy Roman Emperor (his) â 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 Anneâs detractors, goes way too far. Can it possibly be that Henry VIII, who began his reign executing his fatherâs ministers, later declared himself the Supreme Head on Earth of the Church of England, and was miserably cruel to Princess Mary even after Anneâs death, became a pathetic wimp under the spell of this all-powerful temptress? I wonât 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 Anneâs 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 âhot-temperedâ and âindiscreet,â11 and Chapuys, a legal scholar and humanist enthusiast, was thought to be a better choice for Henryâs 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 Katherineâs 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 Itâs difficult to imagine someone who would be less disposed to the dissolution of Henryâs marriage to Katherine and more opposed to the marriage of Henry and Anne Boleyn, who was both sympathetic to reformist ideas and âmore French than a Frenchwoman born.â And indeed, from his first dispatch home in 1529, in which he fervently wished that â[m]ay God remedyâ the kingâs affection for âLa Bolaing,â13 to his delight, in May 1536, over âthe fall and ruin of the concubine,â Chapuys was Anneâs sworn enemy and Katherine and Maryâs most passionate defender.14
Chapuys hated Anne with a passion that he didnât even try to disguise, disgustedly referring to her in his official communications as âthe concubineâ and âthat whoreâ â or, with polite disdain, âThe Lady.â Accordingly, Elizabeth was âthe little bastard.â He accused Anne of plotting to murder Katherine and Mary â without a shred of proof beyond a few reported outbursts of Anneâs â and was the first to advance the argument that she was responsible for Henryâs âcorruption.â (â[I]t is this Anne,â Chapuys wrote, âwho has put [Henry] in this perverse and wicked temper.â15) 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 â not to mention the fact that he did not view himself as writing history but skillfully adjudicating between Henry and Charles â 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.
Itâs 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 â Wolseyâs secretary and later âbiographer,â whose The Life of Cardinal Wolsey is the basis for the narrative that Anne hated Wolsey for breaking up an earlier romance â it would probably be impossible to construct a âstoryâ at all in the sense in which popular histories require, in which events can simply be âreportedâ without the kind of constant qualification, caution, posing of questions, that authors fear will bore readers. If we were to acknowledge that the âhistoryâ 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, Anneâs 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 âbiasedâ but accurate, and hardened them, over time, into history.
Most nonhistorians, before Showtimeâs 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 â or novelistic fictionalizations â 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 Anneâs life, but the extent of his involvement in the court intrigues that led to Anneâs 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 Katherineâs comfort and Maryâs 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 Henryâs marriage, I was amazed to find readers leaping to his defense: âI 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 manâ16; âAs a researcher I just really appreciate his letters and reports, theyâre fantastic. I canât 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 movingâ17; âI must admit to having a real affection for Chapuys as often when Iâm trying to find something in the archives Iâll find what Iâm looking for in his very detailed reports, bless that man! What would we do without him?!â18; âHe always seemed like a kind and gentle man to me.â19
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 doesnât begin with pop culture. Chapuys himself played a huge role in creating the collective fantasy of âvirtuous, patient Katherineâ versus âself-seeking, impatient Anne.â When you closely examine events, itâs 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 Godâs will. When Henry proposed divorce, she was emotionally shattered, but also fiercely resistant and full of righteous indignation â and stayed so right up until her death in 1536. She simply wouldnât let go, impervious even to the disastrous consequences for her beloved Catholic Church, as Henryâs 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 Maryâs inheritance in question, she flatly refused, although it was, as historian David Loades puts it, a âsimple and plausibleâ 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 daughterâs rights.21
Katherine not only refused the nunnery solution, insisting that âshe 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 itâ but she also startled Campeggio with the intensity of her fervor; they ...