by Susan Bordo
It’s easy to forget, given the bloody schism that was to follow, that there was a time—roughly from 1510 to 1520—when criticism of the abuses of the clergy was not yet seen as heretical but as an effluence of the new humanism, which was all the rage among the intellectual avant-garde and perhaps best represented at the time by the Dutch scholar Erasmus, whose The Praise of Folly, published in 1511 (Anne was ten), was a runaway best seller throughout Europe. Folly lampooned all manner of human hypocrisy and foolishness, but sunk serious barbs into the clergy, including popes, who “by their silence” over the abuses of the clergy “allow Christ to be forgotten, who enchain him by mercenary rules, adulterate His teaching by forced interpretations, and crucify Him afresh by their scandalous life!”50 Eighteen years later, Erasmus’s good friend Thomas More was burning Martin Luther’s theses and other criticisms of the clergy (as well as those who espoused those views). But at the time Folly was published, Luther was still an unknown German professor, and criticism of the abuses of the existing Church did not imply repudiation of the central tenets of Catholicism. The new humanism was provocative, it was “radical,” it was antiestablishment, and it was scorned by traditionalists, but it was not viewed as heretical. Thomas More, in fact, was one of its shining lights; its brightest center in England was Cambridge University, where Erasmus taught from 1509 to 1514.
Women, of course, were not allowed to study at Cambridge (or any other university). But that didn’t mean none of them had access to the new humanism. Some parents—such as Thomas More—made sure their daughters were schooled in the classics and were aware of contemporary debates. Arguably, Marguerite de Navarre’s salons, visited by the foremost thinkers of the day (including, most likely, Erasmus, who left England in 1514), provided informal tutoring (not described in that way at the time, of course) for the women at Francis’s court, including Anne. David Starkey, in fact, describes Anne’s time at the court as “her Oxford . . . which, in everything but Latin, gave her a training at least as good as [her brother] George’s.”51 The training Anne received was not, however, limited to classical literature. In Marguerite’s court, all the hot humanist topics of the day were debated, from the “Bible Question” (Did people need priests to interpret Scripture for them or should vernacular versions be widely available?) to the “Woman Question.” (Could a woman be virtuous? If so, what kind of virtue was distinctively hers? Was her intelligence lesser than man’s? Was she even of the same species as man?) These issues had occupied philosophers since the Greeks; the misogynist answers are well-known. But early in the fifteenth century, women had begun to add their own voices to the discussion, coming up with some very different ideas, most notable among them Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the City of Ladies, which protested the “many evil and reproachful things about women and their behavior” in male treatises, their depiction of “the entire female sex, just as if it were a monstrosity in nature.”52
The Tudors, collapsing the significant differences between Marguerite de Navarre and her libidinous brother, depicts Marguerite as a full-breasted, ostentatiously horny visitor to Henry’s court, whom Henry obliges by servicing her for the night. Nothing could be further from an accurate picture of Marguerite, who was a religious mystic; her recommendation for overcoming the sexual double standard that allowed male aggression free rein while condemning women who transgressed was religious transcendence and union with God—for both sexes. Marguerite was also the promoter and protector of many of the main actors in the Evangelical movement, including Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples, one of the founders of French humanism, and Bishop Guillaume Briçonnet, who along with other reformist clergy frequently preached at the French court. These reformist clergy, French historian Robert Knecht writes, “appealed strongly to the ladies, many of whom yearned to reach out to God more directly than through the traditional channels.”53
How much of this did Anne absorb? Anne’s early-nineteenth-century biographers attribute a great deal of influence on Anne to Marguerite. Elizabeth Benger, in 1821, after several pages of lavish praise for the “learned and ingenious” Marguerite, writes that it cannot “be doubted that Anne Boleyn derived incalculable advantage from her early intercourse with one of the most brilliant women of the age.”54 S. W. Singer, in his notes to Cavendish’s The Life of Cardinal Wolsey (1825), acknowledges Anne’s debt to Marguerite, from whom “she first learnt the grounds of the Protestant religion.”55 But then, with the midcentury publication of the Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII and the Spanish Chronicle, both of them chock-full of Chapuys’ and others’ negative commentaries about Anne, any positive influences on her early life or acknowledgment that she may have been something other than a pretty schemer abruptly disappear from the histories. Neither Froude nor Friedmann mention Marguerite, except—in the case of Friedmann—to report her refusal to attend the meeting at Calais, held shortly before Anne and Henry were married, that was intended to introduce Anne in the role of queen-to-be to the French. (Marguerite was opposed to the divorce.) Pollard, who found Anne’s hold over Henry to be a “puzzle,” saw “no evidence” of any “mental accomplishments” besides her excellent French.56 Her “fluency in the gospel,” which Singer had attributed to her time with Marguerite, “had no nobler foundation than the facts that Anne’s position drove her into hostility to the Roman jurisdiction, and that her family shared the envy of church goods, common to the nobility and gentry of the time. Her place in English history is due solely to the circumstances that she appealed to the less refined part of Henry’s nature.”57
Although later historians were to question this picture of Anne, a certain skepticism has remained about the possibility that her time at the French court could have involved anything more than learning to dance, play courtly games, and soak up the latest styles in French fashion. But, in her own mind at least, Anne felt a strong connection to Marguerite, and with only twelve ladies-in-waiting serving at Claude’s court, it’s not a stretch to imagine frequent contact between them or that Marguerite would have served as something of a role model for Anne. In 1535, she sent Marguerite a message saying that her “greatest wish, next to having a son, is to see you again.”58 She also seems to have held no grudge against Marguerite for not attending the 1532 meeting, writing that although every possible comfort had been provided for her, “there was no one thing which her grace so much desired . . . as the want of the said queen of Navarre’s company, with whom to have conference, for more causes than were meet to be expressed, her grace is most desirous.”59 But perhaps more telling than these communications, which could be argued to be diplomatic rather than heartfelt, is Anne’s personal library, which was full of evangelical tracts and Bibles translated into French by members of Marguerite’s reformist circle. Among these was a Bible that she and Henry owned jointly; another was a tract whose introduction pairs Henry and Francis, Anne and Marguerite. Marguerite, remember, was Francis’s sister. The more obvious analogy would have been between Anne and Claude, his wife. But Claude was timid and retiring, and—like Katherine—led a life of queenly obedience. Anne, although she never developed an intellectual salon of her own, loved liberal discussion and debate. And it was perhaps from Marguerite that she learned that in such debate, a woman’s ideas were as worthy as a man’s.
Henry’s attraction to Anne, in any case, seems to have been fueled not only by sexual attraction but by common enjoyments, compatible interests, intellectual stimulation, and shared political purpose. In our own time, this ideal of love is so familiar (if rarely experienced) that it’s become a cliché of Internet dating sites, which compete with one another in their promises of going beyond the “superficial” (read: good looks) to help you find your perfect, life-sharing “match.” But in Henry’s time, people didn’t expect to find such a match in one person.60 In fact, the ideal itself would have baffled them. Plato had advocated a love that began with erotic attraction for a specific individual, but ideally transformed itself into the w
orship of Beauty itself. That was familiar, even if few people managed to attain it. Aristotle’s ideal love was personal, but nonerotic: friendship, such as Henry had with Charles Brandon throughout his life. The medieval marriage, whose conventions were still largely in place in Henry VIII’s time, was a working relationship, with intercourse added to ensure the procreation of legitimate children. Mistresses were for uncomplicated sex (and, for Henry, to produce some backup bastard heirs should the legitimate route fail). Queens were satellites to their husbands, arranged for dynastic purposes; if the couple was lucky, they might find affection and sexual satisfaction in the match, but it was certainly not required.
What was required of a queen was a training very different from the “education” that court women such as Anne received in France. Anne of France’s Lessons for My Daughter, written around 1498 but first printed around 1520, lays out the requirements of behavior for a future queen very clearly. Anne, the daughter of Louis XI, had effectively governed France for seven years when her father died (Louis’ thirteen-year-old heir, Charles, was put in Anne’s custody); when her own daughter, Suzanne, was of marriageable age—and thought to be headed for union with a foreign prince—Anne wrote Lessons to ensure that Suzanne received “the treasure of her experience.”61 But it was clearly not her experience as a ruler in her own right—or as a writer—that Anne had in mind. In outlining the duties of a queen, she emphasized not only chastity and obedience, but also silence. Not that a queen should never speak; but when she does, it is not to be for the purpose of entertaining or debating, but to comfort, reassure, and serve others, particularly “lesser folk”: “Speak to them graciously about their husbands, wives, children, and households, comfort them in their poverty, and admonish them to have patience because to those who are patient come gifts of charity, and from patience comes both the grace of God and the world; for this reason, spare neither your efforts nor your words, which in this situation are appropriate and beneficial.”62
We don’t know if Katherine was familiar with Lessons for My Daughter. But we do know that she was on intimate terms with Juan Luis Vives’s Education of a Christian Woman, which had been written in 1523 expressly for Princess Mary, Katherine’s daughter, to accompany her readings in the classics, the Church fathers, and—for recreation—the legends of the saints and tales about Griselda and other self-sacrificing women. Vives’s book purports to offer instruction for all women, but was clearly written with Katherine’s strict Catholicism as its model. In it, young girls, reminded that they are “the devil’s instrument,” are given strict instructions for how to protect themselves and their chastity from temptation.63 The essence of the instruction: Do not read anything other than Scripture or philosophers of high moral worth and employ no artifice of any sort in the “vainglorious” pursuit of physical beauty (adornments, perfumes, and ointments) that would “despoil her soul of the splendor of virtue.” For “she who rouses allurement in those who behold her does not possess true chastity.”64 Bland food was recommended, so as not to “inflame the body,” and children’s movements should be disciplined against “unseemly gesture” or a “proclivity to talkativeness.”65 And above all else, avoid the kind of witty conversation with men cultivated in court, which Vives viewed as a prelude to sexual abandon. Heterosexual conversation is so much the devil’s tool that Vives advises that “it is not to be permitted that a young woman and a man should converse alone anywhere for any length of time, not even if they are brother and sister.”66 Indeed, it is “best to have as little contact with men as possible.”67 For married women, he prohibits interest in “dances, amusements, and banqueting,” even on the day of their wedding: “There is no need of dancing and all that hubbub of drinking and uncontrolled and prolonged gaiety . . . Marriage was permitted as a remedy for lust, and we have made of the wedding day an occasion for unbridled lust.”68 Once married, she should leave the home as little as possible, speak “only when it would be harmful to keep silent,” and at home “administer everything according to the will and command of her husband.”69
If this was more or less Katherine’s conduct manual, Anne must have appeared as a lifesaving remedy, and not only to an heirless throne. While in the French court, she had perfected a very different set of rules of female comportment, described by Baldassare Castiglione in his 1528 The Book of the Courtier as the cultivation of “a certain pleasant affability” designed to please men without ever tipping over into an unseemly boldness.70 In theory, it was a delightful ideal. In practice, it was a delicate and precarious balancing act, constantly walking the tightrope between “vivacity” and “modesty,” “a little free talk” and “unseemly words,” “prudishness” and “unbridled familiarity.”71 In fact, the entire set of requirements of courtly behavior for women was framed in terms of contradictions (or, more realistically, double binds) that required constant calculation and self-scrutiny. The court lady must never appear to be “vain or frivolous.”72 However, she must “have the good sense to discern what those garments are that enhance that which is the gift of nature. Thus, if she is a little more stout or thin than the medium, or fair or dark, let her seek help from dress, but as covertly as possible; and while keeping herself dainty and neat, let her always seem to give no thought or heed to it.”73 While never appearing to show off, she should also be full of “witticisms and pleasantries,” “have knowledge of letters, music, painting, and know how to dance and make merry,” and be able to play those musical instruments that highlight “the mild gentleness which so much adorns every act a woman does.”74
The point of all this was to be entertaining to men—while projecting feminine delicacy. Since men were expected to be hale fellows, hearty drinkers, and sexual pursuers—the court was a real boys’ club, particularly after the vigorous young Henry became king—“femininity” was a balancing act that required great skill and social intelligence. The pleasure of often boisterous, sexually aggressive men was the goal; but there were exacting sexual boundaries a woman was not permitted to violate. She should be physically desirable and could engage in flirtatious, even sexually provocative talk (and should, when to do otherwise would shame the men or mark her as a prude), but her social performance must never raise doubts about her virtue.75 To guard against this, constant vigilance—in precarious tension with the “vivacity” expected of her—was required. Giuliano de’ Medici (brother of Lorenzo): “She ought also to be more circumspect, and to take better heede that she give no occasion to bee ill reported of, and so behave her selfe, that she be not onely not spotted with any fault, but not so much as with suspition.”76
Ultimately, Anne was to pay a high price for her own vivacity and flirtatiousness, which she could not simply turn off as if it were a faucet once the crown was on her head, and which her enemies used to raise suspicions about her fidelity to Henry. But in the beginning, it was likely her consummate skill in walking the tightrope between desirability and chastity that made her a standout in the English court. Enemies may have described this as manipulative, and, of course, it was; but it was conventionally manipulative—a game all court ladies were expected to play. The “chastity” part may not have been entirely an act either, despite the reputation spread by her enemies. In France, Anne was, after all, lady-in-waiting to Queen Claude, known for her virtue and religious devotion and high moral expectations of her ladies. But then, too, her husband, Francis, was a notorious womanizer, whose own Catholicism, apparently, had different rules than Claude’s. Anne’s years at the French court, divided between the expectations of Claude and the imperative to please men, were excellent training in walking the tightrope. Did Anne have sex with dozens of courtiers, as film and television portrayals would have us believe? That seems highly unlikely, as Claude would have undoubtedly kicked her out of court had there been even a hint of that. Did she bring back to England the provocative yet diffident confidence that French women are known for? It seems that she did.
Having been “finished” as a court lady, An
ne’s sense of propriety was very different from Katherine’s. In France, Anne had learned that clever, provocative talk was an art, not a transgression. Katherine, raised much more strictly in Spain and with her royal status always in mind, had learned that it was a sin. Her everyday regimen was organized around goodness, duty, obedience, and silence. All that, of course, was what was expected of a good Tudor wife—especially of a queen. But Eros rebels at such conventions. Whatever their affection for each other, Henry and Katherine were not exactly vibrantly in tune. Neither one expected that, however, for neither “falling in love” nor “being in love” was the norm for Tudor marriage, particularly not for an arranged royal marriage. They probably were delighted to discover what appears to have been some real mutual attraction when they were young and Henry’s inexperience matched Katherine’s. Had Katherine been able to deliver a male heir, that—and Henry’s mistresses—probably would have kept the marriage alive indefinitely. But they were not soul mates.
For one thing, Henry was never the same kind of Catholic as Katherine was. Henry’s Catholicism was conventional, and in the end proved less precious to him than his own earthly ambitions. He and Anne thought nothing of writing little love notes to each other on a book of hours, exchanged between them in church like teenagers passing notes in class. Katherine would probably have regarded this as sacrilege. Her religiosity was deeply etched in her being and her daily habits. She spent hours in prayer every day and had been taught that dancing, singing, and hunting were inappropriate, if not sinful, for a woman to engage in. But these were among Henry’s greatest pleasures. Initially raised to be the “spare” heir, Henry’s childhood years had been fairly free. But when his brother Arthur died when Henry was eleven, his upbringing changed dramatically. His father was now focused obsessively on keeping Henry safe from harm, and the boy’s chief care was given over to his grandmother, Lady Margaret Beaufort, every bit as pious as Katherine, and her closest adviser, John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester. They provided Henry with a broad and liberal education for his mind, but “cabined, cribbed, and confined” his body, which was powerfully endowed by nature: tall and broad chested, with strong legs and a restless vitality that immediately burst its chains the moment he became king, at the age of eighteen. Even at forty-two, he was still brimming with masculine energy. An adept horseman, jouster, and tennis player, Henry was also a splendid dancer—as was Anne (“Her gracefulness rivaled Venus,” wrote the French chronicler Pierre de Bourdeilles Brantôme), whose personality and pleasures were better matched with Henry’s than Katherine’s were. Like Henry, she loved hunting, riding, and cards. Educated to be a court lady rather than a queen, she was far from silent and verbally jousted with the men around court. (Even Wolsey’s man Cavendish, who rarely had anything good to say about her, admitted she had “a very good wit.”77) She was also bold and not afraid to challenge the superstitious streak that Henry’s grandmother had implanted in him. Elizabeth Benger relates an incident in which Anne was able to persuade Henry to visit a spot in Woodstock Forest, which had the reputation for being haunted. It was believed, in particular, that no king who entered would leave alive. Henry had been taught not to take chances with the gods or the fates. Yet Anne was able to convince him to ride through the forest, and to his relief and gratitude he exited in one piece. The anecdote may be apocryphal in detail, but in spirit it squares with what we know about Anne. It requires no stretch to see how she could come to represent youthful liberation to Henry, while Katherine’s piety, although perfectly “normal” for a queen, may well have carried unpleasant memories of the stifling regime of his grandmother.
