The Creation of Anne Boleyn

by Susan Bordo

  As a dedicated reformist, Anne was also perfectly in synch with Henry’s growing hostility toward the papacy. Once in league with him in pursuit of the divorce, she more than supported Henry’s efforts, supplying the reformist texts and arguments that gave Henry the justification he needed to enlarge his role as the spiritual leader of the nation, including William Tyndale’s The Obedience of a Christian Man, which must have prickled Henry’s sense of manliness as well as supported his resistance to the Church—and it suggests that opposing the Church could be very profitable as well. Tyndale complains that the monarchs of Christendom had become mere shadows, “having nothing to do in the world but when our holy father needeth help,” and encourages them to take back “every farthing,” “all manner of treasure,” and “all the lands which they have gotten with their false prayers.”78 It was Anne who showed Henry this book, but it’s easy to see that feminine brainwashing was hardly required for Henry to “get” that antipapal ideas were on the side of kings. As early as 1515, the youthful Henry, pronouncing on a dispute about the relative powers of ecclesiastical and state courts, declared that the king of England has no “superior but God only” and upheld the authority of “temporal jurisdiction” over Church decrees. This point of view, growing sharper every year that followed, was the cutting edge that ultimately cost Thomas More his head. More’s fatal dispute with Henry was not over Anne, for Henry and Anne were already married by then, without the pope’s approval; it was clear he no longer needed any official “permission” to make her his wife. But what Henry always needed—demanded—was recognition, among his own subjects, of the greater justice of his own authority. More, who was as stubborn and egotistical as Henry when it came to what he thought was “right,” wouldn’t give it, and Henry couldn’t let that go.

  For a traditionalist such as Chapuys, of course, Anne’s having any say at all in Henry’s political affairs would have been outrageously presumptuous, particularly since Anne was not of royal blood. Henry, however, at least at this point in his life, may not have had the same ideas about women and their proper place. Educated alongside his two sisters and extremely close to his mother, he may have had far less than the usual Tudor stock of misogynist ideas about women and their natural inferiority. At various times during their marriage, Katherine had been entrusted with responsibilities that went far beyond the wifely, serving as a mediator between Henry and Spain, and a strong advocate—some even say instigator—of war with France. When Henry left for war, he constituted her as “Regent and Governess of England, Wales, and Ireland” and gave her sweeping powers to raise troops, make appointments, issue warrants, and in general take charge of governing on the domestic front. The active role that Katherine took not only gives the lie to the conventional portrait of her as Henry’s doormat, but also shows that those who later resented Anne’s “interference” in political matters had ideological or personal reasons for their annoyance. Queens, especially well-educated queens such as Katherine, were not just shirt embroiderers or alms distributors. When their husbands were open to it, they often played an active role in international affairs.

  Henry would later become less open to the political participation of his wives, warning Jane Seymour, for example, not to meddle and holding the example of her predecessor ominously over her head (so to speak). But there’s no evidence that during the six years he pursued Anne he had any objection to her counsel. It has to be remembered that these were six years in which Henry spent far less time mooning about Anne than he did arguing, gathering forces, reviewing texts—his ego and his authority more on the line every year that passed. Initially, Henry had every expectation that the pope would quickly reverse the dispensation he had granted for the marriage to Katherine. But for complexly tangled political reasons, the pope was not about to give Henry the easy divorce he imagined, and Henry was drawn into battle with the papacy itself. It was long, fierce, and bloody, fracturing English loyalties, sending devoted papists such as Thomas More to the scaffold and ultimately resulting in a new Church of England with Henry as its head. Anyone who follows it closely can see that the autonomy and authority of kings ultimately became more of an issue for Henry than the divorce.79

  “She is not of ordinary clay,” Henry had once said to Wolsey, explaining his infatuation for Anne, a comment that most historians take to refer to Anne’s unwillingness to engage in sex before marriage.80 But perhaps Henry, tired of docile mistresses and a wife whose undeniable intelligence was cramped by obedience to role and religion, found Anne’s independence and ingenuity of mind among those qualities that made her extraordinary. Certainly, he was more than willing—without any “wheedling” or “crying”—to accept the help she offered in strategizing for the divorce. Even David Starkey notes this. “In the divorce, Anne and Henry were one. They debated it and discussed it; they exchanged ideas and agents; they devised strategies and stratagems. And they did all this together.” For Starkey, this made them “Macbeth and Lady Macbeth”—and Anne, “like Lady Macbeth, frequently took the initiative.”81 But this venomous, anti-Anne gloss on the partnership of Henry and Anne skips over the most unusual thing about it: that it was a partnership. And an unusually “modern” one that did not fit into any of the available cultural patterns. It took a woman “not of ordinary clay” to shatter the mold—and a king who was glad to see it in pieces. For the moment.

  3

  In Love (or Something Like It)

  IN 2009, AS PART of an exhibit at the British Library marking the 500th anniversary of Henry’s accession to the throne, a letter described by David Starkey as a piece of the most “explosive royal correspondence” in the history of England was displayed. For the general public, it created quite a stir. HENRY VIII REVEALS HIS SOFTER SIDE IN NEVER-BEFORE-SEEN GUSHING LOVE LETTER TO ANNE BOLEYN, read the Daily Mail headline on February 14, while Starkey made the most of it: “This marks the moment when British history changes . . . and the world turns upside down,” he pronounced.1

  Tudor scholars were already well aware of the existence of this letter, along with sixteen others, all undated, which were revealed, roughly fifty years after they were written, to be in the Vatican, presumably stolen from among Anne’s possessions in order to make the case, should it be needed, that Henry’s request for a divorce stemmed from erotic rather than theological considerations. The letter Starkey chose to exhibit, however, was not the most lust-filled—that title goes to one in which Henry pines to be in his “sweetheart’s arms, whose pretty dukkys [breasts] I trust shortly to cusse [kiss].”2 Instead, perhaps capitalizing on the success of The Tudors, Starkey chose Henry’s response to a gift from Anne, which he interprets (as does the series) to be the moment when Henry finally receives a yes from Anne. Anne has sent Henry a trinket in the shape of a ship, on which a “solitary damsel” (so reads Henry’s letter), adorned with a pendant diamond, is “tossed about.”3 Henry thanks Anne, not so much for the trinket but for the “interpretation and the too humble submission which your goodness hath used toward me in this case.”4 The “interpretation” is dramatized this way in The Tudors.

  Still breathing heavily with excitement, Henry stares

  at the jewel, trying to puzzle out its secret meaning.

  HENRY: A ship . . . with a woman on board. What is a ship? What, but

  a symbol of protection, like the ark which rescued Noah.

  (beat)

  And the diamond? What does it say in the Roman de la Rose? “A

  heart as hard as diamond, steadfast . . . never changing . . .”

  He paces around. It hits him.

  HENRY: She is the diamond—and I the ship.

  His excitement is almost feverish.

  HENRY: She says yes!5

  In the next scene, we see Henry at Hever Castle, engaged in steamy, to-the-brink-of-intercourse sexual play with Anne. They are both overcome with passion, breathing heavily, “eyes bright with desire” and all the other paraphernalia of cinematic lust. “He can take her now if he wants
to,” the script reads.6 But he rolls off her, vowing to honor her maidenhead.

  Michael Hirst, who created and wrote the series, also provides an ingeniously titillating explanation as to why Henry was corresponding with Anne in the first place. She is at Hever, having left in order to “whet” Henry’s appetite for her, and Henry has a dream in which she appears to him (naked at one point) and breathlessly instructs him to “[s]educe me . . . [w]rite letters to me . . . [r]avish me with your words.”7 So he does. We then follow Anne’s receipt of each letter, usually read aloud to her brother and father, who are brimming with ambitious fantasies over Henry’s deepening desire and offering instruction on how Anne can string him along most effectively. She is reluctant at first, but she soon comes to enjoy the game. And as Henry’s passion mounts, so does hers. “How are you?” he asks when she returns to court. “Burning,” she answers. “Burning with impatience.”

  Actually, we don’t know when or why the letters were written. They aren’t dated, and since Henry presumably destroyed Anne’s replies (at any rate, they’ve never been found), we have to imagine what she wrote on the basis of Henry’s references. Historians have struggled for centuries in an attempt to place Henry’s letters in coherent chronological context and order, with no definitive conclusion (see sidebar, below). None of the hypotheses correspond to The Tudors’ clumping of the letters into a single continuous stream. But a dominant tradition does cast Anne in the correspondence as she is cast in The Tudors—as an enchantress, with Henry as the besotted recipient of her spells. She knew the fate of those, such as her sister, Mary, who gave in easily, only to be used up and discarded by Henry, and she was determined to avoid that fate. So she keeps him bewitched by carefully and strategically manipulating his emotions. Alison Weir: “[S]he handled him with such calculated cleverness that there is no doubt that the crown of England meant more to her than the man through whom she would wear it . . . [E]verything she did, or omitted to do, in relation to Henry was calculated to increase his ardor. In this respect she never failed.”8

  * * *

  Why Was Henry Writing to Anne?

  It is notoriously difficult to reconstruct the order in which the seventeen letters were sent and the occasions for their being written. Different scholars have wildly different hypotheses, all of them the product of imaginative reconstruction rather than forensic evidence: Retha Warnicke argues that they began in June 1528, when Anne was sent back to Hever because of an outbreak of the sweating sickness, broke off when she returned to court in July, and then resumed again in September when she was sent back to Hever to keep her out of sight while they awaited the arrival of Cardinal Campeggio, who Henry hoped would quickly resolve his “great matter.” James Halliwell-Phillipps claims the occasion was Anne’s removal from court in July 1527, “in consequence of reports injurious to her reputation.” (He never says what those were.) Eric Ives breaks them into four groups: one beginning in the fall of 1526, with Henry the beseeching servant trying to make a courtly relationship more serious; the second encompassing the desperate request for an answer, Anne’s apparently encouraging gift of the trinket in reply, and his sending her his picture, solidifying the “engagement”; the third during the ten months from December 1527 to October 1528, with Henry reporting, while Anne is at Hever, his progress toward the divorce; and the final group in June 1528, during the outbreak of the sweating sickness. The fact that one scholar (Warnicke) can date as the first the same letter that another scholar (Ives) dates as the last shows how far from transparent these documents are.

  I find Eric Ives’s ordering and interpretation to be the most convincing—mostly because of the implausibility of the other theories. But really, we just don’t know. I spent a weekend cutting out each letter and arranging and rearranging them with small magnets on a large whiteboard. I found plenty of logical and empirical impossibilities in the ordering of each of my three editions of the letters (one of which has a letter full of anxiety over Anne’s bout with the sweating sickness coming before a letter in which he expresses hope that it will spare her), but I could come up with no fully convincing sequence in which to place the entire set.

  * * *

  Where does Weir get her “certainty” about all this? Her chief evidence is that Anne “often failed to reply to [his letters].”9 But we don’t know when or whether or in what way Anne replies, for we don’t have her letters to Henry. This doesn’t stop Weir from describing Anne’s replies as though she had them right in front of her. “If she detected a hint of irritation in his letters, she dealt with it by quickly reverting from the unattainable to the affectionate, and sending a loving reply.”10 But the “loving replies” in response to the “hints of irritation” that Weir refers to exist only in her imagination. Henry’s letters are unfailingly courteous and deferential; he moans and groans over his lovesick “agony,” but he never scolds her. And since we don’t have Anne’s letters, we can only infer what she said from Henry’s. They don’t tell us much about what she wrote beyond that he has been left “uncertain” for a length of time and then, at some point, reassured by “demonstrations of your affection.”11 In one letter, Henry ends: “Written with the hand of him which desireth as much to be yours as you do to have him”; in another, he refers to their mutual desire for each other’s company.12 These letters suggest that at a certain point an understanding of shared love had been established between them. But in no way do they imply that some manipulatively “loving reply” had come from Anne in response to irritation from Henry. Weir, however, never gets called out, because our collective “history” has been built up around imaginings such as hers. We don’t demand evidence any more than an enthralled child demands evidence that the story of Cinderella is “true.” The narrative is so emotionally satisfying that it doesn’t require historical confirmation. It’s confirmed by its familiarity, its poetic justice, and the ease with which it can be “read.”

  Add a heavy dose of hot sex to the temptress narrative and you get The Tudors. Michael Hirst was well aware that in order to win a contemporary audience for a historical drama, he had to provide plenty of it. He chose his Anne (Natalie Dormer) largely because of the chemistry between the actress and Jonathan Rhys Meyers, and during most of the first season, the relationship between Henry and Anne consists of variations on extended, passionate foreplay. For Hirst, as he shared in an interview with me, the sexed-up version of Henry and Anne’s romance was not, however, simply a cynical ploy to get audiences hooked. He admits that he felt the imperative to seduce viewers who expected dry BBC decorum from a series about the Tudors. But he also was making a point. “I do believe that there was a lot of sex at the time. We have this image now that the court was run by middle-aged people, that Henry was prudish, and there was no sex because there was no heating in the palaces, and so forth. But actually, Europe was run by people in their teens and twenties, and they behaved just as you’d expect crazy young people to behave.”13

  I have no idea what happened behind the doors and between the bodies in Tudor England. No one does, as private sexual behavior was, of course, not documented, and unlike some Eastern cultures, there’s not even a tradition of erotic art from this period to consult. But, in fact, it’s highly unlikely that Anne and Henry were as sexually uninhibited with each other premaritally as portrayed in The Tudors. If they had, Henry would have quickly begun to view Anne as just another strumpet who had learned far too many tricks at the French court to be a worthy queen and mother of his future children. Yes, in one letter he mentions her “pretty dukkys” he “trusts shortly to [kiss].”14 But the exact geography of the desired kiss, and whether it is imagined or remembered, isn’t clear; “breasts” covers a lot of territory, much of which, especially in an era when cleavage was in fashion, doesn’t imply nudity or nipples. And we really have no way of knowing whether the comment isn’t just a bit of slightly risqué but courtly flirtation. Nor do we know just what Anne was thinking about Henry’s letters, because we don’t have her
s. When she sent him that ship, was she agreeing to sex, as The Tudors suggests? Was she indicating she would do so if he divorced Katherine? Was it even about sex at all? Several historians suggest, contrary to the dominant “she said no” tradition, that Henry himself may have been the withholding partner, who found sex unthinkable with a potential queen (which, after all, he was seeking at the time) until they were married; the most that could yield was another illegitimate offspring.