The Creation of Anne Boleyn

by Susan Bordo

  Unlike Chapuys, whose letters to Charles had shied away from explicit references to Anne’s sexuality and physical appearance, Sander, as we’ve seen, wallowed in descriptions of Anne’s body as the deformed but alluring gateway that ensnared Henry and led him through the doors of heresy. Of course, “monster Anne” was a fantasy. It would have been unthinkable for Henry to have taken as his queen a woman whose beauty was so “corrupted” by deformity—or as promiscuous as Sander, who confuses Anne with her sister, makes her out to be. Whether Mary’s reputation was deserved or not (and Alison Weir has claimed, recently, that it was not), it was Mary Boleyn, not Anne (as Sander has it), who was nicknamed the “English mare”—according to the gossip—for having been mounted so often while at the French court. But for Sander, the entire tribe of Boleyn women was a spreading miasma of shameless sexuality. Anne, he claims, was actually the offspring of her mother and Henry VIII! (“A claim,” comments one contemporary critic, “that must have startled even the most cynical Catholic reader.”23)

  Sander’s influence on ideas about Anne has been deep and wide, providing a blueprint for dozens of later representations, even in portrayals that are more sympathetic to Anne, in no small part because they strike an archetypal chord. The idea that she had black hair, which has its origins in Sander, has persisted, in cartoons and contemporary art, and in other imaginative depictions. (In The Tudors shooting script, Anne is described as “a very beautiful woman with jet-black hair.”24) And the sixth finger has been pretty firmly established in popular lists of historical trivia. In Spain, Sander’s influence has been especially enduring. For hundreds of years the annual Corpus Christi festival in Toledo featured a float with a tarasca (or monster) represented by a small female figure known as “Ana Bolena.” Spanish playwright Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s 1627 drama, The Schism in England, which takes all its main ideas about Anne from Sander, portrays Henry, at the end, railing against Anne: “That woman, that fierce animal, that blind enchantment, false sphinx, that basilisk, that poisonous serpent, that enraged tigress, Anne Boleyn, arrest her!”25 In Spain, Katherine remains the legitimate wife and protector of the true religion; Anne the heretical usurper.

  The first prominent Protestant response to Sander came from George Wyatt, grandson of the poet, who begins his defense of Anne with an all-out attack on the “see of Rome” in the “full tide of all wickedness,” “outrageous corruptions and foaming filth”—and goes on to celebrate “the bright beams of [Anne’s] clearness,” in trying to further “the blessed splendor of the Gospel.”26 The point of his book, he tells the reader, is to dispel the “black mists of malice . . . instructed to cover and overshadow her glory with their most black and venomous untruths.”27 As we’ve seen, he challenges Sander’s physical descriptions of Anne point by point, admitting when there was a small basis in fact—such as Anne’s vestigial nail—and, like Foxe, he praises Anne for her numerous virtues, including her support for reformist writing and activity,28 and exonerates her from all charges of adultery and treason, declaring them “incredible” and “by the circumstances impossible” (which was true).29 Unfortunately, the circulation of Wyatt’s counter-Sander manuscript, unlike Sander’s book, was highly limited until the beginning of the nineteenth century, when it was printed along with the first published edition of Cavendish’s The Life of Cardinal Wolsey. The latter had been written in 1641, during Mary’s reign, but was widely circulated before that in manuscript form, contributing in its own way to the anti-Boleyn mythology. Cavendish was more intent on praising his former master’s life than he was on smearing Anne, but smear Anne he did, blaming Anne for Wolsey’s downfall and portraying her as the “instrument” of Venus, a beautiful temptress who was relatively innocent in the beginning, but grew hungry for jewels and power once she realized “the great love that [the king] bare her in the bottom of his stomach.”30

  It’s from Cavendish and Wyatt that we get the stories of Anne’s early romances with Henry Percy and Thomas Wyatt that would so captivate later fiction writers and moviemakers, from Madame d’Aulnoy’s 1680 The Novels of Elizabeth, Queen of England, which re-creates a “secret history” written by Elizabeth that features Anne and Percy longing for each other throughout Anne’s reign, to Philippa Gregory’s The Other Boleyn Girl, in which Anne actually has sex with Percy before she is banished to France in disgrace (eventually to return and steal the king from her kindhearted sister). None of this is in Wyatt or Cavendish, but the theme of love thwarted by royal interests is. The affair with Percy, as Cavendish recounts it, was the more serious, reciprocal one, with the couple already precontracted for marriage when Henry instructed Wolsey to break it up. “Wherewith Mistress Anne Boleyn was greatly offended, saying, that if it ever lay in her power, she would work the cardinal as much displeasure”—which Cavendish believes she did, goading Henry to see Wolsey as responsible for the sluggish pace of the divorce and spiriting Henry away on an early morning picnic so that Wolsey, who was expecting to talk to the king that morning, would have no chance to defend himself.31

  Wyatt, on the other hand, as his grandson emphasizes, was never a real contender for Anne’s affection because he was already married. That didn’t stop Henry, but Wyatt was a more honorable courtier, and so contented himself with writing poetry and charming Anne with flattery and entertaining conversations. Courtly and “innocent” though they were, Wyatt’s attentions (his grandson tells us) were noticed by Henry, who “was whetted the more to discover to her his affection” and “in the end fell to win her by treaty of marriage.”32 In between the whetting of the king’s interest and his serious pursuit of Anne, the king and Wyatt “sport” at bowls together, and a playful dispute arises about a particular winning throw. “Wiat, I tell thee it is mine,” Henry pronounces with a smile and points to the bowl, ostentatiously displaying on his finger a ring that Anne had given him.33 Wyatt, perceiving that the issue in question is not really who has won the throw but who had won Anne’s heart, offers to measure the throw, with the “hope it will be mine.”34 The measuring device, which he takes from around his neck, is a string of lace on which hangs a small jewel that he had mischievously stolen from Anne. Henry recognizes that it is Anne’s, and the game is over. “It may be so, but then I am deceived,” Henry mutters, and stomps off, “showing some discontentment in his countenance.”35 But Anne clears things up, assuring Henry that Wyatt had pilfered the jewel, and “satisfied the king so effectually” that within days Henry is announcing his intentions to Anne’s father, “to whom we may be sure the news was not a little joyful.”36

  From Chapuys until the middle of the nineteenth century, the Protestant/Catholic divide was the major determinant in how Anne was portrayed. Put starkly, the Protestants loved Anne; the Catholics despised her—and each side could be equally fanciful in dramatizing their allegiance. Sander demonized Anne. But John Banks’s Vertue Betray’d: or, Anna Bullen (1682) sanctified her. Banks’s play, which was hugely popular in its day, presents Anne as the hapless victim of “royal tyranny allied with Catholic conspiracy.”37 Banks’s Henry is a megalomaniac, intent on establishing his own supremacy; Wolsey is the Platonic form of the decadent, corrupt priest. The former is heartless and cruel to Anne; the latter plots with Henry’s ex-mistress, Elizabeth Blount, to bring Anne down. And Henry Percy is there as a reminder of what might have been. Banks’s play was among the most popular of the emotion-rousing public entertainments emerging at that time, which many see as forerunners to the development of the romantic novel. But those entertainments, often dismissed nowadays as sentimental tearjerkers, could also be quite “political”—and Vertue Betray’d was an undisguised grenade in the Protestant/Catholic culture wars. At the end of the play, long-suffering Anne goes to her death in magnificent fashion, proclaiming to all the saints, cherubim, and other martyrs in heaven that she is coming to them, and ending many long and lofty speeches with an even loftier prediction of her daughter’s future (and, through her, the glorious future of Protestantis
m).

  Thou, little Child [Elizabeth], Shalt live to see thy Mother’s Wrongs o’re paid In many Blessings on thy Womans State. From this dark Calumny, in which I set, As in a Cloud; thou, like a Star, shalt rise, And awe the Southern World: That holy Tyrant, Who binds all Europe with the Yoak of Conscience, Holding his Feet upon the Necks of Kings; Thou shalt destroy, and quite unloose his Bonds, and lay the Monster trembling at thy Feet. When this shall come to pass, the World shall see Thy Mothers Innocence reviv’d in thee.38

  The “holy tyrant” and “monster,” of course, is the pope. Elsewhere in the play, little Elizabeth slings her own anti-Catholic imagery around, referring to Wolsey as “that red thing there . . . that devil.”39 When Henry protests, “He is no devil, he’s a cardinal,” Elizabeth argues, “Why does he wear that huge, long coat then? Unless it be to hide his cloven feet.”40

  The play makes a hash of history, of course (Elizabeth was two and a half when Anne was executed, and Wolsey died in 1530 before Anne had even become queen), but then, too, so did Shakespeare’s plays about historical figures. His The Famous History of the Life of King Henry the Eighth—subtitled All Is True (1623)—is full of creative alterations of history. But in the seventeenth century, marking the distinction between “fiction” and “history” wasn’t yet an issue; in fact, “history” as a distinct genre of writing was just appearing. Also, fidelity to fact wasn’t yet seen as equivalent to “truth.” That was to come with the scientific revolution, which had only just begun; at this stage, “truth” wasn’t a matter of correct dates or exact measurements, but a metaphysical ideal. Neither Shakespeare nor Banks was interested in an “objective” view of Henry’s reign; they probably wouldn’t have understood exactly what that meant or why anyone would be interested in achieving it. Presenting the moral/religious/political “truth” in a dramatic, emotionally stirring form that would be accessible and engaging to audiences was the goal. This is why Shakespeare could meaningfully subtitle his play All Is True, even though it was clearly not all factual. Literary critics have debated about just what “truth” Shakespeare was going for in this play (it’s notoriously disjointed, and perhaps written in collaboration with John Fletcher), but in Banks’s play, it’s very clear that the truth of history was found in the subordination of individual fortunes to the birth of the Golden Age of Elizabeth.

  8

  Anne’s Afterlives, from She-Tragedy to Historical Romance

  Gender Wars

  THERE ARE SOME other “truths” in Banks’splay as well—and they have to do with what we would call “gender issues.” It’s a mistake, as I argued earlier, to see consciousness of such issues as a modern development. “Gender” as a concept is of extremely recent vintage, but an awareness of male/female inequality is not, and debates surrounding female fitness to rule, sexual differences between men and women, and so on are as old as Plato and Aristotle. What had begun to change in those debates, beginning (as we’ve seen) with some medieval writers and picking up speed in the seventeenth century, is the participation of women themselves in those debates. And around the time that Banks was writing, interesting things were happening in France, where the salon had long been an arena for women poets, storytellers, and visionaries to express their “politics,” sometimes in deceptively amusing forms.

  An important but relatively unknown figure in this development was Marie-Catherine Le Jumel de Barneville—or as she was known in her anonymous works, Madame d’Aulnoy. D’Aulnoy wrote memoirs and travel literature, both of which became popular in England at the beginning of the eighteenth century. However, her most famous writings were her many fantastical fairy tales. Some literary scholars, in fact, credit d’Aulnoy with originating the genre, which in her day was designed to entertain adults in the French salon rather than children at bedtime. D’Aulnoy’s most popular tales often featured enterprising, clever girls whose lives were tyrannized by wicked kings and fathers—very different from the stories of the better-known Charles Perrault, whose heroines are marked by their modesty, obedience, and reliance on the ingenuity of a prince to save them from the spell of a wicked stepmother or witch. But d’Aulnoy’s less conventional heroines found another home in the “secret histories” she (and others) published dealing with historical figures from other times and places but, under that disguise, critiquing the court and culture of Louis XIV. Among these works was d’Aulnoy’s The Novels of Elizabeth, Queen of England, Containing the History of Queen Ann of Bullen. Despite its title (which was a diversionary tactic), it’s really about Anne, not Elizabeth, and as d’Aulnoy tells it, the book is virtually a “real life” dystopian version of the fairy-tale form she favored—clever, generous, and beautiful girl, wicked king, but no happy ending.

  D’Aulnoy’s “secret histories” of English royalty were quickly translated and circulated in England in the 1680s, where they clearly wound up in Banks’s hands, who imported key plot elements of d’Aulnoy’s version of the Anne Boleyn story into his own play. One of those elements is a tortured, unending relationship with Percy (meant to represent what male-female relationships could be like if allowed to develop freely and equally); another is the scheming of the king’s former mistress, Elizabeth Blount, who, abandoned by Henry, collaborates with Wolsey in plotting against Anne. But it’s not plot devices but the gender of the protagonist that was the most radical innovation Banks took from Aulnoy. In Shakespeare’s play, Anne Boleyn hardly figures at all except as a sexual motive for Henry and the incubator of Elizabeth. In Vertue Betray’d, as in d’Aulnoy’s “secret history,” Anne’s trials and tribulations are the heart and spine of the work. This was something new. In fact, having any kind of tragic female hero(ine) was new. Katherine suffers nobly and dramatically in Shakespeare’s play, but she can’t be said to be the “heroine” of a play that ends in the celebration of the birth of Elizabeth. In Vertue Betray’d, it is Anne’s life and death that generate Elizabeth and are vindicated by Elizabeth. She is the tragic hero of the play. As such, she is not simply a martyr to a cause, as she appears in Foxe and Wyatt, but someone whom we are encouraged to suffer along with as we imagine Henry’s betrayals, the terror of imprisonment, and the grief over the loss of her daughter.

  Although the experience of sympathetic identification with the emotions and fate of an entrapped or abused heroine is commonplace to those of us raised on romantic fiction, it was so novel at the end of the seventeenth century that it was hailed (or derided, depending on your point of view) as a new genre, known as the “she-tragedy.” Anne, of course, was a perfect subject for this genre, which introduced some metaphors—such as the “prison” of subordination—that later would become staples of Enlightenment feminist writing. Anne was actually imprisoned, of course, but Banks has her metaphorically imprisoned as well, long before the arrest. In her first appearance in the play, just after her coronation, she is distraught over the loss of autonomy she has suffered through marriage to the king: “Has then a Throne cost me so dear a Price,” she muses, “as forfeit my Liberty of Thinking? Do Princes barter for their Crowns their Freedoms? Good Heav’n! Not think! Nor pray if I have need—If I am Queen, why am I not obey’d?”1 Here, the demand to think her own thoughts (most particularly with respect to religion)—and, as queen, to have them respected—which Anne’s contemporaries had found so outrageous in her behavior, is presented as a legitimate “right.” Banks’s Henry is also the first portrayal—though definitely not the last—to equate Henry as political tyrant with Henry as sexual predator, who controls the state with the same ruthless, invasive force with which he dominates his wife. Describing sex with a resistant Anne, he recalls, not without pleasure, how “[s]he struggles like the Quarry in the Toil: And yields herself unto my loath’d Embraces.”2

  * * *

  Jonathan Swift’s Marginalia on Henry VIII, Found Handwritten in One of His Books

  “I wish he had been flayed, his skin stuffed and hanged upon a gibbet. His bulky guts and flesh left to be devoured by birds and beasts f
or a warning to his successors forever. Amen.”3

  * * *

  This was radical sexual politics for England at the time. But male chroniclers of the period did not see the politics; they only saw the focus on “domestic” relations, which was viewed as of “special” interest to female viewers, but of little relevance to the important issues of the day. When “history” began to carve itself out as a genre, it carried the distinction along with it in the contrast between “particular history” and “general history”—a distinction that at least one influential historian, David Starkey, maintains to this day, with his complaints against “feminised history,” which has turned “proper history” into a profitable “soap opera.”4 “Unhappy marriages are big box office,” he says.5 But neither d’Aulnoy nor Banks was interested in creating romance simply for the sake of soaking audiences’ handkerchiefs; d’Aulnoy used the Henry/Anne story to raise questions about the court culture of her own time, and Vertue Betray’d, as Tracey Miller-Tomlinson argues, uses its virtuous heroine and tyrannical villains to engage political controversies of the time, including the threat of counterreformation conspiracies to control the English throne and thwart a Protestant succession. Even in terms of “gender politics,” Anne and Henry’s union was no ordinary marriage. Anne’s suffering, although it may have moved female audiences of Vertue Betray’d, was not merely that of a wife tyrannized and betrayed by a husband, but a female monarch struggling for religious autonomy and her own authority in the face of the implacable absolutism of a male-dominated state and church. That issue was hardly “domestic”; it had shaped the course of English history since Henry decided that only a male heir would do.