by Linda Porter
The extraordinary woman who prompted such proofs of her monarch’s devotion was a tall, dark-eyed brunette, attractive but not really beautiful, with an oval, almost sculpted face and long, elegant fingers. Henry’s former mistress, Bessie Blount, despite a name which conjures up the image of a plump housewife, was said to be considerably better looking. Anne’s figure was trim rather than voluptuous and contemporaries were critical of her lack of embonpoint, though it does not seem to have bothered Henry.What she possessed in abundance was presence, and she was well aware of the effect that she had on men.Today we would describe her as charismatic and sexy; she was the sort of person who stood out in a gathering because of her personality and social skills.The style of her dress, her deportment, her repartee, her sense of fun, all underpinned by a keen intelligence, gave her an edgy distinctiveness. This was no mean achievement in a fiercely competitive setting, where ladies who wanted to make good marriages vied with each other for attention. Henry’s court was a difficult place for women who got it wrong. Though Katherine of Aragon might be increasingly devoted to things of the spirit, her husband’s courtiers were largely pursuing personal power and fleshly pleasures, and who better to provide the latter than the young ladies paraded by anxious parents in court society. A daughter could be as much a key to worldly success as a son, but the pitfalls if she succumbed too soon to the temptations of the steamy atmosphere of court life were very evident to Anne Boleyn. Her elder sister Mary had a reputation, on both sides of the Channel, for sleeping with anyone. A brief period as Henry’s mistress had seen Mary fade into obscurity and had not materially advanced her family’s prospects. Widowed young, she settled down and married for love, without seeking permission. She was relieved to be away from court, with all its hypocrisy and intrigue. Only the passage of time would show that Mary was actually the more fortunate of the two sisters.
Anne continues to divide opinion, nearly five hundred years after the obscene charade of her downfall.To her enemies, she was nothing more than an upstart schemer, an alluring opportunist who seduced the king from the affections of his lawful wife, bastardised and ill treated his daughter and opened the floodgates for the tide of new religious ideas to sweep over England. She was characterised as an outspoken, self-serving shrew who failed to produce a male heir, could not hold the king’s affections, and got her comeuppance. Many thought it richly deserved but others, who had known her well, thought of her as a highly intelligent woman with an enquiring mind, genuinely committed to religious debate and the study of the scriptures in English.They pointed to her interest in education and the poor and the higher standards of behaviour among the ladies of her court, a contrast to the decadence from which she had emerged.
Fascination with Anne Boleyn has never gone away, but the scholarship of the last two decades means that we know a great deal more about her tempestuous life and can make more balanced judgements about her role. In fact, Anne was of good birth and closely related to both the Howards, who, as dukes of Norfolk, were the premier aristocrats of England, and to the earls of Ormonde, the top echelon of the Anglo-Irish nobility. Born in Norfolk, she certainly spent some of her childhood at the Boleyn family’s mansion at Hever in Kent, but she was no country girl with artificial airs and graces beyond her station. Her father, Sir Thomas Boleyn, was one of the most able diplomats of his day. A fluent French-speaker, he was highly regarded by Margaret of Austria, regent of the Low Countries, and by Francis I of France. It was Sir Thomas’s standing with these rulers which enabled him to give his younger daughter an advantage over her potential rivals in England, by sending her to their courts to be educated and ‘finished’ as the perfect female courtier. So Anne began her notorious career as very much part of the establishment, though with the secret weapon of an exotic continental gloss.
Yet to her denigrators, she came to represent alienation - of a king from his queen, of a country and its Church from the rest of Christendom, of a father from his daughter.To the imperial ambassador, Eustace Chapuys, struggling to support his master’s suffering, humiliated aunt and cousin, she had no redeeming features. Mostly, he refused even to name her, as if denying her identity might in some way minimise her power and the wrong she had done.To him she was merely ‘the Concubine’, a disgraceful appendage to Henry’s life unworthy of individual recognition.
In Anne’s path, some political careers stumbled and were lost while others prospered. The king’s long-serving chief minister, Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, who had orchestrated Princess Mary’s time in the Welsh Marches, could not persuade the pope to free his master from Katherine of Aragon, and was dismissed. Meanwhile, Anne’s family and those who had supported her received honours and titles, and Thomas Cromwell, one of Wolsey’s men, stepped out of the shadows to implement the dismantling of the English Church. Even at the time, Anne was seen as a catalyst for changes in English society. These might, indeed probably would, have happened without Anne, since they mirrored convulsions shaking Europe as a whole, but her own personality and interests influenced the direction that England took. For six long years this redoubtable woman was at Henry’s side, as neither wife nor mistress, encouraging, cajoling, complaining, wheeling and dealing, but never, ever contemplating defeat. She had committed to him as wholeheartedly as he committed to her. She would be England’s queen, not a royal mistress, whatever the cost. And the cost, in money, prestige and international uncertainty, was high indeed, even if the ultimate rewards of sole authority in religious matters in England and the financial subservience of the English Church to Henry were worth the battle. It was a struggle with one major winner - the king - and many losers. And chief among these losers were Katherine of Aragon and her daughter, the princess Mary, who was to become Anne’s mortal enemy.
Nobody had a more lasting impact on Mary than Anne Boleyn. Like Chapuys, Mary would not even pronounce her name - ‘that woman’ was how she described her, and we can almost see the shudder when she uttered the words.Yet there was much more to their mutual enmity than mere personal hatred. Anne had a profound effect on Mary’s relationships with her father and mother and on her own view of who she was. Her physical health and emotional well-being never fully recovered from the strain of the break-up of her parents’ marriage and the anguish that followed. In exploring what happened through Mary’s eyes, it is possible to learn a great deal about the woman she became.
In other circumstances, Mary and Anne might have respected each other and even been companions, at least in the sense that favoured ladies-in-waiting were part of the inner circle around queens and princesses, close enough to be a comforting presence in their daily lives. The two women shared a love of music and dancing and a taste for the latest fashions. Both liked display and creating an effect in public, though Mary would have expected to be noticed by virtue of who she was, while Anne needed to work harder, using her training and wits. Anne had to entertain while Mary expected to be entertained. They were well-educated ladies, but to different ends, and Anne Boleyn had a far wider frame of reference than Mary. Growing up in Margaret of Austria’s court at Mechelen in the Low Countries, she had been developed under the direction of one of the most cultured women of the early 16th century. From there she went to join the entourage of Henry’s sister, Mary, during her brief reign as queen consort of Louis XII of France. For reasons that are not clear, Anne stayed on in France after Louis’s death and joined the household of Queen Claude, the 15-year-old wife of the new king, Francis I. For the better part of seven years she was one of Claude’s ladies, supporting her through annual pregnancies in the pleasant surroundings of the Loire chateaux. Francis used the delicate Claude as breeding stock but otherwise largely ignored her. His behaviour could not have left Anne, who was the same age as the queen, in any doubts about the basic expectations of the queenly role, but this does not seem to have been a deterrent in her own life.
So Anne, unlike Mary, knew about other countries and their customs first hand. She spoke French because she had lived there, r
ather than having been taught it by a schoolmaster in a quiet room in an English palace. And she had a far better idea of the ebb and flow of influence at court, the shifting allegiances and factions in which friends could become foes in a very short space of time. Flexible and intuitive, a natural manipulator, she simply knew more about the world than Mary did. And she was 15 years older.Yet when it came to confrontation, Anne found Mary an implacable opponent.
Mary probably saw Anne for the first time during the pageants given in honour of the imperial ambassadors who had come to finalise the details of the treaty of marriage between herself and Charles V, in early March 1522. It is unlikely she took especial interest in her.Why should she have noticed one among many of the pretty ladies who entertained the diplomats, when she herself, a six-year-old princess gorgeously bejewelled and attired, was the centre of attention? Yet the occasion was important for Anne, her first public performance at Henry’s court, and one for which she was well prepared. She was one of eight ladies, each representing a female virtue, who played in an entertainment known as the Chateau Vert. There is no modern equivalent of this piece of theatre, which was a spectacle without words, relying on lavish display and expenditure and evidently some degree of forward planning and rehearsal but not really calling for any acting ability. Anne would have known the plot, if it can be called that, already, since the Chateau Vert (a specially constructed wooden castle, painted green) was one of a number of standard masques involving imperilled ladies requiring rescue by chivalric forces, in this case led by the king himself. The performance took place after supper (which was eaten early, around five in the afternoon, in Tudor times) and the princess Mary would have watched as her aunt, known for ever after her few months in France as ‘The French Queen’, took a starring role representing Beauty, one of the eight qualities of the perfect mistress. Anne Boleyn was Perseverance, her sister Mary, Kindness, her future sister-in-law, Jane Parker, was Constancy (peculiarly inapt, in view of the role she would play in the downfall of two of Henry’s wives, Anne herself and Katherine Howard), and Gertrude, countess of Devonshire, a close friend of Katherine of Aragon, appropriately took the part of Honour.
Anne was clearly in good company as Henry and his knights, at first repulsed with a shower of sweets and rosewater, eventually overcome the ladies’ reluctance by a barrage of fruit. She and her companions emerged from the castle and agreed to dance with their chivalrous pursuers before the audience and performers went off to an expensive banquet, and the young princess, perhaps, went off to bed. The occasion must have been an exciting one for a little girl, but for Anne it was, despite the significance of the underlying international politics, very much a reflection of her upbringing and its accompanying expectations. She was trained as a court entertainer and knew her place. She must look decorative, perform professionally in masques, dance well and hold her own in social conversation. Flirtatious behaviour with admiring gentlemen was perfectly in order, so long as the bounds of decency were not exceeded. After all, the idea was that one might become her husband. A princess had different standards and Mary’s husband, it was believed, would be grand indeed. Sexual attractiveness, even a pleasing personality, was not required by either party, despite the ritual exchange of portraits. It was all about power.
It is not possible to say when Henry VIII first noticed Anne Boleyn, though she evidently did not make an immediate conquest of him by her performance in the Chateau Vert. Her father he knew well and her sister he preferred to forget. In the years between Anne’s court debut and Princess Mary’s departure for the Welsh Marches, Henry had many other things on his mind. Chief of these, the one that would not go away - indeed, got worse with every passing year - was the succession. For although Mary never acknowledged it, and probably did not realise it at the time, her father had decided to end his marriage to Katherine of Aragon before he fell in love with Anne Boleyn. If it had not been Anne, it would have been someone else. Henry’s growing affection for Anne explains the timing of his moves to have his marriage to Katherine formally annulled, but it was not the prime motive. That motive had to do with power and security, just as in the marriage negotiations with Charles V, which never came to anything. Indeed, it could have been the realisation of just how difficult it was proving to find a match for Mary, young as she still was, which brought home to Henry the realities of a situation that he regarded with growing desperation.
In 1525 he was only 34 but his wife was 40 and it was obvious she would never have any more children.The future of his dynasty, and of England, lay with a girl of nine, unlikely to produce children before her mid-teens at the earliest.Who was to say they would be sons, even when they came? And if they were, would they be true heirs of England, or, more probably, foreign princes brought up outside the realm? Though he had himself acknowledged that Mary was England’s heir, Henry never fully convinced himself that she could succeed him as queen in her own right.There were too many uncertainties, and these concerns themselves weakened Henry’s own position. Eventually, there came a point when he told himself that matters must be addressed, that sending his illegitimate son off to the north of England and his daughter to the west was not the solution. Like all men of his time, Henry looked to God for explanations of his predicament and guidance for the way forward. Disquietingly, the Bible seemed to provide an answer that was not regarded as an impediment at the time of his accession. He had married his brother’s wife and the book of Leviticus said that this was unlawful. No wonder he and Katherine were never blessed with sons who lived.They had flagrantly disregarded God’s will and lived in sin all these years.
Once the light dawned, Henry saw a way out of his wider dilemma. It was not unheard of for monarchs to put aside their wives and in his case there was no alternative, as he had sinned. A papal dispensation would be needed and he still held Katherine personally in great esteem (in fact, he seems to have been rather cowed by her and was often left tongue-tied by her defiance in the face of his attempts to put her aside), but they were no longer having sexual relations and their different interests and outlooks meant that they had little in common. Now he must settle his account with God, his conscience and his country. He had every intention that Katherine would be well served and generously treated, but his priority was to find a new wife and beget male heirs. What this would mean for Mary was left studiously vague.The indications are that he evaded directly addressing the issue for as long as he could, as did those around him. A child born in what was, at the time, believed to be lawful wedlock was not necessarily illegitimate if the marriage was later found to be invalid. But his doubts about Mary’s viability as his heir were only too apparent.
At first, Henry’s reasons for ending his marriage were mostly negative. He was tired of Katherine, who could have no more children; his dynasty hung on the slim thread of a young girl’s life, and though she had been well prepared he could not bring himself to accept that Mary, alone, was his future. He had erred and God had shown his disfavour.Yet by the time that Henry and his daughter met in Oxfordshire in the late summer of 1526, Henry had a much more positive reason to turn from shifting anxieties to positive action. He had fallen for Anne Boleyn.
At first he seems to have noticed Anne because she was the object of courtly pursuit by the poet, Sir Thomas Wyatt the elder, one of Henry’s diplomats and companions. Perhaps it began as curiosity and a regal flexing of muscle, the desire to remind Wyatt that all those near to the king were there because he wanted their society but that it was all a game played by his rules. Wyatt must stand aside and make way for his monarch, an expert in the etiquette of courtly love and its progression to sexual surrender.The lady would surely succumb, just as her sister had done.
But the lady did not succumb, either to chivalric gestures and protestations, or to the less subtle signals that Henry would like to sleep with her. Anne was in her mid-twenties and still without a husband, despite various suitors being mentioned. She had seen what happened to her sister as the king’s mistress
, married off to a cuckold of a husband to give her an air of respectability. Anne was not impressed. At first she rejected Henry, which only enflamed his ardour. Deciding that she must be worried about security and status, and also yearning for her lively, feisty company, Henry made it clear that he wanted Anne as maîtresse en titre. He envisioned this as a permanent arrangement, like the relationship between the king of France and his Françoise de Foix.2 It would have been an impressive success for Anne Boleyn and her family, but she remained unpersuaded, preferring to absent herself from temptation and pressure at home in Hever.We do not know at what point she began to reciprocate Henry’s feelings, or which of them first thought of marriage as the only way their relationship could develop, but by the spring of 1527, not long after Mary’s marriage plans with the duke of Orléans had been deferred, Henry began to consult about an annulment of his own marriage. By the summer of that year, convinced at last that she could be Henry’s wife,Anne apparently agreed to marry him. From that point, events moved swiftly. At the end of August, Henry, having consulted with a number of advisers during an extended stay at the palace of New Hall in Essex (where, ironically, his daughter Mary later lived), decided to send an envoy to Rome to seek a papal dispensation for the annulment of his marriage to Katherine of Aragon. His mind was made up. He would put aside Katherine, his wife of 18 years, who was really no wife at all, and marry Anne Boleyn. With Anne, he could realistically hope to have male heirs. And he did not expect to have to wait long.
