The Creation of Anne Boleyn (15 page)

Whether or not Henry was involved, relatively early on, with someone else (“Who was this new flame?” Ives asks, skeptically
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), the quarrels don’t appear to amount to anything until Jane Seymour enters the picture. Anne had her outbursts, Henry had his, but they had many more “merry” times, reported throughout the collected papers, and both had to have been well aware that no royal relationship could ride on the twists and turns of passion. If that had been the case, Henry would have sought to divorce Katherine long before he did, instead of waiting until he had become convinced that she was no longer capable of providing an heir. And kings—not even narcissistic Henry—didn’t get rid of queens just because they had the occasional jealous outburst. Katherine, too, despite her reputation as the all-accepting, patient Griselda, had had her own vocal quarrels with the king when he first began to seek the sexual company of other women. It was to be expected, for everyone knew that women were weak and ruled by their passions. But ultimately, once the shouting and weeping were over, the queen was required to accept and obey.

This was hard for Anne. Whatever the nature of her romantic or sexual feelings for Henry, Anne was used to being the pursued darling for six years, and now she was expected to behave like a wife. That included accepting Henry’s occasional flirtations, innocent and not, something she apparently found difficult to do. She admitted this in her speech at her trial in 1536: “I confess,” she said, “I have had jealous fancies and suspicions of him, which I had not discretion enough, and wisdom, to conceal at all times.”
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Whether her jealousy was because she was in love with Henry or because she was fearful of being supplanted as Queen, or if it was simply her pride rebelling, we don’t know. But it led to a number of public quarrels, followed by amorous reconciliations (“sunshine and storms” is how Ives describes the years between 1533 and 1536
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), both of which provided fodder for Anne’s enemies to paint a picture of her as shrewish, Henry as either henpecked or philandering depending on the weather, and the relationship as tottering.

It was largely propaganda. If you put all the documentation of the “thousand days” that Henry and Anne were married in chronological order—the letters, the gossip, the various ambassadors’ reports—it’s a script with a gaping hole if what you think you are reading is a love story in which declining passion and jealousy play the major role. For there is no evidence that either of these was the tipping point that turned Anne’s fate around, although they may have contributed to her fall. In fact, there seems to have been no single factor that brought about the disastrous events of April and May 1536, but rather it was a combustion of court atmospherics, political maneuvering, and sheer bad luck. What turned the cherished, hotly pursued consort into the lady in the Tower, awaiting her execution, did not belong primarily to the realm of emotions, but to the gathering of a “perfect storm” of political, personal, and biological events, the absence of any one of which might have resulted in things turning out very differently for Anne.

What Happens When a King Marries a Woman “Not of Ordinary Clay”

After his years with intelligent but conventional Katherine, Henry had found Anne, whose young womanhood had been shaped by confident women unafraid to speak their minds about virtually any subject, to be an intellectually and erotically stimulating challenge. But the court was still very much a boys’ club; Henry had delighted in surprising Katherine by showing up in her bedroom one morning with twelve of his hyperactive companions dressed like Robin Hood and his Merry Men. “The queen,” Edward Hall reports, “the ladies and all other there were abashed, as well for the strange sight, as also for their sudden coming.”
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Blushing bride, boisterous husband—it was just the way it was supposed to be. But Anne was not a blusher. Spontaneous and intense in an era when women were supposed to silently provide a pleasing backdrop for men’s adventures, Anne had never “stayed in her place”—which was exciting in a mistress, but a PR problem in a wife. Even if Henry’s own fascination with Anne had remained unwavering (which it probably did not; after such a long unrealized pursuit, even the most enchanting woman would have to seem a little too “real”), her involvement (read: interference) in the political and religious struggles of the day was a continual annoyance to her enemies, who saw her as the mastermind behind every evil that properly should have been laid at Henry’s feet, from the destruction of Wolsey and More to the harsh treatment of Katherine and Mary.

We know from her actions that Anne was not content to flirt with power through womanly wiles and pillow talk. She was a player. Although a few historians are still insistent that Anne’s contribution to “The King’s Reformation” (as G. W. Bernard titles his book) was exaggerated by later Protestant “rehabilitators” of Anne’s image, by now most historians agree that Anne was not just the face that launched the Reformation, but an active participant. She was an avid reader of the radical religious works of the day (many of them banned from England and smuggled in for her), both in French and English. Her surviving library of books includes a large selection of early French evangelical works, including Marguerite de Navarre’s first published poem,
“Miroir de l’âme pécheresse”
(1531), which was later to be translated into English as “Mirror of the Sinful Soul” in 1544 by Anne’s eleven-year-old daughter, Elizabeth.
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Anne’s library also included Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples’ French translation of the Bible, published by the same man (Martin Lempereur) responsible for publishing Tyndale’s New Testament and numerous other French evangelical tracts. She had Tyndale’s English-language New Testament (which was to become the basis for the King James Bible) read to her ladies at court. She also introduced Henry to Tyndale’s antipapal
The Obedience of a Christian Man
and probably also to Simon Fish’s
Supplication for the Beggars
. James Carley, the curator of the books of Henry and his wives, also sees it as highly significant that
all
the antipapal literature Henry collected that supported his break with Rome dates from after he began to pursue Anne.
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Although she may not have supplied the actual readings herself, the couple was almost certainly discussing the issues and theological arguments involved, as both were avid readers of the Bible.

This was a time of religious anarchy, and although clear-cut divisions between various sects were not yet established—in fact, the Protestant/Catholic divide was just forming—Anne clearly stood on the “evangelical” side of issues. In those days, that chiefly meant a belief that the word of God was to be found in the Bible, unmediated by the interpretations of popes and priests. But direct, “personal” access to the Bible required, for all but the classically trained elite, that it be available to people in their own language. This was a cause Anne passionately supported. She secured the appointment of several evangelical bishops and deans when Henry created the newly independent Church of England. She attempted to intervene on behalf of reformists imprisoned for their religious beliefs. Multiple corroborating sources from her own time remember her as “a patron of rising evangelicals, a protector of those who were harassed,” both “a model and champion” of reformers, “in England and abroad.”
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The promotion and protection of the cause of reform was an especially dangerous business for Anne to engage in, because it was such a divisive issue (to put it mildly), and men’s careers (and sometimes heads) could flourish or fall depending on which side was winning. Anne took a risk in showing Tyndale and Fish to Henry, but it was one that initially paid off, as he immediately saw that they were on the side of kings rather than Rome when it came to earthly authority. (Henry’s reported reaction to discovering Tyndale—“This is a book for me and all kings to read”—is one of those quotes, enshrined even in
The Tudors,
that has become a pop signature of his recognition that he didn’t have to argue with the pope, just ignore him.) But even if Henry had no objection to Anne’s tutelage, others did, and their objections were a potent mix of misogyny and anti-Protestant fervor. Much of the gossip that circulated around court and through Europe came from the tongues (and pens) of those for whom being antipapal was to be prodevil. “Lutheran” women (an incorrect appellation for Anne, who did not subscribe to Lutheran doctrine) enraged Catholic dogmatists, who were quick to accuse them of witchcraft—an old charge against “talkative,” impertinent women that was particularly handy when the women were “heretics.” From “heretic” to “witch” was a short step, and from “witch” to “insatiable carnal lust” and “consorting with the devil” took barely a breath.
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The same year that Anne was executed, an effigy of evangelical Marguerite de Navarre, on a horse drawn by devils wearing placards bearing Luther’s name, appeared during a masquerade in Notre Dame.
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Protestants, of course, could be no less zealous than papists in their diatribes against women who presumed to interfere in men’s business—particularly when women who threatened to bring Catholicism back to the throne were on the horizon. Actually, the Protestants could be even more vehement, as they had a religious doctrine within which the Father, whether God, king, or husband, was the model of all authority. Which side you stood on—Catholic or Protestant—determined which presumptuous women were most offensive to you. When Mary Tudor became queen of England in 1553, her Catholicism added fuel to the fire that was already burning in Protestant reformer John Knox, who argued, in his famously titled
The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, “
that any woman who presumed ‘to sit in the seat of God, that is, to teach, to judge, or to reign above a man’” was “a monster in nature.”
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And then the old familiar charges came pouring out again. “Nature . . . doth paint them forth to be weak, frail, impatient, feeble, and foolish, and experience hath declared them to be unconstant, variable, cruel, and lacking the spirit of counsel and regiment.”
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No wonder Elizabeth felt it important that people see her as having “the heart and stomach of a King”!
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Anne Boleyn’s problem, though, as far as public relations went, was the pro-Katherine, papist faction. It was they who called her a “whore,” a would-be poisoner, and a vicious corrupter of otherwise sweet-tempered King Hal. It was they who later spread rumors that she bore physical marks of the devil on her body. It was they who were most terrified of her insidious influence on the king’s politics. Her actual contribution to the scourge of Lutheranism, far from being minimized as it later was in the writings of early-twentieth-century historians, was inflated to unbelievable proportions. In one letter to Charles, Chapuys goes so far as to blame “the heretical doctrines and practices of the concubine” as “the principal cause of the spread of Lutheranism in this country.”
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It was preposterous, and Henry certainly didn’t believe it. But it created a political/religious “wing” of anti-Anne sentiment that was exploited by Cromwell when he turned against Anne, and it was a powerful obstacle in the way of Anne’s acceptance by the (still largely Catholic) English people. In gaining that acceptance—and with it some protection from the winds of shifting politics—Anne already had several strikes against her. She had supplanted a beloved queen. She was rumored to be “haughty” and suspiciously “French”—and even worse than that, a vocal, intellectual, “interfering” woman. Jane Seymour, when she entered the picture in 1536, was no less the “other woman” than Anne was (and probably more deserving of the charge of using her virginity as bait than Anne was), but when she became queen, her apparent docility miraculously spared her from the antipathy that Anne inspired. True, Jane was a believer in the “old ways” and a supporter of Mary’s rights, which would have endeared her to Chapuys no matter what her personality. But although later historians would question just how docile Jane actually was, in her own time she was constantly commended for her gentleness, compassion, and submissiveness, which she advertised in her own motto: “Bound to obey and serve.” With few exceptions, that stereotype has not lost its grip on popular culture.

With Anne it was quite the opposite. Even those who shared her religious views, such as Cromwell, had no scruples about spreading nasty rumors when it suited their purposes. For Anne’s reputation as a woman who simply would not behave as she should had created an atmosphere that did not incline men to be her protectors, but rather freed them to take the gloves off when fighting with her. And while her unwillingness to occupy her “proper place” was not in itself the cause of Cromwell’s turn against her, it certainly contributed to their standoff, unleashed his ruthlessness, and ensured his success in planning her downfall. “Had she been gracious and modest,” writes nineteenth-century commentator James Froude, “she might have partially overcome the prejudice against her.”
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“Gracious and modest” seem like laudable qualities. But what they meant in the context of the times and why Anne could never play the part is laid bare by David Loades: “Anne . . . could not pretend to be a fool or a nonentity, and the self-effacement customary in a royal consort did not suit her style at all . . . In many ways her sharpness of perception and readiness of wit made her more suitable for the council chamber than for the boudoir.”
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But women did not belong in the council chamber.