The Creation of Anne Boleyn (16 page)

Anne recognized that she had overstepped the boundaries of appropriate wifely behavior. At her trial, insisting that she was “clear of all the offences which you have laid to my charge,” she went on to acknowledge not only her “jealous fancies” but also her failure to show the king “that humility which his goodness to me, and the honours to which he raised me, merited.”
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Anne’s recognition that she had not shown the king enough humility, in this context, shows remarkable insight into the gender politics that undoubtedly played a role in her downfall. She stood accused of adultery and treason. Yet she did not simply refute those charges; she admitted to a different “crime”: not remaining in her proper “place.” In juxtaposing these two transgressions, Anne seems to be suggesting that not only did she recognize that she had overstepped the norms of wifely behavior, but that this transgression also was somehow related to the grim situation she now found herself in.

The idea that Anne was aware that she had fatally defied the rules governing wifely (and queenly) behavior may seem, at first, like the wishful, anachronistic thinking of a twenty-first-century woman looking for would-be feminists in the shadows of every historical era. But actually, educated women of her time were very much aware of the various debates concerning the “
querelle des femmes
,” which was first introduced by Christine de Pizan in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, and which had a particular resonance in Britain, where the issue of whether or not women were suitable to rule became more than just theoretical during Henry VIII’s reign. Pizan is most famous for her
The Book of the City of Ladies
(1404–5), which gathers heroines from history and Pizan’s own time to refute ancient views of female inferiority, and which was published in England in 1521 around the same time that Anne was about to return from France. Historians of women have made a strong argument that Pizan’s book became part of an ongoing debate about “the woman question” in England, beginning with Juan Luis Vives’s
The Education of a Christian Woman
(1523), written expressly for Mary, that insisted, against Pizan’s arguments, on the necessarily subordinate role of women. The debate continues in 1540 and 1542 with Sir Thomas Elyot’s refutation of Vives,
Defence of Good Women,
and Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim’s
Of the Nobilitie and Excellencye of Womankynde,
which historian Constance Jordan describes as “the most explicitly feminist text to be published in England in the first half of the century.”
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In its original Latin form, published in 1509, it was dedicated to Margaret of Austria, who was to be Anne’s first model of queenly behavior. Anticipating later Enlightenment thinkers, Agrippa argues that the differences between men and women were only bodily and that “the woman hathe that some mynd that a man hath, the same reason and speche, she gothe to the same ende of blysfulnes [spirituality], where shall be no exception of kynde.” Why then are they everywhere subordinate to men? Because they are not permitted to make the laws or write history, and therefore they, as Jordan paraphrases Agrippa, “cannot contribute to or criticize the intellectual bases on which they are categorized as inferior.”
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To describe Anne Boleyn as a feminist would be an anachronism—and not nearly as appropriate an anachronism as in the case of Marguerite de Navarre and others who openly championed female equality. Marguerite did not have the word, but she was conscious of a women’s “cause.” There’s no evidence that Anne felt similarly. But she had learned to value her body and her ideas, and she ultimately recognized that there was something unsettling about this for Henry and understood that this played a role in her downfall. “I do not say I have always shown him that humility,” she said at her trial, insistent even then on speaking what she believed.
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Anne wasn’t a feminist. But she did step over the ever-moving line that marked the boundary of the comfort zone for men of her era, and for all the unease and backlash she inspired, she may as well have been one.

Anne as a Piece on the Chessboard of Politics

By 1536 Henry was well aware that public opinion, especially after the executions of Bishop Fisher and Thomas More (for refusing to take the oath declaring Henry Supreme Head of the Church of England), was not exactly riding in his favor.

Besides anger over Fisher and More, who were generally admired, there was growing public resentment over the mistreatment of Katherine and Princess Mary, whom Henry kept separated from each other, treating them as if they were discarded limbs. The abuse of Mary was especially acute, as she was forced to wait on her younger sister, Elizabeth, and was allowed no audience with the king, who had formerly been an affectionate father, so long as she refused to acknowledge Anne as queen. This she would not do, not even after Anne had personally offered her friendship and a home at court on that one condition. Despite a huge amount of evidence that Henry was in a rage over his daughter’s “obstinacy” and hardly required any goading to punish and humiliate her, Chapuys blamed her mistreatment entirely on Anne, whom he believed turned the king against Mary, and he did all that he could to ensure that every other person who would listen to him saw it that way.

Even those who knew better, such as Thomas Cromwell, realized that blaming the king for Mary’s mistreatment could create a huge public relations disaster and encouraged Chapuys in his Anne-blaming. As early as October of 1534, Chapuys met with Cromwell, who reassured Chapuys of Henry’s “paternal affection” for Mary and claimed that “he loved her 100 times more than his last born” and that he and Chapuys should do all that they could to “soften and mend all matters relating to her,” for “in time everything would be set to rights.”
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Although I am often skeptical of Chapuys’ second- and thirdhand “intelligence,” the manipulative, self-serving speech he attributes to Cromwell has, to my ears, the ring of truth.

True it was [Cromwell said] that the King, his master, had occasionally complained of the suit which Your Majesty had instituted against him at Rome, but he [Cromwell] had fully shown that Your Majesty could not help stirring in favour of Queen Katherine, bound as she was to you by the bonds of consanguinity and royal rank; and that, considering the King, his master, if in your Majesty’s place, might have acted as you did there was no fear of his now taking in bad part your interference in the affairs of so close a relative. He himself had so strongly and so often inculcated that reasoning upon the King, that, in his opinion, no cause now remained for disagreement between Your Majesty and his master, save perhaps the affair of these two good ladies [Katherine and Mary]; to remedy which, as he had signified to me, it was needful that we both should agree upon a satisfactory settlement of all complaints, and the knitting of that lasting friendship which might otherwise be endangered. Cromwell ended by saying in passing that it was perfectly true that great union and friendship existed now between France and England, but that I could guess the cause of it. He did not say more on this subject. Your Majesty, by your great wisdom, will be able to judge what Cromwell’s last words meant.
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Of course, the “cause” that was implied here was Anne—who Cromwell “hinted” was standing between the repair of relations between England and Spain in a double way: first, because she was known to be a Francophile, and second and more important, because she was the obstacle standing in the way of reaching a “satisfactory settlement of all complaints” by Katherine and Mary.
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Chapuys also took Cromwell as hinting “that there was some appearance of the King changing his love.”
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He wasn’t sure whether to take this seriously—for Cromwell was quite capable of dissembling when it suited his purposes—but what seems crystal clear is that Cromwell was buttering up Chapuys in the interests of Henry’s PR and future good relations with Charles, and that Anne was already being used by him to take the heat off Henry.

Why would Cromwell, who shared Anne’s religious proclivities, want to stir up the anti-Anne pot with Chapuys and Charles? After all, he had been the chief engineer of the break with Rome and, as a reformist himself, had been Anne’s strongest ally at the start of her relationship with Henry. At one point, it was generally believed that Cromwell, as Chapuys later put it, was “Anne’s right hand.”
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What had happened? At this point, nothing of grave significance. But Cromwell was a man who was ever alert to the slightest changes in the weather of power politics, and Anne had just had a miscarriage in July of 1535. It was not publicly reported, but this can be inferred from comments made about her “goodly belly” in April and Henry’s postponement of a trip to France that summer “on account of her condition.”
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Then in July—silence. There now had been two unsuccessful pregnancies as far as the issue of a male heir was concerned. Moreover, although Elizabeth was born healthy and beautiful, this child had not even gone to term—a far more ominous sign for superstitious Henry. Was he already wondering whether God disapproved of this marriage? And did he share his misgivings with his “most beloved” Cromwell?

Cromwell and Anne, although they inveighed against Rome and fought for the divorce together, had a serious break brewing. Even though they may have shared the same “theory” of reform (although we don’t know for sure, as what became English Protestantism was only just evolving), they disagreed sharply on what should be done with the spoils of disbanded churches and monasteries. From the beginning of his ascent to power—and among the reasons why he was able to keep the favor of the nobility even after Wolsey was deposed—Cromwell “actively assisted the King in diverting revenues from the suppressed monasteries, originally granted to Wolsey’s two colleges, to the purses of Henry’s cronies at court.”
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Anne, in contrast, favored using the funds to set up educational and charitable institutions, and was shocked to learn that the money was being diverted for private use. This difference between them would not explode until April of 1536, but it seems that in sidling up to Chapuys, Cromwell was already preparing for the possibility that there might be a showdown that would result in his own fall from favor, and he was seeking an alliance with Chapuys to prepare for a possible strike against Anne.

Cromwell was aware that developing a friendship with Chapuys was risky, but assessing the situation at the time, he wasn’t overly concerned. In June of 1535 he told Chapuys that if Anne knew how close he and Chapuys were, she would see Cromwell’s head off his shoulders. At the time, Cromwell shrugged it off, telling Chapuys that “I trust so much on my master, that I fancy she cannot do me any harm.”
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But the differences between Anne and Cromwell were escalating—not just over the use of confiscated money but also over international alliances (Anne favored France, while Cromwell was beginning to lean toward some kind of accommodation with Charles)—and the mere fact that Cromwell was already assessing his security relative to Anne’s displeasure with him suggests that he was aware she could, under the right circumstances, be a danger to him and that he was making preparations.

Cromwell also undoubtedly became aware, in the fall of that year, that a new family was rising in the king’s favor: the Seymours. Edward Seymour, who had hosted a visit from Henry to Wolf Hall in September, was becoming a special favorite. Henry had always enjoyed the company of vital, masculine, young men (“thrusting, acquisitive and ambitious” is how Derek Wilson describes them
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) and as his own athleticism and sense of masculine potency declined, hobbled by leg ulcers and increasing obesity, he may have begun to live vicariously through them, “unconsciously sucking new life from their physical and mental vigor.”
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By 1535, Seymour’s circle—John Dudley, Thomas Wriothesley, Ralph Sadler—had come to serve this function for Henry. They were also courting Cromwell, whom they rightly saw as having the king’s ear and who was seemingly, at this point, the architect of England’s future. They hated the Boleyns. And Edward Seymour had a sister.

The Other Women: Katherine and Jane

On January 7, 1536, Katherine of Aragon died, most likely of cancer of the heart (a real illness, but an apt bodily metaphor as well). It was an enormous relief to both Anne and Henry. For Anne, it meant that at last she was the only queen of England. And both of them hoped that Katherine’s death, removing the chief reason for the emperor’s breach with Henry, would repair relations with Charles and tip the balance in England’s favor vis-à-vis Francis (who now would have to court Henry in order to be sure that England did not ally against him with Charles). “The next day,” Ives reports, “the king and queen appeared in joyful yellow from top to toe, and Elizabeth was triumphantly paraded to church. After dinner Henry went down to the Great Hall, where the ladies of the court were dancing, with his sixteen month old daughter in his arms, showing her off to one and another.”
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Whether or not their yellow clothing was a mark of their joy, as Ives says, or a sign of respect for the dead has been much debated. But whatever the meaning of the color of their clothing, neither had a political reason at this point to mourn Katherine’s death—and Henry, over the years of battle with Katherine, seems to have lost any trace of affection for her.