The Creation of Anne Boleyn (27 page)

But prudishness with regard to Anne and Henry’s sex life was not limited to female writers; virtually no Victorian historian, male or female, mentioned it. (Elizabeth, it was either stated or implied, was very premature.) And idealized “feminine” descriptions, mostly of Katherine but sometimes of Anne, too, blossomed in all their sticky sweet fragrance on the pages of male writers as well. Tom Taylor’s popular 1875 play,
Anne Boleyn,
gives us an Anne who is haunted by the plight of “that poor Queen whose place I took”
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and whose love for the king is so virtuous that when she sees what a mess their romance is causing, she reminds him that “It’s not yet too late for pausing. Think, my lord, if you repent, there’s no harm done—’tis but to chase me from you, to look back on a four years’ golden dream.”
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The king refuses; it’s his lust, not Anne’s connivance, that moves events forward. Even more striking—and probably more influential—in creating a popular image of Anne as the romantic victim of Henry’s tyranny were two paintings:
Anne Boleyn in the Tower
(Edouard Cibot, 1835) and an 1838 depiction of Anne saying a final farewell to Elizabeth by Gustave Wappers. If the Victorians “feminized” history, it had more to do with a gender ideology that men and women shared rather than which sex held the pen (or the brush).

What Victorian Kids Were Taught About Anne Boleyn

From Oliver Goldsmith’s
The History of England
(1771):

“It happened that among the maids of honour, then attending the queen, there was one Anna Bullen, the daughter of Sir Thomas Bullen, a gentleman of distinction, and related to most of the nobility. The beauty of Anna surpassed whatever had hitherto appeared at this voluptuous court; and her education, which had been at Paris, tended to set off her personal charms. Her features were regular, mild, and attractive, her stature elegant, though below the middling size, while her wit and vivacity exceeded even her other allurements. Henry, who had never learned the art of restraining any passion that he desired to gratify, saw and loved her; but after several efforts to induce her to comply with his criminal desires, he found that without marriage, he could have no chance of succeeding. This obstacle, therefore, he hardily undertook to remove; and as his own queen was now become hateful to him, in order to procure a divorce, he alleged that his conscience rebuked him for having so long lived in incest with the wife of his brother . . .

“. . . Anna Bullen, his queen, had always been a favourer of the reformation, and consequently had many enemies on that account, who only waited some fit occasion to destroy her credit with the king; and that occasion presented itself but too soon. The king’s passion was by this time quite palled with satiety; he was now fallen in love with another, and languished for the possession of Jane Seymour, who had for some time been maid of honour to the queen . . .

“. . . The queen and her brother were tried by a jury of peers . . . Part of the charge against her was, that she had declared to her attendants that the king never had her heart; which was considered a slander upon the throne, and strained into a breach of a law-statute, by which it was declared criminal to throw any slander upon the king, queen, or their issue. The unhappy queen, although unassisted by counsel, defended herself with great judgement and presence of mind . . . but the king’s authority was not to be controlled; she was declared guilty . . .

“. . . She was beheaded by the executioner of Calais, who was brought over, as much more expert than any in England. The very next day after her execution, Henry married the lady Jane Seymour, his cruel heart being no way softened by the wretched fate of one that had been so lately the object of his warmest affections.”
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From Charles Dickens’s
A Child’s History of England
(1854):

“We now come to King Henry the Eighth whom it has been too much the fashion to call ‘Bluff King Hal’ or ‘Burly King Henry’ and other fine names but whom I shall take the liberty to call, plainly, one of the most detestable villains that ever drew breath . . . He was a big, burly, noisy, smelly, small-eyed, large-faced, double-chinned, swinish looking fellow in later life (as we know from the likenesses of him, painted by the famous Hans Holbein), and it is not easy to believe that so bad a character can ever have been veiled under a prepossessing appearance . . . He was a most intolerable ruffian, a disgrace to human nature, and a blot of blood and grease upon the History of England.

“. . . All this time [while Henry was trying to divorce Katherine], the king and Anne Boleyn were writing letters to each other almost daily, full of impatience to have the case settled; and Anne Boleyn was showing herself (as I think) very worthy of the fate which afterward befell her.”
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From Lady Maria Callcott’s
Little Arthur’s England
(first published in 1835 and widely used in home schooling):

“I told you Anne Boleyn was very young and beautiful. She was also clever and pleasant and I believe really good. But the king and some of his wicked friends pretended that she had done several bad things; and, as Henry had become very cruel as well as changeable, he ordered poor Anne’s head to be cut off. On the day she was to suffer death she sent to beg the king to be kind to her little daughter Elizabeth. She said to the last moment that she was innocent; she prayed God to bless the king and the people, and then she knelt down, and her head was cut off.”
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From Samuel Gardiner’s
English History for Students
(1881):

“After Henry had been married for some time he grew tired of his wife, Queen Catharine, and wanted to marry a sparkling beauty named Anne Boleyn. He suddenly discovered that he had done wrong in marrying his brother’s widow . . . Anne brought him a daughter Elizabeth, who was to be more famous than any son could be . . . Her mother was suddenly accused of the vilest misconduct to the king her husband. Whether she was guilty or innocent cannot now be known.”
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From Lydia Hoyt Farmer’s
The Girl’s Book of Famous Queens
(1887):

“On the day of Catharine’s burial, King Henry wore mourning, but Anne Boleyn clothed herself and all her ladies in yellow, exclaiming ‘Now am I queen!’ . . . Neither King Henry’s arrogant power nor Anne Boleyn’s pernicious influence could prevent the widespread and lasting effect of the Christian death-bed of Catharine . . . And now Anne herself was to suffer the penalty of her wicked ambition.”
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The old Protestant/Catholic divide was still in operation too. And despite the growing tendency to distinguish between “commercial” biographies, appealing to the sensibilities of female readers, and “real” history, which had “accuracy and importance” as its guiding lights, no works of the period, by men or women, were free of undisguised, and often strident, moral agendas and biases. Henry William Herbert, in
Memoirs of Henry the Eighth of England: With the Fortunes, Fates, and Characters of His Six Wives
(1856), refers condescendingly in his preface to “the lighter and more gossiping sketches of the lady-biographers of the queens” and accuses both Benger and the Stricklands of being motivated by “false sympathy for their sex.”
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This is the way, he says, “in which ladies write history concerning ladies.”
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But Herbert’s view of Anne and Katherine is not much different from the old Catholic propaganda: Anne was a “vain,” “wily,” and “cruel persecutress,” while Katherine was a living saint: “I know of no woman, recorded in veritable history, or portrayed in romance, who approaches so nearly to perfection . . . there was no speck to mar the loveliness, no shadow to dim the perfection, of her faultless, Christian womanhood.”
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He criticizes John Knox for his “fierce, intolerant, fanatic” hostility toward Queen Mary, but although Knox was a blatant misogynist, it is only Benger and the Stricklands who are charged with “buckler[ing] the cause of their sex, rather than that of truth.”
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He is especially furious with Benger for having not even “the smallest regard to consistency or truth”
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; but his own work is peppered with both the old mythology, taken unquestioningly from Chapuys and Sander, and some new embellishments, as novelistic as anything found in the “ladies’ histories.”

I see, in her every move, a deep determination to win the game, at all hazards; I see it in her coyness at one time, in her consent in another; and above all, I see it in the implacable, unrelenting hatred with which she pursued all those who opposed her marriage to the king,—Wolsey to ruin; More and Fisher to the block . . . I read base rivalry [with Katherine] and cruel triumph; I mark her ungentle persecution of the fallen queen’s orphan child, bastardized for her aggrandizement; I see the triumphal dress of yellow
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, worn on that fallen rival’s funeral day; I hear the exulting speech—“At length I am the queen of England”—it needs not the imagination of a Shakespeare to conceive, if it might tax his powers to create, the phantom of the abused, departed royalty, floating in vengeful majesty athwart the path of the exulting beauty, and replying to the wicked vaunt, “Not long! not long!”
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Actually, although Herbert presents himself as a professional historian, his “histories” were not much more than a hobby. A sportswriter by profession, Herbert was better known as the author of
Frank Forester’s
Fish and Fishing of the United States and British Provinces of North America.
But recognized historians, too, still openly took sides in the “Anne versus Katherine” construct, without apparently thinking that they were being anything but “objective.” At this point (from about 1850 onward) most of the
Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII,
as well as foreign state calendars and correspondence, were available, resulting in much more detailed and documented work, including recognition of Chapuys’ role in the creation of “bad Anne” and “good Katherine.”
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But it’s going too far to write, as Alison Weir does, that this “new tradition in historical study” was increasingly “free of religious bias” and “more rational” in its assessment of Henry’s queens.
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The two exemplars she refers to—James Anthony Froude and Paul Friedmann—may debunk the romantic view of Anne as the tragically wronged heroine of the Protestant Reformation. But in its place, as we saw in chapter 1, they substitute a refurbished version of Chapuys’ scheming adventuress. Froude is an enthusiast for the Protestant cause, but Anne was an “unworthy,” “foolish and bad woman” who had “stained the purity” of Henry’s cause and made herself universally “detested for her insolence and dreaded for her intrigues.”
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After conceding that “imperfect credit” must be given to Chapuys’ stories, he goes on to claim that “the existence of such stories shows the reputation which Anne had earned for herself, and which in part she deserves.”
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He concludes, “Anne, it is likely, was really dangerous.”
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Friedmann (
Anne Boleyn: A Chapter of English History,
1884) agrees. Although he admits that there “was no trustworthy evidence to sustain the specific charges,” he is “by no means convinced that Anne did not commit offenses quite as grave as most of those of which she was accused.”
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And Albert Frederick Pollard (
Henry VIII
) goes still further than Friedmann concerning Anne’s guilt: “[I]t is not credible that the juries should have found her accomplices guilty, that twenty-six peers, including her uncle, should have condemned Anne herself, without some colourable justification.”
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His assessment of Anne’s character: “Her place in English history is due solely to the circumstance that she appealed to the less refined part of Henry’s nature; she was pre-eminent neither in beauty nor in intellect, and her virtue was not of a character to command or deserve the respect of her own or subsequent ages.”
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In no way am I claiming that Froude, Friedmann, and Pollard were nothing more than anti-Anne polemicists. Their detailed, informative histories represent an enormous advance in our knowledge of the king’s “great matter” and the events that followed. But whether religious, gender, or national antipathies are the cause, or frustration with the idealized Anne of the Elizabethans and Romantics, or some combination of all of these, Froude, Friedmann, and Pollard return us to the scheming adventuress of Chapuys’ letters. They don’t achieve balance; they simply tip the scales in the opposite direction.