The Creation of Anne Boleyn (28 page)

Anne Makes Her Debut in the Novel

As she sat there alone in the room, her chin in her hand, her dark eyes heavy with anxieties, the thought that had slipped some time ago, shamefaced and sly, into the back of her mind edged more and more into the open . . . What if she played her last card—her precious card—herself! . . .

. . . ‘I dare not,’ she whispered to herself, and then in a strangled voice, ‘I dare!’

She grew aware at last that her clasped hands were clutching each other so tightly that the rings were cutting into the flesh. She drew off the ring from the sharpest cut. It was one of Henry’s earliest gifts to her, a plain gold band with ‘Thy virtue is thy honor,’ graved within it . . . Her virtue—God alone knew how she had hugged that comfort to her smarting pride against the secret sneers she divined about her. Yet now . . . [t]he ring slipped from her fingers and rolled out across the floor. A bit of rush blocked it and it toppled and dropped through an open knot hole. The augury seemed to her complete. She laughed—and then something, like a hand upon her throat, seemed to strangle the laughter at its source and she quivered back among the cushions, her hands hiding her face like some poor shamed thing.

That year the Christmas revels were gayer than ever and King Henry was scarce an instant to be parted from his marchioness.
⁴⁶

This is as close as Mary Hastings Bradley, in
The Favor of Kings
(1912), the first full-length novel about Anne, comes to describing the moment when Anne decided to let Henry have—gasp—sex with her. It was a huge advance in sexual candor, however, over the Victorians, who had mangled Elizabeth’s stage of development at birth and/or Anne and Henry’s marriage date in order to avoid acknowledging that Anne and Henry had bedded together before marriage. Bradley, an English major and graduate of Smith College who went on to lead quite an adventurous life, was committed to staying as true to “actual situations . . . real incident, and dialogue” as possible and did extensive research among the collected foreign and domestic letters and papers of Henry’s reign; the then-prominent histories of Friedmann, the Stricklands, David Hume, and others; and at historical sites.
⁴⁷
In her foreword, she acknowledges her use of these sources and also indicates where she has “taken liberties” with history (an admission that was quite common among novelists in the first half of the century and that has, unfortunately, gone completely out of fashion today). But she stresses that her aim is not to “enter an historical controversy” but “to suggest the truth of the colors of the picture I have tried to paint, and to offer the Anne Boleyn of this story, a very human girl.”
⁴⁸

I want to pause for a moment over those two words: “human” and “girl.” Bradley doesn’t say exactly what she meant, but I speculate that “human” is to be counterposed to “Historical Figure” and “girl” is to be contrasted with “queen” as well as “woman.” Bradley wanted Anne to be someone whom readers could identify with, not observe from afar as a player in a grand historical pageant, “The Tudor Saga” or “The Reformation Crisis.” She wasn’t interested in either redeeming or vilifying Anne. She wanted readers to understand her. And a large part of what would make this understanding possible is the imaginative conjuring of Anne’s feelings and thoughts before she had been subjected to and transformed by “the favor of kings”—a title Bradley means sardonically—but was still a creature of fantasies and dreams, “gay and fearless and rashly proud, as the likeness of that Anne who dared and lost so long ago and whose blood was the first of any woman’s to stain an English scaffold.”
⁴⁹
And so, for the first time, an author ventures into the “inner life” of Anne, the young girl.

[Wolsey’s] cold arrogance that treated her mercilessly as a wooden pawn to be moved hither and yon quickened her to the fiercest resentment her fiery little heart had ever thrilled with . . . It was just such a night as [this] one that she had last met Percy, and under all the fierce surge of her anger came stealing the pain of the nevermore. Nevermore would they meet there—it might be they would never meet again. The poignancy of such denial was strange to her, but she divined that it was but the beginning of sorrow. Memories that had suddenly become an agony enwrapped her, and an aching presentiment of grief to come.
⁵⁰

In making Anne “human,” Bradley’s narrative introduces some elements that are absent from previous ideas about Anne but that have since become stock features of later fictional portrayals. One is the manipulation of Anne by her father and uncle, whose ambitions for the family are behind their desire for the match between her and the king. With all that we now know about social history, the history of the family, and the position of women in the sixteenth century, it seems incredible that Anne would have been the all-powerful, autonomous prime mover that Chapuys and the histories that take his word for it make her out to be during the six years that the king pursued her. But ideology and hostility were much stronger forces than common sense in those accounts, and sociological thinking, completely unknown to the early polemicists and still a very young discipline even at the end of the nineteenth century, did not play much of a role in the first histories and biographies of Anne and Henry. Neither did the idea that Anne, as a young woman, might have been a less formidable personality than she would become as queen. Only the Stricklands and Benger seem to recognize that Anne, in fact, was once a young girl. Perhaps the fact that they, too, were once girls makes it harder for them to see Anne, as Froude, Friedmann, and Pollard do, as having sprung fully formed from the French court—a mature, ambitious agent of her own destiny.

But then, too, so little is actually known about Anne’s life as a girl that historians, although they indulge in creative license in their imaginings of Anne the woman, may have felt that Anne’s early life was off-limits. Novelists, who freely admitted to filling in the blanks, felt no such limitations. Sometimes the early twentieth-century portraits were little more than anachronistic transplants of the Gibson girl into the sixteenth century, as in Reginald Drew’s 1912
Anne Boleyn.

[Young Anne] was a vision of loveliness. She was radiant and dimpled, and her beautiful face, pink-hued and lily white, rippled with laughter and bubbled with vivacity. She had sparkling eyes, wavy, golden-brown hair which framed her face like a picture, and which her coif could not either confine or conceal. She rode her palfrey perfectly, flicking her whip with her daintily gloved hand; her whole being personified emotion, her carriage was that of a queen, and her musical laughter sounded like rippling water to the thirsting.
⁵¹

Drew wasn’t the last to turn Anne into a creature of his own fantasies while ignoring the historical evidence (slim as that evidence is, we do know a few things, and among them is that she did not have “golden-brown hair”). It’s been a continuing tendency of Anne’s imaginers, whether they are painters, novelists, or casting directors, to project the beauty standards and feminine ideals of their own day onto Anne. The Victorians were fond of depicting Anne, in scenes with Henry, as a mature, curvaceous (but, of course, corseted) fair-haired beauty, properly clinging to her husband; interestingly enough, she looks most like the “real” Anne—dark-haired and slender—in the paintings that mourn her fall. In the first decades of the twentieth century, Anne starts to look—and act—like the audacious “new girls” of the twenties and thirties, full of spunk and fun, “speeding joyously along on her bicycle [substitute “horse”] . . . women’s rights perched on the handlebars and cramping modes and manners strewn on her track.”
⁵²
She’s slender and clever, flirtatious and emotionally spontaneous; she doesn’t know when to hold her tongue.

Bradley’s Anne is of this model, which actually suits what we know of the historical Anne much better than the Victorian versions. It’s a very sympathetic picture, while not an idealizing one. Although Anne’s girlish high spirits, in the novel, are ultimately disfigured by ambition, it is the machinations of her father and uncle that are responsible for her loss of innocence. Yet, the “seeds” of her destruction are also “in” her—not in her vanity or defiance of sexual morality, as the Stricklands have it, but in her proud, independent nature. In the passage that follows, Bradley presents the young Anne to us through the (retrospective) perspective of poet Thomas Wyatt, who never gives up his thwarted love for Anne and who represents the one who sees “the truth” in the novel.

He looked at her now [after Anne becomes queen], jeweled and gauded till her slender body was like the glittering image of some idol . . . [B]ehind her chair in smiling converse, were her father and uncle, suave images of insincerity, assiduously grimacing upon her, and at the sight Wyatt’s heart filled with yet heavier dejection. Those elegants were like vultures feeding on her youth, he thought, in bitter clarity of vision . . . He had never thought before of Anne as over-young and helpless, but now . . . for all her heavy robes of state, her jewels, her air of command, he saw the girl in her as he had never seen it when she was yet younger; the flushed face that smiled so proudly under the drift of dark hair was a child’s face, its woman soul unawakened, its eyes smiling in a dream, unopened to the abyss ahead.
⁵³

The paradigm of Anne as a vivacious, high-spirited young girl whose life was profoundly—and tragically—altered by becoming Henry’s queen has remained the narrative spine of the twentieth-century novels that are sympathetic to her. But sympathy is not the same as idealization, and the Anne of the early twentieth century has very “human” faults. Some of those faults—such as pride and ambition—are not so different from the charges laid against her by Friedmann, Froude, and Pollard. But in the early novels, they no longer mark her as a “type”: a
bad
woman. This is due partly to the more flexible imagination of the creative writer. And it’s due partly to changes in the ideology of femininity: Sexuality was no longer consistently seen as the line that divided good girls from bad girls, and female “ambition” was more likely to be viewed with uneasy ambivalence rather than pure horror. But Freudian and developmental psychology, as well as the perspectives of sociologists and anthropologists, had also created new frameworks for imagining the interaction of external environment and personality; and the power of the change in Anne’s circumstances, once the king had singled her out—and then even more dramatically when she became queen—began to be seen as more significant to her story.

The Anne of most twentieth-century fiction is not a bred-in-the-bone she-devil. Rather, she is a strong-willed young woman with personal qualities that are quite attractive but, when unleashed by her elevation, proved dangerous to her. Even as a young girl, she was “audacious,” “confident,” and above all, “proud,” as Bradley, through Wyatt, describes her. “By the law of her nature,” she writes elsewhere in the novel, “she might command, coax, dominate, divert, bewitch, enthrall; but implore—never!”
⁵⁴
It’s Anne’s proud nature, in Bradley, that distinguishes her from her pliant sister and that motivates her sexual resistance to the king.
⁵⁵
Her Anne does not withhold her favors out of manipulative ambition, as later narratives would have it, but because she was “too high of pride, too maiden of spirit, to surrender to such ignoble fate”—and because she was still in love with Percy.
⁵⁶
For the first third of the novel, Anne hopes that her persistent refusal would “weary Henry” and that “he would find some newer face, some fresher fancy.”
⁵⁷
The turning point comes only when she realizes that Henry means to make her queen.

Anne is surprised and confused by this prospect rather than (as in other depictions) having schemed to bring it about: “The glade seemed to whirl about her. She felt the rushing of vast wings, the elation of airy heights. To be queen—to be Queen of England!”
⁵⁸
But the thrill is not only due to the sudden, unexpected fantasy of being queen. Anne’s pride, wounded by Wolsey’s ability to rearrange her fate—and in this novel, Katherine’s unwillingness to intercede—is also vindicated, and the “recklessness” of her nature is challenged. “A fierce, cruel wave of joy swept over. To be queen on Katherine’s throne—Oh, what an exquisite, what an infinitely ironic retaliation! Dared she trust herself to the mad project? Dared she undertake the humbling of one queen, the crowning of another? Aye, she dared! Her blood rushed on in faster time: with feverish recklessness it sang songs of triumph and power in her veins. There was little that wild blood would not dare!”
⁵⁹

This Anne is no maiden whose virtue was plundered by a rapacious monarch. But neither is she the temptress/witch incarnate. She’s a young woman whose temperament, for all her flirtatiousness, was more unnervingly “masculine” than was usual for her time: confident, excited by her own potential to effect action in the world, capable of fierce resentments, daring ambitions, bold action—and unwilling to be anyone’s plaything or political tool. As Francis Hackett sums it up: She was the mother of Elizabeth, not “an understudy of Queen Victoria.”
⁶⁰
And she has a sexual life, too, although her erotic temperament and tastes vary wildly from novel to novel, and—especially as historical fiction became a thriving commercial specialty—could be quite extravagant. Elizabeth Louisa Moresby, writing under the pen name of E. Barrington (
Anne Boleyn,
1932), while insisting that her story “is as true to history as the consultation of many authorities can make it,” apparently consulted some very odd authorities because her Anne, while sexually frigid with everyone else and thoroughly repulsed by Henry, is smitten with Dionysian Smeaton.