The Creation of Anne Boleyn (41 page)

Do we know the truth of Anne’s sexual activity—or lack of it—while in France? No. She may have been scrupulously careful to never stray from the game of “courtly” flirtation. Or she may have had some discreet sexual affairs, rumors of which never saw the light of day—hard as that is to believe in Henry’s gossipy court—until she was accused of adultery. We just don’t know and probably never will. What we do know is that despite the paucity of dependable evidence, scheming, sexually provocative Anne still clings tightly to popular narratives.
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When it comes to the male players in the drama, old images are continually being energetically deconstructed.
The Tudors
has replaced Charles Laughton’s blustering, chicken-chomping buffoon with Jonathan Rhys Meyers’s lean, athletic bad boy.
Wolf Hall
exposes Thomas More as coldly, viciously pious and turns the ruthless, calculating Cromwell we know from depictions of his role in Anne Boleyn’s death into the true “man for all seasons”: warm, loyal, and opportunistic only because his survival requires it. These revisions—particularly the arresting portraits of
Wolf Hall
—have made us question how much received wisdom about the Tudors, most of which we learned in the school of popular culture, is sedimented mythology turned into “history” by decades of repetition.

In this skeptical, revisionist moment, it’s striking how Anne the temptress just keeps bubbling up—for example, in G. W. Bernard’s
Anne Boleyn:
Fatal Attractions
(2010), a sensationalistic, poorly argued extension of an equally flimsy scholarly article from 1991, in which Bernard claims that “Anne indeed committed adultery with Norris, probably with Smeaton, and possibly with Weston” largely on the basis of what he himself calls “a hunch.”
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The reasoning behind this “hunch”: a poem by Lancelot de Carles—well-known for years by scholars, but rightly regarded as not much more than a description of a chain of gossip and accusation—and Anne’s flirtatious behavior, “hinting at what might be called a liberated, certainly an un-puritan, attitude toward sexuality.”
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Serious scholars of the Tudor period will recall that Eric Ives and Greg Walker had already challenged Bernard’s views on Anne’s fall in a series of scholarly responses in 2002. But that was before the success of
The Other Boleyn Girl
and
The Tudors,
and since Bernard’s article was hidden in the pages of a scholarly journal, why not trot it out again for a mass audience? It’s difficult to imagine that this book was motivated by much beyond a craving to cash in on the wave of Tudor- mania. But although many academics privately shook their heads over the shabby logic and wild imaginings of the book, Bernard was too eminent a personage to get taken much to task in public. David Starkey, who never misses an opportunity to shower uncensored scorn on feminist historians, was gravely respectful. “There will undoubtedly be something in what Professor Bernard has got to say. He’s a very serious scholar with a profound knowledge of the period.”
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Peter Marshall, in a piece in
Literary Review,
is similarly deferential. Although he (like Starkey) doesn’t buy Bernard’s conclusion, he strains to end his review with praise. “(Bernard). . . at the very least can be said to have shown it to be not entirely impossible that the charges had some substance.”
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Bolstered by these kinds of endorsements, the mass media jumped on it:
ANNE BOLEYN DID HAVE AN AFFAIR WITH HER BROTHER; THE POEM THAT
“
PROVES” THE ADULTERY OF HENRY VIII’S QUEEN,
reads the headline of a
Daily Mail
piece on the book, accompanied by a photo of Anne from
The Tudors
with the legend: “Promiscuous.”
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In the even more freewheeling world of historical fiction, Gregory’s Anne has continued her career, most sordidly in Carolly Erickson’s
The Favored Queen
(2011), a recycling of the winning good girl/bad girl premise of
The Other Boleyn Girl
with Jane Seymour now playing the role of the abused innocent and Katherine in the supporting cast as such a self-sacrificing Christian soul that she even tends Anne when Anne gets the sleeping sickness. Erickson’s Anne, in contrast to these angels of mercy, dwarfs Gregory’s Anne in her malevolence, and she’s even more unhinged from history. I could cite chapter and verse detailing the various poisonings, tormentings of servants, and illicit affairs that Erickson’s Anne commits but the summary on the flyleaf will spare me that task.

Born into an ambitious noble family, young Jane Seymour is sent to court as a maid of honor to Katherine of Aragon, Henry VIII’s aging queen. She is devoted to her mistress and watches with empathy as the calculating Anne Boleyn contrives to supplant Katherine as queen. Anne’s single-minded intrigues threaten all who stand in her way; she does not hesitate to arrange the murder of a woman who knows a secret so dark that, if revealed, would make it impossible for the king to marry Anne. Once Anne becomes queen, no one at court is safe, and Jane herself becomes a victim of Anne’s venomous rage.
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Although I hesitate to mention it in the same breath as Erickson, even Hilary Mantel’s
Wolf Hall,
which won the Man Booker Prize in 2010, follows the old stereotype in her portrayal of Anne as a scheming predator. Mantel’s Anne is a nervously “calculating being” with “small teeth, white and sharp”
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and “a cold slick brain at work behind her hungry black eyes.”
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Her eyes passed over him [Cromwell] on her way to someone who interested her more. They are black eyes, slightly protuberant, shiny like the beads of an abacus; they are shiny and always in motion, as she makes calculations of her own advantage. Uncle Norfolk must have said to her “There goes the man who knows the cardinal’s secrets,” because now when he comes into her sight her long neck darts; those shining black beads go click, click, as she looks him up and down and decides what use can be got out of him . . . ”
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. . . At the feast Anne sits beside Henry on the dais, and when she turns to speak to him her black lashes brush her cheeks. She is almost there now, almost there, her body taut like a bowstring, her skin dusted with gold, with tints of apricot and honey; when she smiles, which she does often, she shows small teeth, white and sharp.
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Mantel, of course, cannot be compared as a writer with Erickson (or with Gregory, for that matter), and her artistry brings touches that distinguish her Anne from the cartoon schemers of historical romance. Her Anne is brittle, anxious, tightly wound, and skinny; she exudes the nervous energy of a modern-day anorexic, her true self and laser focus carefully hidden away, constantly calculating how to keep up appearances lest her secrets be exposed. And, of course, she’s only a bit player in the novel, which is the world according to Cromwell. Yet it seems clear, especially with the publication of
Bring Up the Bodies,
that Mantel’s Anne is not just an “offering” of how Cromwell might have seen her, but Mantel’s own rejoinder to the more sympathetic portraits of other writers and filmmakers.

In both novels, for example, Mantel excludes some key historical material that, coincidentally, might cause readers to question (her) Cromwell’s view of Anne as a cold “strategist,” with whom he feels some identification but little affection,
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“a woman without remorse” who would “commit any sin or crime.”
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Among the most famous material that she rejects are Anne’s eloquent speeches at her trial and on the scaffold, left out, Mantel says in her author’s note, because they “should be read with skepticism.”
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The explanation via skepticism over the authenticity of this material is odd, not only because there are multiple corroborating reports of both speeches, but because she has just told readers that she claims no
historical
“authority” for her version of things. Certainly, she doesn’t let history get in the way of other narrative choices. For example, it’s a matter of historical record that Anne’s longtime ally Cranmer, shocked by Anne’s arrest, sat down to write a letter to Henry expressing his amazement at the charges and his belief in Anne’s virtue. His writing was interrupted (as Cranmer relates when he resumes) by a visit from Cromwell and his cronies. They apparently helped him “change his mind” about Anne’s guilt, for the letter ends very differently than it begins, with poor Cranmer, clearly quaking in his boots, acknowledging that she must be guilty.
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Mantel chooses not to tell us about Cromwell’s interruption, although, of course, it’s part of his story. But this detail would have made Cromwell seem like more of a thug than Mantel wants to present him.

Mantel is creating a fiction, of course, and can do what she wants. But if she gives herself such free rein with Cranmer’s letter (and other incidents), it seems disingenuous to justify the absence of Anne’s speeches (and her final letter) on the basis of skepticism about their factual nature. Is this history or a novel? Mantel would be the first to acknowledge that it’s a novel. But her choices of what to include and what to eliminate from the historical record suggest that she (and not merely her Cromwell) is intent on building a case against Anne—not necessarily for the commission of the crimes with which she was accused (she leaves that ambiguous) but certainly as a cold, self-seeking manipulator.

I love Mantel’s writing; no other novelist has given us such a textured, unsettlingly “real” re-creation of Henry’s court and the tightrope nature of survival within it. But I can’t help wondering why, in an imaginative work of great depth and subtlety, we find the old, one-sided, extremist view of Anne as a wily schemer. Perhaps this is our “default” Anne, who insinuates herself in the imagination whenever we aren’t specifically focused on rehabilitating her. In
The Tudors,
it took the concerted efforts of Natalie Dormer to knock her off the page and replace her with someone more complex. And when Howard Brenton’s play
Anne Boleyn
opened in 2010—the first popular depiction of Anne since her early Protestant defenders to present her as a heroine of the Reformation—it was hailed as “fresh and sympathetic,”
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a “radically revisionist work” that “challenges received wisdom,”
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“an alternative history,”
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“eye opening,”
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“a re-materialization of . . . an Anne we have, until now, never seen,”
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which will “have the historians scratching their heads.”
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The praise for the vibrant, witty play was deserved, but few responsible historians would scratch their heads over Anne the reformist (Brenton himself credits his interpretation to historian Eric Ives). That Brenton’s sexy but spiritual Anne was “eye-opening” says more about the intransigence of temptress stereotypes than Brenton’s “radical” revision of history. And even in those appreciative reviews, the “received wisdom” kept popping up in the descriptions of Anne. She “used her sexual stranglehold over Henry VIII to pursue the idea of religious reform,”
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“advances herself in court—and Henry’s heart—by dedicating herself to the spirituality of William Tyndale’s low church, while simultaneously allowing a drooling, still-Catholic Henry to inch ever further up her leg over seven long years”
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; “Her irresistible wickedness is a fiery companion to Anthony Howell’s fiercely lusty Henry as she tempts, resists and subsists to his advances over seven years.”
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I spoke with Brenton when the play first opened and can say with confidence that he had no interest in portraying Henry as “drooling” and Anne as having a “sexual stranglehold” over him. In fact, we talked at some length about those stereotypes and their indebtedness to the puritanical strain of Protestantism that had not yet developed in Anne’s own time.

I do think that even in England, the mind/body split, or the soul/body split, the fallen body, all that, which came out of Calvin, really, was only beginning to make its way into the reformist faction at this time. Come the turn of the century, it had taken hold, and it was warfare between the different sections of Puritans, really. But I thought, well, maybe it hadn’t really got hold by the time of this play. And that’s reflected in Anne’s version of Protestantism.
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In other words: Yes, Anne was sexual (and Brenton’s play definitely portrays her as such), but our reading of this as “wicked” (even if deliciously so) is a puritanical leap that would have baffled Anne. I’m not sure that I agree with Brenton’s chronology or genealogy regarding the mind/body split. What was clear from talking to him, though, was that he was much less interested in Anne’s hold over Henry than her advocacy of Tyndale’s Bible. That, and her courage: “What was extraordinary to me about her was her recklessness. The Tudor court was unbelievably dangerous and yet she got to the very center of it, and the only way out was either bear a male child or death. There was no other way out. There was no retreat, and that I thought was an extraordinary existential place to end up, and I thought the recklessness of it, the courage that took, was amazing.”
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