The Creation of Anne Boleyn (6 page)

But then Anne entered the picture. We don’t know for certain when he first became attracted to her or what the circumstances were, in large part because the available sources only begin to speculate about her when the king’s interest was publicly known, and by the time that happened, in 1527, people were more interested in the divorce and scandal of it all than how it had begun. All later accounts of Henry and Anne’s meeting are retrospective. George Cavendish, Wolsey’s gentleman usher, writes (thirty-five years after the event) that “the King’s love began to take place” when, after her return from France, Anne was made one of Katherine’s ladies-in-waiting, “among whome, for her excellent gesture and behaviour, she did excel all other; in so much that the Kinge began to grow enamoured with her; which was not known to any person, ne scantly to her owne person.”
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Agnes Strickland, citing Gregorio Leti, whose seventeenth-century
Life of Elizabeth I
includes many colorful but uncorroborated anecdotes, relates that:

[T]he first time Henry saw her [Anne] after her return to England . . . [was] in her father’s garden at Hever, where . . . admiring her beauty and graceful demeanor he entered into conversation with her; when he was so much charmed with her sprightly wit, that on his return to Westminster he told Wolsey, “that he had been discoursing with a young lady who had the wit of an angel, and was worthy of a crown.”
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Cavendish and Strickland/Leti disagree sharply on Wolsey’s reaction. Strickland, citing Leti, describes Wolsey as so eager to get power in his own hands that he was “glad to see the king engrossed in the intoxication of a love affair” and delighted that it was Anne, whom he had first recommended to be one of Katherine’s ladies.
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But Leti was a devoted Elizabethan Protestant and harsh critic of Wolsey. Cavendish, in contrast, was Wolsey’s faithful admirer and servant, and pre- sents Wolsey as only “acting on the King’s devised commandment” in breaking up Anne’s relationship with Henry Percy so that Henry could get his hands on her.
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Wolsey’s interference, according to Cavendish, “greatly offended” Anne, who “promis[ed] if it ever lay in her power, she would work much displeasure to the Cardinal” (which, according to Cavendish, “she did in deede” by goading Henry to turn against Wolsey).
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Cavendish goes on to show that he clearly belongs to the “greedy Anne/patient Katherine” school of thought: “After [Anne] knewe the kings pleasure, and the bottom of his secret stomacke, then she began to look very haughty and stoute [arrogant], lacking no manner of jewells, or rich apparel, that might be gotten for money,” while Katherine accepted all this “in good parte,” showing “no kinde or sparke of grudge or displeasure.”
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With historical sources leaving no clear record, the imaginations of biographers, novelists, and screenwriters have followed their own fantasies—or those that they felt would appeal to audiences. Many of them, in one way or another, have Henry being struck by the thunderbolt of love at first sight. William Hepworth Dixon, in his 1874 pro-Protestant biography of Anne, describes Henry as “taken by a word and smile. A face so innocently arch, a wit so rapid and so bright, a mien so modest yet so gay, were new to him. The King was tiring of such beauties as Elizabeth Blount; mere lumps of rosy flesh, without the sparkle of a living soul . . . He fell so swiftly and completely that the outside world imagined he was won by magic arts.”
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In
Anne of the Thousand Days,
Henry sees Anne dancing at court, is immediately smitten, and instructs Wolsey to “unmatch” Anne and Percy, and then send her packing back to Hever. Henry then takes off himself (on a “hunting” trip, as he tells Wolsey) for Hever, where he tells Anne that he will have her “even if it breaks the earth in two like an apple and flings the halves into the void.”
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In the movie
The Other Boleyn Girl,
Henry picks Anne (Natalie Portman) out of the Boleyn family lineup with nary a glance at Mary (Scarlett Johansson); he takes up with Mary first only because Anne humiliates him by being a more expert rider than he.
The Tudors
has Anne and Henry locking eyes in the tower of Château Vert
,
where Henry, as the shooting script tells us, “comes face to face with his destiny—with a sharp intake of breath, like an arrow through his heart. A very beautiful, 18-year-old young woman with jet-black hair and dark, expressive, exquisite eyes looks back at him.”
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Later, after the dancing begins, “he stares at Anne as if suddenly rendered incapable of speech . . . ‘Who are you?’ he asks, when the steps of the dance bring them eye to eye. And she whispers back, ‘Anne Boleyn.’”
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Anne Boleyn did make her debut at court at the Château Vert pageant, an extravagant affair complete with a triple-turreted, shining green minicastle created especially for the occasion. The pageant was supposed to be a celebration of courtly love. The players, both male and female, each represented one of the chivalric ideals—Nobleness, Loyalty, Gentleness, Attendance, Constancy, Honor, and so forth. (Anne was Perseverance—very apt, as it later turned out.) But the eight female players, masked and dressed in white and yellow satin with headdresses of gold, made little beyond a pretense of maidenly resistance when eight dashing masked courtiers, announced by a cannon blast and led by the king, stormed the castle with dates, oranges, and “other fruits made for pleasure,” and carried the damsels off for a night of dancing. When the dancing was over, the masks were removed and all sat down to a lavish banquet.

We do not know which lady the king carried off from the Château Vert to be his first partner for that night’s dancing, but it was unlikely to have been Anne, and it certainly wouldn’t have happened as depicted in
The Tudors.
Anyone who has even the slightest actual knowledge of Tudor history is aware that the Anne who could turn men to jelly at first sight is a myth—or perhaps more accurately, a reflection of the limits of twentieth-century conceptions of attraction, fixated as they are on the surface of the body. It’s hard for us to imagine a woman for whom a king would split the earth in two who is anything less than ravishing. But in her own time, Anne’s looks were not rated among her greatest assets. “Reasonably good-looking,” pronounced John Barlow, one of Anne’s favorite clerics.
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“Not one of the handsomest women in the world,” reported the Venetian diplomat, Francesco Sanuto: “[S]he is of middling stature, swarthy complexion, long neck, wide mouth, bosom not much raised, and in fact has nothing but the English King’s great appetite, and her eyes, which are black and beautiful, and take great effect on those who served the Queen when she was on the throne.”
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Sanuto was not a fan, but George Wyatt, grandson of one of Anne’s early admirers, the poet Thomas Wyatt, was. In 1623, he gave his nephew a manuscript that he had apparently written some twenty-five years earlier, in which, drawing on the reports of relatives and friends who had known Anne, he writes that although Anne was a “rare and admirable beauty,” she was not without flaws: Her coloring was “not so whitely” as was then esteemed and she had several “small moles . . . upon certain parts of her body.”
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Wyatt also writes that “[t]here was found, indeed, upon the side of her nail upon one of her fingers, some little show of a nail, which was yet so small, by the report of those that have seen her, as the workmaster seemed to leave it an occasion of greater grace to her hand, which, with the tip of one of her other fingers might be, and was usually by her hidden without any least blemish to it.”
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None of Anne’s “flaws,” in our multiracial, post–Cindy Crawford age, seems particularly significant. Some, such as Anne’s olive skin, boyish physique, and wide mouth—not to mention the well-placed moles—could put her in contention for
America’s Next Top Model.
But in Anne’s own time, beauty spots were not yet a fashion accessory, and even so slight a deformity as a “little show” of extra nail, despite Wyatt’s courtly spin, could raise questions about Satan’s influence on Anne’s conception. Snow-white skin, which women (including Anne’s famous daughter, Elizabeth I) would try to simulate using makeup, was a requisite of English beauty and remained so for hundreds of years, overdetermined by racial, class, and moral meanings distinguishing the leisured classes from their “coarse and brown inferiors” and thought to be the outward manifestation of a “fair and unspotted soul.”
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And fair hair, which Anne’s predecessors (both legal and extramarital) apparently enjoyed, reigned in the Tudor hierarchy of beauty. Both the Virgin Mary and Venus (most famously in Botticelli’s 1486 painting) were always pictured as blondes. So were all the heroines of the literature of courtly love, from Iseult to Guinevere: “Gallant knights, poets and troubadours celebrated their love of blondes with much eager serenading” and “felicitous poems and romantic tales bursting with golden-haired heroines poured from the pens of passionate lovers.”
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Light-haired women were also considered to be more “cheerful and submissive” (very desirable). Within a century or so, the generous, sweet, needing-to-be-rescued blonde heroine would become an essential ingredient of every successful fairy tale.

“Look for a woman with a good figure and with a small head; Hair that is blond but not from henna; whose eyebrows are spaced apart, long and arched in a peak; who is nice and plump in the buttocks,” advised fourteenth-century poet and priest Juan Ruiz. “A Lady’s hair should be fine and fair, in the similitude now of gold, now of honey, and now of the shining rays of the sun,”
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wrote another courtier in 1548.
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Today, evolutionary psychologists would argue that these preferences are hardwired into male brain circuitry, as both fair skin and curvaceous bodies signal youth, health, and a high estrogen load. If so, “swarthy,” slender Anne Boleyn was a perverse choice for Henry to make in his attempt to secure an heir.
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Her moles were an even bigger problem, because birthmarks were often seen as ominous signs. The medievals, whose notions about the human body often lingered into the Renaissance, believed that a mother’s imagination while pregnant could rupture the skin, and they read birthmarks the way later generations would decipher bumps on the skull. A mole on the throat (where several observers report Anne’s to have been) predicted a violent death. One on the upper lip meant good fortune for a man—but debauchery for a woman. If it was just above the left side of her mouth, “vanity and pride, and an unlawful offspring to provide for.”
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Fifteenth-century witch hunter Lambert Daneau saw moles as witch’s marks. Daneau and other “witch-prickers” would stick pins in the moles to find the bedeviled ones; when the suspect registered no pain (hard to imagine), it indicated Satan’s handiwork.
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Notions such as these explain how Anne’s moles could morph, in the hands of Catholic propagandist Nicholas Sander, writing half a century after Anne’s death, into a third nipple. Sander, who probably never saw Anne dressed, let alone naked (he was a small child when she was executed—but he was exiled by Elizabeth I), is responsible for most of the mythology surrounding Anne’s body, including her notorious sixth finger. In his book,
Schismatis Anglicani (The Rise and Growth of the Anglican Schism),
written expressly to provide a counterhistory to John Foxe’s
Book of Martyrs
(among whom Anne is numbered), Sander wallows in descriptions of Anne’s body as the gateway that lured the lusting, ensnared Henry through the doors of heresy. But amazingly, Sander saw no contradiction in claiming that this desirable body was also marked with the outward manifestations of her league with Satan.

Anne Boleyn was rather tall of stature, with black hair and an oval face of sallow complexion, as if troubled with jaundice. She had a projecting tooth under the upper lip, and on her right hand, six fingers. There was a large wen under her chin, and therefore to hide its ugliness, she wore a high dress covering her throat. In this she was followed by the ladies of the court, who also wore high dresses, having before been in the habit of leaving their necks and the upper portion of their person uncovered.
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This mythology was clearly ideologically motivated (more about the Catholic/Protestant culture wars in a later chapter). Such pronounced deformities as described by Sander would certainly have eliminated Anne as a lady-in-waiting, much less as a candidate for queen. Sander, moreover, was not well-informed about female fashion. High necks were not yet in vogue while Anne was alive, and a “large wen” would not have been hidden by the delicate ropes of pearls or the decorative “B” that she wore around her neck. The wen probably was inspired by the anonymous manuscript describing Anne’s coronation that attributed a “disfiguring wart” and a neck swelling “resembling goître” to her.
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The sixth finger seems likely to have been an exaggeration of the vestigial nail that Wyatt describes, and this explains Wyatt’s mention of it, as his book was, by his own admission, “not without an intent to have opposed Saunders [Sander],” whom he calls “the Romish fable-framer.”
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The point of his book (entitled
Extracts from the Life of the Virtuous Christian and Renowned Queen Anne Boleigne
), he tells the reader, is to dispel the “black mists of malice . . . instructed to cover and overshadow [Anne Boleyn’s] glory with their most black and venomous untruths.”
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So he was hardly an impartial reporter himself. But despite his biases, Wyatt’s own sources are far more respectable than Sander’s, especially when it comes to descriptions of Anne’s physical appearance. Based on notes taken when he was young, gathered from Anne Gainsford, one of Anne’s personal attendants, as well as relatives of his who were “well acquainted with the persons that most this concerneth,” his corrections of Sander’s descriptions of Anne’s imperfections sound highly plausible, as Wyatt doesn’t insist that Anne was a beauty without flaws, but acknowledges the nail, moles, and “not so whitely” complexion.
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