The Creation of Anne Boleyn (7 page)

The wens, goiters, and projecting tooth have all faded from the popular imagination. But that sixth finger just won’t let go. By the nineteenth century, it had become a “fact” that even today many people remember as among the first things they learned about Anne.
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At the beginning of every public lecture I ask my audiences what they know about Anne Boleyn; invariably, several attendees shout out, “She had six fingers!” Internet sites devoted to “fascinating facts” still list Anne’s six fingers (sometimes multiplying them to six on
each
hand). A girls’-magazine feature giving inspiration for girls to “love their bodies” presents Anne and her extra finger (and the extra nipple) as a role model.
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At least one well-known portrait, once hanging in Ludlow Castle and now privately owned, prominently features Anne with six fingers on each hand. One of the more imaginative histories cites her “malformed hand” as the reason she was kept out of sight in France until a suitable husband could be contracted.
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When an art installation opened in 2011 with a full-size Anne among the creations, the wax figure had an extra finger. Anne’s sixth finger is even mentioned in the movie
Steel Magnolias
when the women in Truvy’s beauty shop banter through the bathroom door about an article in a woman’s magazine. The bottom line, however: Anne did not have six fingers. Since Anne’s death, the bodies buried in the chapel of St. Peter ad Vincula have been exhumed and none of the skeletons have shown evidence of a sixth finger. Of course, there are those who claim Anne’s body is actually not among them. But skeletal remains aside, if the living Anne actually had a sixth finger, would the eagle-eyed Chapuys have failed to report it? Anne’s liabilities were a favorite topic of his gossipy letters home; yet a sixth finger is not mentioned in one of them (or in any other court letters or papers prior to Sander).

Beyond the dark hair and eyes, the olive skin, the small moles, and the likelihood of a tiny extra nail on her little finger, we know very little with certainty about what Anne looked like. Before her execution, as we’ve seen, Henry, determined to wipe the slate clean, had any original portraits of Anne that he could find destroyed. Those that remain are almost all later copies and interpretations, and are quite inconsistent with one another. Some are thought to be of Jane Seymour or some other woman rather than Anne, while other portraits not identified as Anne—the beautiful Sommersby portrait thought to be of Jane Grey, for example—have been argued to actually be Anne. Historians and art historians have gone back and forth on the identity of the various sitters in many “Anne” portraits, with agreement on only a few. One is a tiny miniature in a locket ring worn by Elizabeth I, which was found among her belongings after her death. The existence of the ring, which bears the image of Elizabeth on one side and her mother on the other, is haunting, but, being so small, it tells us little about what Anne looked like. There is also general consensus about a portrait by an unknown artist circa 1533–1536 that is on permanent exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery. This portrait, often referred to as “the NPG portrait,” has provided the model for many later depictions on book covers, magnets, and postcards, where it has been variously glamorized or distorted, depending on the artist’s inclinations.

The NPG portrait is as reliable an indication as we have of what Anne looked like. But even this portrait cannot be taken “literally.” Historian Lacey Baldwin Smith has written that “Tudor portraits bear about as much resemblance to their subjects as elephants to prunes.”
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A slight exaggeration, maybe. But it is true that portraits often bore the mark of “symbolic iconizing”—the translation of a belief or argument about the person’s character into visual imagery—more than the attempt to mirror features with photographic precision. Hans Holbein’s famous sketch of Henry (the painting itself was destroyed in a fire) clearly served this function, with the king posed to emphasize his power, authority, and resoluteness: legs spread and firmly planted, broad shoulders—and a very visible codpiece. Since generations of later artists were content with small variations on the Holbein paradigm, we have the sense that we know what Henry looked like. But actually, what we have is an icon that has settled into a recognizable shape over the centuries.

There is no icon of Anne comparable to that of Holbein’s Henry, and in its place, we have created our own. It varies a bit from generation to generation, but she always has a beauty that stands out in the crowd by whatever standards appeal to the writers or directors who have cast her. Merle Oberon, Alexander Korda’s Anne, was considered an “exotic beauty” at the time and later became his wife. Geneviève Bujold was picked out by Hal Wallis without benefit of a screen test; she was a little-known Canadian actress at the time when he saw her in her first role and immediately recognized that “this is my Anne.” Although most Annes have followed the historical record in depicting her with dark hair, one of the most recent Annes, Miranda Raison, the first actress to play Anne in Howard Brenton’s play
Anne Boleyn,
is a decidedly contemporary-looking blonde.
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But perhaps the most stunning Anne of all is
The Tudors’
Natalie Dormer: exquisite, sensual, curvaceous in her push-up gowns. She gives a brilliant performance, but the only indisputable correspondence to the historical Anne is her dark hair (dyed for the role) and a few fetching facial moles.

What Color Was Anne Boleyn’s Hair?

Asked in the twentieth or twenty-first centuries about Anne Boleyn’s hair color, most people would answer “black”—or, perhaps, “very dark brown.” With the exception of Geneviève Bujold, whose hair was distinctly chestnut hued, the best-known actresses who have played Anne—Merle Oberon, Dorothy Tutin, Natalie Portman, Natalie Dormer—have black or dark brown hair, and modern portraits and cartoons follow the prototype of Anne as a “raven-haired temptress.” Yet the portraits and representations that have been judged to bear the closest resemblance to the historical Anne—including the National Portrait Gallery painting—show her with auburn hair. This isn’t incompatible with the many descriptions of her as “dark”—for in an aesthetic and religious world that divided things into “light” and “dark,” you wouldn’t have to have jet-black hair to be in the “dark” category.

In fact, there are only two descriptions of Anne from (roughly) her own time that associate Anne with the color “black”: One is from the Catholic propagandist Nicholas Sander, who was clearly out to make Anne sound as witchlike as possible. The other is Cardinal Wolsey’s private nickname—“the night crow”—a metaphor that may or may not have also been physically descriptive. All other sources describe her simply as “dark” or “brunette.” “Brunette” translates to “brown” for us, but may have had a much broader referent then, covering many hues of darkish hair. It’s not clear that the medievals even had a term for dark red hair; “auburn,” for example, originally meant whitish! And “black” could refer to colors, but in their deepest, darkest hues.

It provides some perspective on our own visual stereotypes of Anne to learn that raven-haired Anne—Sander aside—is largely a twentieth-century invention. Not that other eras are more historically reliable than ours. The Romantics almost always depicted her as fair—the visual counterpart to their view of Anne as victim rather than vixen. This lasts well into the early twentieth century, as in this description from Reginald Drew’s 1912 novel: “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.”
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Ernst Lubitsch’s Anne, Henny Porten, is fair (1920). And Jessie Armstrong’s Anne, in
My Friend Anne
(1935), could be Mary Pickford (whose style was already out-of-date in the thirties, but perhaps for that reason could represent “old-fashioned” beauty). In the thirties, “blonde” was already becoming, with Mae West and Jean Harlow, the mark of the vamp. But it hadn’t happened yet. For the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the old associations of fair hair with innocence and purity still held. Today, it’s surprising (and annoying, for those who care about historical accuracy) when a blonde Anne pops up, but it doesn’t signify much other than the loosening, in our postmodern age, of “moral” associations with hair color.

The most tenacious historical inaccuracy, actually, has not been in depictions of Anne, but of Katherine. She—unlike Anne—was indeed golden-haired. But she was Spanish, and our stunted racial imagination has therefore almost invariably given her dark hair (Irene Papas in
Anne of the Thousand Days
, Maria Doyle Kennedy in
The Tudors,
Ana Torrent in
The Other Boleyn Girl
—the outstanding exception: Annette Crosbie’s Katherine in the 1970 BBC production of
The Six Wives of Henry VIII
). Racial stereotyping, it seems, trumps gender ideology. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that racial profiling collaborates creatively with gender ideology. “Our” Anne-the-seductress, still wearing the collective imprinting of Sander, is raven-haired. But since she has morphed into a great beauty, too, we’ve rejected the historical consensus (from sympathizers as well as detractors) that her skin was “not so whitely as desired.”
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Surely that better describes Katherine, the unglamorous Spanish discard! So Anne becomes Snow White in coloring, while Spanish Katherine, who was, in fact, the fairer skinned of the two, becomes the “swarthy” wife.

The bottom line: Fantasy, not fact, rules in the cultural imagination.

Among historians, it is generally recognized that the real Anne, however, although not deformed, was not a conventional beauty (by the standards of her own time). Yet dark-haired, olive-skinned Anne not only prevailed over the pale English roses, but seems to have done so defiantly. Ignoring the fashion for blondes, for example, Anne grew her dark hair so long that she could sit on it. Before marriage, young women were permitted to wear their hair loose (after, it had to be hidden under a hood; the exception was the queen, on those state occasions that required her to wear a crown). And then there were Anne’s eyes. Eastern cultures foregrounded them for their sexual power. But proper English ladies did not brazenly issue a sexual invitation; they submitted, casting their eyes downward. Not Anne, apparently. Nearly every commentator mentions her eyes, not just “black and beautiful” (according to Sanuto, who was not a supporter), but also sexually artful. The French diplomat Lancelot de Carles, who later brought the news of her execution to France, was—being French—more lavish and precise in his description of Anne’s “most attractive” eyes: “Which she knew well how to use with effect, Sometimes leaving them at rest, And at others, sending a message To carry the secret witness of the heart.”
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De Carles here describes a classic form of flirtation, which Anne may have explicitly learned as an “art” during her formative years at the French court or which may have simply come naturally to her personality. She was not afraid to “send a message” with her gaze, then provocatively turn away, inspiring pursuit. Thus, Anne challenged the Mary-fixated religious ideology of beauty by engaging in the more biologically potent use of the eyes to meet and invite. Thomas Wyatt, one of the first at court to develop an infatuation for Anne, probably had Anne in mind when, in one of his love poems, he describes his beloved’s eyes as “sunbeams to turn with such vehemence, / To daze men’s sight, as by their bright presence.”
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Anne also seems to have had that elusive quality—“style”—which can never be quantified or permanently attached to specific body parts, hair color, or facial features, and which can transform a flat chest into a gracefully unencumbered torso and a birthmark into a beauty spot. “Style” cannot be defined. But in its presence, the rules of attraction are transformed. Style defies convention and calls the shots on what is considered beautiful. There are plenty of examples from our own time. Consider Audrey Hepburn, whose portrayal of Holly Golightly in
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
turned teenage girls’ gazes away from hourglass-shaped Sandra Dee and Annette Funicello, their bodies seemingly made for producing cute little babies, toward a new vision of cool, long-limbed, not-made-for-the-kitchen beauty that has remained a dominant ideal through the present day. Think of Barbra Streisand, who, like some modern-day Nefertiti, proudly offered her “Jewish” profile in dramatic, high-fashion poses that shouted “F*** you” to Gidget—and the rhinoplasts. Think Michelle Obama, whose prominent jaw would disqualify her immediately among those who insist that symmetry and a delicate chin are biologically inscribed requisites for female appeal. People with “style” remind us that the body is not just a piece of inert matter that can be measured and molded. And beauty, far from being cast in an unchanging, Platonic (or sociobiological) mold, is the human body moving through history, accepting or challenging the rules of its time and place. Sometimes, the prevailing rules of beauty are ripe for changing.
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Anne seems to have been among those who have changed the rules.

And perhaps it was more than sex and style . . .

Among the numerous historical romances that Anne has inspired, one was written specifically for young girls,
Doomed Queen Anne.
In it, late one night, a very young Anne overhears her parents discussing her future. “What of Nan?” she hears her mother ask. “I cannot imagine that we shall ever be able to find her a suitable husband. The poor child is so ill-favored! Dark as a gypsy, and that blemish upon her neck, the little bud of an extra finger . . .” “Ill-favored, true enough,” her father replies, “but not dull-witted.”
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Doomed Queen Anne
reminds us that even the most notorious concubine was once a young girl. And apparently, with an unusually “promising” quickness of mind, ready enough to be sent to be educated, at the minimum age allowable, to the court of the Archduchess Margaret of Austria, who was serving as regent for her thirteen-year-old nephew, Charles of Burgundy. There began the first term in what Eric Ives calls Anne’s “European Education.”
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Anne had not been there very long when Margaret wrote to Anne’s father that she found Anne “of such good address and so pleasing in her youthful age that I am more beholden to you for having sent her to me than you are to me.”
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From there, she was sent to France, where Francis’s sister, Marguerite de Navarre, had turned the Valois court into a center of intellectual and artistic brilliance. The “king’s respected counselor and confidante” since he took the throne in 1515, Marguerite filled the court with poets, philosophers, and the most provocative reformist intellectuals of the time.
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