The Creation of Anne Boleyn (9 page)

If this was more or less Katherine’s conduct manual, Anne must have appeared as a lifesaving remedy, and not only to an heirless throne. While in the French court, she had perfected a very different set of rules of female comportment, described by Baldassare Castiglione in his 1528
The Book of the Courtier
as the cultivation of “a certain pleasant affability” designed to please men without ever tipping over into an unseemly boldness.
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In theory, it was a delightful ideal. In practice, it was a delicate and precarious balancing act, constantly walking the tightrope between “vivacity” and “modesty,” “a little free talk” and “unseemly words,” “prudishness” and “unbridled familiarity.”
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In fact, the entire set of requirements of courtly behavior for women was framed in terms of contradictions (or, more realistically, double binds) that required constant calculation and self-scrutiny. The court lady must never appear to be “vain or frivolous.”
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However, she must “have the good sense to discern what those garments are that enhance that which is the gift of nature. Thus, if she is a little more stout or thin than the medium, or fair or dark, let her seek help from dress, but as covertly as possible; and while keeping herself dainty and neat, let her always seem to give no thought or heed to it.”
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While never appearing to show off, she should also be full of “witticisms and pleasantries,” “have knowledge of letters, music, painting, and know how to dance and make merry,” and be able to play those musical instruments that highlight “the mild gentleness which so much adorns every act a woman does.”
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The point of all this was to be entertaining to men—while projecting feminine delicacy. Since men were expected to be hale fellows, hearty drinkers, and sexual pursuers—the court was a real boys’ club, particularly after the vigorous young Henry became king—“femininity” was a balancing act that required great skill and social intelligence. The pleasure of often boisterous, sexually aggressive men was the goal; but there were exacting sexual boundaries a woman was not permitted to violate. She should be physically desirable and could engage in flirtatious, even sexually provocative talk (and
should,
when to do otherwise would shame the men or mark her as a prude), but her social performance must never raise doubts about her virtue.
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To guard against this, constant vigilance—in precarious tension with the “vivacity” expected of her—was required. Giuliano de’ Medici (brother of Lorenzo): “She ought also to be more circumspect, and to take better heede that she give no occasion to bee ill reported of, and so behave her selfe, that she be not onely not spotted with any fault, but not so much as with suspition.”
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Ultimately, Anne was to pay a high price for her own vivacity and flirtatiousness, which she could not simply turn off as if it were a faucet once the crown was on her head, and which her enemies used to raise suspicions about her fidelity to Henry. But in the beginning, it was likely her consummate skill in walking the tightrope between desirability and chastity that made her a standout in the English court. Enemies may have described this as manipulative, and, of course, it was; but it was conventionally manipulative—a game all court ladies were expected to play. The “chastity” part may not have been entirely an act either, despite the reputation spread by her enemies. In France, Anne was, after all, lady-in-waiting to Queen Claude, known for her virtue and religious devotion and high moral expectations of her ladies. But then, too, her husband, Francis, was a notorious womanizer, whose own Catholicism, apparently, had different rules than Claude’s. Anne’s years at the French court, divided between the expectations of Claude and the imperative to please men, were excellent training in walking the tightrope. Did Anne have sex with dozens of courtiers, as film and television portrayals would have us believe? That seems highly unlikely, as Claude would have undoubtedly kicked her out of court had there been even a hint of that. Did she bring back to England the provocative yet diffident confidence that French women are known for? It seems that she did.

Having been “finished” as a court lady, Anne’s sense of propriety was very different from Katherine’s. In France, Anne had learned that clever, provocative talk was an art, not a transgression. Katherine, raised much more strictly in Spain and with her royal status always in mind, had learned that it was a sin. Her everyday regimen was organized around goodness, duty, obedience, and silence. All that, of course, was what was expected of a good Tudor wife—especially of a queen. But Eros rebels at such conventions. Whatever their affection for each other, Henry and Katherine were not exactly vibrantly in tune. Neither one expected that, however, for neither “falling in love” nor “being in love” was the norm for Tudor marriage, particularly not for an arranged royal marriage. They probably were delighted to discover what appears to have been some real mutual attraction when they were young and Henry’s inexperience matched Katherine’s. Had Katherine been able to deliver a male heir, that—and Henry’s mistresses—probably would have kept the marriage alive indefinitely. But they were not soul mates.

For one thing, Henry was never the same kind of Catholic as Katherine was. Henry’s Catholicism was conventional, and in the end proved less precious to him than his own earthly ambitions. He and Anne thought nothing of writing little love notes to each other on a book of hours, exchanged between them in church like teenagers passing notes in class. Katherine would probably have regarded this as sacrilege. Her religiosity was deeply etched in her being and her daily habits. She spent hours in prayer every day and had been taught that dancing, singing, and hunting were inappropriate, if not sinful, for a woman to engage in. But these were among Henry’s greatest pleasures. Initially raised to be the “spare” heir, Henry’s childhood years had been fairly free. But when his brother Arthur died when Henry was eleven, his upbringing changed dramatically. His father was now focused obsessively on keeping Henry safe from harm, and the boy’s chief care was given over to his grandmother, Lady Margaret Beaufort, every bit as pious as Katherine, and her closest adviser, John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester. They provided Henry with a broad and liberal education for his mind, but “cabined, cribbed, and confined” his body, which was powerfully endowed by nature: tall and broad chested, with strong legs and a restless vitality that immediately burst its chains the moment he became king, at the age of eighteen. Even at forty-two, he was still brimming with masculine energy. An adept horseman, jouster, and tennis player, Henry was also a splendid dancer—as was Anne (“Her gracefulness rivaled Venus,” wrote the French chronicler Pierre de Bourdeilles Brantôme), whose personality and pleasures were better matched with Henry’s than Katherine’s were. Like Henry, she loved hunting, riding, and cards. Educated to be a court lady rather than a queen, she was far from silent and verbally jousted with the men around court. (Even Wolsey’s man Cavendish, who rarely had anything good to say about her, admitted she had “a very good wit.”
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) She was also bold and not afraid to challenge the superstitious streak that Henry’s grandmother had implanted in him. Elizabeth Benger relates an incident in which Anne was able to persuade Henry to visit a spot in Woodstock Forest, which had the reputation for being haunted. It was believed, in particular, that no king who entered would leave alive. Henry had been taught not to take chances with the gods or the fates. Yet Anne was able to convince him to ride through the forest, and to his relief and gratitude he exited in one piece. The anecdote may be apocryphal in detail, but in spirit it squares with what we know about Anne. It requires no stretch to see how she could come to represent youthful liberation to Henry, while Katherine’s piety, although perfectly “normal” for a queen, may well have carried unpleasant memories of the stifling regime of his grandmother.

As a dedicated reformist, Anne was also perfectly in synch with Henry’s growing hostility toward the papacy. Once in league with him in pursuit of the divorce, she more than supported Henry’s efforts, supplying the reformist texts and arguments that gave Henry the justification he needed to enlarge his role as the spiritual leader of the nation, including William Tyndale’s
The
Obedience of a Christian Man,
which must have prickled Henry’s sense of manliness as well as supported his resistance to the Church—and it suggests that opposing the Church could be very profitable as well. Tyndale complains that the monarchs of Christendom had become mere shadows, “having nothing to do in the world but when our holy father needeth help,” and encourages them to take back “every farthing,” “all manner of treasure,” and “all the lands which they have gotten with their false prayers.”
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It was Anne who showed Henry this book, but it’s easy to see that feminine brainwashing was hardly required for Henry to “get” that antipapal ideas were on the side of kings. As early as 1515, the youthful Henry, pronouncing on a dispute about the relative powers of ecclesiastical and state courts, declared that the king of England has no “superior but God only” and upheld the authority of “temporal jurisdiction” over Church decrees. This point of view, growing sharper every year that followed, was the cutting edge that ultimately cost Thomas More his head. More’s fatal dispute with Henry was not over Anne, for Henry and Anne were already married by then, without the pope’s approval; it was clear he no longer needed any official “permission” to make her his wife. But what Henry always needed—demanded—was recognition, among his own subjects, of the greater justice of his own authority. More, who was as stubborn and egotistical as Henry when it came to what he thought was “right,” wouldn’t give it, and Henry couldn’t let that go.

For a traditionalist such as Chapuys, of course, Anne’s having any say at all in Henry’s political affairs would have been outrageously presumptuous, particularly since Anne was not of royal blood. Henry, however, at least at this point in his life, may not have had the same ideas about women and their proper place. Educated alongside his two sisters and extremely close to his mother, he may have had far less than the usual Tudor stock of misogynist ideas about women and their natural inferiority. At various times during their marriage, Katherine had been entrusted with responsibilities that went far beyond the wifely, serving as a mediator between Henry and Spain, and a strong advocate—some even say instigator—of war with France. When Henry left for war, he constituted her as “Regent and Governess of England, Wales, and Ireland” and gave her sweeping powers to raise troops, make appointments, issue warrants, and in general take charge of governing on the domestic front. The active role that Katherine took not only gives the lie to the conventional portrait of her as Henry’s doormat, but also shows that those who later resented Anne’s “interference” in political matters had ideological or personal reasons for their annoyance. Queens, especially well-educated queens such as Katherine, were not just shirt embroiderers or alms distributors. When their husbands were open to it, they often played an active role in international affairs.

Henry would later become less open to the political participation of his wives, warning Jane Seymour, for example, not to meddle and holding the example of her predecessor ominously over her head (so to speak). But there’s no evidence that during the six years he pursued Anne he had any objection to her counsel. It has to be remembered that these were six years in which Henry spent far less time mooning about Anne than he did arguing, gathering forces, reviewing texts—his ego and his authority more on the line every year that passed. Initially, Henry had every expectation that the pope would quickly reverse the dispensation he had granted for the marriage to Katherine. But for complexly tangled political reasons, the pope was not about to give Henry the easy divorce he imagined, and Henry was drawn into battle with the papacy itself. It was long, fierce, and bloody, fracturing English loyalties, sending devoted papists such as Thomas More to the scaffold and ultimately resulting in a new Church of England with Henry as its head. Anyone who follows it closely can see that the autonomy and authority of kings ultimately became more of an issue for Henry than the divorce.
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“She is not of ordinary clay,” Henry had once said to Wolsey, explaining his infatuation for Anne, a comment that most historians take to refer to Anne’s unwillingness to engage in sex before marriage.
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But perhaps Henry, tired of docile mistresses and a wife whose undeniable intelligence was cramped by obedience to role and religion, found Anne’s independence and ingenuity of mind among those qualities that made her extraordinary. Certainly, he was more than willing—without any “wheedling” or “crying”—to accept the help she offered in strategizing for the divorce. Even David Starkey notes this. “In the divorce, Anne and Henry were one. They debated it and discussed it; they exchanged ideas and agents; they devised strategies and stratagems. And they did all this together.” For Starkey, this made them “Macbeth and Lady Macbeth”—and Anne, “like Lady Macbeth, frequently took the initiative.”
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But this venomous, anti-Anne gloss on the partnership of Henry and Anne skips over the most unusual thing about it: that it
was
a partnership. And an unusually “modern” one that did not fit into any of the available cultural patterns. It took a woman “not of ordinary clay” to shatter the mold—and a king who was glad to see it in pieces. For the moment.