Threads: The Reincarnation of Anne Boleyn (49 page)

Modern speculation superficially provides a
plausible, very convincing case for diabetes and strokes. While the
diagnosis of diabetes and its symptoms appears to me personally to
be the most likely overall, there is nothing to prevent a person
from suffering from two or more of these ailments at once.

The "sweating sickness" referred to in
Threads
is not bubonic plague, as was suggested on some
Internet sites. Karen Lindsey noted that it was a "bizarre illness"
sometimes called "the English disease" because only the English
seemed to have developed no immunity toward it when it spread
across Europe. Eric W. Ives wrote that it was highly contagious,
frequently fatal, and may have been related to the Spanish
influenza that killed millions in 1918.

Even the experts are not certain what the
sweating sickness was - or is. Scientists are examining the remains
of Arthur Tudor, older brother to Henry VIII, in hopes of further
identifying the illness, which they suspect was the cause of his
death.

Anne contracted this illness during the
sweating sickness epidemic of 1528, and her sister's husband died
from it. Henry was distraught while Anne was ill, but could not see
her himself since he had to stay at a distance from infection.
Instead, he sent his second best surgeon to attend to her (he kept
his best surgeon for himself). By the time the surgeon arrived,
Anne, who was always very healthy, was already on the mend.

According to Eric W. Ives, Anne said to Henry
in 1530, "It is foretold in ancient prophesies that at this time a
queen shall be burnt. But even if I were to suffer a thousand
deaths, my love for you would not abate one jot." Henry almost had
her burnt at the stake, then changed his mind and allowed her to be
executed instead. He even allowed her to be executed with a sword
rather than an axe, and gave her a choice in who would perform the
deed. Anne chose a French executioner who was said to be very
skilled.

Henry VIII forced Anne's former lover, Henry
Percy, to sit on the jury that found Anne guilty of adultery. Since
Percy was one of those accused of having committed adultery with
Anne, he had to also submit to interrogation. When the verdict was
announced, Percy collapsed and had to be carried from the
courtroom.

The king dismissed Anne's servants and
disbanded her household before her trial leaving no serious
question as to his intentions. While one or two sources suggested
that the trial was "fair", common sense leads you to wonder how
Henry could know Anne would no longer need her household unless he
was certain of the outcome of the trial before it was even
conducted.

Shortly before the execution, he also
annulled their marriage. Common sense also makes you wonder how
Anne could have committed adultery when she was never married to
Henry in the first place.

According to Eric W. Ives, her executioner
was so taken by Anne that he was shaken, and found it difficult to
proceed with the execution. In order to distract her, he shouted,
"Where is my sword?" just before killing her so that Anne could die
thinking she had a few seconds more to live.

Henry VIII lived another 11 years after Anne
Boleyn died, and married four more times. Jane Seymour died after
giving birth to Prince Edward (who outlived his father, but not for
long). Henry then was betrothed to Anne of Cleves on the basis of a
flattering portrait, but upon seeing the woman herself, was
appalled and repelled by her unattractiveness and quickly arranged
for a divorce without ever consummating the marriage. Next was a
young girl (reports of her age vary between 15 and 21), Katherine
Howard, who had a very poorly-hidden, ill-advised affair with her
young lover, and was subsequently beheaded. Last was Katherine
Parr, who gathered up all of Henry’s children, brought them to live
with their father, and acted as a kindly mother toward all of them.
She also acted in the unenviable capacity as nurse to Henry who,
toward the end of his life was enormously obese and covered with
oozing sores that emitted a foul odor. A tour guide at Hampton
Court Palace noted that you could smell Henry before you saw
him.

Within one or two years after Anne died, both
her parents died as well, so Hever Castle became the property of
the Crown. Henry VIII gave it as a divorce gift to Anne of Cleves,
who lived in it thereafter. It then passed through other hands, and
was in a state of abandoned disrepair until the early 1900’s when
William Waldorf Astor purchased it, renovated it, and essentially
saved it. It now has an Italian garden, two mazes, and a little
village of Tudor-style cottages. It is open to the public and a
visit is enthusiastically recommended.

Hever Castle has Anne’s prayer book encased
in glass and opened to a page where Anne wrote, "Remember me when
you do pray that hope doth lead from day to day." Her handwriting
was even, graceful and without many flourishes. When signing her
name to the passage, she wrote: "anne boleyn", and did not
capitalize the "A" or the "B".

In another prayer book, she cryptically
wrote, "The time will come" in French. The page with this notation
displays a picture of the Resurrection of the Dead, illustrating
corpses preparing to climb out of their graves.

In
Threads
, the Anne Boleyn I offer
to you is the one I kept seeing in each of her biographies,
whatever facts they presented or how those facts colored her, the
Anne who was always described as an "enigma". I think that term
applies to anyone who has a difficult personality, but whose
character is essentially good.

Folklore has always given Anne six fingers.
There isn’t much evidence to support this legend, or to suggest
that she really had a huge “wen” on her neck. All her biographies
concluded that she probably did not have either one but there is no
solid proof either way.

There is no proof of the order in which the
Boleyn (or “Bullen”) siblings were born. Various references each
prefer a different birth order, and no two agree. The most
supportable and convincing evidence, noted in “Anne Boleyn” by E.
W. Ives, favored a birth order of Mary, then Anne, then George.
(There were two additional Boleyn infants who died.) This book also
favors a birth year of 1501 (versus 1507), a date that is further
supported by an example of Anne’s handwriting in 1514 (shown in
“The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn” by Retha M. Warnicke). The
handwriting sample is unmistakably that of a young adult because it
has small, tightly controlled and evenly formed letters. A child of
seven, no matter how intelligent, would only have the mechanical
ability to write in a large, uneven scrawl.

There was a rumor (unverified) that Anne
Boleyn was raped by one of her father’s officers at Hever when she
was seven (I placed the rape in France instead, to make the
situation more traumatic for her). Only Alison Weir even mentions
this in passing, but she then dismisses the rumor as untrue. There
has never been any hard evidence, even in the midst of rampant
speculation and very close scrutiny, that Anne was ever intimate
with anyone but her husband. Despite this, considering the times,
premarital chastity was highly improbable. What is known about Anne
is that she a) was not a virgin when she married (only Karen
Lindsey suggested she was), b) conceived immediately after
commencing relations with Henry and, c) was regularly pregnant
thereafter. Her obvious fertility would not have allowed for much
illicit premarital sex leaving the child molestation theory still
open to explain her lost virginity, particularly for a work of
fiction. The two men she was most likely to have been with, Lord
Henry Percy and Sir Thomas Wyatt, both survived the accusations and
the interrogation prior to her execution for adultery. Whether this
is because they were innocent or useful to the Crown is
unknown.

Anne Boleyn was not listed as a passenger on
the ship that carried Mary Tudor and her entourage to France.
“Mistress” Boleyn was. There are three possible explanations. One
is that “Mistress” pertained to the older Boleyn sibling, while the
younger sister was insignificant and not worthy of mention on the
ship’s passenger list. Another was that it was simply an oversight.
The last was that Anne went directly from the Netherlands (where
she had been living) to France by land. This last explanation is
most plausible. However, I preferred the first explanations after
seeing the size of Anne’s bedroom at Hever Castle, and because I
had reason to want to make her arrival in France a bleak one.

Anne Boleyn’s love affair with Lord Henry
Percy is recorded as having been kept secret, whereas in
"Threads"
, it was more or less carried out in public. In
addition, their “goodbye” meeting is entirely fictitious (unless
something of the kind was done in secret, as in the story). The
king did not allow them to say goodbye, in fact, Alison Weir
mentions that Anne’s parents locked her in her room to prevent her
from trying to contact Percy, as she was frantic to do. I let them
say goodbye primarily to develop Hal’s character and to explore the
effect King Henry’s decision had on the couple. Percy did send a
note to Anne begging her to never love anyone else, and history
suggests she gamely made the effort, as Henry soon found out.
How
soon is another matter open to conjecture. Some
references suggest that he did not openly pursue Anne for as long
as one to four years after her betrothal to Percy was broken.
Others mention that they had had a courtly flirtation for years,
and that it may have grown serious from Henry’s perspective even as
he kept Anne’s sister Mary as his mistress. However, exact dates
are unknown.

According to Karen Lindsey, only one person
suggested that the betrothal of Percy and Anne Boleyn was broken at
Henry’s command rather than Wolsey’s (as noted by the official
version). However, that one person was a close and trusted servant
of Wolsey, and a reliable source. Lindsey states it would have been
in keeping with Henry’s personality to take measures to shift the
blame to Wolsey in order to deflect Anne’s resulting anger.

Other information is speculative, and
could
be true, but probably isn’t. According to legend,
Henry VIII wrote the song, “Greensleeves”. However, some
Encyclopedia sources place the date of the song’s composition
somewhere in the 17
^th
century,
perhaps 100 years after he died. Other references claim it was
first printed in 1580 by Richard Jones, who specialized in ballad
printing. Some sources point out that the song contains elements
that were not popular until later in the 16
^th
century,
about the time of the first printing and years after the death of
Henry VIII. Either way, it was noted that Henry VIII, while being a
most enthusiastic musician, primarily made small changes to
existing songs, then claimed them as his own. Most of his own songs
sound very much alike (and nothing at all like Greensleeves), and
he is not viewed historically as someone who had the talent to
write a song of that caliber. Historical references suggest that
Anne Boleyn, by all accounts,
did
have that kind of talent.
I wanted to make the strong point that Anne lost everything, even
credit for her talent and creativity, when she married Henry VIII.
I do not know–or presume–that she wrote Greensleeves.

To the best of my knowledge, none of Anne’s
songs survive, except for one, “O Death, Rock Me Asleep”, with
music written by her chaplain after her death. However, the source
of both the lyrics and the music is in question. It is only known
that the poem was found in the Tower immediately after Anne’s
death, and that it was later put to music.

Anne had a fourth pregnancy I didn’t mention
in the book, resulting in another stillbirth.

There are some theories about the health of
Henry VIII. One was that he had scurvy because of his notoriously
meat-heavy diet. Another is that he, his siblings and his
offspring, suffered from diabetes. Still another was that he
suffered from syphilis. His body was last exhumed in 1812 before
any conclusive tests were available. However, there was an epidemic
of syphilis in Europe during the 1500’s, and the symptoms of
syphilis listed by The New Complete Medical and Health Encyclopedia
(published by Lexicon) somewhat match the health ailments Henry
VIII experienced in his lifetime. In particular, the changes in his
personality and mental state from the start to the end of his reign
make syphilis possible. Katherine of Aragon, his first wife, was
known to have suffered from a "mysterious female ailment" that
might possibly have been related to infection. In addition, infants
born to infected mothers can be stillborn, die shortly after birth,
or suffer health ailments that can lead to death years later. Henry
VIII admittedly had some trouble fathering viable infants, and
produced children with all of the aforementioned results. Syphilis
is one possible cause. However, there is also nothing to prevent
someone from suffering from two or more of these ailments at once,
and nothing more substantial than speculation to support any theory
at the present time.

According to Eric W. Ives, her executioner
was so taken by Anne that he was shaken, and found it difficult to
proceed with the execution. In order to distract her, he shouted,
“Where is my sword?” just before killing her so that Anne could die
thinking she had a few seconds more to live.

Additional information and resources about
the Tudors are available at
www.nellgavin.com
.

"The Six Wives of Henry VIII
" by
Alison Weir

"Anne Boleyn"
by Eric W. Ives

"Mistress Anne"
by Carolly
Erickson