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By HILARY MANTEL
Published: January 22, 2010
The story of Anne Boleyn, second wife of Henry VIII, ended in May 1536, when the master executioner of Calais — sent for specially, and said to be an adept in his art — separated her clever head from her seductive body with one clean stroke of his sword. Historians are still puzzling over Anne’s downfall. Henry had fought for years to extricate himself from his first marriage and create a world where he and Anne could be husband and wife; to achieve it, he had split Christian Europe apart. How did he become so alienated from her that he wanted her dead? Had she really slept with her brother George? Who was the prime mover in alleging against her multiple acts of adultery, involving five men? Was it Henry himself, crediting some slander and lashing out in blind rage? Or his minister Thomas Cromwell, fighting for his own career? What part was played by the papist supporters of the Princess Mary, Henry’s child by his first marriage? Were all these parties, for different reasons, acting together? And at what point was Anne’s doom sealed? Did her fortunes begin to falter in January 1536, when the king’s first wife died and Anne miscarried a child? Or was she brought down over a few days, in an atmosphere of fulminating panic that infected the entire court?
Illustration by Hugo Guinness
THE LADY IN THE TOWER
The Fall of Anne Boleyn
By Alison Weir
Illustrated. 434 pp. Ballantine Books. $28
Related
Excerpt: ‘The Lady in the Tower’ (January 24, 2010)
Up Front: Hilary Mantel (January 24, 2010)
Janet Maslin’s Review of ‘The Lady in the Tower’ (December 17, 2010)
Anne is one of the most striking female presences in English history, but we can’t even be sure of her date of birth, let alone her bedroom secrets. She was the daughter of Sir Thomas Boleyn, a courtier and diplomat, and her uncle was the powerful magnate Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk. She had spent some of her girlhood at the louche French court, and when she appeared at the English court in 1521, she brought with her polished sophistication and new fashions. She was not an acknowledged beauty, but she was sparkling, sinuous, a natural intriguer. When Henry fell in love with her, he already wanted to be free of his long marriage to Catherine of Aragon, because he had no son to succeed him, and Catherine’s childbearing years seemed to be over. Cardinal Wolsey, the powerful statesman at the king’s right hand, expected Henry to remarry for diplomatic advantage, and a state of courteous warfare set in between himself and Anne. To everyone’s surprise, Anne refused to become Henry’s mistress; she outfaced Wolsey, who fell from power, and played Henry astutely till he broke away from Rome, declared himself head of the English church, arranged his own divorce and married her secretly. Anne was identified with the reformist tendency in religion, and long before the king had permitted a vernacular version of the Bible, she kept the Scriptures in French set up in her chamber. She was crowned queen in June of 1533, at which time she was heavily pregnant with the child who would become Elizabeth I. Henry cannot have been pleased by the emergence of another daughter. He seemed to take it philosophically at the time. But miscarriages followed, and his attention began to move elsewhere.
Alison Weir, a respected and popular historian, has already written about Anne in “The Six Wives of Henry VIII” and “Henry VIII: The King and His Court.” Her new book focuses on the last few months of Anne’s life. She has sifted the sources, examining their reliability. Doubts have already been cast on Weir’s assumptions; the historian John Guy has recently suggested that two sources she took to be mutually corroborating are in fact one and the same person. This doesn’t invalidate her brave effort to lay bare, for the Tudor fan, the bones of the controversy and evaluate the range of opinion about Anne’s fall. Some of her findings, she admits, contradict her previous beliefs; for instance, she no longer thinks that Anne was pregnant at the time of her execution. She notes that there is no evidence for the controversial theories put forward in Retha Warnicke’s 1989 book “The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn.” Warnicke suggested that Anne had miscarried a deformed child, and so was thought guilty of witchcraft, but Weir gives more credence to Warnicke’s suggestion that Anne’s male friends, her brother in particular, were involved in homosexual acts thought deviant at the time. No such allegations surfaced in court, but they may have contributed to a climate of moral panic, as sexuality and witchcraft were linked in the imagination of the time. When Thomas Cromwell gave an account of the destruction of the Boleyns in a letter to English ambassadors in France, he declined to give details, as “the things be so abominable.”
Weir’s conclusion is that “Anne was probably framed.” Like Eric Ives in his scholarly and authoritative biography of Anne, Weir puts Cromwell at the center of an intricate conspiracy, pulling together the queen’s enemies, uniting them briefly in the common cause of destroying her. In 1533 Anne had called Cromwell “her man.” By 1536 he was his own man, and the Boleyns were in his way. The queen had quarreled with him and threatened him. He needed to clear out the king’s privy chamber and put his own men there, in daily proximity to Henry. He had a longstanding political dispute with at least one of the men accused of adultery with Anne. He had the motive, the ingenious mind and the powerful personality.
The problem with this approach is that Henry comes across as a gullible fool. Weir calls him “the most suggestible of men.” In “Six Wives: The Queens of Henry VIII,” David Starkey places responsibility differently, describing Cromwell as “jackal to Henry’s lion.” If Cromwell acted, initially, without Henry’s sanction, it was a plan of huge boldness. And the accusations seem so extravagant. Weir quotes Ives: “Quadruple adultery plus incest invites disbelief.” Perhaps Anne was guilty — not of adultery with five men, but with one or two? A leading contemporary scholar, G. W. Bernard of the University of Southampton, thinks this possible and is publishing a book on Anne’s case this spring. It is often said that, as a queen in those days had so little privacy, Anne had no chance of meetings with a secret lover. This didn’t stop Catherine Howard, Henry’s fifth wife, beheaded in 1542. Catherine could not have acted without a confidante and accomplice. She was able to meet her lover with the help of a lady-in-waiting, Jane, Lady Rochford, who seems to have been involved in the downfall of two queens.
In 1536, Jane was a lady-in-waiting to Anne Boleyn and was married to George Boleyn, Anne’s brother and co-accused. Was it she who laid the crucial evidence against him? She has often been pictured as a warped, devious and malign woman; a recent biography by the scholar Julia Fox was a spirited attempt to vindicate her. This is murky territory, and it’s not likely we’ll ever have definitive answers. Historians deal in documented facts, and the power of rumor and gossip are hard for them to evaluate. But it may have been innuendo that ruined Anne, creating around her a black climate, a cloud that followed her when she stood before her judges. When Anne’s narrow body was put into an arrow chest and taken away for burial, the substance of the truth went with her.
Why are we so obsessed with understanding every detail of Anne Boleyn’s rise and fall? It is because her character has archetypal force. The story is of its time and place, but also universal. She is the young fertile beauty who displaces the menopausal wife. She is the mistress whose calculating methods beguile the married man; but in time he sees through her tricks and turns against her. It is the human drama that engages us. Her trial is only patchily documented, but you can make an argument that, in judicial terms, Anne was murdered. In human terms, we see that she has been paid out. Natural justice came for Anne not in the shape of the headsman, but in the shape of Jane Seymour, the sly unnoticed rival who replaced her, within days, as the king’s third wife.
Hilary Mantel’s novel about Thomas Cromwell, “Wolf Hall,” won the 2009 Man Booker Prize.
Next Article in Books (11 of 27) » A version of this article appeared in print on January 24, 2010, on page BR10 of the New York edition.
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