Despite her proclaimed readiness to die, until very near the end Anne still harbored the belief that Henry might pardon her. It was not an unreasonable expectation. Not only had no British queen up until then been executed, but the last-minute rescue of the condemned queen was a centerpiece of the romance of chivalry, which was still being avidly consumed at court via Mallory’s Le Morte d’Arthur. In the Arthurian legend, Guinevere is condemned to death twice for treason (the second time for adultery with Lancelot) and both times is saved from the stake by Lancelot—with King Arthur’s blessings. Arthur had, in fact, suspected the queen’s infidelity for years, but because of his love for her and for Lancelot, had kept his suspicions a secret. When Modred and Aggravane, plotting their own coup d’etat, told the King about it, he had no choice but to condemn his queen, while privately hoping she would be rescued.

It was a romantic fantasy—but one which Henry and Anne had grown up with, and which no doubt shaped their ideas about love. The Arthurian romance, even today, has the power to move us. And in 1536, many of the outward trappings and habits of courtly love still existed. Henry was himself an adroit and seductively tender courtier, who at the beginning of his courtship of Anne had written seventeen letters in which he pledged himself her “servant” and swore his constancy. The pledges may (or may not) have been made manipulatively, but his infatuation was real and the gestures were convincing. Why wouldn’t Anne, who Henry had in fact honored like Guinevere for six years, cherish the hope that she, too, would be rescued from death?

Henry had no such plans in mind, however. As Anne prepared for her death, Henry was spending much of his time at Chelsea, visiting Jane Seymour and making plans for their wedding. Chapuys describes the king as showing “extravagant joy” at Anne’s arrest. Convinced (or making a great show for posterity) that Anne was an “accursed whore” who had slept with hundreds of men, he was “very impatient” and wishing to have the thing done with “already.” Ironically, Anne, on her part, felt the same way. Expecting to die on the 18th, she took the sacrament at 2 a.m., having prepared her soul for many hours. By now all who were in close contact with her must have been convinced of her innocence, whatever their politics. She had insisted that Kingston be present when she took confession, so her assertion of innocence of the charges would be public record. Even her old enemy Chapuys was impressed by the fact that Anne, before and after receiving the Sacrament, affirmed to those who had charge of her “on damnation of her soul, that she had never offended with her body against the King.” In the 16th century, to speak anything other than the truth at such a time would be to invite the utter condemnation of God. Anne had nothing to gain and her salvation to lose by lying.

She was prepared to die. Yet, cruelly, the execution was delayed twice, once in order to clear the Tower of possible sympathetic observers, the second time because the executioner had been delayed. The first delay dismayed Anne, who thought that at the newly appointed hour she would already “be dead and past my pain.” Kingston, who seems to have been an absurdly literal man, took her to be referring to the physical pain of the execution itself, and reassured her that “there would be no pain, it was so subtle.” Anne replied with her most famous line: “I have heard say the executioner is very good, and I have a little neck.” And then, according to Kingston, “she put her hand around [her neck], laughing heartily.” Kingston flat-footedly interpreted this to mean that Anne had “much joy and pleasure in death.” He apparently did not “get” Anne’s irony, or the fact that at this point, she was probably becoming a bit unhinged. At the news of the second delay, she was distraught. But “It was not that she desired death,” as she told Kingston (or perhaps one of the ladies, who then told him) “but she had thought herself prepared to die, and feared that the delay would weaken her resolve. “ So much for Kingston’s theory that Anne felt “joy and pleasure” at the prospect of death.

What she may have felt was something closer to what James Hillman describes as the state of mind that often precedes an attempt at suicide: a desperate desire to shed an old self whose suffering had become unbearable, and thus be “reborn” in the act of dying. This imagined rebirth, for Hillman, has nothing to do with belief in reincarnation, or even in heaven, but the perception, ironically, that the soul cannot survive under existing conditions. What Anne had been through was certainly enough to shatter any hold her previous life may have exerted on her. She had been discarded by the man who had pursued her for six years, fathered her daughter, and seemingly adored her for much of their time together. The person she was closest to in the world—her brother George—had been executed on the most hideous and shameful of charges. The rest of her family, as far as we can tell, had either abandoned her or—as Anne believed of her mother–was awash with despair and grief over what was happening. Still recovering from a miscarriage, her body and mind undoubtedly assaulted by hormonal changes and unstable moods, she had been sent to prison on absurd, concocted charges, and “cared for” there by women who were hostile spies. She knew she would never see her daughter Elizabeth again, and—unlike the fictional Anne of Anne of the Thousand Days, who predicts that “Elizabeth will be queen!”—had no hope, after Cranmer’s visit, that her child would ever be anything more than she had seen Mary reduced to: a bastardized ex-princess forced to bow down to any children the new wife might produce for Henry. She had been given reason to hope that she would be allowed to live, only to have those hopes crushed at her sentencing. In a sense, she had already been through dozens of dyings. Nothing was left but the withered skin of her old life, which she was ready to shed.

As she mounted the scaffold, wearing a role of dark damask (black in some reports, grey in others) trimmed with white fur, with a red kirtle (petticote) underneath—red being the liturgical color of Catholic martyrdom—political and national affiliations continued, as they had through her reign and would for centuries to come–to shape the descriptions of her appearance and behavior. To an author of the Spanish Chronicle, she exhibited “a devilish spirit.” A Portugese witness who had snuck in despite the ban on “strangers”, wrote that “never had she looked so beautiful.” An imperialist observer described her as “feeble and stupefied” (which would be understandable, and not incompatible with her looking beautiful as well.) Wriothesley says she showed “a goodly smiling countenance.” French de Carles commented on the beauty of her complexion, pure and clear as though cleansed by all the suffering. For all, the spectacle of a queen, wearing the white ermine of her role, mounting the stairs to the scaffold, was unnerving.

Unlike her trial speech and her “last letter,” Anne’s remarks on the scaffold made the more conventional bows to the goodness and mercy of the King—in this highly public context, it was virtually required, if only to prevent any retribution against surviving relatives—and asked the people to pray for her. She did not admit to guilt for the offenses with which she was charged or accuse the judges of malice, but did make reference to the “cruel law of the land by which I die.” By now, the four young ladies who had accompanied her to the scaffold (clearly not the hostile spies that had lived with her in the Tower, but others, more intimate with her, who she had been allowed to have with her in these last moments) were weeping. Anne, having helped them take off her robe—an act that in itself must have demanded great composure and courage—“appeared dazed” as he kneeled down, modestly covering her feet with her dress, and asked the executioner to remove her coif, lest it interfere with his stroke. The executioner realized that she was afraid of the pain of an impeded blow; she kept looking around her, her hand on her coif, anticipating the moment. Clearly “distressed” at the task he was to perform, he told her that he would wait until she gave the signal. “With a fervent spirit” she began to pray, and the Portuguese contingent, unable to bear it, huddled together and knelt down against the scaffold, wailing loudly.

Anne gave the signal. But either the executioner or someone else in charge had devised a scheme to distract Anne at the last moment, so the fatal blow would come when she wasn’t expecting it; he turned toward the scaffold steps and called for the sword, and when Anne blindly turned her head in that direction, he brought the sword down from the other side and swiftly “divided her neck at a blow.” As these things went—others had died only after multiple clumsy hackings—it was an easy death: if the naturalist Lewis Thomas has it right, it was far easier than her weeks of suffering in the Tower: “Pain, “ he writes, “is useful for avoidance, for getting away when there’s time to get away, but when it is end game, and no way back, pain is likely to be turned off, and the mechanisms for this are wonderfully precise and quick. If I had to design an ecosystem in which creatures had to live off each other and in which dying was an indispensible part of living, I could not think of a better way to manage.” He quotes Montaigne, who nearly died in a riding accident and later described the “letting go” that he experienced at what could have easily been the very end:

“It was an idea that was only floating on the surface of my soul, as delicate and feeble as all the rest, but in truth not only free from distress but mingled with that sweet feeling that people have who have let themselves slide into sleep. I believe this is the same state in which people find themselves whom we see fainting in the agony of death, and maintain that we pity them without cause…If you know not how to die, never trouble yourself; Nature will in a moment fully and sufficiently instruct you; she will exactly do that business for you; take you no care with it” (Lewis, 104-5).

Dostoevsky too had experienced a close brush with death—by the Czar’s firing squad, a sentence from which he was reprieved at the last moment—and fictionalizes his experience through a character in The Idiot. His account, though very different from Montaigne’s, nonetheless describes a radically altered state of consciousness, not characterized by pain but a sense of the infinity of time, stretching his final moments into an extended reflection culminating in the sense of impending re-birth into the “new self” that James Hillman describes:

“About twenty paces from the scaffold, where he had stood to hear the sentence, were three posts, fixed in the ground, to which to fasten the criminals (of whom there were several). The first three criminals were taken to the posts, dressed in long white tunics, with white caps drawn over their faces, so that they could not see the rifles pointed at them. Then a group of soldiers took their stand opposite to each post. My friend was the eighth on the list, and therefore he would have been among the third lot to go up. A priest went about among them with a cross: and there was about five minutes of time left for him to live.

He said that those five minutes seemed to him to be a most interminable period, an enormous wealth of time; he seemed to be living, in these minutes, so many lives that there was no need as yet to think of that last moment, so that he made several arrangements, dividing up the time into portions–one for saying farewell to his companions, two minutes for that; then a couple more for thinking over his own life and career and all about himself; and another minute for a last look around….A little way off there stood a church, and its gilded spire glittered in the sun. He remembered staring stubbornly at this spire, and at the rays of light sparkling from it. He could not tear his eyes from these rays of light; he got the idea that these rays were his new nature, and that in three minutes he would become one of them, amalgamated somehow with them.”

Anne’s preparations for dying, facing the inevitability of her execution, may also have been filled with internal good-byes, existential confrontation with the mystery of “being” and “nothingness”, and imaginings of becoming one with nature. I like to think of her final hours as immensely rich, in a way that I cannot comprehend but that was sustaining to her, even beyond her more conventional—but extremely deep, for Anne—religious faith. And then, at the end, I hope that nature or God (it makes no difference), gave her no more to figure out, no more to regret, no more to say good-bye to, no more work to do, and took care of her dying.

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There is a scene in the 1969 film version of Anne of the Thousand Days that has audiences cheering to this day. Henry VIII (Richard Burton) visits Anne Boleyn (Geneviève Bujold) as she awaits execution in the Tower of London and reflects on the “thousand days” of her marriage to the king. He has come to offer a bargain. If Anne will declare their marriage unlawful and their daughter Elizabeth illegitimate, freeing him to marry Jane Seymour, he will spare Anne’s life. But Anne is having none of it. Her hair disheveled, eyes burning a path straight to his masculine pride, she rejects the offer and spits out a lie: “It is true. I was unfaithful to you with all of them. With half your court. With soldiers of your guard, with grooms, with stable hands. Look for the rest of your life at every man that ever knew me and wonder if I didn’t find him a better man than you!” Rattled and enraged, Henry shouts, “You whore!” Anne has an even sharper arrow in her quiver:

“But Elizabeth is yours. Watch her as she grows; she’s yours. She’s a Tudor! Get yourself a son off of that sweet, pale girl if you can—and hope that he will live! But Elizabeth shall reign after you! Yes, Elizabeth—child of Anne the Whore and Henry the Blood-Stained Lecher—shall be Queen! And remember this: Elizabeth shall be a greater queen than any king of yours! She shall rule a greater England than you could ever have built! Yes—MY Elizabeth SHALL BE QUEEN! And my blood will have been well spent!”

The scene is without historical foundation. Henry never visited Anne in the tower, and Anne never delivered her speech; indeed, at that point, Anne would have known that the chances of Elizabeth becoming queen were slim. Two days before her execution, her marriage to Henry was declared void, and Elizabeth would soon be bastardized. In the movie (and before that, the 1948 Maxwell Anderson play on which it was based), she is given a choice that the real Anne never had.

Did the fact that the tower scene was invention matter to viewers? Not a bit. While critics at the time were not particularly enthusiastic (Vincent Canby was typical in praising Bujold but disparaging the movie as “unbearably classy” and “conventionally reverential”), not one complained of the historical inaccuracies. Even today, among audiences who have seen enough alternative versions of Anne’s final days to wonder about the authenticity of any of them, the general consensus about the tower scene seems to be that if it didn’t happen that way, it should have.

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Anne of the Thousand Days is not the only historical drama to escape the scrutiny of fact checkers. Sixties’ critics were so enchanted with the 1966 film A Man for All Seasons’ witty, anti-establishment dropout Thomas More (Paul Scofield) that they were unconcerned with its whitewashing of More’s obsessive, brutal heretic hunting. And while the occasional academic would later reference that license with history, it was only until another fictional depiction—in Showtime’s The Tudors (2007-10)—displaced it that idolatry of More was challenged in the minds of popular audiences.

Of course these renderings are fictions—and as such, it could be argued, should not have to answer to historical accuracy. Writing about The Other Boleyn Girl (2008), the critic Thomas Sutcliffe praised the movie’s screenwriter, Peter Morton, as “brilliant at side-stepping the usual shrieking reflex of anxiety about mixing fantasy and truth.” Many historical novelists would agree that too much “anxiety” about the fact/fiction divide would make the work of historical fiction impossible, too. Margaret George once laughingly told me about overhearing someone say about her book The Autobiography of Henry VIII (1986), “This is just a lie! Henry VIII never wrote an autobiography!”

Hilary Mantel once told me in an e-mail interview: “You have to think what you owe to history. But you also have to think what you owe to the novel form. Your readers expect a story. And they don’t want it to be two-dimensional, barely dramatized.” In the case of Tudor history, there are plenty of gaps that beg to be filled in by the creative imagination if there is to be any coherent narrative at all. One of the biggest is Anne Boleyn herself. Even before her execution, Henry set about erasing all evidence of her life—emblems, portraits, and (apparently) letters—a purge that has allowed polarized camps to define and redefine her over the centuries. For supporters of the queen she supplanted, Katherine of Aragon, she was a coldhearted murderess. For Roman Catholic propagandists, a six-fingered, jaundiced-looking erotomaniac. For many Elizabethans, she was the unsung heroine of the Protestant Reformation. For the Romantics, particularly in painting, she was the hapless victim of a king’s tyranny. In postwar movies and on television, Anne has been animated by the rebellious spirit of the 60s (Anne of the Thousand Days), the “mean girl” celebration of female competitiveness of the 90s (The Other Boleyn Girl), and the “third wave” feminism of a new generation of Anne-worshipers, who see Natalie Dormer’s brainy seductress of The Tudors as too smart, sexy, and strong for her own time.

In Wolf Hall, the first volume of Mantel’s magisterial portrait of Henry’s minister Thomas Cromwell, Anne was a bit player, but a vivid one. Ignoring the fact that Cromwell and Anne were allies for most of her reign, Mantel paints her through Cromwell’s eyes as a predatory calculator with “a cold slick brain at work behind her hungry black eyes.” That remains unchanged in the sequel, Bring Up the Bodies, which deals with the chilling, sudden turnabout of Anne’s fortunes and fall, “as it might have looked from Thomas Cromwell’s point of view.”

***From Season One, Episode Two of the excellent BBC series, with Claire Foy as the archetypally scheming Anne that Mantel depicts in the novel, and Mark Rylance as the ever-oblique Cromwell:

The imaginative fiction of “Cromwell’s point of view” is both the novel’s greatest achievement and a handy rationale for playing very loose with the facts. As in Wolf Hall, Mantel is a literary wizard. There is something magical and mysterious in the way she captures the precarious yet oddly cozy world of the Tudor court as experienced by Cromwell. But channeled by Mantel, the details of Anne’s fall are quite different from what most historians now believe—namely, that Cromwell (for his own reasons) played the leading hand in cooking up the ruthless plot that cost Anne her life, along with that of five others, including her brother. Mantel’s Cromwell is less a master strategist than the happy recipient of some well-timed gossip, which he exploits, quieting his own “unwelcome” knowledge of Anne’s innocence by reminding himself that she is the kind of woman who could “commit any sin or crime.”

”What is the nature of the border between truth and lies?” Cromwell muses. “It is permeable and blurred because it is planted thick with rumour, confabulation, misunderstanding and twisted tales.” In Bring Up the Bodies, Mantel brilliantly recreates that permeable and blurred experience (even Anne’s guilt or innocence remains undecided), which is what makes her fiction remarkable. The 16th-century world she creates is somehow both completely familiar, and utterly strange. It’s a masterpiece of a painting. Yet it is as blurred with regard to the truth as the false rumors that swirled around Anne’s sexual behavior.

Should we care?

Our answer seems to be: It all depends.

Showtime’s The Tudors, which despite its own inventions is arguably more faithful to historical detail than any previous film version, had critics and historians frothing at the mouth. “Perfectly preposterous”; “A Wikipedia entry with boobs,” declared the British media critics. David Starkey, one of the Grand Deans of Tudor history (and a self-confessed “all-purpose media tart”), called the series “gratuitously awful.”

Michael Hirst, the creator and writer of The Tudors, acknowledged in an interview with me that the first season didn’t do justice to Anne’s character and that “we probably had too much sex in the beginning” (a bit of an understatement). But the series is hardly “dumbed down,” as some critics objected. And as Hirst pointed out, The Tudors got slammed for its gaps and inventions, while Wolf Hall got nothing but praise, despite its liberties with history. Wolf Hall, Hirst said, not without some justice, is “complete fiction. But nobody says that. They all say: ‘What a wonderful book, what insights it brings to the Tudors.’ Isn’t that bizarre?”

It’s not bizarre, but it does invite reflection on the shifting standards we apply to historical representations. Some depictions—for example, Alexander Korda’s film The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933)—get away with nonsense simply because they were created long enough ago that they are viewed as cultural artifacts. Others give offense because they are considered “pop” rather than “literary,” and vice versa.

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I loved Wolf Hall but I have to wonder how readers not immersed in Tudor history kept all those Thomases straight—Boleyn, Cromwell, Cranmer, More, Wolsey. ... The novel is a dense, detailed, challenging work; perhaps critics were afraid to question its fidelity to history because, like students in a high-theory college course, they were afraid of displaying their ignorance.

What is seen as objectionable often depends on what you care about. The historian Retha Warnicke “shuddered” at Hirst’s merging of Henry’s two sisters into one character. I, on the other hand, was most offended when, in the third episode, Francis I’s sister, Marguerite de Navarre—author, intellectual light of the French court, and a deep believer in platonic love between men and women—appears as a visitor to the English court, bosom spilling out of her dress, casting hot glances across the dining hall at Henry as both bite into their roasted thighs and wings, Tom Jones fashion. Later that night, two guards stoically keep watch while Henry and Marguerite grunt and moan behind his bedroom door. Most viewers would not have realized that a distinguished historical figure—often called “the mother of the Renaissance"—was being turned into a trollop for the sake of ratings. But for those who are devoted to the history of women, it seemed not merely gratuitous but nasty.

Television and movies, because they carry the illusion of verisimilitude, are more likely to be criticized for historical inaccuracy than novels, no matter how often their creators insist that they are not meant to be entirely factual. If, however, they comport themselves with enough dignity—like the 1970 BBC production of The Six Wives of Henry VIII—they are off the hook. The inventions of more recent productions are apt to be not only sexually sleazier but more epistemologically seductive. In our media-dominated, digitally enhanced (and now, AI generated) era, people are arguably being culturally trained to have greater difficulty distinguishing between fact and fiction. If the created reality is vivid and convincing enough (whether a flawless, computer-generated complexion, an AI video of animals doing impossible things, or a spin on events), it carries authority; that’s the way advertisers and politicians want it. The movies, which are often extremely attentive to historical details, creating a highly realistic texture for the scaffolding surrounding the actions of the characters, make it even harder for audiences to draw the line.

Thanks to The Other Boleyn Girl, my students came to class convinced that Anne Boleyn “stole” Henry from her virtuous sister, Mary (in fact, the Mary/Henry affair was over by the time Anne entered the picture), and proposed sex with her brother, George, in order to conceive a child (a charge to which only one historian that I know of gives any credence). Oh, and another trifle noted by the critic Jonathan Jones—the movie “manages to virtually edit out a rather large historical fact: the Reformation.”

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People, however, were being snookered by the novel The Other Boleyn Girl long before it became a movie, in no small part because its author, Philippa Gregory (who also wrote the screenplay with Peter Morgan), describes herself as a historian (in fact, her degree is in 18th-century literature), and claims she applies “very strict rules of accuracy” to her novels. What does she supply as a novelist? Only “the bits that we don’t know” and “feelings.” Fine, but Gregory also defends the (often preposterous) “bits” as “historical probability.”

An earlier generation of historical novelists, less jaded than we are about the dangers of mixing fact and fiction, were often careful to point out exactly what was invented in their books. Some contemporary writers believe we should return to that practice. Margaret George told me she worries that we are “losing our collective sense of what really happened.” Mantel doesn’t go that far, but she aptly described Wolf Hall to me not as “history” but “part of a chain of literary representation. My Cromwell shakes hands with the Cromwell of the Book of Martyrs, and with the trickster Cromwell of the truly awful but funny Elizabethan play about him. I am conscious of all his later, if fugitive, incarnations in fiction and drama. I am conscious on every page of hard choices to be made, and I make sure I never believe my own story.”

But even Mantel sometimes does just that. In Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, it’s not just her Cromwell who “shakes hands” with previous depictions, but her Anne as well. Her cold, feral Anne is clearly a rejoinder to the more sympathetic portraits of other generations, and possibly to Anne’s current standing as something of a protofeminist. But, like Gregory, Mantel can’t seem to resist calling on history to justify her narrative choices. In both novels, for example, she excludes some key historical material that, coincidentally, might cause readers to question (her) Cromwell’s view of Anne as an unfeeling “strategist"—not least, Anne’s eloquent speech at her trial and then the one on the scaffold. In her author’s note, Mantel says the speeches “should be read with skepticism.” Odd, not only because there are multiple corroborating reports of both, but also because Mantel has just told readers that she claims no historical “authority” for her version of things. It’s just an “offering,” she writes.

But Mantel knew, too, as she told me, that “fiction is commonly more persuasive than history texts,” and some of her narrative choices do seem to be making a covert, nonliterary defense of Cromwell, rather than an imaginative recreation of his experience. For example, it’s a matter of historical record that Anne’s longtime ally Thomas Cranmer, shocked by Anne’s arrests, sat down to write a letter to Henry expressing his amazement at the charges against her. His writing was interrupted, however (as Cranmer relates when he resumes), by a visit from Cromwell and his cronies. They apparently helped him “change his mind” about Anne’s guilt, for the letter ends very differently than it begins, with poor Cranmer, clearly quaking in his boots, acknowledging that she must be guilty. Mantel chooses not to tell us about the interruption; the detail would have made Cromwell seem more like a thug. That’s her prerogative as a novelist. But by the same token, it’s that prerogative, not concerns about historical accuracy, that readers should understand as the reason for excluding Anne’s speeches as well.

I love fiction, and believe it can put us in touch with truths that no history text can attain. But when the work of imagination is presented as something other than that—when a novel or film justifies highly inventive, provocative choices by invoking history—we’ve lost whatever compass we have left (and it’s gotten pretty fragile) for sorting out fiction from fact.

In her interview with me, Mantel astutely observed that “all historical fiction is really contemporary fiction; you write out of your own time.” I couldn’t agree more. Her morally ambiguous, watchful Cromwell is a man for our cynical season, and so is her greedy, narcissistic Anne. Let’s not imagine, however, that just because they belong to literature rather than pop culture, they are more historically accurate than the Anne and Cromwell of Thousand Days or The Tudors.

From My Website, A Gallery of Representations of Anne:

Some Recent Fictional Annes (Can you identify all three?)

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You’ll find other stacks of interest to Tudorphiles under the “Anne Boleyn Special” tab on the BordoLines homepage.

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https://bordocrossings.com/book/the-creation-of-anne-boleyn/.

Before you read any more, a little quiz.

How many of the “facts” in the following image from “Interesting-fact.com” are true?

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The answer to my quiz: JUST ONE of these “interesting facts” is true.

Anne was indeed one of King Henry VIII’s six wives.

She did not have six fingers on one hand, let alone both. And no extra nipple. Those colorful details were supplied by Catholic propagandist Nicholas Sander, writing half a century after Anne’s death. Sander probably never saw Anne dressed, let alone naked (he was a small child when she was executed.) But he had an agenda. Anne had been an evangelical who criticized the abuses of the Catholic Church, promoted the English-language bible, and disputed the authority of priests and pope to interpret scripture for us. (Yes, a bit different from the current “evangelicals” who have made Donald Trump their God.) And Sander, who had been exiled by Anne’s daughter Elizabeth I, saw Anne’s body as the gateway that lured Henry VIII through the doors of heresy. In Schismatis Anglicani (The Rise and Growth of the Anglican Schism), he wrote that Anne, besides having slept with most of the French court, was actually the daughter of Henry VIII and Anne's own mother. He was so steamed up with anti-Anne animus that he saw no contradiction in claiming that her 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.

A more accurate picture is supplied by George Wyatt, grandson of one of Anne’s early admirers, the poet Thomas Wyatt. In 1623, George gave his nephew a manuscript that he had written some twenty-five years earlier, in which, drawing on the reports of relatives and friends who had actually 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.” 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.”

The projecting tooth and extra nipple (perhaps morphed from the “small moles”) have faded from the popular imagination, which—erasing Sanders’ contradiction between seductive temptress and Devil’s deformed handmaiden—has generally portayed Anne as a great beauty. But that sixth finger just won’t let go. By the 19th century, it had become a “fact” that even today many people remember as among the first things they learned about Anne. At the beginning of every talk I gave when I was doing a book tour for The Creation of Anne Boleyn, I asked audiences what they know about Anne Boleyn. Invariably, several members of the audience shouted out, “She had six fingers!” A girls’ magazine feature giving inspiration for girls to “love their bodies” presents Anne and her extra finger (and the extra nipple, too!) as a role model.At least one well-known portrait, once hanging in Ludlow Castle and now privately owned, prominently features Anne with six fingers on each hand, and 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. 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.

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. Anne was also not tried for witchcraft but for adultery, incest and treason. It’s true that Henry, eager to be rid of his second wife and carry on with Jane Seymour, claimed at one point that he had been bewitched by Anne. But that was a notion that, as in our own time, was freely bandied about in a very loose, metaphorical manner. It could mean simply “overcome beyond rationality by her charms” — as Eustache Chapuys (another architect of anti-Anne mythology) meant when he complained, in one of his many poisonous letters home, that the “accursed Lady has so enchanted and bewitched him that he will not dare to do anything against her will.”

The “Interesting Facts” turn out to be bits and pieces of misinformation, right down to that kitchen knife. Anne was not beheaded by a Home Shopping Network Special or even by the more usual axe, but by an extremely precise sword, brought from France by a skilled French executioner. It seems to be the only mercy Henry extended to Anne. On May 19, 1536, she became the first Queen in English history to be executed.  She died with many enemies, mostly Catholic, who described her as a scheming harpy, “goggle-eyed whore” and Lutheran heretic, who ensnared Henry with her French ways.

Although the “heretic” part has faded, the scheming, ambitious temptress mythology followed Anne through much of history. “Incredibly vain, ambitious, unscrupulous, coarse, fierce, and relentless." The description comes from Paul Friedman's 1884 biography. But fans of Philippa Gregory will find her reincarnated as the sister from hell of The Other Boleyn Girl. In David Starkey's 2004 Six Wives, she is a vicious, vengeful harpy who "hardened" Henry's heart and judgment and who "rejoiced" when her enemies were "hunted down." And most recently, she has slithered her way into the higher literary reaches of Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, where she appears as a predatory, anxious schemer with "a cold slick brain behind her hungry eyes.” Mantel’s Anne is described in various reviews as a “sharp-toothed vixen” (The Guardian)”vile and manipulative” (The Telegraph) and so “spitefully ambitious” that “one feels any king would be justified in beheading” her (The Morning Star.)  Manipulative. Calculating. Ambitious. Cold-hearted. A social climber who lured Henry into abandoning his faithful, devout wife of 15 years and would stop at nothing to become queen.  

Where exactly did Anne the skanky schemer come from? In essence, she is the creation of a many-centuries-long telephone game that turned politically motivated lies into inflammatory gossip and alchemized that gossip into "history." Ironically, that "history" then became the inspiration for fictions -- novels, movies, television shows -- which in turn have assumed the authority of fact for many readers.

The original architect of the prototype was one man: Eustace Chapuys, ambassador of Emperor Charles V at the court of Henry VIII from 1529 through the sixteen tumultuous years that followed. Chapuys was not a historian (a profession that actually didn't exist at the time.) His official job was to report court goings-on to Spain, and to skillfully adjudicate between Henry and Charles. But his personal mission was to protect Katherine of Aragon and the Catholic cause from the turmoil brought about by The King's Great Matter and -- as Chapuys saw it -- the suspiciously "Frenchified" slut who had inspired the divorce proceedings and everything awful that Henry did thereafter: Anne Boleyn.

Chapuys hated Anne with a venom that he didn't even try to disguise, disgustedly referring to her in his official communications as "the concubine" and "that whore" -- or, with polite disdain, "The Lady." Elizabeth was "the little bastard." Everything dishonorable in Henry's behavior, including his shabby treatment of Katherine’s daughter Mary (which actually persisted after Anne's execution), was the fault of Anne's "perverse and malicious nature," "the wickedness of this accursed woman." He was convinced -- and convinced many others at court -- that Anne was continually plotting to murder both Katherine and Mary (no evidence of either). And he even charged Anne with responsibility for spreading the heretical "scourge" of Lutheranism throughout England.  For Chapuys, this was equivalent to being pro-devil, as from “anti-papal” to “heretic” to “witch” was a short step.

Chapuys was hardly a credible witness to events. But Katherine's supporters did not ask for proof or logic, and Chapuys, spreading his tales around court and encouraging Katherine and Mary's suspicions of Anne, was able to generate an atmosphere of hostility toward Anne. Centuries later, his lengthy, gossipy letters became the prime source of all the early biographies of Henry and Anne. For narrative abhors a vacuum, and Chapuys was there to dress the slender skeleton of fact with juicy but unsubstantiated adornment. Passed from one generation to another, Chapuys' venomous portrait of Anne's character and her manipulation of Henry crept into later histories, biographies, novels, films, television, and what we might call "the popular imagination."

Later generations, as I chronicle in my book, would try to rehabilitate Anne's image -- often going way too far in the opposite direction and cloaking her with the mantle of Protestant Saint. But Chapuys' Anne is the one that, like Freddy from Nightmare on Elm Street, refuses to die. One might say that she is our default Anne. We stray away from her for a time, but then she pops up again.

And she almost always has a counterpart.

In Anne’s own time, it was Queen Katherine. While Anne was depicted by her enemies as too ambitious, too vocal, and too interfering in matters of state and religion, Katherine behaved like a “true” Queen and a virtuous woman. Unlike French-educated Anne, Katherine had been raised to be chaste, obedient, to speak up “only when it would be harmful to keep silent” and to “administer everything according to the will and command of her husband.” (Those are quotes from Vives, Education of a Christian Woman, written in 1523 for Katherine’s daughter Mary.) In reality, Katherine was quite a powerhouse—and certainly not without ambition. In pro-Catholic mythology, however, she was likened to the Virgin Mary.

More recently, Anne appears as the selfish, treacherous sister in Philippa Gregory’s The Other Boleyn Girl, in which she poaches Henry from her generous, tenderhearted sister Mary and proceeds to tyrannize her (and everyone around her), barking out orders, plotting deaths, appropriating her sister’s child, and—when she miscarries her final pregnancy with Henry—coercing her brother George to have sex with her. Neither “Sleeping Beauty” nor “Cinderella” strike a more clean-cut division between the good and the wicked woman, with Anne playing the role of the wicked witch and Mary the long-suffering, virtuous heroine. And as in any other fairy tale, the good are ultimately rewarded and the evil are punished.  Anne, having gone to “the gates of hell” with her brother in order to get pregnant, miscarries a deformed child (an idea that Gregory picked up from Retha Warnicke’s 1989 biography), is accused of witchcraft, and goes to the scaffold (in far less dignified fashion than history records) while Mary, with Elizabeth in her arms, retires to a bucolic life with husband and children.

It got even more extreme when the book was made into a movie. The screenplay, written by Gregory and Peter Morgan (The Queen, The Last King of Scotland, Frost/Nixon), contributed fresh inventions to the story.  The newly added fantasies/fictions included a gratuitous (and utterly out-of-character) rape of Anne by Henry, Mary begging Henry for a last-minute pardon for Anne, and a heroic capture of Elizabeth by Mary, who strides into court after Anne’s execution, grabs her niece, and—with the whole court watching and not lifting a finger—leaves the palace with the future queen in her arms. None of it happened. (As Gina Carbone puts it gently in her review, “Let’s just say you shouldn’t watch this and base any Jeopardy answers on it.”) But when I taught courses on the Tudors, I had to spend weeks de-programming students who insisted that everything in the book and movie was based on fact (disinformation that Gregory herself promoted.)

The Madonna/Whore duality doesn’t give up easily.

It’s a favorite of fiction and film.

And it manages to creep into mass media representations of real people too—especially when, as in the paradigm case of Anne/Katherine, the sexualized schemer is depicted as trying to steal the man away from the virtuous wife/girlfriend.

Are you ready for a big leap?

When I first announced on Facebook that I was going to be writing a stack with the title “Anne Boleyn and Stormy Daniels: The Revenge of the Bad Girls,” fans of Anne Boleyn were not happy with me. “What?” “Huh?” “No comparison!” But as those of you who are familiar with my previous work know, I hardly ever write about real people, but cultural representations. In The Creation of Anne Boleyn I traced the history of those representations from Chapuys’s letters to Wolf Hall.. In The Destruction of Hillary Clinton, I “deconstructed” the image of Hillary that had been built up from a potent combination of Right Wing strategizing, gendered double-standards, “progressive” campaigns, and—most of all—mass media malpractice. Yes, I said malpractice. And they’re still at it, oblivious (it seems) to the damage they are doing.

So, for example, after Michael Cohen’s cross-examination on Thursday, after a repetitious, boring morning, all the commentators were delighted to finally have a “stunning moment” to report. And report. And report. And chew over how “severely damaging” it was. They had trouble containing their excitement. (I’ve italicized and bolded to make this point clear.)

CNN Live Event/Special

Soon: Trump Defense Resumes Cross-Examination Of Michael Cohen; Stunning Moment With Michael Cohen In Trump Hush Money Trial. Aired 1:30-2p ET

Aired May 16, 2024 - 13:30   ET

ANDERSON COOPER, CNN HOST: This one, Todd Blanche clearly saved this to right before the lunch break. [At first it seemed]…you know, like a ridiculous story, some 14-year-old is sending him nasty text messages and he's going to call Keith Schiller about it. And then you realize, you look at -- he showed the phone logs, that the prosecutor it had shown, and it's the phone call that -- that Michael Cohen had previously talked about.

I think it is severely damaging to Michael Cohen's testimony.

Kara, you are there. What did you think?
We were sitting -- I was sitting in the opposite aisle. So I haven't been able to talk to you. But I found it just so exciting. It was - whatever -- whoever you believe, whatever side, it was just a remarkable moment in court.

KARA SCANNELL, CNN CORRESPONDENT: It truly was. Because it was really just kind of this building crescendo with more of that more mundane questioning of just trying to see if Cohen did lie about multiple things, including whether he wanted a pardon or whether he was accepting responsibility for his guilty plea.

But then it built to that moment where Todd Blanche methodically went through the phone calls, the text messages. And as you were saying, kind of put Michael Cohen in the box and then shut the lid.

Because it was -- and Blanche added to it by being himself more theatrical about it. He's pacing, he's rubbing his head, he's swailling his arms. His voice is rising as he is being incredulous.
Saying to Cohen, are you -- do really expect me to believe that in that one-minute, 36-second phone call you talk to Keith Schiller about the harassing text messages and phone calls, and also to Donald Trump about Stormy Daniels where you told him it was resolved… And Cohen, while he maintained his composure, he certainly didn't look like he had a lot of confidence in his answers there. And then he just built and built and built by showing those text messages, showing the call logs.

And then, at the end, where he left the jury with it after that big moment, he then said, you know, so I don't want what you think he remember. I want -- the jury needs to know what you know and what you definitely remember.

And then he left it hanging in the air, did -- was this true for all of the phone calls that Cohen recalled in 2016?

…..

We're going to take a short break, really just a remarkable close of this session in court.

After a full day and a half of this we finally got more judicious analysis of that “stunning moment” (that involved one phone call out of several in which Cohen discussed the upcoming payment to Stormy and that the prosecution is likely to “clean up” with ease in a redirect or a closing.) But of course, by then, most viewers had been led to believe that Michael Cohen’s credibility was “severely damaged”—just because the defense had gotten loud and woken everyone up.

Because I was simultaneously thinking about what I was doing for my next stack on Anne Boleyn (this is Anne Boleyn month here on BordoLines) and watching the trial, I couldn’t help but notice how the good girl/bad girl duality was playing out in representations of Hope Hicks and Stormy Daniels. Hicks: the devoted “girl Friday” who didn’t enjoy publicity (I don’t think I’d even heard her voice once during her time with the Trump administration), who announced to the courtroom how nervous she was, and whose big moment for the media was when she broke down in tears when asked about her relationship with the Trump family.

And then there was Stormy, whose name had been constantly prefaced by “porn star” (earlier headlines often didn’t even include her name) and who had to be cautioned not to provide any “salacious” details about her night with Trump. (The mass media, apparently, only knows has that one word—“salacious”—in its vocabulary when talking about Stormy’s testimony, and couldn’t stop using it, even about details that were more humiliating to Trump than sexually steamy. Silk pajamas? Boxer shorts? A spanking with a magazine. Salacious? Really?)

Not just the defense but the prosecution was oh-so-gentle with Hicks, even as she waffled and alluded vaguely to being “concerned” about the Access Hollywood tape: “It’s hard to describe. It’s hard to describe. It was definitely concerning.” Uh, can you be more explicit? But Hope was “vulnerable” and prosecutors were careful not to “disrupt her testimony without coming off as too aggressive and alienating sympathetic jurors.”

The defense showed no such concern for the “porn star.” Necheles came right at her; virtually every question was not just to throw doubt on Daniel’s account, but to impugn her character: “That motivates you a lot in life, making more money, right?“ “You despise Trump, and you made fun of how he looks, right?” “You’re making this up as you sit there, right?” “You were looking to extort money from President Trump, right?”

Necheles believed she could come at Stormy hard because, in direct contrast to the presumption that the Jury would have sympathy for “publicity-shy”, unblemished Hope Hicks, she expected the jury to have little concern—perhaps even to enjoy—watching her take down a woman already dirtied in their eyes by her “salacious” occupation.

Personally, Stormy won me over by her courage (if you doubt that it took guts to stand up against Trump, read her book—or just consider the toadying Republican Party), her smarts (again, check out her book) and sense of humor (“If that story was untrue, I would have written it to be a lot better.” Daniels told Necheles when accused that she made up the affair), and her love of horses (personal bias.) Hope Hicks? For me, her defining moment was not when she cried but her email recommendation, when sent a transcript of the Access Hollywood tape, to “deny, deny, deny.” Wonder why the media didn’t give it the same headline attention that they gave her tears? Much has been made of her “loyalty” to Trump; less of what she did to protect him. She’s always been that well-groomed, virtually blank presence at his side. “Deny, deny, deny” reveals she wasn’t quite the silently obedient “girl Friday” she’s been portrayed as.

The good girl/bad girl dualities are always fictions that rarely remain constant. Anne Boleyn has shape-shifted numerous times throughout the centuries. When Elizabeth came to the throne, Anne became for many Protestants the idealized, martyred heroine of the Reformation; for the Romantics, particularly in painting, she was depicted as the sorrowful, hapless victim of a king's tyranny. And when historical fiction became popular, authors won our sympathy by giving Anne an innocent adolescence, ruined by her scheming relatives. Twentieth and twenty-first century fiction and histories, both of Anne and of Katherine, have tried to reverse some of the old stereotypes. (Please do read my book if you’re interested in Anne’s cultural history.)

It didn’t take centuries for followers of the “hush money” trial to protest Necheles’ harsh, “slut-shaming” treatment of Stormy Daniels, who has legions of defenders on social media, many of whom regard her as a heroine. Especially since this will be the only verdict we get before the election—the other trials having been stalled and sabotaged in various ways—if Trump is judged guilty, we will certainly have a lot to thank her for. So far, Trump, like Henry, has enjoyed an unimpeded tyranny over our system of justice. If Stormy pulls him down off his throne Anne will be smiling.

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May 19, 1536: Anne Boleyn, convicted of treason, adultery, and incest, became the first Queen in English history to be executed.  She died with many enemies, mostly Catholic, who described her as a scheming harpy, “goggle-eyed whore” and Lutheran heretic, who ensnared Henry with her French ways. Chief among them was Eustache Chapuys, imperial ambassador to Spain, who viewed Anne as a scheming non-royal interloper who destroyed all that was good about Henry VIII, plotted to poison Katherine and Mary, and simply refused to stay “in her place.”

According to this old but amazingly enduring view, which has become what I call “our default Anne,” Anne used her sexuality to lure Henry from his devout first wife, interfered in matters of religion and politics, was demanding, bossy, and unwilling to tolerate what good wives were supposed to endure in silence—most famously, Henry’s straying.  Too ambitious, too vocal, and therefore not a proper queen. Not like Katherine, who had been raised to be chaste, obedient, to speak up “only when it would be harmful to keep silent” and to “administer everything according to the will and command of her husband.” (Those are quotes from Vives, Education of a Christian Woman, written in 1523 for Katherine’s daughter Mary.)

This isn’t the place to sort out myth from reality here, or to detail the complexities of Anne’s fall.  (See my book, The Creation of Anne Boleyn, for that.) Suffice to say that when her enemies finally got their way and had her mortal body silenced, it backfired on them and Henry in a big way in terms of her enduring cultural prominence. Even before her execution, Henry, determined to start life afresh with a new, more obedient consort, had been busy at work attempting to erase Anne’s life from the recorded legacy of his reign.  He got rid of her portraits.  He apparently destroyed her letters. He even had workmen remove the entwined H’s and A’s strewn throughout the walls and ceilings of the Great Hall at Hampton Court.

He missed several. More significantly, he failed utterly in the attempt to make Anne disappear.  She is undoubtedly his most famous wife. 

Here are a few highlights from her vibrant and varied cultural afterlife:

After Anne’s daughter Elizabeth ascends to the throne in 1558, Protestant defenders begin to emerge from the closet.  In their eyes, Anne Boleyn is the mother of the Reformation, a “most virtuous and noble lady” who helped bring true religion to England.

Then, in 1585, pro-Catholic Nicholas Sander, exiled by Elizabeth, writes that not only did Anne sleep with half the French court and her father’s chaplain, but she is actually Henry’s daughter, by her own mother.  She is also grossly deformed, with a projecting tooth, large growth on her neck, and six fingers on one hand.  It’s a myth—Anne had an extra nail, not an extra finger—but most people still believe it’s true.

In 1682, John Banks (following the “Secret History” of Madame D’Aulnoy, famous French writer of fairy-tales) and others cast a new narrative of love and betrayal and create a new dramatic persona: the “she-heroine.” Ingredients: clever, virtuous girl, wicked king, scheming “other woman,” and tragic ending.  The soap opera begins.

Between 1700-1900, opinion about Anne begins to get divided along gender lines. Is she a Fallen Woman or Scheming Adventuress? The Strickland sisters see Anne as a cautionary tale, while Anthony Froude and other male historians view her as a “foolish and bad woman” who corrupted Henry.  The male historians have nothing but scorn for the “sentimental” “tiddle-tattle” of the women writers—conveniently overlooking the fact that their own research relies largely on the gossipy letters of Eustace Chapuys, imperial ambassador to Spain! (And Katherine’s dear friend).  While the writers battle it out, romantic painters have the last word in the popular imagination. Anne—often now depicted as blonde and rather plump—is shown swooning, weeping, and stoicly meeting an unjust end.

1912-1939: The Victorians had mangled the date of Elizabeth’s birth to avoid confronting the fact that Anne and Henry had slept together before they were married.   The birth of the historical romance makes their premarital sex mandatory. And the fictional juice begins to flow…and flow…and flow.  Love. Longing. Loathing. Lust. By the time she is published in paperback (Francis Hacket’s Queen Anne Boleyn) the story has become the stuff of the back-cover salespitch: “She conquered the heart of a king—and lost her life for her love.”

1969: Anne of the Thousand Days (film): In an interview with me, Genevieve Bujold told me “Anne is mine.” Indeed.  As the first truly iconic Anne, Bujold proudly plunges off the cliff decades before “Thelma and Louise.”  We were charmed by her elfin beauty, we cheered when she told Henry off in the tower (never happened, but who cares?), and yes, “Elizabeth Shall Be Queen!” 

2002: Philippa Gregory’s “The Other Boleyn Girl”: Clearly in touch with the times, Gregory mangles history to produce the nastiest Anne ever, and convinces a new generation, befuddled by the postmodern blurring of fiction and fact, that she really did sleep with her brother.  Sander is chortling, historians are grimacing, and Gregory is smiling all the way to the best-seller list.

2007: Showtime’s “The Tudors”:  Jonathan Rhys-Meyers refused to wear a fat suit, the Showtime execs demanded hot sex in every episode, and Michael Hirst (creator and writer of the series) tried to inject a bit of the Reformation Crisis in between the scenes of Henry romping in bed.  Only Natalie Dormer, barely known at the time, stood up for Anne, refusing to play her as a blonde and insisting that Hirst make her less slutty, smarter, and stronger in the second season.  For historians, the changes may have seemed slight.  But teenage and twenty-something viewers were enraptured.  “She was a modern day girl in the wrong time period,” they declared, constructing a new, “third-wave” feminist icon out of Dormer’s portrayal: ambitious, intelligent, flirtatious and perhaps most important to her fans, “hugely complicated and not easy to dismiss.”

 15 years ago, when I was talking to prospective editors about my book, one—from a major press—said skeptically “Do you really think there’s still interest in Anne Boleyn?” Luckily for me, she was a bit out of touch.  With “The Tudors” came the websites…and the tee-shirts, mugs, and jewelry…and the facebook pages…and a whole new stream of bios, novels, films, and plays.1

My point: Anne, a wife whom Henry desperately wanted to erase, is in fact his most represented consort.  Post-structuralist theorists would say that this makes sense: what we try to bury or make marginal, by its very suppression, keeps making itself known—and with the aid of modern media, deployed in a multiplicity of ways.  Henry could destroy the symbols that HE had created, but he couldn’t prevent the unfolding of a cultural afterlife that so far shows no signs of ending.  Ironically, Anne—who wasn’t born to be royal—wound up having the immortal body of royalty, as a cultural creation.

July 22, 2013.  Three months earlier, The Creation of Anne Boleyn had been published, and my book’s Facebook page had been filled for weeks with postings about the upcoming birth of the royal baby. The world was entranced with the latest unfolding of the fairy tale.  I was swept up, too, but also growing annoyed at what seemed to be the eclipse of that other princess—the one who wasn’t quite so skilled at behaving as Queen consorts-to-be are supposed to—and getting tired of the endless coverage of Princess Kate’s “royal bump.”

Princess Kate seemed so different from Diana “whose human awkwardness and emotional incontinence showed in her every gesture.” (Hillary Mantel) Her biographer Rosalind Coward, who does know her better than most, wrote that she presents “no immediate danger of going off like a loose canon…Unlike Diana, this is a woman well-briefed and carefully supervised.” When the queen embarked on a series of Diamond Jubilee tours of Britain’s provinces, she even “took with her the newly minted duchess as if to finally lay to rest Diana’s ghost.”

It was irritating. Didn’t anyone remember that there was another Princess for whom the fairytale didn’t end so happily? Why isn’t there any mention of the royal bump’s deceased grandmother? Have we so easily replaced one glamorous mama-goddess with another? Annoyed, on the day George was born I posted this photograph of Diana and her sons, with the caption “Congratulations, Grandma.”  It was purely for my own satisfaction; I didn’t expect more than a few dozen “likes.”

Instead, the post went viral, and the comments extolling Diana poured in by the thousands.

And it struck me that this picture was every bit as much an icon as Holbein’s Henry VIII or Elizabeth I’s Gloriana.  And I was put in mind, too, of the queen about whom I’d just written a book.

Diana and Anne seem on the surface to have little in common, with Diana now venerated and Anne constantly caricatured as a nasty, narcissistic schemer. But scratch the surface of the stereotypes and their sisterhood appears. Like Anne, Diana had challenged the power and authority of the monarchy to decide what her rightful role as the future King’s wife should be. Diana, too, had been viewed by her enemies as a bossy, overly ambitious, non-royal interloper who refused to behave as she should and was unwilling to tolerate the infidelity that good wives were supposed to endure in silence. Instead of waving and smiling while her fairy tale fell apart, Diana spoke up, drolly remarking, in her famous Panorama interview with Martin Bashir, that her marriage was “a bit crowded” as there were “three of us in it.”

The initial price she paid for her failure to be silent was to offend a powerful network of country club and court who, for a time, seemed in control of the situation: “The mantra,” wrote one of Diana’s biographers, “was that Diana was a scheming girl who had set her cap at Charles and got him…[But] she [turned out to be] impossible to live with,” ferociously possessive, and “cruel and domineering” both to her staff and Prince Charles. Sound familiar to Anne Boleyn aficionados?

But Diana, unlike Anne, had weapons to fight back with, chief among them a modern media machine capable of promoting her personal glamour and warmth, as well as her caring, maternal activities. People particularly cheered her refusal to accept that being emotional did not go along with being royal. “I lead from the heart, not the head,” she told Bashir. But that was just fine as far as Diana was concerned, for she wanted to reign not officially but as a Queen of Hearts, giving affection and helping others.  Quite an interesting reversal of the age-old notion, which has often been used to contrast Mary Queen of Scots and Elizabeth I, that rulers must choose in favor of intellect over love, male mind over female body. It all depended on what sort of throne you wished to sit upon, Diana suggested.

With her death, however, the worship of her as “Queen of Hearts” exposed that even the official throne was in need of more “heart” when the Queen, at first, stayed away from the mourning crowds and refused to fly the royal flag for Diana.  “Show us there’s a heart at the house of Windsor” the headlines blasted, a painful moment for Elizabeth and one of the themes of Stephen Frears The Queen, which shows Elizabeth II as utterly baffled by the seeming change in the rules of the game.  She’s done what she thought was expected of her, only to find that she was hated for her coldness and formality.  She confides in Tony Blair:

“Ever since Diana people want glamour and tears…the grand performance…and I’m not very good at that.  I prefer to keep my feelings to myself…foolishly I believed that’s what people wanted from their Queen. Not to make a fuss nor wear one’s heart on one’s sleeve, duty first…self second.  It’s how I was brought up, it’s all I’ve ever known.”

Diana, of course—and again like Anne Boleyn—was not brought up to be a royal. She didn’t even know much royal history, and fantasized about marrying prince Charles, “the only man,” she said, “who couldn’t divorce me.” “It could be quite fun,” she said to a friend.  It would be like Anne Boleyn or Guinevere.” Her apparently more educated friend replied, “I bloody hope not!” For good and for bad, Diana’s marriage did turn out to be more like Anne’s marriage than she would have wished had she known her history. Although Charles was never passionately in love with Diana as Henry (apparently) was with Anne at the beginning, Charles was no less surprised than Henry to find that his wife actually expected fidelity from him—and no less outraged when she called him out on his behavior.  Like Henry, he was rattled by Diana’s unwillingness to recede into the background.  Like Henry, he expected that once she was out of the picture, not in death but in divorce, it would all go back to normal.

Has it? Or has Diana, like Anne, become “more royal than the family she joined”?

“It had nothing to do with family trees.  Something in her personality, her receptivity, fitted her to be the carrier of myth.” (Hillary Mantel)……2

During the episode of “The Tudors” in which Anne Boleyn is executed, scenes of her suffering in the Tower are punctuated with the image of Henry, gazing contemplatively at two beautiful swans nuzzling in the pond outside the palace.  His mood and thoughts are left deliberately ambiguous; perhaps, the viewer imagines, he is thinking back over his love for Anne and the life they shared together, perhaps he is having regrets, feeling sorrow for the beauty that is about to be lost? 

No.  After the execution scene, we are immediately taken to the King at his table, looking forward to his breakfast, which is being brought to him in a large gilt tureen on a silver platter.  The lid is lifted, and the servants and nobles surrounding Henry gasp and applaud in delight.  There on the platter is one of the swans, roasted and decorated with its own beautiful wings, posed as gracefully as if it were still swimming in a lake.  Henry, referencing Charles Laughton’s famous eating scene but giving Henry’s voraciousness a menace missing from Laughton’s comic depiction, tears off a wing, plunges his hand into the body of the swan, and begins eating, oblivious to the greasy drool spilling from his mouth.

Had Henry become the monster depicted in this scene?

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The execution of a queen was unprecedented, extreme and shocking, even to Anne’s enemies. Henry had invested six years of time, energy, intellect, money, and blood in making the marriage happen. They were married less than three years. There is no evidence of an unbridgeable emotional estrangement between them. His earlier love letters to her, admittedly written in the bloom of fresh passion, portray a solicitous, tender suitor whom it is impossible to imagine coldly ordering a wife’s death. There are plenty of explanations for Henry’s desire for a new marriage–Anne’s failure to provide a male heir, Jane Seymour, waiting in the wings, fresh and fertile, Henry’s recognition that Anne was creating problems with his image. In the end, however, it still takes a leap of incomprehension to find any of them sufficient to explain Henry’s willingness—in fact, seeming eagerness—to sign the order for Anne’s execution.  We are still left asking ourselves: How could he do it?  What follows are six different “answers,” not all of them incompatible with each other, but all offering a slightly (and in one case radically) different “take” on one of the most notorious death decrees in history:

1. Suzannah Lipscomb:  After a year of physical and emotional disasters, the wound to Henry’s masculine honor and the need to restore patriarchal authority was all-important:

“Two contemporary comments provide a clue [to Henry’s behavior]. Cranmer, in his letter to the king concerning his disbelief at Anne’s guilt, wrote that he could not ‘deny but your grace hath great causes…of lamentable heaviness; and also, that…your grace’s honour of every part is so highly touched’, before rushing on to undo these words by disingenuously assuring Henry, ‘if the reports of the Queen be true, they are only to her dishonor, not yours’. A similar sentiment was expressed by a European observer, the reformer Philipp Melancthon, when he wrote, ‘see how dreadfully this calamity will dishonor the King’. 

Honour, as we have seen, was chiefly a measure of one’s ability to conform to the ideals demanded of one’s gender. For a man, it meant exerting masculinity, imposing patriarchy, controlling the women in one’s household, maintaining a good reputation and demonstrating physical and sexual prowess. Chiefly, it meant controlling the morality of the women under his care and, specifically, their sexual morality. 

That henry had been unable to do this denoted two things: it was evidence of Henry’s inability as a man and as a monarch. Contemporary thought made a clear link between a man’s sexual potency and his wife’s fidelity – men who were cuckolded were those whose ‘lack of sexual dominance led their wives to adultery’. ‘To be a man’, writes Lyndal Roper, ‘was to have the power to take a woman.’ Anne’s very behavior, if assumed to be true, testified to the king’s lack of manliness, and as if this weren’t enough, Anne and Rochford’s ridicule of the king on this very matter drove the point home. 

It was not something that went unnoticed in the kingdom. Sir Nicholas Porter, the parson of Freshwater, was reported to have said in 1538, ‘Lo, while the King and his Council were busy to put down abbeys and pull away the right of Holy Church, he was made cuckold at home.’ There was also a strong connection in the popular mind betw4en impotency and old age – the image of ‘Old Adam’ whose feeble old body could not satisfy his vigorous young wife was a constant refrain in the ballads found in contemporary broadsides. 

There were huge repercussions if such a failure were found in a king. Early modern thinking linked the governance of a house with the governance of a realm; as John Dod and Robert Cleaver wrote in 1612, ‘it is impossible for a man to understand how to govern the commonwealth, that doth not know how to rule his own house’. Any woman’s adultery, but especially that of a queen, upset the social order and gender hierarchy upon which society was based. 

Cranmer was right the first time – Henry’s honour was ‘highly touched’ by Anne’s apparent adultery. This also explains why Henry felt the need to cavort himself with ladies and increase the pace of his relationship with Jane Seymour, marrying her so quickly. It wasn’t just, as Alesius later hypothesized, that he was ‘openly insulting’ Anne: in the light of Anne’s devastating assault on his masculinity, Henry did it to restore the patriarchal order and to prove his manhood.” (From 1536: The Year that Changed Henry VIII, p. 88-89)

Videos: (1) The Joust as a test of masculinity. (2) Henry slaps Anne when she gets “out of line.” 

 2. Alison Weir: Henry VIII, ready to believe anything about a woman he had come to see as a monster, found the charges against Anne entirely credible:

“From the time of Anne’s committal to the Tower, Henry VIII’s behavior was typical of a man confronted with appalling evidence of his wife’s infidelity, and whose masculine pride has been deeply wounded. He avoided parading his humiliation in public, and remained incommunicado until all was over. Henry was apparently ready to believe anything of Anne. 

He would shortly manifest the conviction that she was a monster not only of lechery but also of cruelty. The latter was, to him, probably entirely credible. She had hounded Wolsey night until death; repeatedly urged henry to send Katherine of Aragon and Mary, his own daughter, to the scaffold; been ruthless against her enemies. Five years earlier, rumor had placed her faction behind an attempt to poison John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, and out-spoken and upright opponent of the Boleyns; and only a couple of months ago it was bruited that Katherine of Aragon had been poisoned, and that Anne was the culprit. 

Now it appeared she had plotted to do away with the King himself, her own husband. That certainly gave Henry a jolt, and his imagination began to run riot. When his bastard son, the seventeen-year-old Henry FitzRoy, Duke of Richmond, came on the evening of May 2 to receive his father’s blessing before retiring for the night, “the King began to weep, saying that he and his sister {Lady Mary} were greatly bound to God for having escaped the hands of that accursed whore, who had determined to poison them. These tears were the only ones Henry is known to have shed in connection with Anne Boleyn’s fall, while his tirade betrayed his conviction that she was guilty of far worse than adultery, and the sharp-minded Chapuys picked upon this: “From these words, it would appear the King knows something about it.”

(From The Lady in the Tower, pgs. 150-151)

3. G. W. Bernard: Lancelot de Carles’ poetic account of remarks by the Duchess of Worcester, combined with Anne’s outrageously flirtatious behavior, strongly suggest that Anne was indeed guilty of at least one adultery:

“Also just possible, of course, is that everything we have considered was no more than a series of misunderstandings in response to ‘unguarded speech and gossip’, ‘a lot of smoke but precious little fire’. After Anne, in the Tower, told Kingston about Mark Smeaton, her mother rebuked her: ‘such desire as you have had to such tales has brought you to this’. It is just about possible that the countess of Worcester had herself read too much into what she thought she had seen, not just in the case of Anne’s brother, but of all she spoke of. It is also just about possible that Anne’s burblings in the Tower could be innocently explained away – but, crucially, that what henry learned was amply sufficient to make him, reluctantly but reasonably, conclude that, alas, it was all true and then seek furiously to deal with those who had wronged him. 

Was it that, although there was no evidence that Anne was guilty, enough had been said to make Henry understandably and sincerely believe that she was? Yet the countess of Worcester was in absolutely no doubt about Anne’s behavior – and she was in a very good position to know the truth. If what she said was wholly wrong, we should have to believe either that she deliberately invented the charges she brought against Anne or that she utterly mistook what Anne was, and was not, doing in her chamber. 

It is far more plausible that the countess was not totally wrong and that if, perhaps, she read too much into George Boleyn’s visits to his sister’s chamber, there was still a good deal of truth in what she declared about Anne’s behaviour. And so it remains my own hunch that Anne had indeed committed adultery with Norris, probably with Smeaton, possibly with Weston, and was then the victim of the most appalling bad luck when the countess of Worcester, one of her trusted ladies, contrived in a moment of irritation with her brother to trigger the devastating chain of events that led inexorably to Anne’s downfall.”

(From Anne Boleyn: Fatal Attractions, pgs. 191-192)

Videos: From The Other Boleyn Girl film, which depicts a sexually provocative Anne much like Bernard’s Anne.

(1) “With my thighs” from The Other Boleyn Girl.

(2) Anne propositions her brother

(3) Anne schemes to “steal” Henry

4. Michael Hirst (creator of The Tudors):  Anne’s failure to produce an heir was not just a blow to the security of the Tudor line but a sign that the hope that Henry had built his entire life around was based on an illusion- that he had spent years of his life, shed the blood of friends, and broken with the church of his childhood, only to be proved mistaken in the supposition that this was what God wanted of him:

“He had attacked the church on the basis of a love affair, largely.  But he felt sure of what he was doing at the time, and Anne had mistaken promised him a son. After she’d given him a daughter and had the miscarriages, it began to seem to him as though he’d gone horribly wrong.  He was plunged back into reality, which is messy and not perfect. And I think that as he confronted the huge seriousness of it, he began to think in weird ways, that she was a witch and so forth.  This of course, shows how juvenile he still was.  And he did have an absolutely ruthless streak which his father, too, had possessed.  But beyond that, he did suffer a severe psychological crisis, knowing he had been so deluded. He came out of that crisis a much worse person, a complete tyrant and monster, who killed off the best part of himself in the attempt to reconcile his psychological issues.”

(From a personal interview with Susan Bordo)

5. Kyra Kramer:  Henry was suffering from a genetic disorder that radically altered his mental state as he grew older, resulting in more and more erratic and irrational behavior.

“Who in their right mind would stalk a woman until she gave in and dated him, wait several years to marry her and be allowed to consummate the relationship, rip a country apart and declare his own daughter a bastard in order to keep his new bride, and then kill that same beloved woman just a few years after saying “I do”? No one, that’s who.

Well, no one in his or her right mind that is.

According to a theory put forth by Dr. Catrina Banks Whitley and myself, Henry VIII was not actually in his right mind when he had Anne Boleyn legally murdered. The theory postulates that Henry had a Kell positive blood type concurrent with McLeod syndrome, resulting in reproductive losses and an altered mental state in his forties.

McLeod syndrome can only be manifested in people, who are thus far always men, with a Kell positive blood type. (Before the medical specialists comment – yes, one can have K(K1) effecting pregnancies and the father still express McLeod syndrome because of variant Kell antigen expression. Usually the symptoms of McLeod syndrome begin to appear near the patient’s fortieth birthday and grow progressively worse over time. Those symptoms can include physical issues, such as muscle and nerve deterioration, facial tics, malformed blood cells, and damage of the internal organs like the liver and the heart. The disease is also often expressed by an erosion of mental stability, wherein the patient becomes more and more irrational and erratic.

There is a plethora of evidence to show how Henry’s personality and mental processes changed in the 1530s, which I have room to explicate more fully in my book, Blood Will Tell, but you’ll have to trust me on for now. The kinds of psychopathology exhibited by patients with McLeod syndrome include, but are not limited to, deterioration of memory and executive functions, paranoia, depression, socially inappropriate conduct, and can even get so bad that it mimics schizophrenia-like behaviors. In severe cases, “schizophrenia-like symptoms” of personality changes can be the “prominent initial clinical manifestation” of McLeod syndrome. This abrupt mental change would explain why Henry started his reign as a puissant prince but ended it as a pestilent putz.

Moreover, the timing fits McLeod syndrome like a glove. Henry turned forty in the summer of 1531, and shortly thereafter his treatment of Queen Katherina turned much harsher. For the first couple of years she was the only victim. By the time he was forty-four the King’s personality alterations were becoming clearer in the most disturbing ways. In spite of his enduring reputation for tyranny, he only started wantonly killing people who disagreed with him in 1535, the year he beheaded Thomas More. Before that, getting him to agree to an execution was like pulling teeth. Cardinal Wolsey had a devil of a time getting him to execute even the Duke of Buckingham, who was blatantly gunning for Henry’s throne.

(While most people remember 1536 as the watershed year for Henry’s new fondness for the axe, because that is the year he beheaded Anne Boleyn, he actually started his killing spree in 1535. Incidentally, the bloodbath began several months before he fell and was knocked unconscious during a tournament in January of 1536. That means that the blow to the head may have exacerbated his symptoms, but the alteration in his personality had already started more than a year before. )

Henry’s relationship with Anne Boleyn neatly straddles the manifestation of his mental symptoms. The King started pursuing Anne in 1525 (maybe as early as 1524) and beheaded her in 1536. Prior to his fortieth birthday he is clearly her besotted swain, yet he was still trying to please everyone and let Katherina down gently (good luck with that, bub). After his fortieth birthday he becomes increasingly cruel to Katherina, and then murderous to anyone who disagrees with him, and then turns abruptly and viciously on the woman he had loved so dearly.

Personally, I happen to agree with Walker, and think Anne’s death was not caused by her miscarriage in January of 1536, but rather because she told a courtier that he wished for “dead men’s shoes” in April. That statement could be constructed as imagining the death of the King, which was treason. Her enemies, under Cromwell’s management, pounced on her slip of the tongue and convinced Henry she was plotting his death. A little torture of Mark Smeaton and his confession of adultery — voila, she is a whore and Cromwell can conveniently rid himself of some of her supporters.

Henry, having become paranoid and irrational due to McLeod syndrome, was easy prey to manipulation by Anne’s foes. Once he had signed off on his wife’s beheading, his imagination ran wild. Soon the King had convinced himself that Anne had been plotting to poison his older children and that she had slept with more than one hundred men. Rational people do not suspect a woman under the constant lack of privacy Anne faced to have had sex with one hundred men.

The man who killed Anne Boleyn was clearly not the same kind and gentle knight of his youth, and he would grow steadily worse after her death. Nowadays, most people only remember the villainous brutality of the last fifteen years of his reign, and have very little idea of the gentle and intelligent man the King was until the 1530’s. I really hope that one day his remains can be exhumed for DNA analysis. If he did have McLeod syndrome, perhaps people will forgive him for the crimes he committed as a result of an uncontrollable mental illness. If nothing else, I hope the evidence I present in my book will at least encourage people to see Henry VIII as the complex monarch he was, rather than an unmitigated monster.”

(Based on the arguments of Blood Will Tell.)

Video: Some physiological theories about Henry:

6.  Susan Bordo:  Henry’s resilience, emotional balance, and temper may indeed have degenerated as he got older, possibly exacerbated by genetic factors as well as the challenging events of 1536, but he was always a dangerously capricious personality:

“Henry was always a man of many faces, a “baffling composite of shifting silhouettes” (Lacey Baldwin Smith) who could be good-natured, generous and charming one moment and dangerously cold as stone the next, highly emotional yet rigidly stubborn, a genuine searcher of his conscience for “God’s will” yet able to subordinate all moral scruples and guilt to solidifying his own authority or satisfying his own desires.  The combination of informal warmth and lethal self-interest meant that even the closest relationships with him were never on solid ground, always skating on thin ice.  

Thomas More, of all of Henry’s contemporaries, was most perceptive about the inherent danger of making too much of the King’s outward gestures of affection. He told Fisher that “the king has a way of making every man feel that he is enjoying his special favor.”  It may have been a compliment, but it was also a warning.  He told a young courtier—and this was in 1520, before any “crisis” had occurred in Henry’s reign—that having fun with the king was like “having fun with tamed lions—often it is harmless, but just as often there is the fear of harm.  Often he roars in rage for no known reason, and suddenly the roar becomes fatal.  The pleasure you get is not safe enough to relieve you of anxiety.  For you it is a great pleasure.  As for me, let my pleasure be less great—and safe” (Lion’s Court, p. 217).

But even More couldn’t remain safe.  He realized, as he told his son in law Roper, that even when he was favored by the King “more singularly” than any subject in the realm, “I have no cause to be proud thereof, for if my head could win him a castle in France, it should not fail to go.” (Ridley, 188)   In the end, Henry was just that cavalier with More’s life, although not over a castle in France. Henry had promised, years before, that he would always allow More to avoid any declarations or actions that went against his conscience.  But when Henry’s own supremacy was at issue, More’s conscience—and his head—proved to be easily dispensed with.  

On the day of More’s execution, Henry went hunting in Reading.  This was the way Henry dealt with all his executions of old friends and lovers: go hunting, have a party, be merry. Move on. He was shockingly capable of decisively and irrevocably turning off the switch of affection, love, tender feeling and shared memories, severing all ties, and refusing to look back.

In fact, those whom he loved the most—Wolsey, More, Anne, Cromwell–were most at risk.  Because he loved them, they had the most power to disappoint him—and for Henry, disappointment could never be “slight.”  All wounds to his authority, his manhood, his trust, were bloody gashes that he could only repair by annihilating (psychologically or literally) the one who inflicted the wound.  

This, perhaps, is what distinguishes Henry’s pattern from “ordinary” royal imperiousness.  Kings execute people.  Kings have grandiose ambitions.  Kings are threatened by challenges to their authority.  Kings can become drunk on power, and often do.   But Henry may be unique among famous authoritarian kings in that his close relationships only had two switches: on and off.  As Howard Brenton, author of the play Anne Boleyn, put it in an interview with me, “With Henry, you were either totally in or you were dead.  He would have someone close to him, he’d elevate them, and they’d be terrific and virtually run everything on his behalf, and then when something went wrong, or a wind came his way, he would turn 180 degrees against them and they would be out.  It happened to Wolsey, it happened to More, it happened to Anne, it happened to Cromwell.”  It almost happened to Mary, who so enraged Henry when she refused, even after Anne was dead, to take the oath recognizing her father as Supreme Head of the Church of England, that Cranmer , at the last minute, had to talk him out of ordering her execution (Ridley, 274).  Mary was Henry’s daughter.

And his will was capricious. The letters of ambassadors, even from the early years of his reign, describe sudden, explosive angers, “tears and tantrums.”  In 1535, the king’s fool almost lost his life over a joke about Anne Boleyn; a year later, Henry was weeping uncontrollably while hugging his illegitimate son, relieved that he was now safe from  “that accursed whore” who had slept with over a hundred men.  A hundred?  That would have meant a new man every ten days of her Queenship.  Yet it’s possible that Henry believed something near to this, for his emotional switch, for whatever reasons, had turned against her, and she was now as wholly evil in his eyes as she once was wholly virtuous.

Whatever the origins of Henry’s personality, his problems were vastly exacerbated by the fact that he was, after all, king.  As such, he was continually flattered and pampered, his every whim indulged, his grandiosity rarely challenged, his illusions carefully maintained.  All of this encouraged his sense of omnipotence, which in turn made it all the riskier for those around him to show anything less than absolute allegiance.  

In proving this, even obedience, ironically, put one at risk, for Henry wasn’t a fool; he knew those around him were afraid, and so never fully trusted anyone.  When he was young, he sought out people like More, and encouraged them to be honest with him, seeking some solid ground on which to base a relationship.  But it was a zero sum game; when More ran up against Henry’s need to be the center of the universe, More’s once-cherished independence of mind became worse than “nothing” in Henry’s “all or nothing” demands on relationships.

It’s hard to know exactly what threw the switch with Anne.  Her final miscarriage may have convinced him that God was not on the side of their relationship.  He may have believed in the charges of adultery—although his exaggerated estimates of her infidelities make me less rather than more likely to believe that; if he truly believed she had slept with five men, including her own brother, surely that would have been enough to “justify” his outrage without dragging half the men in court into her bed.  Or the humiliation of hearing that Anne gossiped about his lack of sexual performance may have been all that was needed.  

We will never know, and it really doesn’t matter.  It was sufficient, whatever it was, to shut off any currents of empathy, memory, attachment that Henry felt for Anne.  This is where “Anne of the Thousand Days” has it so wrong.  The play and movie both open with Henry tormented by the decision whether or not to order Anne’s execution.  In Maxwell Anderson’s play, which is written in verse, Henry muses:

“This is hard to dowhen you come to put pen to paper.You say to yourself:She must die.  And she must—If thing are to go as planned.Yes, if they are to go at all.If I am to ruleAnd keep my sanity and hold my England off the rocks…Go back to it, Henry, go back to it.Keep your mindOn this parchment you must sign.Dip the pen in the ink write your name…

It’s only that a woman you’ve held in your armsAnd longer for when she was away,And suffered with her—no, but she promised you an heir.Write it down—Write Henry Rex, and it’s done.And then the headsmanWill cry out suddenly, “Look, look there!’And point to the first flash of sunrise,And she’ll look,Not knowing what he means, and his sword will flashIn the flick of sun, through the little bones of her neckAs she looks away,And it will be done.It will be done.”

It’s romantic and moving, and beautifully written.  But it is not, I believe, the poetry of Henry’s reality.  In that reality, they handed him the parchment.  He dipped the pen in the ink.  He signed his name: Henry Rex.  And it was done.

Video: Of All the Henrys, Robert Shaw most perfectly captures the vicissitudes of Henry VIII—and the obedience of those around him (except, of course, for More, who is idealized in the film.)

A Man for all Seasons

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Based on material from The Creation of Anne Boleyn: A New Look of England’s Most Notorious Queen, available in a US edition or a UK edition. To learn more and to order from your favorite seller:

THE CREATION OF ANNE BOLEYN

Hillary Mantel’s sequel to Wolf Hall, entitled Bring Up the Bodies, had just been published when I posted this interview. She was not yet finished with the sequel when we corresponded; in fact, was at that point not planning a trilogy, but a long second volume. Her publishers convinced her, however, that her section on the fall of Anne Boleyn constituted a book on their own—hence, the decision to enlarge and publish that section as Bring up the Bodies.  I had promised Hilary not to post the interview until the sequel was published. Before now, it has never been published anywhere except on my personal website.

SB: We all know that any work of imagination has to go beyond the recorded facts.   But do you think that there is a point at which historical fiction can go too far?  What historical standards do you hold yourself to?

HM: First let me say I don’t want to defame other authors for their choices. I don’t want to prescribe for them or defend them.  I don’t think there’s a right way of creating historical fiction, but I think some ways are more honest than others. I am probably less comfortable about ‘making up’ than most authors. I never knowingly distort facts, and even if they’re difficult to explain or for the reader to grasp, I try to find a way round that doesn’t falsify or sell short the complexities of a topic.

I must see myself as part of a chain of literary representation. My Cromwell shakes hands with the Cromwell of the Book of Martyrs, and with the trickster Cromwell of the truly awful but funny Elizabethan play about him. I am conscious of all his later, if fugitive, incarnations in fiction and drama.

I am conscious on every page of hard choices to be made, and I make sure I never believe my own story. (Bring Up the Bodies) raises the whole question with the reader, hands it over if you like: points out the power of gossip once it gets going, the difficulty of separating rumour from facts, the difficulties of bearing witness and assessing evidence. I don’t talk about these problems in a narrative overview, I make them part of the plot. I don’t think AB was brought down by facts, but by the power of rumour. That’s a slippery and insubstantial thing to describe, and almost impossible for historians to tackle. By its nature, conspiracy is off the record. The important conversations probably leave no trace. I think this is why historians try again and again to disentangle the mystery of AB’s fall, without ever sounding entirely convincing. There’s always something that is left over, something unaccounted for,  a piece of territory that vanishes when you try to map it. I think this is where fiction operates best, and can possibly contribute to our understanding of the past. I can’t explain the events better than historians can, but I might be able to evoke what it was like to live through those days.

That’s the largest claim I will make for fiction.

SB: In an interview with me, Michael Hirst complained that while people were constantly criticizing “The Tudors” for its departures from historical record, “Wolf Hall” got nothing but praise for its almost entirely imaginative universe.  Care to comment on that?

HM: I think there’s a difference between the sort of making up I do and the sort the creators of ‘The Tudors’ went in for. They decide that fact is not always neat enough, and that fiction can improve it. They think, for example, it’s too complicated for the viewer if Henry has two sisters, so they roll them up into one. So then they have to invent an imaginary king for the composite to marry. And so we get further and further from anything resembling the record, because one falsification trips another. They decide they don’t need too many geographical noblemen — not Norfolk AND Suffolk: so they dispense with AB’s uncle, one of the unignorable figures of Henry’s reign; and that’s a really bad choice, not just historically but dramatically, because they miss all the fun of having a man who helps execute both his nieces.

Re Philippa Gregory: Retha Warnicke’s eccentric interpretation of Anne’s fall is a gift to novelists because it’s so sensational, but it’s very much a minority view. Through PG’s fiction, it’s gained traction. It’s through fiction that it’s become popular, though historians are mostly dismissive. I have to admit to some reservation about PG’s methods, not only because she relies heavily on one interpretation but because I have heard her claim that Mary Boleyn was an obscure figure until she rescued her: whereas of course you can’t read much about Henry’s reign without encountering Mary Boleyn, whose existence was a vast canon law complication.  She’s even a character in that old film ‘Anne of  the Thousand Days.’  However, PG evidently knows her readership and what they want.

SB: I noticed that in the earliest novels, authors often had a section devoted to outlining for readers what was created and what is factual in their works.  We tend not to do that any more.  Why not?  And what do you think of such a practice?

HM: A section telling readers what’s true and what’s false? You can certainly do that in outline, but if I myself were to do it properly, the notes would be longer than the book; almost every line would have to be parsed. Can I give an example? In the winter of 1535 a man otherwise unknown to history wrote to Thomas Cromwell to explain how he had made a snowman. It was made to look like the pope. It was ‘for the better setting forth of the king’s supremacy.’ But his local priest and his associates broke his door down, barged in and accused him of heresy. Can Cromwell help?

This made me laugh very much, and I can bet that was the effect on Cromwell too. (How do I know he had a sense of humour? Letter writers send enclosures, ‘put in to make you laugh.’) So in my book, when TC comes home from court one chilly late December twilight to his house at Stepney, he finds that snowmen have been constructed in the garden (the pope and his cardinals) and everyone under thirty (and some over thirty)  has spent the afternoon at this, for, as his son says ‘the better setting forth of the king’s supremacy,’ and they are also having a bonfire, and dancing around it is led by Christophe (fictional) and Dick Purser (factual.) So what now is the status of the snowmen?

To create an episode like this gives me great delight and  I try to think why. I am happy that the original snowman isn’t lost for ever, that it has been, as it were, rebuilt, only to melt again. I think about myself, thinking about the letter writer, whom perhaps no one has thought of for hundreds of years. And it works dramatically because gives me something silly and joyous to counterpoint the dire things happening that night: Katherine of Aragon is dying, Chapuys is ready to take to the road at dawn, Stephen Vaughan will be right behind him, etc. And it’s something so true of its time, that I could never make it up, would never dare (though everyone will think I have) and it hints at that whole world of Tudor ‘misrule’ and the annual breakdown of authority that marked the turn of the year, which always sounds so unconvincing when it’s described in folkloric texts.

SB: Some defenders of Philippa Gregory have argued that “all history is interpretation anyway.”    This was said, too, by Natalie Portman, who played Anne in “The Other Boleyn Girl.”  Neither she nor Scarlet Johansen nor Eric Bana did much research beyond readed PG’s novel, because “all you got from historians was competing views, anyway.”  Care to comment?

HM: Having argued that there are not two neat categories, ‘fact’ and ‘fiction,’ I still think the notion that ‘it’s all interpretation’ must be qualified; some interpretations are well grounded in fact and context, others are not. I spend a lot of time seeing if I can reconcile interpretations, and I do as much research and reading as  I possibly can.  But I know I can’t proof myself against errors or misperceptions. And that’s why I don’t like to look down on authors who write quicker: I might this very day be generating some vast error, the more vast because I’ve tried to  know so much.  But I referred above to the idea of being ‘honest’  and I guess this is what I mean: at least, put the hours in. Respect the dead.

You have to think what you owe to history. But you also have to think what you owe to the novel form. Your readers expect a story. And they don’t want it to be two-dimensional, barely dramatized. So (and this is queasy ground) you have to create interiority for your characters. Your chances of guessing their thoughts are slim or none; and yet there is no reality left, against which to measure your failure.

SB: In our “post-Oliver Stone, post-O.J. Trial” era, in which viewers/readers may no longer have much ability to distinguish between different kinds of narratives, do you think the fact/fiction issue has become more problematic?

HM: A problem: what readers think they know. Fiction is commonly more persuasive than history texts. After Wolf Hall was published, I was constantly being asked ‘Was Thomas More really like that? We thought he was a really nice man!’ I could only answer, ‘I am trying to describe how he might have appeared if you were standing in the shoes of Thomas Cromwell: who, incidentally, did not dislike him.’ But of course what I was really up against was A Man for All Seasons:  the older fiction having accreted authority, just by being around for two generations.  When I say to people, ‘Do you really think More was a 1960s liberal?’ they laugh. ‘Of course not.’ But (again, for the sake of honesty) you constantly have to weaken your own case, by pointing out to people that all historical fiction is really contemporary fiction; you write out of your own time. General readers are always asking you for the ‘real truth,’ and suppose that historians know more than they do: that they have ready access to a corpus of reliable, contemporary, first-hand reports, and that the perverse choice of the historical novelist is to deviate from these, in order to be sensational and sell more copies.

Re AB, I think it’s an obvious point  that she is carrying our projections; we (women readers especially) hang our story on to hers. This explains the undying appeal of the story of Henry VIII. Usually, to bring women characters to the fore in the writing of history (factual or fictional) you have to force the issue a bit. You have to position them centrally, when they weren’t really central, to pretend they were more important than they were or that we know more about them than we do. But in the reign of Bluebeard, you don’t have to pretend. Women, their bodies, their animal nature, their reproductive capacities, are central to the era. Also, you have at least 2 queens, Katherine and Anne, who are very well documented compared to most women in history: the same goes for the princess Mary. Not only are they documented, but they are real players: politicians, strategists.

But. There is a big ‘but’ coming. These women operated in a masculine context. Can you understand their stories if you stay down among the women? I don’t think you can. And I don’t really understand the appeal of doing so.   But I’m very interested in how some popular novels use Katherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn as ‘teaching material.’ Women’s lives are thus, and thus: do this and you win: but then you get paid out. They are made into moral tales; which, indeed, they were to the contemporaries of the women concerned. It’s rather worrying that the morals drawn are much the same, across the centuries.

EXTRA: MY 2015 REVIEW

I admired Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies very much. But I was struck by the fact that while every other character was creatively re-imagined, her portrait of Anne, particular in did not depart from what I call “Our Default Anne.” I was also struck by the particular historical events Hillary decided to leave out—those that “softened” and complicated her portrait of Anne—and the fact that, despite what she says in this interview, she defended those choices as “historical.” I had some critical things to say in my book, and also wrote several pieces about the problems with historical fictions claiming to be factual. I’ve continued to wrestle with this issue and appreciate the fact that creatively imagined histories (like “Queen Charlotte,” which I reviewed on BordoLines) have revived the old practice that I ask Hillary about in this interview, and announce clearly that they are fictions.

I continue to admire Wolf Hall and I very much mourned Hillary’s death. We lost a great creative writer.

My 2015 review appeared in Huffington Post UK

“Why Not Just Admit It’s Fiction?”

When I interviewed Hilary Mantel in 2011 while she was still writing Bring Up the Bodies, she described her characters as belonging to "a chain of literary representation." Her Cromwell, she told me, "shakes hands" with previous depictions, as does her Thomas More, a bold departure from earlier depictions such as the sanctified, witty dropout of Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons:

"[W] hat I was really up against [in Wolf Hall] was A Man for All Seasons: the older fiction having accreted authority, just by being around for two generations. When I say to people, 'Do you really think More was a 1960s liberal?' they laugh. 'Of course not.' "

But Mantel understood that her More, like her Cromwell and her Anne, reflects cultural projections and agendas no less than Bolt's. "All historical fiction is really contemporary fiction," she told me, "We always write from our own time." She was reluctant to criticize other authors for their "choices." "I never knowingly distort facts," she told me. But history is full of factual chasms and moral ambiguities, and "I might this very day be generating some vast error."

“I make sure I never believe my own story" she said.

All that seems to have changed now that her books have been made into a play and television series, widely praised by the press and touted by Mantel herself for its historical accuracy. Keeping careful watch over The BBC's adaptation so as to avoid what she has called the "cascade of errors" and the "nonsense" of historical dramas such as The Tudors, in recent interviews Mantel has declared the series a success. "History is never a convenient shape, it's true, but if you have the craft and the will to do it, you can find a way to tell a good story without distortion." She is delighted "that accuracy remained a priority" in the series. Commentators have overwhelmingly agreed, from the not-always-scrupulous Daily Mail ("Accuracy is king in the most eagerly anticipated TV event of the year...You won't find a zip, or Velcro, even in the crowd") to historian Lucy Worsley (who finds "no flaws" beyond the fact that "Jane Seymour is too pretty.") A notable dissenter is David Starkey, who as usual undermines his own critique by lathering it with bile, calling Mantel's version of characters and events a "deliberate perversion" of historical fact.

Virtually alone in his calm candor about the inventiveness of Mantel's universe, the show's director Peter Kosminsky is both more modest in his claims for accuracy than Mantel, but unlike Starkey does not find anything "perverse" about its license with fact: "Wolf Hall is revisionist history, there's no doubt about it. There are people who take strong exception to her interpretations, particularly of Sir Thomas More. Is this the truth? I have no idea. We set out to shoot Peter's script. This is our attempt to bring Hilary's books to the screen, no more or less."

Thank you, Mr. Kosminsky. Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies are indeed revisionist "history," and not just in the depiction of More. Operating (although not consistently) with the literary device of how people and events "might have looked from Thomas Cromwell's point of view," Mantel gives us portraits of people and events that are often factually unsupported and sometimes downright contradicted, and so far the series is following her lead. Its portrait of Anne Boleyn, for example, is a rather tired old stereotype of Anne as a coldly ambitious, narcissistic schemer that seems to be written more from the point of view of Anne's political enemy Eustace Chapuys than Cromwell. In the novel, Mantel sustains that "mean girl" stereotype by excluding some key historical events that the real Cromwell, whatever his feelings about Anne, would have witnessed or known about - Anne's eloquent speech at her trial, for example, and the one at the scaffold. In her author's note, Mantel "justifies" the omission of the speeches, citing skepticism that they actually occurred. But this is odd, not only because there are multiple corroborating reports of both, but also because Mantel had a few sentences before told her readers that she claims no historical "authority" for her version of things. (It seems she is no longer skeptical about the scaffold speech, as it has apparently been included in the television series.)

Only two episodes have been broadcast so far, so we will have to see whether the series follows the novels in omitting other key incidents that don't buttress Mantel's view of Cromwell. It's a matter of historical record, for example, that Anne's longtime ally Thomas Cranmer, shocked by Anne's arrests, sat down to write a letter to Henry expressing his amazement at the charges against her. His writing was interrupted however (as Cranmer relates when he resumes), by a visit from Cromwell and his cronies. They apparently helped him to "change his mind" about Anne's guilt, for the letter ends very differently than it begins, with poor Cranmer, clearly quaking in his boots, acknowledging that she must be guilty. Mantel chooses, in Bring up the Bodies, not to tell us about the interruption. Perhaps the detail would have made Cromwell seem more like a thug than she wished to portray him.

All this, of course, is Mantel's prerogative as a novelist. Why then not admit that it's that prerogative rather than concerns about historical accuracy that account for her exclusion of Anne's speeches as well? Why not admit, in other words, that the world she has created, while situated in history and peopled with characters that had an historical existence, is fiction. What on earth is wrong with that? Why all the PR about the historical "rigor," "accuracy," many years of research, etc. that went into the novels?

Fiction can put us in touch with truths that no history text can attain, and should be proud of its ability to do just that. Mantel's novels brilliantly capture the cozy but claustrophobic world of Henry's court and the tightrope nature of survival within it. And her Cromwell is a compelling personification of the kind of man who could prosper in that season. Mark Rylance's performance in the BBC series is both still and magnetic, and I would watch the show for it alone. But let's not suppose that just because the clothes have no zippers and the gardens are not manicured that Mantel's Cromwell (or Anne, or More, or Wolsey) are more "historically accurate" than A Man for All Seasons or The Tudors.

Susan Bordo is the author of The Creation of Anne Boleyn, now available both in the US and in the UK in paperback.

For reviews of my book and to order from your favorite seller:

THE CREATION OF ANNE BOLEYN

….Genevieve Bujold’s performance, and a few key changes in the play, were to make quite a dramatic transformation in the Maxwell Anderson original.  Anderson’s play, despite it’s fireball Anne, was really Henry’s story, and, like Hackett’s biography, was intent on exorcising the ghost of Bluff King Hal, described in Hacket’s biography  as “the  sort of man who cuts off his wife’s heads, ha-ha, out of a big, jovial, exuberant good humor.  Off with her head!  Off with the next one’s head!  The more, the merrier.” (248) Charles Laughton, in Private Life, played precisely this kind of Henry, and with such gusto and ingenuity that many viewers (and reviewers) believed that they were seeing the “real” Henry.

Hacket and Anderson, however, considered this kind of portrait to be a caricature.  Their respective Henrys are not piggy old souls, but tortured monarchs. Anderson’s Henry, in particular, is a tragic figure. He truly loves Anne, but gets caught in the net of his own obsession with an heir, masculine pride, and self-indulgence.  Ultimately, he comes to see that he has paid an enormous price, but that “nothing can ever be put back the way it was.”  In the final speech of the play, Henry muses on the magnitude of what has changed for his country (“the limb that was cut from Rome won’t graft to that trunk again”) and, with Anne’s ghost hovering in the background, begins to realize that “all other women will be shadows” and that he will seek Anne “forever down the long corridors of air, finding them empty, hearing only echoes.”  “It would have been easier,” he now recognizes, “to forget you living than to forget you dead.”

In Anderson’s play, it’s Henry, then, who has the final word, who makes the final pronouncements about history, whose torments we are left to imagine.

The film, however, ends very differently.  The screenplay, adapted from the play by Brigid Boland, John Hale, and Richard Sokolove, has Henry, in our last glimpse of him, listening for the signal sounding Anne’s death, then galloping off to see Jane Seymour with nary a second thought.  In place of his sober, sad reflections at the end of the play, in the film we see little Elizabeth, a sprig of flowers in her hand, toddling down the path towards greatness (actually in the gardens of Penshurst Castle) while her mother’s voice in the background predicts her daughter’s glorious future.  The voice-over is a repeat of part of an earlier speech, one that has viewers cheering for Anne to this day.  As in the play, Henry visits Anne in the Tower, and as in the play, she lies to him about her fidelity to him.  In the movie, however, she embellishes her lie with more detail, and pierces his manhood with even sharper arrows:

Yes, it’s overblown.  And it’s utterly without historical foundation.  Henry never visited Anne in her room in the Tower, and Anne never delivered a speech like this; indeed, at this point, Anne knew the chances of Elizabeth ever becoming queen were extremely slim.  Two days before her execution, her marriage to Henry was declared null and void by Henry’s lawyers, and Elizabeth bastardized.  In the movie, she is given a choice that the real Anne never had: to live, if she will willingly end the marriage, freeing Henry to marry Jane Seymour and making Elizabeth illegitimate in the bargain.  Or to die, with Elizabeth still a rightful heir.  She turns Henry down flat.

It was all invention, but of a particularly potent and timely sort for 1969. This was a period of convention-smashing in film: Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, In the Heat of the Night, Midnight Cowboy, The Wild Bunch, Butch Cassidy, and Easy Rider.  But with the exception of Bonnie Parker and Mrs. Robinson (but strikingly not her daughter Elaine), the female characters in the New American Cinema played by the rules.  It was the men who challenged the “status quo,” and the men who paid heroically for it. 1Hale and Boland’s Anne, long before Thelma and Louise, is the first female heroine to ride off the cliff, in full consciousness of what she is doing, to preserve her own integrity (and in this case, the future of her daughter and of England).

It struck a chord, even with me. In 1969, I was a pretty cynical movie-goer.  The anti-sentimentalist Pauline Kael, who did movie reviews for The New Yorker,  was my idol, and I hated anything that smacked of pretention or high-mindedness.  I was not a feminist in anything but the most inchoate sense of the word.  While friends of mine were joining consciousness-raising groups and attending demonstrations, I scorned and was made anxious by what I thought of as “groupthink.”  My own personal rebellion was to drop out of school, have a lot of mindless sex, marry someone I didn’t love, and then suffer a nervous breakdown which made me unable to leave him. 

But I did manage to make it to the movies—and Anne of the Thousand Days was one of them. It was my first introduction, since the boring, sexless Tudor history I’d read in high school, to the story of Henry and Anne.  I had no idea what was invented and what was historically documented, but it made no difference. I loved fiery, rebellious Anne.  I loved the way she bossed Richard Burton’s Henry around like a surly, 20^th-century teenager.  I loved the fact that Genevieve Bujold’s hair was messy as she delivered that speech to Henry, loved her intensity, loved her less-than-perfectly symmetrical beauty, loved the fact that someone that small could pack such a wallop.

Anne’s speech in the Tower might have seemed melodramatic if it had been played by a young Bette Davis—or, heaven forfend, an Elizabeth Taylor!  But Bujold’s fire, issuing from her petite frame and elfin face, her hair disheveled, her dark eyes glittering with pride, desperation, hurt, and vengeance, transformed the potentially hokey into an indelible, iconic moment. Even at a recent festival of Burton’s films, held by the British Film Institute, the audience was stirred, crying out “Go, Anne, go, you tell him!”

“After watching this,” writes one contemporary Tudorphile,  “you come away with the feeling that if that ain’t the way it really happened then it should’ve. I love the pride she displays even after Henry slaps her. She’s right, he’s wrong and they both know it. As she goes on talking down to him you can see him shriveling little by little and he nevermore was the man he’d once been. Seems she got the last laugh in more ways than one.”

Bujold also did something with Anne’s famous—and famously ambiguous—comments in the Tower that no other actress before or since has done, and that contributed to the believability of that final speech.   Anne’s behavior in the Tower, as she awaited her sentencing and then her death, provides some of  the most intriguing clues to her personality.  Unfortunately, it was recorded by Constable Kingston, a man who seems to have been tone-deaf to her sense of irony.  When Anne delivered her best-known line—“I heard say the executioner was very good, and I have a little neck”—then put her hands around her neck and “laughed heartily” (as Kingston described it), he took her to be showing “much joy and pleasure in death.” The actresses who have played Anne have been too smart to accept that interpretation, but then have been left with the task of figuring out just what was going on. 

Merle Oberon and Dorothy Tutin, who played Anne in the 1971 BBC series The Six Wives of Henry VIII, eliminate the laughter entirely, and have Anne say the line wistfully, as if in resigned acceptance (and in the case of Oberon, with a touch of narcissism) over the reality of the coming confrontation between steel and flesh.  Natalie Dormer, who played Anne in Showtime’s The Tudors, plays the “little neck” speech as a moment when the unimaginable stress that Anne is enduring breaks through her composure, and both the absurdity and the terror of her situation erupt in a crazy joke and then, hysterical laughter—an interpretation that fits well with the evidence that Anne’s  behavior in the tower was frequently unhinged.  But Bujold chooses to emphasize Anne’s intelligence and pride rather than her emotional instability, and plays the line as a sardonic response to Kingston’s lame reasurrances that the blow would be so “subtle” there would be no pain. Her Anne recognizes cowardly, self-serving bull when it’s thrown at her, and will have none of it.  Her Anne was, and probably always will be, the proudest of the Annes.

…..Bujold’s own history had prepared her well to play a young woman breaking through the confinements of convention.  She had grown up in a devout French-Canadian Catholic household, and spent her first twelve school years in a convent; in an online biography, she is quoted as saying that at the time she felt “as if I were in a long, dark tunnel, trying to convince myself that if I could ever get out, there was light ahead.” But something about her religious training made its way into her attitude toward acting.  When asked in 2007 how she prepared for her roles, she answered, “You pray for grace.  If you’ve done your homework and, most of all, are open to receive, you go forward…Preparation for me is sacred.”  But going forward with her own life required rebellion as well as grace; she finally “got out’ of the tunnel by being caught reading a forbidden book.  Liberated to pursue her own designs for her life, she enrolled in Montreal’s free Conservatoire d’Art Dramatique.”  While on tour in Paris with the company, she was discovered by director Alain Resnais, who cast her with Yves Montand in the acclaimed La Guerre est Finie.

Resnais taught her an acting lesson that “still is in me, will always be with me. ‘Always go to the end of your movement,’ he told me”–don’t short-circuit the emotion, the bodily expression, the commitments of the personality you are playing, allow them to fully unfold. That’s something that Genevieve saw in Anne as well. “You can’t put something into a character,” she said, “that you haven’t got within you. Every little thing in life is fed into the character…A word, a thought.  I had read something on Anne Boleyn that Hal gave me and I could look at her with joy and energy; Anne brought a smile to my face.” I asked her what elicited that smile. “Independence. A healthy sense of justice. And she knew herself and was well with herself.  She obviously had such profound integrity in that respect.  She was willing to lose her head to go to the end of her movement.”  That’s what we see, too, in her portrayal of Anne, especially in that final speech, and it’s why “My Elizabeth shall be queen!” still has audiences cheering for her, unconcerned with the historical liberties.

Most movies of the late nine-sixties have not worn exceptionally well, particularly with today’s generation of viewers, for whom many of the lifestyle protests of the times seem dated and silly.   My students snoozed through Easy Rider.  With Anne of the Thousand Days, the passing years and changing culture have had the opposite effect; my students adored it, and especially an Anne that seems to become “truer” as the generations have become less patient with passive heroines and perhaps a bit tired by the cutesy, man-focused femininity of many current female stars.: “Everything I imagine Anne really was”; “How I always picture Anne—as a strong woman not a sniveling girl”; “The gold standard of Annes”; “When I imagine Anne, it is her that I see”; “One of the best Annes ever — all fire and grace.” “The definitive Anne Boleyn for me”; “Pitch-perfect”; “So powerful that she turned a big, tough guy like myself into a wimpering fool.”

Before I said good-by to Genevieve in our interview, I asked her who she would pick to play Anne today.  She admitted that she hadn’t seen either Natalie Portman or Natalie Dormer; she lives a fairly reclusive life in Malibu, and rarely sees movies or watches television.  “But is there anyone who you think would do the part justice?”  She was silent for awhile, then asked me if she could be honest.  Of course, I said.  “Maybe it’s selfish, but…the way I feel….” Genevieve had been so warm and generous throughout the interview, praising all her mentors and influences in her life, she was clearly a bit uncomfortable with what she wanted to say.  So, I pressed a bit more, and she responded, with an intensity that recalled her performance and made me smile with delight.

“No-one,” she replied, “Anne is mine.”

Purchase the book!

For “My Book, the Movie,” Susan Bordo dreamcasts an adaptation of her book,The Creation of Anne Boleyn: A New Look at England’s Most Notorious Queen:

You might think it would be a daunting task to pick out actors to play characters who have been cast, often memorably, many times before. But actually, it’s an opportunity that I have fantasized about. It is well known to Tudor scholars but virtually no one else that the BBC, Hollywood, and Showtime have rarely made choices that remotely resembled—either physically or in their “essence”—the central players in the drama of Henry VIII and ill-fated Anne Boleyn. Charles Laughton  caricatured dynamic, quixotic Henry as a chicken-tossing buffoon; at the other end of the spectrum, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, in the Showtime production, refused to get fat (“Jonny would never have allowed us to make him appear grotesque,” the show’s creator Michael Hirst told me.) Anne has usually been played, from Merle Oberon to Natalie Dormer, by actresses who are way too conventionally gorgeous to convey the not-exactly-beautiful but striking je ne sais quoi that Anne was said to embody. Most annoying, Katherine of Aragon has, with one exception (Annette Crosbie in the 1970 BBC The Six Wives of Henry VIII) been played by dark-complected, dark-haired actresses. Katherine had golden hair and fair skin—but she was Spanish, and ethnic stereotyping has prevailed over historical fact.

My book is neither fiction nor a full-blown biography, so it’s unlikely to be made into a movie. However, if some creative screenwriter was to do for it what Sofia Coppola did for Caroline Weber’s The Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution and turn a cultural study into movie art, here is my dream cast:

For Henry, Russell Crowe, an actor who can be seductive, thoughtful, boyish, and callous as is variously called for—and who would be happy to get fat, even without an artificial body suit. He has the range, he has the right look, and he might be capable of replacing my devotion to Robert Shaw as the perfect Henry (Shaw’s role was small—in A Men for all Seasons—but when he was on screen, he was completely in command.)

For Anne Boleyn, Charlotte Gainsbourg. Like Anne, she’s dark and slender, with “duckies” (Tudorese for breasts) that “are not much raised.” She’s not exactly pretty, but you cannot take your eyes off her, and she’s capable of altering everything mammary-mad men think makes a woman sexy

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For Katherine of Aragon, Laura Linney. She has both softness and steel in her—and she actually looks something like the real Katherine!! Katherine was not the pathetic “first wife” some imagine; she was a woman of deep conviction and great stubbornness. Linney could pull it all off, and putting her and Charlotte Gainsburg together on the same screen would raise the Katherine/Anne conflict way above sudsy standards

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For Thomas Cromwell, Benedict Cumberbatch, the British actor who made Sherlock Holmes both lovable and frightening at the same time. Cromwell was very, very smart and very ruthless. But he could also turn on obsequiousness or charm when needed. James Frain in The Tudors was good; I think Cumberbatch would be even better

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For Eustace Chapuys, the Spanish Ambassador who plays a large role in my book’s version of events, as the originator of virtually every nasty rumor that has come down to us about Anne Boleyn, Christophe Waltz. Anthony Brophy, in The Tudors, made him way too sympathetic. Yes, Eustace was devoted to Katherine and Mary, but he was a viper when it came to Anne. In choosing Waltz, was I influenced by his portrayal of the smooth, scheming Nazi in Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds? You bet

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Learn more about the book: https://bordocrossings.com/book/the-creation-of-anne-boleyn/

And please do comment on my casting and offer your own. Let me know, also, if you’d like more posts on Anne Boleyn and the Tudors!

My Book, The Movie

Note: This is a highly condensed excerpt from my 2013 book The Creation of Anne Boleyn, which discusses historical, fictional, stage and film versions of the life and death of Anne Boleyn. Since it was published—and especially during the past several years—new versions of Anne have popped up that I will discuss in later posts. I start with this excerpt because I was surprised to see that the issue about The Other Boleyn Girl’s accuracy, which I had thought to be settled by now, is apparently still a live question, e.g. this piece, published today: “Is The Other Boleyn Girl Based on a True Story? “]

In 2002, Robin Maxwell, who had written a highly-praised novel about Anne, The Secret Diary of Anne Boleyn, was given a new manuscript to read.  Arcade editor Trish Todd wanted to know, would Robin give it a blurb?

The manuscript took Maxwell by surprise. Most novels about Anne that were written in the 1980’s and 90’s had been quite sympathetic toward her. Maxwell’s own book (1997)is constructed around the delightful fiction that daughter Elizabeth discovers Anne’s diary and learns how much her mother loved her and how “cruel and outrageously unjust” her father had been; the knowledge redeems Anne in her daughter’s eyes and sets Elizabeth up for a lifetime of caution about giving the men in her life too much power. In Jean Plaidy’s beautifully wrought The Lady in the Tower (1986), we find Anne imprisoned, thinking back on her life, wondering “how I had come to pass from such adulation to bitter rejection in three short years”; her reflections are those of a mature, regretful, clear-sighted woman, capable of recognizing her own faults, but very much aware of how her own mis-steps had been cruelly exploited by others. This new book, however, seemed to Maxwell to be a modernized recreation of the old Catholic view of Anne as a scheming viper.

“I was appalled,” Robin recalled in a phone interview with me.  “It was a great read, a page turner.  But she had taken every rumor, every nasty thing that anyone had ever said about Anne Boleyn and turned it into the truth in her book. You can argue that she had every right because she’s a historical fiction author, but I refused the blurb on principle because of its vicious, unsupportable view of Anne.”

The book was Philippa Gregory’s The Other Boleyn Girl.  In it, the character of Anne is indeed more selfish, spiteful, and vindictive than she had appeared in any previous novel, a nasty, screechy shrew who poaches Henry from her generous, tenderhearted (and very blonde) sister Mary and proceeds to tyrannize her (and everyone around her), barking out orders, plotting deaths, appropriating her sister’s child, and—when she miscarries her final pregnancy with Henry—coercing her brother George to have sex with her. Neither “Sleeping Beauty” nor “Cinderella” strike a more clean-cut division between the good and the wicked woman, with Anne playing the role of the wicked witch and Mary the long-suffering, virtuous heroine. As in any other fairy tale, however, the good are ultimately rewarded and the evil are punished.  Anne, having gone to “the gates of hell” with her brother in order to get pregnant, miscarries a deformed child (an idea that Gregory picked up from Retha Warnicke’s 1989 biography), is accused of witchcraft, and goes to the scaffold (in far less dignified fashion than history records) while Mary, with Elizabeth in her arms, retires to a bucolic life with husband and children.

Gregory describes herself as a “feminist, radical historian” and Mary Boleyn as a feminist heroine—apparently because she has sex and yet isn’t portrayed as “bad.” (I thought we went past that—and then some–with Bridget Jone’s Diary, “Ally McBeal” and “Sex and the City”.) Her novel allows Mary to be both sexual and saint-like, and despite having been “used” sexually by Henry, she is rewarded with the best ending of anyone in the book (which just happens to be a life of domestic happiness).  “Mary’s story is one of absolute independence and victory,” Gregory says, and a “triumph of common sense over the ambition of her sister Anne.” Huh? Sex is allowed, but ambition isn’t?  What kind of feminism is this?

There’s no doubt that Gregory plays fast and loose with history in The Other Boleyn Girl.

And it got far worse when the book was made into a movie. The screenplay, written by Gregory and Peter Morgan (The Queen, The Last King of Scotland, Frost/Nixon), contributed fresh inventions to the story.  Michael Grandage, who directed the HBO drama Frost/Nixon, credits Morgan with the ability to weave a fictional storyline “so deeply” into a factual situation “that audiences don’t know where the boundaries of truth lie.” In the case of The Other Boleyn Girl, the “interwoven” fantasies/fictions included a gratuitous (and utterly out-of-character) rape of Anne by Henry, Mary begging Henry for a last-minute pardon for Anne, and a heroic capture of Elizabeth by Mary, who strides into court after Anne’s execution, grabs her niece, and—with the whole court watching and not lifting a finger—leaves the palace with the future queen in her arms.  Oh, and another trifle—“The movies manages to virtually edit out a rather large historical fact: the Reformation”[1] As Gina Carbone puts it in her review, “Let’s just say you shouldn’t watch this and base any Jeopardy answers on it.”

The actors, apparently, did little research beyond reading the novel (Gregory commends Scarlett Johnson, who played Mary Boleyn, for having “her copy of my book in her hand practically all the time we were on set”), learning how deeply to curtsy from an etiquette coach (“It was those kinds of things’”says Johannson, “that added to the freshness and authenticity of the period”), and mastering the English accent.  Natalie Portman, who played Anne, admits to not “relating” to her character, but appears to be so postmodern in her approach to history (perhaps due to her Harvard degree) that it didn’t matter much: “You have to accept that all history is fiction. All you get from history is competing views.” Eric Bana didn’t even bother with checking out the history books.  “Look,” he told the director Justin Chadwick when offered the part, “I’m not someone who ever envisaged myself playing a king, or anything like that.  But Henry, the guy, I think I can get to the core of him and I want to play him just as a man, that’s all I know.  So I just used that.  I didn’t get too bogged down in history, because I felt like at the core of it, it was kind of irrelevant.”

Not getting “bogged down” in history mattered to some, and not to others. “No matter what criticisms The Tudors may have received for its inaccuracies,” one reviewer wrote, “the Showtime series seems like a History Channel documentary compared to this movie.” But others didn’t care whether or not, for example, Anne actually propositioned her brother. “It makes for a juicy and shocking footnote,” shrugged Rex Reed, tellingly conflating the apparatus of scholarship with an “event” that has been pretty thoroughly shown by scholars to be Cromwell’s invention.  And now that it has become culturally referenced by the film, a whole new generation, with little background in history but an extensive media education, has become vulnerable, once again, to the argument.  “Well done and beautifully produced,” proclaims the headline of one review, “Satisfactorily explains the incest charge against Anne Boleyn.” This is what Mark Lawson has called the “Oliver Stone phenomenon’, referring to the sizeable number of Americans who believe Oliver Stone’s film “JFK” to be an accurate portrayal of an actual conspiracy to kill Kennedy.

Of course, if my book has demonstrated anything at all, it’s that neither The Tudors nor The Other Boleyn Girl has a monopoly on the creative uses of a history that, after all, has some very large holes in the record. Nell Gavin, whose ingenious and moving Threads follows Anne through several reincarnations, is based on a metaphysical premise that many readers find dubious, Anne of the Thousand Days cooks up a fictional exhange between Henry and Anne that not only did not happen but is almost unimaginable, Norah Lofts’ The Concubine has Anne engaging not just in one but multiple, anonymous acts of adultery, Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons conveniently omits Thomas More’s heretic-burnings from among his other hobbies, and Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall has Cromwell suspicious of Anne from the very beginning of their relationship, whereas in fact they were allies for much of her reign. These depictions are not just accepted without protest, but prize-winning, beloved, admired.  So why should we expect different from Gregory?

What’s most disturbing are not Gregory’s distortions of fact, but her self-deceptive and self-promoting chutzpah. “Because I am a trained historian,” she wrote in 2008 (in fact, her degree is in 18th century literature), “I described the story of the Boleyn girls in the full context of the dramatic political, religious and social changes of the time.  Without realizing it, in so doing I invented a new way of writing the historical novel in which the ‘history’ part of the equation is just as important as the ‘novel’ part.  The fact plays as great a part in the story as the fiction, and when there is a choice of fact or fiction, I always choose the factual version.  The only time that I create events for my real-life characters is to join up one factual event and another, to fill in the gaps of their story.”  She describes herself as a scrupulous researcher who “applies very strict rules of accuracy” to her novels: “I read tons of primary and secondary material on a subject,” she said in a 2010 interview, “and then, using the absolute facts of a life as the bones of a story, that’s what I write.”  What does she supply as a novelist?  Only “the bits that we don’t know” and “feelings, because we don’t know how people felt.”

In the case of Anne Boleyn, “the bits that we don’t know” are far more plentiful than the bits that we do know, so Gregory has given herself plenty of room to maneuver—as a novelist.  But Gregory wants to defend her narrative choices as history, too, although waveringly.  In one interview, Gregory described the “made up bits” as speculation about what was “fairly likely.”  In a Q and A appendix to The Other Boleyn Girl, however, she went further, claiming that all her choices “can be defended as historical probability” and then still further, with bold statements such as “Anne Boleyn was clearly guilty of one murder” (and probably another, she implies) and—in another interview—“Anne’s incest is powerfully suggested by the historical record” (“the historical record” here seems to be the fact that she was found guilty.) 

It’s Gregory’s insistence on her meticulous adherence to history that most aggravates the scholars. David Loades:  “What is important is that the author should be honest, and not claim an historical basis which does not in fact exist. It would have been safer if Philippa Gregory had claimed to be writing fiction, because that is what she was doing.” Instead, Gregory’s website repetitively intones the mantra that her work is “absolutely rooted in the historical record.”  “I’m passionate about getting things right,” she says in a 2008 interview.  (The example she gives: a “long investigation,” for the movie, “of precisely when riding sidesaddle first being known in England.”)

I wouldn’t be hammering away at Gregory if it were only her arrogance at issue. But the fact is that many of her readers take her at her word, and consider The Other Boleyn Girl to be a historically accurate recreation of events that actually happened.  I’ve gotten plenty of direct evidence of this from audiences at my talks when I ask the opening question: “What do you know about Anne Boleyn?”  “Six fingers” comes first (one myth Gregory isn’t responsible for.)  Then: “She slept with her brother.”  “She gave birth to a deformed child.”  Sometimes, people will argue with me over the “facts” that they’ve learned from the book.  Others have had the same experience:

“I think people assumed Gregory’s portrayal of the main characters had to be, in essence, more or less fair. I can remember at one point at university when the novel was brought up, someone criticised Mary Boleyn and said that in reality she had been a bedhopping slut, or something equally un-PC, and a girl in the room responded, ‘Well, Anne wasn’t exactly much better, was she?’

The novel’s portrayal of Anne as promiscuous, immoral and thoroughly nasty, I think, is what most people came away from TOBG assuming must have been more or less true….and Philippa Gregory’s assertion that she only “filled in the gaps” when the historical record couldn’t provide the info she needed, implicitly led people to believe that everything in the book was either based on fact or was supposition that occurred only when the fact was absent. Many, if not most, of Anne Boleyn’s actions in TOBG bear little or no relation to what we know about the historical Anne’s. Her personality in TOBG appears to be based on the letters of Anne’s sworn enemies. But people find it impossible or improbable that a novelist would claim historical credibility but would then make up SO much about one of the most famous women in British history.

Even members of my Anne Boleyn facebook book page—unusually well-educated in things Tudor—frequently admit that before they began to delve deeper into the history, Philippa Gregory was their authority:

“I completely took TOBG as fact when first reading it in tenth grade! I had no real background knowledge on Anne before reading it, so I took what the book said as fact, especially after reading the author’s note. Ms. Gregory is a very good and CONVINCING author, and it took me reading some other books afterwards to “Detox” Gregory’s Anne from my mind! It really taught me not to take historical fiction at face value.”

This fan became “detoxed.” Others, however, do not. Her most ardent fans do not distinguish between well-researched trivia of the sort that can give you an advantage in board games and the lively—and perhaps “humanizing” but inaccurate—“facts” about what the characters said and did.  Neither, it appears, does Gregory, who seems to believe that knowledge about manners, dress, food, or the bad breath of the pre-toothpaste Tudors is enough to keep her novels “grounded in historical fact”. 

The seductions of those details have become even more acute in our media-dominated, digitally enhanced era in which people are being cultural trained to have difficulty distinguishing between created “realities” and the real thing.  If the created reality is vivid and convincing enough (whether it is a flawless, computer-generated complexion, or a “spin” on events) it carries authority—and that’s the way advertisers and politicians want it.  The movies, which are often extremely attentive to historical details, creating a highly realistic texture for the scaffolding surrounding the actions of the characters, make it even harder for audiences to draw the line.  Directors, who are after all focused on entertaining rather than educating, may not want audiences to draw that line.  Thomas Sutcliffe, the director of The Other Boleyn Girl, describes Peter Morton as “brilliant at side-stepping the usual shrieking reflex of anxiety about mixing fantasy and truth.”

The novelists I interviewed would agree with Morton that too much “anxiety” about the fact/fiction divide would make the work of historical fiction impossible. Margaret George laughingly told me about overhearing someone say, about her Autobiography of Henry VIII, “This is just a lie!  Henry VIII never wrote an autobiography!”  But George also expressed concern that in an age when most people get their history from TV and movies, we are losing our collective sense of “what really happened.”  

But for thoughtful creators of fiction (whether written or cinematic) “shrieking anxiety” and “anything goes” are not the only alternatives.  There’s the responsible middle-ground of recognition that there is an unavoidable tension between the demands of history and the requirements of fiction. As Hilary Mantel put it:

You have to think what you owe to history. But you also have to think what you owe to the novel form. Your readers expect a story. And they don’t want it to be two-dimensional, barely dramatized. So (and this is queasy ground) you have to create interiority for your characters. Your chances of guessing their thoughts are slim or none; and yet there is no reality left, against which to measure your failure.  

Fiction is commonly more persuasive than history texts. After Wolf Hall was published, I was constantly being asked ‘Was Thomas More really like that? We thought he was a really nice man!’ I could only answer, ‘I am trying to describe how he might have appeared if you were standing in the shoes of Thomas Cromwell: who, incidentally, did not dislike him.’ But of course what I was really up against was A Man for All Seasons:  the older fiction having accreted authority, just by being around for two generations.  When I say to people, ‘Do you really think More was a 1960s liberal?’ they laugh. ‘Of course not.’ But (again, for the sake of honesty) you constantly have to weaken your own case, by pointing out to people that all historical fiction is really contemporary fiction; you write out of your own time.

[This quote comes from a personal interview with Mantel that I conducted with her while she was writing Wolf Hall. As I’ve discussed in later pieces, she went on to forget—or ignore—some of her own guidelines here. But that’s for another posting!]

P.S. Let me know in my chat room (or a comment here) if you’d be interested my my posting that full interview with Mantel, which thus far has only been published on my website

THE OTHER BOLEYN GIRL: A FACT-CHECKER

[1] Jonathan Jones, in The Guardian.  But this is nothing new. In the acclaimed PBS series on Henry as well as Anne of the Thousand Days movie, Anne is never seen reading a book, let alone conversing with Henry—as the actual Anne often did—about the religious debates of the day.  Her role in Henry’s break from Rome is purely as the tantalizing object of his desire, his history-launching Helen, for whom he was willing to defy the pope, suffer excommunication, have old friends like More executed, and create a poisonous schism in his kingdom. One of the innovations of The Tudors is its break with this convention, largely due to the intervention of Natalie Dormer.