The Creation of Anne Boleyn (13 page)

This is pretty difficult to buy, as in 1527 he was already writing his beseeching letters to Anne Boleyn, describing being “stricken with the dart of love” for more than a year, begging her to give herself up “body and heart” to him, and sending her charming love tokens such as a freshly slaughtered buck, “hoping that when you eat of it you may think of the hunter.”
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But whether rhetorical or deeply felt, or some combination of both, one thing is clear, which is that at a certain point he was assured that his feelings for Anne were reciprocated, and from that moment on, the two were united in the effort to obtain a divorce.

Reprinted among Henry’s love letters to Anne is a “joint production” by the two of them that supports this view. It was sent to Wolsey after Anne had recovered from the sweating sickness and rejoined Henry at court to anxiously await the long-delayed Campeggio. The main letter is by Anne, followed by a postscript from Henry. Popular representations, following Cavendish’s reports, have tended to portray Anne’s relationship with Wolsey as one of all-out hostility, with Anne harboring a long-standing resentment over Wolsey’s ending of her romance with Henry Percy, after which (according to Cavendish) she had vowed to destroy Wolsey at the earliest opportunity. In fact, however, relations between Anne and Wolsey were extremely cordial—about as warm as Tudor relations were capable of being—until the end of 1528, when both she and Henry began to reach the limit of frustration with Wolsey’s faltering strategy (not his fault, but that fact was irrelevant to Henry) to achieve the divorce. This letter was written, apparently, during the period of still-amicable relations with Wolsey, but right on the cusp of their breakdown. Anne and Henry had been waiting for months for Campeggio to arrive from Rome and (as they hoped at the time) settle the “great matter”; travel and health difficulties had caused delay after delay, and Henry, as we see from his postscript, was losing patience.

Anne to Wolsey:

My Lord, in my most humblest wise that my heart can think, I desire you to pardon me that I am so bold to trouble you with my simple and rude writing, esteeming it to proceed from her that is much desirous to know that your grace does well, as I perceive by this bearer that you do, the which I pray God long to continue, as I am most bound to pray; for I do know the great pains and troubles that you have taken for me is never likely to be recompensed on my part, but alone in loving you next unto the king’s grace, above all creatures living. And I do not doubt but the daily proofs of my deeds shall manifestly declare and affirm my writing to be true, and I do trust you to think the same.

My lord, I do assure you, I do long to hear from you news of the legate; for I do hope, as they come from you, they shall be very good; and I am sure you desire it as much as I, and more, an it were possible; as I know it is not: and thus remaining in a steadfast hope, I make an end to my letter.

Written with the hand of her that is most bound to be

Your humble servant,

Anne Boleyn.
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Postscript by Henry:

The writer of this letter would not cease, till she had caused me likewise to set my hand, desiring you, though it be short, to take it in good part. I ensure you that there is neither of us but greatly desireth to see you, and are joyous to hear that you have escaped this plague so well, trusting the fury thereof to be passed, especially with them that keepeth good diet, as I trust you do. The not hearing of the legate’s arrival in France causeth us somewhat to muse; notwithstanding, we trust, by your diligence and vigilancy (with the assistance of Almighty God), shortly to be eased out of that trouble. No more to you at this time, but that I pray God send you as good health and prosperity as the writer would.

By your loving sovereign and friend,

H.R.
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Pray that you never have so “loving” a friend as Henry VIII. For just a little more than a year later, and without a glance backward, Henry had stripped Wolsey of his office of Lord Chancellor and all his accumulated treasures, a culmination of events that many scholars blame on Anne (“Anne and her faction did their work thoroughly,” writes Weir
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), ignoring that it was Henry’s pattern, way before he met Anne, to blow hot then ruthlessly cold when things weren’t going as he wished. Both Weir and Starkey see Anne as engineering Wolsey’s downfall, with Henry the gullible, lust-driven fool skillfully played by her. But there was nothing gullible about Henry; indeed, he was among the most watchful, even paranoid, of rulers. And he was creepily unflinching in neutralizing perceived enemies, including those who had been lifelong friends and mentors, such as Wolsey and More. Nowadays, we might diagnose him as a sociopath due to the ease with which he dispatched death to his former buddies and lovers. But then again, kings at that time were trained in royal sociopathy, learning to put their emotions out of reach in the service of “the crown,” and Henry, it seemed, became better and better at it with each passing year.

As to Anne, even if she matched Henry’s political pragmatism (to put it in the most generous terms), it is unlikely that she had to “wheedle” Henry, as Starkey puts it, into getting rid of Wolsey,
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just as in this jointly written letter they are of one mind about the need to gently urge him on. It is Henry who supplies the one chilling note, qualifying his expressions of faith in Wolsey with the admission that the delay of Campeggio “causeth us somewhat to muse.”
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(I’m sure Wolsey was quite aware that, Henry’s praise for his diet aside, the ominous “musing” was the point here.) Weir describes Anne as having “nagged” Henry to add the postscript, an ungracious choice of words that nonetheless acknowledges that this is no exchange between a besotted courtier and his lady but a domestic snapshot. We can imagine Henry and Anne together, bent over a desk, shoulder to shoulder. Perhaps she’s caught at his robe and pulled him over to her as he paced the room, restlessly waiting for her to finish tinkering with her letter so they could go off to hunt or dine or dance, perhaps he’s been looking over her shoulder the whole time, poking her in the ribs over this or that turn of phrase. Perhaps she has “nagged,” but perhaps she has persuaded him with argument, reminding him that only Henry’s seal of approval would get Wolsey to take her seriously. Whatever scene one imagines, this joint letter is one of the very rare moments when we actually get to “hear” Anne and Henry in a kind of conversation with each other, unfiltered by the biases of the various court reporters—and it suggests an intimacy, affection, and shared purpose that doesn’t fit at all with Starkey and Weir’s “plotting Anne/manipulated Henry” telling of the story.

Of course, everything I’ve concluded is highly interpretive. That is unavoidable when trying to make sense of what is, in the end, elusive material—and much more complicated than simply an expression of Henry’s “softer side” or passionate nature. For not only was the culture in transition, moving from one paradigm of human experience, one set of human ideals, to another, but Henry VIII was himself a barometer of that transition writ large. He was schooled in Arthurian honor, which served and protected women as one of its highest goals. But he could never abide by anything except his own supremacy. He was also an instrumental thinker for whom the ends ultimately justified all means, and he lived in a time when kingly authority—not knighthood—was in flower. Raised on the romance of one set of ideals, he was capable of setting aside his dislike of letter writing to pen seventeen love-stricken letters to Anne. But we are mistaken if we take what he says in those letters too literally. He wanted her, yes. But he was never her servant—not even emotionally—and even in these letters, he never forgot that.

4

A Perfect Storm

Consummation

I
N JANUARY OF
1533, after years of negotiating, waiting, strategizing, trial and error, dramatic public confrontations, behind-the-scenes machinations, veiled threats, and outright tantrums from all concerned, Anne and Henry were married secretly—without the pope’s blessing. By now, Henry couldn’t care less, because with the aid of his new right-hand man, Thomas Cromwell, he was well on his way to supplanting papal authority with his own supremacy as head of the Church of England. Cromwell, like Wolsey (the son of a butcher), was a self-made man who understood that he could not rely on birth but had to use his own ingenuity to further his interests. It’s not surprising that Wolsey, in 1523, felt a kinship with Cromwell, and handpicked him from the ranks of young lawyers (by then Cromwell was a member of Parliament) to become his councilor and friend. But unlike Wolsey, who had been educated at Oxford—in those days, virtually a Catholic institution—Cromwell, whose beginnings were far rougher (his father, a Putney blacksmith, was often drunk and violent, and Cromwell left home at the age of fifteen), had a far less conventional “education,” roaming Europe, serving as a mercenary in the French army, clerking in Italy, trading in the Netherlands, and finally setting himself up as a lawyer in England at the age of twenty. He had no allegiance to the Catholic Church and relied less on diplomacy—Wolsey’s forte, which ultimately failed him—than what we would today call “thinking outside the box.” In the case of Henry’s “great matter,” this translated to ignoring the papacy rather than trying to win its seal of approval for the divorce.

Historians now speculate, calculating from Elizabeth’s birth, that Anne had finally slept with Henry in October during an extended trip to meet Francis and his court. The point of the trip was to gain French recognition of Anne as Henry’s future queen, and no expense—or humiliation of Katherine—was spared. Anne was given the title of Marquess of Pembroke to elevate her to noble status for the occasion, regal garments were fitted for her, and Henry sent a messenger to Katherine, requesting the return of the queen’s official jewels. Katherine, indignant, refused to allow her jewels to adorn the woman whom she called “the scandal of Christendom.”
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The request then quickly became an order. Henry could not, however, order Francis’s wife, Claude, or his sister, Marguerite, to come to Calais for the occasion; although they knew Anne from her years at the French court, she was still the king’s mistress, and—contrary to the common belief that the entire French court was a hotbed of sexual liaisons—they were both very proper when it came to sexual protocol. There is no indication that Anne was angry or hurt.

Once in Calais, Anne and Henry relaxed together for a week, and then, after Henry and Francis had met separately in Boulogne for four days, Henry returned to Calais with Francis for an extravagant reception organized in Francis’s honor. It included a dinner of 170 dishes, the firing of 3,000 guns, and a surprise appearance by Anne and six “gorgeously apparelled” masked ladies.
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Their costumes were “of strange fashion”—more Isadora Duncan than Tudor—loose, gold-laced overdresses of gold cloth with sashes of crimson and silver.
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But there is no evidence, contrary to
The Tudors,
that they performed a Salome-style seduction dance to the steady beat of drums. At the conclusion of the dance, each of the ladies chose a man to dance with and Anne, as she and Henry had planned, chose Francis. Then the masks were removed, and Francis recognized (perhaps only pretending to be surprised) that he was dancing with the “brunette Venus,” Anne.
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Anne and Francis then spent the better part of an hour in private conversation while the others danced.
The Tudors,
contributing to the mythology that Anne had been promiscuous in France, has Anne refer to “some things, perhaps, which Your Majesty knows about me which I would rather you kept secret and never mention to the king.”
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Francis, ever the gallant Frenchman, promises never to reveal her secrets, which, of course, “every beautiful woman must have.”
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That conversation is invented; we actually don’t know what Anne and Francis talked about.

In the days that followed, there was more overconsumption, more dancing, and some manly wrestling. Henry and Francis did not themselves engage in contests of physical one-upmanship, as they had years before at their meeting at the Field of the Cloth of Gold (in that match Henry lost to Francis and didn’t take it well), but watched others perform as their surrogates. By the time the French took their leave on October 29, a violent storm and unmanageable tides kept Henry’s party in Calais until November 12. There, in sumptuous adjoining suites, Henry and Anne privately celebrated what was already being trumpeted in England—news that was probably prearranged to be released in a timely fashion—as “the triumph at Calais and Boulogne.”
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When it was finally safe to leave, they took their time getting home; although they reached Dover by November 14, they arrived at Eltham only by November 24. Clearly, they were enjoying their quality time alone together. By the time they returned to London, it was very likely that Anne was already pregnant, although too early for her to know it.