The Creation of Anne Boleyn (23 page)

In 2012, this kind of personality would probably be diagnosed as borderline or narcissistic. Of course, those designations were unknown in the sixteenth century, and some would argue that the inclination to categorize and medicalize people into “types” is an invention of a later era. But we don’t have to go that far to see that phenomenologically—that is, without attempting to put a medical label on Henry, but simply looking at his patterns of behavior—some of the descriptions of what we call “borderline” personality are apt—for example, the phenomenon that therapists call “splitting.”

The world of a borderline, like that of a child, is split into heroes and villains. A child emotionally, the borderline cannot tolerate human inconsistencies and ambiguities; he cannot reconcile another’s good and bad qualities into a constant coherent understanding of that person. At any particular moment, one is either “good” or “evil”; there is no in-between, no gray area. Nuances and shadows are grasped with great difficulty, if at all. Lovers and mates, mothers and father, siblings . . . and friends may be idolized one day, totally devalued and dismissed the next.
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In a certain sense, of course, the medieval worldview was itself a “split” universe, in which God and Satan, the saved and the fallen, were at starkly opposite poles, and “history was an extended moral homily upon the actions of men behaving rightly or wrongly.”
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It wasn’t until the psychological turn of the nineteenth century that human beings began to be seen as mixtures of good and evil, ego and id, light and dark. But a dualistic ideology and a personality for whom others are either “for you” or “against you” are two very different things. In philosophical or religious dualism, it is God (or the universe) who assigns the categories of good and bad, which are relatively stable; for Henry, his own shifting needs were the measure of all things. “He is a prince of a royal disposition, and hath a princely heart,” Wolsey told Kingston in 1529, long before Kingston became Anne’s warder in the Tower, but “rather than he will either miss or want any part of his will or appetite, he will put the loss of one half of his realm in danger.”
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But Henry’s “will” was not always easy to discern. In the screenplay of
A Man for All Seasons,
Robert Bolt brilliantly captures, in one brief action, not only the trembling uncertainty this produced in those around him but also Henry’s delight in it. Henry’s boat has just arrived at Chelsea, More’s home, and the king (Robert Shaw), robust and athletic, has jumped off the deck and, unexpectedly, into a pool of mud. He glares menacingly at the oarsmen, who quake appropriately. Henry then bursts into a hearty, howling laugh, and the tense atmosphere among the men is transformed into playtime as they take their turns jumping into the mud.

There’s no evidence that Henry took such childish pleasure in manipulating the emotions of his subjects—although there are plenty of occasions when he used his ability to make people cower in order to show his magnanimity (e.g., staging last-minute pardons) or assert his authority. Those tactics were pretty standard for kings, whose image was essential to maintaining power. But Henry’s turnabouts do not seem to have been always under his control. The letters of ambassadors, even from the early years of his reign, describe sudden, explosive angers, “tears and tantrums.”
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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 by Bessie Blount, relieved that he was now safe from “that accursed whore” who had slept with more than 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.

If we want to go beyond the phenomenology of Henry’s “splitting” to causal explanation, we could find it in his childhood, which was itself split between the “cosy feminine world” of his mother and sisters and the cold indifference, then hostile domination, of his father. “As the only boy in the royal nursery,” writes Robert Hutchinson, Henry “was thoroughly spoilt and tenderly protected from the hard knocks and bruises of childhood misfortune. The toddler prince was cosseted, his grumpiness and tears sweetly cooed away, and his every whim swiftly fulfilled by the doting matronly ladies who cared for him.”
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It’s not clear, however, that naturally energetic Henry was entirely happy with all this “doting,” which, after Arthur’s death, kept him “as locked away as a woman” out of fear that the precious spare heir would also be lost.
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But the masculine attentions of his father came with a high price too. Until Arthur’s death, his father had virtually ignored Henry, leaving him to the care of the women; after Arthur died, however, he became obsessively focused on preparing Henry for the throne, and in the process, Henry became subject to his father’s famous rages when he didn’t do exactly as was required of him. Henry VII was so strict with the child that he gave the impression to Reginald Pole, Henry’s contemporary, that he had “no affection or fancy unto him.”
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You don’t need to venture into contemporary developmental theory to imagine Henry growing up with the belief that relationships were an either/or business, defined by gender: You could be extravagantly loved but smothered by women (perhaps part of the reason why he was initially drawn to both Katherine and Anne, and later to Katherine Parr, all of whom were strong-minded women whose strengths he came to resent). Or you could excel in the competitive world of men, where you might exercise power and command fear but never achieve the unconditional adoration you crave. Perhaps this intense desire for male love, in addition to the freedom from the restrictions of his childhood, helps to explain both his attraction to a father figure such as Wolsey, and also why Henry was at his happiest, most generous, and most exuberant among the young men he hunted and cavorted with. But in the end, everyone—with the exception of Charles Brandon and Katherine Parr, the two “survivors” of life with Henry—was bound to fail him. And they, too, walked a precarious tightrope in keeping Henry’s favor. Brandon was exiled from court for a time when he married Henry’s sister without the king’s permission. And Katherine came very near to arrest for her Protestant sympathies, managing to talk Henry out of it at the last moment by humbling herself before him and begging his tolerance for her “womanly weaknesses and natural imperfections.”
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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. “When you believe in yourself as morally superior, and at the same time do not scrutinize yourself,” writes Francis Hackett in his perceptive biography, “when you dispense with this scrutiny because you are Defender of the Faith, A Knight of the Garter, Knight of the Golden Fleece, and a vast number of other distinguished things make you an automatic gentleman, you do not descend from the height of your scruples, even though they are spavined, to the level of mother earth. You are knighted for all time.”
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The closest comparison from our own time might be to the cult of the sports superhero, who not only gets away with abuse—and sometimes, like O. J. Simpson, murder—but remains immune to any sense of guilt or regret. Neither Simpson nor the high-school athletes who raped a mentally handicapped girl in the basement of one of their homes, then had the whole town rally round them in support, were born without a conscience; their senses of absolute entitlement were conferred on them through years of adulation and “getting away” with bad behavior.

Henry’s inability to see himself as in the wrong made it all the riskier for those around him to show anything less than absolute allegiance. And proving allegiance, even obedience, put one at risk, ironically. 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 such as 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 prowess 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, and 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 do
when you come to put pen to paper.
You say to yourself:
She must die. And she must—
If things are to go as planned.
Yes, if they are to go at all.
If I am to rule
And keep my sanity and hold my England off the rocks . . .
Go back to it, Henry, go back to it.
Keep your mind
On 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 arms
And longed 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 headsman
Will 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 flash
In the flick of sun, through the little bones of her neck
As she looks away,
And it will be done.
It will be done.
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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.

PART II: Recipes for “Anne Boleyn”

7

Basic Historical Ingredients

C
HAPUYS EXULTED OVER
Anne’s fall: “I cannot well describe,” he wrote Charles, “the great joy the inhabitants of this city have lately experienced and manifested, not only at the fall and ruin of the concubine, but in the hope that the Princess will be soon reinstated in her rights.”
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Yet even in letters written in the hours immediately after her execution, qualifications creep into his reports: “[A] few” people, he admits, “find fault and grumble at the manner in which the proceedings against her have been conducted, and the condemnation of her and the rest, which is generally thought strange enough.”
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Moreover, people have begun to question the king’s role in all this, a “slander” that Chapuys fears “will not cease when they hear of what passed and is passing between him and his new mistress, Jane Seymour.”
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They have heard that Henry has been out making merry on his barge at night, showing “joy and pleasure” at what Chapuys compares to the anticipation of “getting rid of a thin, old, and vicious hack in the hope of soon getting a fine horse to ride.”
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Despite the snide remarks and reassurance of the people’s “joy,” it seems from this letter that even Chapuys is beginning to have his doubts about Anne’s guilt. “No one ever shewed more courage,” Chapuys admits, than the used-up, scraggly mare in the face of her execution.
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And then, too, there is the disquieting fact—relayed to Chapuys by “the lady” attending Anne in prison who had been secretly reporting her every word to him—that both before and after receiving the Sacrament, Anne “affirmed, on peril of her soul’s damnation, that she had not misconducted herself so far as her husband the King was concerned.”
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