The Creation of Anne Boleyn (30 page)

Brief Gaudy Hour
is a very enjoyable novel; in fact, it’s often still listed by fans of historical fiction as one of their favorites. But without disputing its pleasures, I did find its portrait of Anne very odd—and, in hindsight, a harbinger of things to come. Anne the teenager is charming and “real.” But Anne the queen becomes virtually demonic. Here, for example, Barnes traces the beginnings of Henry’s turning against Anne
⁷
to her response to Katherine’s death. Henry has just returned from Westminster to find Anne celebrating with her maids and courtiers in wild, Dionysian revelry, complete with pagan horns.

And now it was time for her to don her antlers, for the Queen, leaving her bevy of saffron-gowned maidens, was beginning to lure the men dancers within the magic circle Smeaton had chalked upon the floor, turning them, by her lascivious dancing, into beasts. Through the noise they made, the stamping and laughter, they did not hear the commotion of the King’s unexpected arrival . . . From velvet cap to rolled, slashed shoe, he was clad in black velvet, with only a plain silver dagger hanging from his belt . . . Anne noticed that his eyes were puffed and red . . .

“I saw the lights of your orgy,” he said, his blue eyes no longer blinking, but flicking like a whip over everybody present and taking in every frivolous detail . . . “Take off that unseemly dress,” he ordered sharply, “and go pray for some sense of fitness!”
⁸

“Saffron” (as in “saffron-gowned”) here refers to the color yellow, which Chapuys says
Henry
wore after Katherine’s death. Scholars have reached no firm conclusion as to what it meant. Some claim it was the Spanish color of mourning; others say it was a blatant gesture of celebration. In Barnes’s scene it clearly signifies celebration, and it is Anne and her fellow revelers, not Henry, who are wearing it. As to grief-stricken Henry, his eyes puffed and red, it’s a brand-new fiction. In reality there’s no evidence that he was any less relieved than Anne over Katherine’s death, or that any tender feelings for Katherine remained. Katherine, after all, had fought him tooth and nail for six years, stubbornly refusing all attempts to provide her with a dignified exit, seemingly unconcerned that she was tearing England apart with her resistance. Henry was furious with her, and the equally obstinate Mary, for defying his authority and bringing England to the brink of war with Spain. On the Sunday following Katherine’s death, he appeared in extremely high spirits with Elizabeth in his arms in the middle of a dance at the palace. But Barnes’s Henry is incapable of such callousness, and becomes meaner as the novel goes on only because Anne, “through years of trickery and sex enslavement,” had “schooled him to shut up his compassion.”
⁹

Norah Lofts’
The Concubine
(1963) is another postwar novel that takes a dark view of the relationship between Henry and Anne. Lofts’s Anne, unlike Barnes’s, has no time of childish innocence; the novel begins with Wolsey’s breaking up of the relationship with Percy, so in our first introduction to Anne, she has already become cynical and guarded, and so proud that she doesn’t shed a tear over Percy, even though she is, in fact, heartbroken. She has contempt for her sister and never develops lasting affection for Henry. When he offers marriage, she immediately begins bargaining—“How long would it take?”
¹⁰
—and when it all drags on, calculates that a pregnancy will speed things along, so she sleeps with him. But after their first night together, he is disappointed and depressed. “All that promise, that hint of some peculiar and precious joy in store, was mere illusion,” a “trick”; “[b]etween the sheets, in the dark, she was no different from Katherine, Bessie Blount, Mary Boleyn.”
¹¹
Anne, on her part, feels as cold and alone as “in her grave.”
¹²
But she was not disappointed, for she had “expected nothing”; she’d known “ever since her forced parting from Henry Percy, that from this part of life enchantment had gone forever.”
¹³
Thinking of Percy, she stifles an impulse to cry, then decides that dwelling on that is a “waste of time.”
¹⁴
She had done what she had planned—“every word, every gesture, every smile almost, directed to the one end”—and consoles herself with the thought:
“My child will be King of England.”
¹⁵

Something surprising happens in
The Concubine.
For only one of two times in her career as a heroine of romantic fiction, Anne actually does commit adultery—three separate acts, with three different men—in order to secretly get pregnant again after she’s lost the child she’d been carrying by the king. What’s bizarre—and not very credible, even in a work of romantic fiction—is that none of her partners “could say truthfully that he had sinned with the Queen,” for each coupling had happened during a masked ball, and Anne, in costume and with her voice disguised, “had made absolutely sure that no man could look at her next day and think . . .”
¹⁶
The reader is left in the same position with respect to whom she had sex with, for we’re never told. This was the last time fictional Anne would actually be guilty of any of the charges laid against her until 2001, when the first truly despicable Anne since Chapuys’ letters became the reigning queen of historical fiction.

Barnes’s and Lofts’s Henry and Anne are never soul mates or even lovers in anything but the most mechanical sense; they are bad romances from the start. In contrast, Maxwell Anderson’s
Anne of the Thousand Days,
which premiered December 8, 1948, the year before Barnes’s novel was published, is the story of a true love affair gone sour. Drama critic Brooks Atkinson called the play “the story of two violent, willful people who act on each other without mercy.”
¹⁷
That may be going a bit too far. The violence amounts to a slap across the face, but “willful” is on target—and so is the passion that Anne and Henry’s battle of wills brings about. It’s truly a match between equals, in every respect except the fatal inequality of Henry’s power over Anne’s life and death. And in a season that also brought
South Pacific
and
Death of a Salesman
to Broadway, it was a surprisingly popular success, despite the fact that it is written in a combination of prose and verse, and often wanders into long, somewhat pretentious poetic monologues. The key to its popularity: Although the play is peppered with fragmentary (and often confusing) references to “large” historical issues and events, the central drama is domestic—a battle of the sexes between Henry and Anne, within which they behave more like a man and a woman than a bluebeard and a vixen in a Grand Historical Drama.

Most audiences of the play would have been familiar with the Henry played by Charles Laughton, who in Alexander Korda’s
The Private Life of Henry VIII
(1933) bequeathed to us the enduring image of Henry devouring a chicken, tearing off a chunk, taking one bite, then chucking each piece over his shoulder as he dives for the next while burpingly lamenting the death of civility. “There’s no delicacy nowadays. No consideration for others [belch]. Refinement’s a thing of the past! . . . Manners are
dead!
[Belch.]”
¹⁸
Some might have remembered Emil Jannings’s gluttonous, volatile lecher from Ernst Lubitsch’s melodramatic silent movie,
Anna Boleyn
(1920). From prevailing representations they would have expected a buffoon; a leering bloated tyrant; or “Bluff King Hal.” In
Anne of the Thousand Days
they got manly, handsome Rex Harrison (who won a Tony for the role), charming and suave, but also calculating, arrogant, and utterly unused to being refused anything, even by God. (“I pray,” he says, “and God answers.”
¹⁹
)

As for Anne, her previous appearances on stage and in film exhibited little in the way of “character.” Shakespeare’s play is not and never was among his most popular, and the real show-stealing speeches are given to Katherine. In Gaetano Donizetti’s 1830 opera,
Anna Bolena,
Anne is pure victim, tormented by the loss of her first love, Percy (a theme undoubtedly picked up from
Vertue Betray’d
), manipulated and treated coldly by Henry, and ultimately driven mad by everything that has happened to her (the high point of the opera finds Anne in the Tower careening between hallucinations from a happier past and hysterical confrontation with her present agony). In Lubitsch’s version, Anne is also a victim, a virtuous—and blonde—sacrificial lamb very much in the tradition of the wide-eyed, demure heroines that Mary Pickford made famous. Barely post-Victorian, she goes to her death unadorned, in a plain white smock.
²⁰
Merle Oberon (Korda’s Anne) was the first of many elegant, hypnotic beauties who helped create the more glamorous version of femininity that reigned in the thirties—and that seems to be her main function in the film. She has only a few scenes to play, and each one seems designed to highlight the actress’s regal (and, in those days, “exotic”
²¹
) beauty. As she prepares for her execution, she gazes into the mirror, fusses with her hair, ponders which headdress to wear. She preens, she suffers a bit, she looks beautiful, and then she’s gone. Relieved of Anne, the Korda film can then go on to play future episodes in Henry’s “private life” mostly as comedy—although with dark undertones. Before Anne is executed, for example, we are given a scene of Anne’s ladies-in-waiting fluttering about, preparing the king’s bed and gossiping with each other over Anne’s impending execution and Jane Seymour’s takeover.

1ST LADY
: So that’s the king’s bed.

NURSE
: Yes, my dear. And he has not long left it—feel!

1ST LADY
: I wonder what he looks like—in bed.

2ND LADY
(
a rival beauty
):
You’ll
never know!

1ST LADY
(
annoyed
): Well, there’s no need to be spiteful, is there, Mistress Nurse?

NURSE
(
consolingly
): No, my dear; and you’ve as good a chance as another when the king’s in one of his merry moods.

The girls laugh.

1ST LADY
: Oh! I never meant . . . I never thought . . .

2ND LADY
:
Didn’t
you, darling?

NURSE
: Now, ladies! You’re not here to quarrel, but to get busy with your needles. Look—all these A’s must come out, and J’s go in. Hurry, ladies, hurry!

Anderson’s Anne (played by petite but feisty Joyce Redman) was clearly not influenced by these earlier stage and film depictions. Perhaps Bette Davis’s Elizabeth I in
The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex
(1939), which was based on a stage play that was also written by Anderson, helped shape his image of Anne. Perhaps—as Francis Hackett claimed—Anderson was influenced by Hackett’s 1939 novel. There, as with his portrait of Henry in his 1929 biography
Henry VIII: The Personal History of a Dynast and His Wives,
Hackett was determined to go beyond the clichés and stereotypes to show readers that “it is creatures of flesh and blood . . . who make great history.”
²²
With Henry, this required going beyond the caricatures of Bluff King Hal, the jovial serial collector of wives, a cartoon figure described by Hackett as “one of the most vulgar and fatuous and horrible of illusions.”
²³
With Anne, he wanted readers to understand how this woman—and only this woman, with the exceptions, perhaps, of his grandmother and Katherine Parr—could have, for so long, matched Henry eye to eye, power for power, in the relationship. His Anne has a personality that refuses to be vanquished; this is what draws Henry to her, while infuriating everyone else.

If ever a slip of a girl owed it to the established order to satisfy her lover by a union outside the bonds of matrimony, this was a clear instance; and Cardinals and ambassadors and blood-relations and the pope were soon beside themselves with eagerness to learn that this chit would remain simply Henry’s mistress. Her father grew weary of her obstinacy. Her uncle Norfolk resented her ambition. Her sister could not understand Anne’s rigorousness. But she was not a coquette nor a wanton. She was a high-spirited, high-minded girl who made this marriage a term of her being and who, in spite of this, delivered herself to ruin.
²⁴

It’s a pretty accurate description of Anderson’s Anne too.
²⁵
Fiercely independent and apparently without a drop of fear, “the slip of a girl” refuses Henry’s advances and calls him out: “You are spoiled and vengeful and malicious and bloody. The poetry they praise so much is sour, and the music you write’s worse. You dance like a hobbledehoy; you make love as you eat—with a good deal of noise and no subtlety.”
²⁶
Although in “real life” this attitude would probably have resulted in her head going missing much earlier in the story, in the play it inflames Henry’s desire for her, and he vows that “[i]f it breaks the world in two like an apple and flings the halves into the void, I shall make you queen.”
²⁷
Anderson’s Anne also has a sexual past—she confides to Percy, her first love, that she slept with men while she was in France and even before that. Sander and others had claimed that too. But what is striking here is how irrelevant it is to the play’s assessment of Anne’s moral character. She’s not a virgin—big deal. The king knows it and doesn’t care. Neither does Percy. She tells him about it matter-of-factly, without a hint of coyness; she’s more the modern “liberated” woman than either the trembling virgin or the temptress who endows sexuality with subversive power.