The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn

‘Magnificently researched. Eric Ives has written the finest, most accurate study of Anne Boleyn we are ever likely to posses. He leaves no stone unturned in his quest to discover the truth. Never has the historical Anne been so satisfyingly portrayed.’

John Guy
, author of
My Heart is my Own
:
The Life of Mary Queen of Scots

‘This is a moving and compelling account by an author who is the absolute master of his subject. I read it with great excitement and admiration.’

Susan Bridgen
, University of Oxford

For Ruth

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The right of E. W. Ives to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher.

First published 2004 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ives, E. W. (Eric William), 1931-

The life and death of Anne Boleyn: ‘the most happy’ / Eric Ives.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index.

ISBN 0-631-23479-9 (alk. paper)

1. Anne Boleyn, Queen, consort of Henry VIII, King of England, 1507-1536. 2. Great Britain-History-Henry VIII, 1509-1547-Biography. 3. Henry VIII, King of England, 1491-1547-Marriage. 4. Queens-Great Britain-Biography. I. Tide.

DA333.B61845 2004

942.05’2’092-dc22

2003021527

A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

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Printed and bound in the United Kingdom
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PREFACE

O
NE question is asked whenever Anne Boleyn’s name comes up - did she really commit adultery? Was she, while married to Henry VIII, being serviced by a stable of lovers which included the king’s best friend and her very own brother? For this she was beheaded, and five men with her, but what if Anne was innocent? Henry must then be a multiple murderer. The case has been fiercely contested for the best part of five centuries and certainly makes good copy. Shakespeare put a carefully edited version of Anne’s courtship and marriage on the stage, and since then, plays, opera, fiction, popular biography, film and, most recently, television have made capital of a story linking the most famous of English kings with sex, scandal and wife-killing.

So why yet another book about Anne Boleyn, beyond feeding a popular obsession, especially since I wrote about her at length twenty years ago? The answer is that Anne Boleyn was so much more important than the circumstances of her execution - a macabre story which yeomen warders of the Tower of London retail with glee to spectators at the scaffold site on Tower Green (incidentally many yards from the real spot). And awareness of that importance is steadily increasing over the years. The chronological narrative remains, but not our understanding of it. It is only a decade ago that I discovered the reason she had to die, and even less since what we knew about her life as queen was revolutionized by the publication of Henry VIII’s inventory. We have also learnt and are learning more and more about the world in which she lived and particularly about the royal court which was the milieu for her success and her destruction. For instance, her preoccupation with glamour, which older historians despised as feminine weakness, has now been recognized as a concern with ‘image’, ‘presentation’ and ‘message’ which was as integral to the exercise of power in the sixteenth century as it is in the modern world.

Seeing Anne only through the prism of her final hours produces manifest distortion but, like most people, I began there. Indeed, my interest was not in Anne herself but in the career of one of those who died with her, William Brereton from Malpas in Cheshire. In no way could I see him as her ‘lover’ - his wife certainly did not - so I was challenged to explain how he became involved in Anne’s destruction. Enquiry revealed that the reason for the deaths of Anne, Brereton and the others was not sexual excess but politics. Their fate is explained by what happened not in the bedroom, but in the corridors of power.

I have sometimes described Anne Boleyn as the third woman in my life, after my immediate family, and it is true that once she interests you, fascination grows, as it did for men at the time, and finally for Henry himself. Thus, being able to explain her destruction merely provokes another question. Why was Anne queen in the first place? Until the last thirty years po-faced historians preferred to ignore this. The Victorian J. A. Froude held that ‘It would have been well for Henry VIII if he had lived in a world in which women could have been dispensed with; so ill, in all his relations with them, he succeeded.’ A. F. Pollard, who dominated Tudor history in the years before the Second World War, wrote that Anne’s ‘place in English history is due solely to the circumstance that she appealed to the less refined part of Henry’s nature; she was pre-eminent neither in beauty nor in intellect, and her virtue was not of a character to command or deserve the respect of her own or subsequent ages.’

Yet is it credible that the woman Henry VIII pursued single-mindedly for six years should be so worthless? And why did Henry marry one of his own subjects? It was a virtual rule among Western monarchs to marry for political advantage - almost always a foreign princess. If carnal desire was what drove Henry, society had mechanisms other than marriage to deal with that. Indeed, what baffled contemporaries abroad was his apparent determination to marry a mistress, and the few who knew he didn’t sleep with her failed to understand why not. And was Anne, as Pollard and most historians have implied, merely Henry’s obsession; had she nothing to say for herself? The ‘other woman’ in the most shattering marriage break-up in history, she ousted an entrenched queen of many years’ standing, hugely respected. And what did she then make of that victory? Surely there was more to the role of second wife than producing a famous daughter and failing to produce a son.

There was also a public dimension which followed on being first Henry’s fiancée and later his queen. Under her encouragement, royal policy took directions which continue to shape the English constitution today. Anne was also an active and effective politician, the destroyer of Thomas Wolsey, Henry’s great minister, and it was in order to avoid the same fate that the cardinal’s successor, Thomas Cromwell, determined to destroy Anne first. Equally significant was Anne’s personal religious commitment. It laid the foundations blocks of Protestant England and set the scene for the monumental changes that produced the religious settlement of her daughter, Elizabeth I. Pollard went wildly astray in claiming that Anne was intellectually inadequate. She read deeply in theology, the intellectual topic of the day, and her artistic taste was highly developed. She was, in fact, the first royal consort to embrace and promote the new fashion which we call Renaissance art.

Pursuing Anne gave Henry VIII years of frustration. Frustration is likewise the lot of her biographer. Anne succeeded by exploiting the rules and conventions of politics and high society, but ‘influence’ leaves no paper trail, no evidence of its passage. Manipulation can only be inferred from consequences. No one knows what Anne said to Henry in bed. Anne, moreover, left no journal, no memoranda and very few letters, so her inner life must similarly be inferred from externals, for instance, what she believed from what she chose to read and promote. To make matters even more difficult, Anne was such a contentious figure that much of the evidence of observers is either adulatory or bitterly hostile. Writing a biography of Anne Boleyn has all the challenge, excitement and confusion of police detection. It is no surprise that conclusions differ. Yet although we cannot recover Anne in sharp focus, she does come through as more than two-dimensional, more than a silhouette. She was the most influential and important queen consort this country has ever had. Indeed, Anne deserves to be a feminist icon, a woman in a society which was, above all else, male-dominated, who broke through the glass ceiling by sheer character and initiative.

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