The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn (11 page)

Read The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn Online

Authors: Eric Ives

Protestants told the opposite story. John Foxe staunchly defended both the queen’s morals and her religious commitment. He hints at the involvement of the papists in her fall and cannot resist assigning responsibility to his
bête noire,
the conservative champion, Stephen Gardiner: ‘neither is it unlike, but that Stephen bishop of Winchester, being then abroad in an embassy was not altogether asleep.’
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And Foxe had clinching supernatural proof of Anne’s virtue:
to all other sinister judgements and opinions, whatsoever can be conceived of man against that virtuous queen, I object and oppose again (as instead of answer) the evident demonstration of God’s favour, in maintaining, preserving, and advancing the offspring of her body, the lady Elizabeth, now queen.
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Bishop John Aylmer, replying in 1559 to Knox’s
Monstrous Regiment of Women
, hailed Anne as ‘the crop and root’ of the Reformation whom ‘God had endued with wisdom that she could, and given her the mind that she would, do it’; John Bridges, writing in 1573, elevated Anne to the status of ‘a most holy martyr’.
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Protestant writers were not, however, always unanimous in praise of Anne Boleyn. William Thomas, that pseudo-intellectual hustler who was to be Northumberland’s clerk of the privy council, and who was executed later for plotting Mary’s assassination, firmly maintained the official version of Anne’s guilt, even after Henry VIII’s death:
[Anne’s] liberal life were so shameful to rehearse. Once she was as wise a woman endued with as many outward good qualities in playing on instruments, singing and such other courtly graces as few women of her time, with such a certain outward profession of gravity as was to be marvelled at. But inward she was all another dame than she seemed to be; for in satisfying of her carnal appetite she fled not so much as the company of her own natural brother besides the company of three or four others of the gallantest gentlemen that were near about the king’s proper person - drawn by her own devilish devices that it should seem she was always well occupied.
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A school of puritan opinion was prepared to imply that Henry’s second marriage was as much a matter of lust as principle:
Whether he did it of an upright conscience or to serve his lusts I will not judge for in the burrows of man’s heart be many secret corners and it cannot be denied but that he was a very fleshly man, and no marvel for albeit his father brought him up in good learning yet after... he fell into all riot and overmuch love of women.
 
As for Anne herself:
This gentlewoman in proportion of body might compare with the rest of the ladies and gentlewomen of the court, albeit in beauty she was to many inferior, but for behaviour, manners, attire and tongue she excelled them all ... But howsoever she outwardly appeared, she was indeed a very wilful woman which perhaps might seem no fault because seldom women do lack it, but yet that and other things cost her after dear.
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It is indeed noticeable that a number of writers seem almost reluctant to write about Anne Boleyn in any detail. Thus Holinshed remarked:
Because I might rather say much than sufficiently enough in praise of this noble queen as well for her singular wit and other excellent qualities of mind as also for her favouring of learned men, zeal of religion and liberality in distributing alms in relief of the poor, I will refer the reader unto that which Mr. Foxe says.
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Foxe, however, had already himself referred to better-informed reports still to appear:
because touching the memorable virtues of this worthy queen, partly we have said something before, partly because more also is promised to be declared of her virtuous life (the Lord so permitting) by others who were then about her, I will cease in this matter further to proceed.
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No vindication of Anne Boleyn was ever published. Her chaplain, William Latymer, presented to her daughter an encomium on her religious activities, and the Scottish Lutheran, Alexander Ales, wrote an account of her fall, placing all the blame on the enemies of the Reformation, but both men evidently had patronage in mind. Ales, indeed, included an address for any financial contributions Elizabeth would like to send.
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The reason for silence elsewhere is not far to seek. Few defences of Anne Boleyn have been entirely happy. Any vindication of the wife was an implicit criticism of the husband; if Anne was ‘noble’, ‘virtuous’ and ‘worthy’, Henry had been either a monster or a gull.
One of those who may have been concerned with a project for an official Elizabethan account of ‘the mother of our blessed Queen’ was George Wyatt of Boxley Abbey in Kent (1554-1624).
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One of the most assiduous of Anne’s defenders, Wyatt claimed that he had begun work at the request of an official biographer who had asked him to set down what he knew of Anne Boleyn’s early years, and had continued it under the encouragement of the archbishop of Canterbury. With the accession of James, interest, so he implies, had waned, leaving him to carry on alone. George had a strong personal interest in vindicating the English Reformation in general and Anne Boleyn in particular; he was the youngest son (but also the heir) of Thomas Wyatt, the leader of the 1554 rebellion against Katherine of Aragon’s daughter, Mary I, and grandson of Thomas Wyatt, the poet who had been imprisoned in the Tower in 1536 as one of those suspected of involvement with the queen.
George Wyatt devoted the latter part of his life not only to her biography but, as we have seen over the business of Anne’s alleged deformity, to an effort to reply specifically to the Catholic propagandist, Nicholas Sander. Sander was no original authority, but his
Origins and Progress of the English Schism
(posthumously published in Cologne in 1585) had broadcast very effectively the scandalous stories about Anne which circulated in recusant circles.
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A typical example is
La Vie de Anne Boulein ou de Bouloigne mere de Elizabeth Royne Dangleterre.
Its
pièce de résistance
is the story that after her miscarriage in January 1536, Anne committed incest with her brother in order to beget a son and so set up the Boleyn dynasty.
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In the end Wyatt was no more successful than others had been in publishing a defence of the queen, but more because of the grandiose nature of his plans than want of effort. Two, or possibly three, of his attempts have survived: the earliest a brief but completed ‘Life of Queen Anne Boleigne’, the second a vindication of the relations between Anne and Thomas Wyatt the elder, which may not be by, but is certainly after, George Wyatt, and finally (and after 1603) the opening section of a massive ‘History of the English Reformation’.
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The purpose of what George does have to say about Anne is naïvely obvious. ‘Elect of God’, ‘heroical spirit’, ‘princely lady’ - the adjectives abound. Henry VIII, so the ‘Defence of Sir Thomas Wyatt’ has it:
joined himself unto her [Anne] as the oak to the vine, he sustaining her, she adoring him, both embracing and clasping one another with that most straight and sacred knot, that heaven and earth were consenting to knit not to be loosed ever without the impiety of those that envied so incomparable felicity, like to grow to this noble realm thereby... Thus they lived tokens of increasing love perpetually increasing. Her mind brought him forth the rich treasures of love of piety, love of truth, love of learning. Her body yielded him the fruit of marriage inestimable pledges of faithful and loyal love.
 
And what put a period to this idyll?
She had a king, he not his like, ever liked and loved, and to be liked and loved of her, (alas), too much liked of others that were practised to draw his liking from her, thereby to have him not like himself, whereby they wrought her end.
 
Which, despite the attempted concealment of the play on words, is to say that the incomparable Henry was a dupe.
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The fact that writers have agendas according to their religious alignments does not, however, make them valueless to the historian. The test is, did they have access to real sources of information? The line from Sander back to William Rastell is direct, but if we are to believe Sir Thomas More, he never discussed Anne with Rastell or anyone else, and the personal recollections of the members of his family were confined to his life outside the council and the court. They certainly breathe no word of More’s dangerous and sometimes highly secret encouragement of the opposition to the king’s divorce.
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On the other hand, even the author of a Catholic account as full of picaresque invention as the mid-century
Cronica del Rey Enrico Otavo de Inglaterra
had from time to time access to genuine recollections — for example, his report that Thomas Wyatt watched the execution of Anne’s alleged lovers in 1536, which was only confirmed in 1959 when a manuscript containing hitherto unknown Wyatt material was identified in the library of Trinity College, Dublin.
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As for George Wyatt, he had three particular sources to augment the material he collected about Anne: ‘some helps’ left by his grandfather, the poet, the recollections of his mother Jane, who had married in 1537 and lived to the end of the century, and the memories of Anne Gainsford, later the wife of George Zouche, gentleman pensioner and a target for Catholic investigation in Mary’s reign. Given such links, the volume of material Wyatt recorded is disappointing, but at least one important episode has independent warranty in other sources.
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The importance of persisting with material from partisan sources is well illustrated in the little which John Foxe does record about Anne. Undoubtedly Foxe wished to present Anne in a positive light, but he was equally aware that factual inaccuracy would lay him open to ridicule - and so too the Protestantism he espoused. In consequence, he regularly revised his account of the queen as his data improved.
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In his first work, the
Rerum in ecclesia gestarum ... Commentarii
, written while he was still abroad, he was little more than hagiographical:
There was at this time in the king’s court a young woman, not of ignoble family, but much more ennobled by beauty, as well as being the most beautiful of all in true piety and character, Anne Boleyn, whom the king greatly loved, as she well merited, and took as his wife and queen.
 
‘The entire British nation’ he went on, was indebted to Anne, not only for her own contribution to the commencement of the Reformation but as the mother of Queen Elizabeth, who has revived it.
If only the freedom of the English Church, brought about this first time by Anne had lasted longer and she had been able to enjoy longer life.
 
Anne’s fate he refused to discuss, but he did include her scaffold speech as evidence of her ‘singular faith and complete modesty towards her king’. In 1563 Foxe, now back in England, was able to be more specific in the first edition of his great work,
The Acts and Monuments,
better known as
The Book of Martyrs.
He gave details of Anne’s charitable activity, her support of named scholars, the discipline she kept in her household and her feeding of the reformist ideas of Simon Fish to the king. What is more, he cited sources, for example, Anne’s silk woman, Joan Wilkinson. Seven years later, a second edition added other stories and identified the material about Fish as having come from his widow. Foxe also included a rebuttal of Anne’s alleged offences, along with the barbed comment that Henry’s immediate remarriage was ‘to such as wisely can judge upon cases occurrant, a great clearing of her’ — as near to the knuckle as he dared go. In the last edition (the fourth of 1583), he was able to tell of Anne’s support for Thomas Patmore, the unorthodox parson of Much Hadham, almost certainly based on the text of a surviving petition. We also have an amount of material which Foxe assembled but did not use, or else abridged.
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Foxe’s overall purpose was to present Anne as a Protestant role model, but that is no reason
ex hypothesi
to discard material carefully collected, much of which can, in fact, be verified.
The problem of potential distortion is equally or more pressing with the one source that approaches anything like a regular commentary on English affairs. This is provided by the reports of resident foreign ambassadors, for, as well as regular domestic news reporting being unknown, Tudor monarchs were convinced that it was best for subjects to be told only what was good for them. The resident ambassador was a new breed in northern Europe. Only in the sixteenth century was it becoming generally recognized that a country needed to keep a representative at the court of an important neighbour, to watch over its own interests and to send back a steady flow of news. Older-style envoys continued to be sent to handle special negotiations, but there were now men stationed abroad and, according to the advice manuals, reporting back every few days, with monthly situation reports and, on their return, a
relation
or written debriefing. Theory did not turn out quite like that in practice, but a series of letters to the home government updating the situation every ten or twelve days — which is what survives from the best-organized embassies — is an outside commentary on affairs of unique value to the historian.
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