The scarcity of genuine letters from Anne is nothing to wonder at. Except in diplomacy or matters of exceptional importance, people at this period did not normally keep copies of the letters they sent. Correspondence is generally known only if the original has survived in the papers of the recipient. Letters to the queen are, indeed, somewhat more plentiful and more revealing, in particular the seventeen love-letters from Henry himself, ten in French and the rest in English, which have ended up — of all places - in the Vatican.
49
These letters have no dates; although some belong to the summer and autumn of 1528 there is, as with Shakespeare’s Sonnets, no firm agreement about the order in which they were written.
50
Letters between third parties are also valuable, particularly to and from correspondents within court circles such as Lord Lisle, the governor of Calais, and his wife, but with one proviso: communicating political information or gossip could get people into serious trouble, so that sensitive material was normally conveyed by word of mouth.
51
On-the-spot reporting of news had no place in sixteenth-century life, but a number of eyewitness accounts have survived of several of the episodes in Anne Boleyn’s career, including a number by foreigners. These are, of course, confined to the more public events, from her creation as marchioness of Pembroke in September 1532 to her execution in the Tower three years and nine months later. Furthermore, they are subject to the prejudices of the various eyewitnesses. Carping descriptions of, say, Anne’s coronation procession contrast with the initial neutrality of Judge John Spelman, the warmer recollection of Thomas Cranmer, and the semi-official propaganda of Wynkyn de Worde’s pamphlet,
The noble tryumphant coronacyon of quene Anne, wyfe unto the most noble kynge Henry the VIII.
And in such a range of reporting there lies safety for the historian.
52
An additional complication arises when first-hand reports have been worked into consciously produced pieces of literature. One example we have already encountered is the poetry of George Cavendish.
53
From about 1522 until the cardinal’s death in 1530, Cavendish was one of his gentlemen ushers and so splendidly placed to collect first-hand information about Wolsey and the court, but he wrote in Mary’s reign, long after the event. What is more, his intention to display the mutability of Fortune makes for verse heavy on lamentation and light on information; there are some nuggets of value, but the 365 lines covering Anne and her alleged lovers, one after another, contain fewer than twenty points of substance. Cavendish’s better-known ‘Life and Death of Cardinal Wolsey’ is far more informative, but this work was also written from the hindsight of the mid-century.
54
Furthermore, given that theme is again the fickleness of Fortune, it casts Anne Boleyn as the agent of ‘Venus the insatiate goddess’, called in by Fortune to ‘bate’ Wolsey’s ‘high port’ and humble him to the dust.
Another important literary source is Edward Hall’s
The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Famelies of York and Lancaster.
Better known as Hall’s Chronicle, this is the work of a Londoner who did see much of what he described and tried to investigate more. Yet his stated theme — ‘The triumphant reign of King Henry the VIII’ — expresses the standpoint he took, and the finished narrative (to 1532) has only three isolated sentences about Anne, and a short paragraph about her dancing with Francis I at Calais.
55
The rest of the book, worked up posthumously from Hall’s notes and drafts, has two sentences about Anne’s marriage, another about her pregnancy, a long description of her coronation (in which Hall was involved), details of the birth and christening of Elizabeth, terse reports of Anne’s reaction to Katherine of Aragon’s death and of her own subsequent miscarriage, six final sentences on her condemnation and a brief version of her speech on the scaffold. Perhaps if Hall had lived to write the material in final form himself we would have had more, but a hint in one passage suggests that he intended to gloss over Anne’s marriage as something on which ‘the king was not well counselled’.
56
Anything else would be quite out of character for Hall’s hero king. A ‘Chronicle’ which is truer to the style of London chronicles in general is that of Charles Wriothesley, Windsor Herald
(c.
1508-62). It is immediate — items were recorded as or soon after they occurred - and also well-informed since the author was close to government and took part in some of the events he describes.
57
The literary account which is closest in time to the events described is the
Histoire de Anne Boleyn Jadis Royne d‘Angleterre,
the French metrical account of Anne’s trial and execution by Lancelot de Carles which we have already encountered. It was completed on 2 June 1536, a bare fortnight after her death. Manuscript versions exist in London, in a number of repositories in France, and in Brussels; it reached print at Lyons in 1545, with the author described as
Charles aulmosnier de M. le Dauphin
.
58
Although de Carles did not himself witness the trial of Anne and her brother, he was in London at the time; he could have attended the trial of the commoners accused, and undoubtedly had contact with well-informed eyewitnesses.
59
Because of this and the immediacy of his writing, de Carles’s account has been assumed to have original authority. Caution should, in fact, have warned otherwise. How could de Carles report events not accessible to the public, notably his long and unique account of the speech by an unnamed lord reporting Anne’s misdeeds to Henry in absolute confidence? The true source of his information was made clear when research revealed that a presentation copy of his poem, sent to Henry VIII, was listed as a ‘French book written in form of a tragedy by one Carle being attendant and near about the ambassador’.
60
In other words, de Carles wrote on the basis of what was known by the French embassy, and the principal source for this would have been the English government. It is therefore no surprise that de Carles’s account agrees with the information Cromwell had sent to Henry’s ambassadors in Paris on 14 May, setting out for foreign consumption the Crown’s version of her arrest and indictment.
61
The
Histoire
is, in effect, the government line in translation. One must also note the description ‘in form of a tragedy’. De Carles imaginatively elaborated the queen’s response to being found guilty into fifty lines of verse. Her scaffold speech, too, is enhanced and distorted. She seems to have said, ‘I am come hither to accuse no man of my death, neither my judges nor any other,’ or something of the kind.
62
The Histoire makes her say: ‘The judge of all the world, in whom abounds justice and truth knows all, and through his love I beseech that he will have compassion on those who have condemned me to this death.’ This is clearly one more in the category of ‘last words’ which should have been uttered but were not.
63
Paul Friedmann closed his magisterial two-volume study,
Anne Boleyn: A Chapter of English History, 1527-1536,
with the depressing comment: ‘my object has been to show that very little is known of the events of those times, and that the history of Henry’s first divorce and of the rise and fall of Anne Boleyn has still to be written.’
64
The sources available today for a biography of Anne Boleyn suggest that we no longer need to be quite as pessimistic. True, there have been no block discoveries since Friedmann’s day, but during the century and more since he wrote, valuable new evidence has come to light piecemeal, and despite their distortions and irregularities, the bits and pieces do add up. What is even more important is that historical research has transformed our reading of the period; the context into which evidence, old and new, has to be placed is far better understood. Our knowledge of the court, in particular, and also of the nature and progress of Henry’s matrimonial affairs and their relation to religious Reformation means that we can now see Anne as an active, three-dimensional, proactive participant.
Friedmann’s comment, nevertheless, remains true in one respect. The sources for the life of Anne Boleyn stop short of that level of inner documentation which biography ideally requires. Only at a handful of points in the story do we know anything of what Anne thought. Only in Henry’s love-letters and in remarks scrawled on that Book of Hours do we know for certain what they said to each other. All the rest is of the order of what somebody said somebody else thought or said - and according to tradition it was Henry VIII who remarked, ‘if I thought my cap knew my counsel, I would cast it into the fire and burn it.’
65
The limitations are galling, given the fascination Anne Boleyn and her story have continued to exercise over the intervening centuries, and many have concluded that only artistic imagination will bring us to the truth. That is a valid position. There is a place for Donizetti’s Anna Bolena, for Anna of the Thousand Days, for the variant dramatizations by Rosemary Anne Sisson and Nick McCarthy in the television series
Six Wives of Henry VIII
and for the many literary attempts at biographical
actualité,
provided we recognize them for what they are: statements about ourselves. They explore our values, they tell us how we feel men and women would react, might react, should react in an imagined situation. What they can never quite tell us is how Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn did react.
5
PASSION AND COURTLY LOVE
S
OURCE problems are particularly relevant to our pursuit of Anne Boleyn in the years between March 1522 and the end of 1527. At the first, she was newly come from France, the most glamorous of the ladies rescued from the
Château Vert,
although in reality on passage to exile in Ireland. By the second, her name was beginning to pass along the diplomatic grapevine as Henry VIII’s inamorata. In England her stock was soaring and Anne could ‘look very haughty and stout [self-confident], having all manner of jewels or rich apparel that might be gotten with money’.
1
The events of these five years see Anne involved first with Henry Percy, heir to the earldom of Northumberland, then with Thomas Wyatt the elder, and finally with Henry VIII and the problem of his childless marriage.
The principal source for the Percy story, and the only one which gives any detail, is Cavendish’s biography of Cardinal Wolsey. According to Cavendish — and he writes as an eyewitness — Percy was a young man in Wolsey’s household and Anne a maid of honour to Queen Katherine.
2
When accompanying his master to court, Percy gravitated to the queen’s chamber: ‘And there would fall in dalliance among the queen’s maidens, being at the last more conversant with Mistress Anne Boleyn than with any other, so that there grew such a secret love between them that at length they were ensured together intending to marry.’ Henry, however, was himself taken with Anne, who ‘for her excellent gesture and behaviour did excel all other’, and ordered the cardinal to intervene. So when Wolsey got back to York Place, he called Percy to the gallery and told him off in no uncertain terms:
I marvel not a little of thy peevish folly that thou wouldest tangle and ensure thyself with a foolish girl yonder in the court. I mean Anne Boleyn. Dost thou not consider the state that God hath called thee unto in this world, for after the death of thy noble father thou art most like to inherit and possess one of the most worthiest earldoms of this realm? Therefore it had been most meet and convenient for thee to have sued for the consent of thy father in that behalf, and to have also made the king’s highness privy thereto, requiring then his princely favour.
The king would have found him a far better match and formed a much better impression of his worth, but now he had offended both father and monarch at once. Wolsey would send for the earl to discipline his son and the king would insist on the relationship ending because he had planned another match for Anne (unknown to her) and ‘was almost at a point with the same person’.
This reduced Percy to tears, but he defended both his right to choose and Anne’s suitability, beseeching the cardinal to intercede with the king ‘on my behalf for his princely benevolence in this matter the which I cannot deny or forsake’.
3
At this Wolsey addressed bitter comments to Cavendish and others of his household about the wilfulness of youth, but Percy insisted: ‘in this matter I have gone so far before so many worthy witnesses that I know not how to avoid myself nor to discharge my conscience.’ The worldly-wise cardinal saw no problem, sent for the earl and, in the meantime, forbade Percy to see Anne.
When the father arrived, he and Wolsey planned what to do. Then, as Cavendish and his fellows were escorting Northumberland to his barge, Henry Percy was sent for and given a public dressing-down by his formidable parent: ‘Son, thou hast always been a proud, presumptuous, disdainful, and very unthrifty waster, and even so hast thou now declared thyself.’ Threats of the king’s displeasure, the horrible prospect that he would be the last Percy, earl of Northumberland, unfavourable comparison with his brothers and a threat of disinheritance followed in quick succession, and the earl swept out with a dire prophecy to those around that they would see it all come true. At this Lord Percy crumbled, and ‘after long debating and consultation’ (presumably with the canon lawyers), a way was found to invalidate the young lord’s commitment to Anne, who had, in the meantime, been sent to her father’s country house. To make assurance sure, Percy was married off to a daughter of the earl of Shrewsbury (George Talbot), and Anne thereafter nursed an implacable hatred for Wolsey, uttering threats that ‘if it lay ever in her power, she would work the cardinal as much [similar] displeasure.’