The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn (47 page)

What, one may ask, did all this have to do with St Anne? To modern readers the apology offered by one child in the tableau for ‘our simpleness ... the brief time considering’ may appear inadequate to excuse this incongrous
mélange
of religion and heraldry. In fact, Leland and Udall were cleverly linking the conception of Anne’s child and the conception of Christ. The New Testament tells how an angel came to the Virgin Mary to announce that the Holy Ghost would descend on her and that she would conceive the Son of God.
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In Western art this descent was regularly pictured as a white dove coming down to Mary. To transmute the white dove who descended on Mary into the white falcon (Anne) descending on the tree-stump (Henry) was, therefore, to assert that the child whom the couple expected was a divine gift. Moreover, the crowning of the falcon associated Anne’s own coronation with Mary’s coronation by God in the city of heaven. All in all, therefore, the Leaden Hall tableau welcomed Anne as the source of a revived Tudor family, a mother sent by God, whose pregnancy was according to the will of God’s Spirit, and one on whose head the crown would soon be placed as a sign of divine grace and acceptance. Nor was the message left to the eye or only to the speeches made by the children. Udall wrote additional Latin verses for the educated - on the St Anne theme, on the falcon and the roses, and on the coronation of the bird (that is, Anne), while a Leland stanza summed up. Finally, the queen left to the strains of a ballad about the white falcon. Perhaps Udall may have had Anne’s physique in mind when he wrote:
Of body small,
Of power regal
She is, and sharp of sight;
Of courage hault,
No manner fault
Is in this falcon white.
 
What, however, is without doubt is that the final verses refer to papal obstructiveness and spell out that justice had at last been done and the country could now relax.
And where by wrong
She hath flown long,
Uncertain where to [a]light;
Herself repose
Upon the Rose
Now may this falcon white.
Whereon to rest
And build her nest,
God grant her most of might!
That England may
Rejoice alway,
In this same falcon white.
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Analogies between Anne Boleyn and St Anne and between Anne and the Blessed Virgin contributed to the coronation’s immediate purpose, investing the new queen with a sacred identity. There are, however, interesting continental parallels. Indeed, the notion that Leland and Udall should exploit the descent of the Holy Spirit and the crowning of the Virgin may well have come from Anne herself. At Queen Claude’s entry to Paris in 1517, in which Anne almost certainly took part, a mechanical dove (the Holy Spirit) descended to place a crown on the queen’s head.
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Early sixteenth-century attitudes saw no embarrassment in subsuming the Virgin Mary in the personality of an earthly woman. The Marian motet
O salve genetrix Virgo
may very possibly have been adapted for use at Anne’s coronation, while other Marian pieces could be sung unchanged because of the implication of a promised son to be born.
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The theme of Anne’s ‘assumption’ was continued in one of the pageants which were not designed by Leland and Udall. Located at the gate into the precinct of St Paul’s, it consisted of a throne set high and awaiting its new occupant.
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Below sat three splendidly dressed women, unidentified but clearly representing either holy virgins or more probably the Sibyls of antiquity who prophesied the advent of Christ. Those on either side held silver placards with suitable general-purpose texts from the Bible written in blue, but the central figure held a gold placard with the inscription (also in blue),
Veni amica coronaberis
(‘Come, my love, thou shalt be crowned’), a deliberate appropriation of the Marian hymn,
Veni coronaberis.
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And to make a double point, two angels sat at the base of the tableau holding up a crown, an imperial crown.
The climax of the Marian series came at the Conduit in Fleet Street, 500 yards from the limit of the City’s jurisdiction at Temple Bar.
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The images on the Conduit itself had been gilded and its coats of arms new painted, but a special tower with four turrets had also been erected on the top. This was intended to represent the Heavenly City itself. Indeed, Hall commented that inside the tower were ‘such several solemn instruments that it seemed to be a heavenly noise’. To make the identification even more obvious, the exterior was apparently painted the jasper green mentioned twice in the
Revelation of St John.
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In each turret stood a speaker representing one of the Cardinal Virtues, without which no one could enter the Holy City. They, however, promised never to leave the queen ‘but to be aiding and comforting her’. Anne’s ‘Assumption to Heaven’ was complete. She could now proceed to her coronation.
The pageants at the Leaden Hall, ‘it Paul’s Gate and the Fleet Street Conduit thus developed and elaborated a traditional religious syllabus. Four other sites, however, deliberately broke with tradition in favour of classical themes. At the turn from Fenchurch Street into Gracechurch Street a likeness of Mount Parnassus (in classical legend the abode of Apollo and the nine Muses) had been constructed with its sacred fountain of Helicon, all carefully following Virgil.
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The ‘fountain’ was made of white marble — or pseudo-marble — and consisted of a large antique-style basin with a classical column rising from the middle to support a smaller bowl a metre and more above. The basin was filled with ‘racked’ (filtered) Rhenish wine and from its rim four nozzles jetted wine into the upper bowl, the whole being driven by pressure. On Mount Parnassus, above and behind the fountain, Apollo, the god of music and poetry, sat enthroned, with his eagle perching above, and Calliope, the Muse of epic poetry, at his feet, with the other Muses of art and learning grouped on either side. Latin verses by Leland and Udall drew Anne into the scene as one whom the gods had come expressly to honour, and each of the deities in turn praised Henry’s new queen. According to Edward Hall, the Muses did not actually speak their lines but had them displayed in letters of gold, while the goddesses themselves played on a variety of musical instruments; whether Apollo was similarly treated is not clear. The advantage of this was not just that it spared Anne lengthy Latin speeches, which she possibly would not have understood, but that she could have the verses pointed out and translated without embarrassment. Furthermore, it was probably asking a good deal of London’s musical and dramatic talent to assemble at short notice a large consort, each of whose members could also declaim Latin verse effectively.
Beauty, chastity, virtue, noble descent, these were the qualities that the Muses proclaimed, along with the assurance that she was now to give Henry the companionship and consolation he had lacked for too long - and children, above all children, and male children at that. There was no diffidence about drawing glad attention to Anne’s pregnancy. It was her supreme achievement and her greatest merit. Anne Boleyn was flaunting in front of critics and public opinion her divine right to the king’s bed and to the throne. As the words given to Clio, the Muse of history, declared in the sophistication of Latin:
Anna comes, the most famous woman in all the world;
Anna comes, the shining incarnation of chastity.
In snow-white litter, just like the goddesses,
Anna the Queen is here, the preservation of your future.
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To support this paean of praise to Anne, and to defy the world, Udall plundered the full repertoire of classical myth and allusion. Here were the roses of Paestum; the festival of Ceres; Cybele. Henry was Nestor, Anne one of the Sibyls; he was to love her as Titus Sempronius Gracchus the elder loved his wife Cornelia; Anne was purer than the rigid morality of the Sabines; her love for Henry was the love of Portia for Brutus.
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This classical metaphor is in marked contrast to previous processions. Here we find humanism in the service of monarchy, whereas in 1501 the medieval pageant tradition had been dominant, and so too even in 1522 (despite Lily).
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Admittedly the classicism only overlays traditional forms and ideas, and that somewhat thinly - as when the Muse Thalia based her speech on Anne’s heraldic badge, the falcon — but this is more a comment on Tudor humanism generally.
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The significant point for our purpose is that Anne Boleyn should have committed herself so firmly to the new humanist style.
The Gracechurch Street tableau is also important for another connection. It was the ‘device’ which the council had persuaded the Hanse merchants of the Steelyard to pay for, and it was designed by Hans Holbein the younger, who had returned to England for his second and lasting stay in 1532. With the exception that, as executed, the triumphal arch was omitted and the Muses were all seated and grouped slightly differently, the drawing now in the Staatliche Museen in Berlin closely matches Hall’s description and also fits Udall’s verse (plate 38). Scholars have normally accounted for Holbein’s design by his connection with the Hanse, but given the short time available and the government imprint on the celebrations, it seems certain that the role of the merchants was simply to pay, and that Holbein executed a design to a detailed English specification.
Holbein’s presentation of Parnassus gave rise to one of the hostile canards which so bedevil the story of Anne Boleyn. A month after Chapuys had dismissed the coronation as ‘a cold, meagre and uncomfortable thing’, he got hold of the story that the eagle hovering over Apollo had been deliberately placed there by the German merchants as a reference to the emperor, Charles V.
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His symbol thereby towered over the arms of Henry VIII and Anne which, the drawing suggests, were on antique pillars, framing the nine Muses. Three weeks later he repeats the tale, and others have repeated it ever since. It is first of all quite implausible that foreign merchants who ‘made’ the tableau as a favour to the English Crown should negate their subservience with a deliberately offensive gesture, even assuming they chose the theme. Second, it is clear that the eagle in Holbein’s drawing is not the two-headed bird of the Habsburgs. Third, the iconography of the tableau demands that the eagle be the one associated with Apollo; to have incorporated the imperial bird associated with Zeus, and without any justification in the Virgilian text, would have been illiteracy of the first order. We may note, too, that according to the classical story the eagle was blinded by Apollo’s brilliance — hardly a compliment to Charles V! Indeed, if we are at all to credit Chapuys’ story of Anne being annoyed, it was probably irritation at the ignorance of
hoi polloi.
30
The second of the classical pageants was at the Conduit in Cornhill, where the Three Graces of Roman mythology waited to greet the queen. Although framed by a Latin prologue and epilogue, the display was again somewhat incongruous because the deities announced themselves by English equivalents typical of chivalric disguising - Heart Gladness (Aglaia), Stable Honour (Thalia) and Continual Success (Euphrosyne).
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A similar
mélange
was also prepared at the Great Conduit and the Standard in Cheapside, where static displays of heraldic devices and coats of arms were coupled with Latin speeches and music. Reality interrupted just beyond the next landmark, the newly decorated Eleanor Cross, with the aldermen presenting a gold purse containing a thousand marks (
£
666.66), but classicism took over again at the Little Conduit, much more convincingly this time, though still largely in English.
32
The tableau depicted ‘The Judgement of Paris’ in which Mercury, the messenger of Jupiter, gives Paris a golden apple to present to the fairest of three goddesses, the wealthy Juno, the wise Pallas Athene and the beautiful Venus.
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Each tries to outbid the others before Paris awards the prize to Venus. Thus far the script was in line with the classical story, but Paris then came up to date:
Yet to be plain
Here is the fourth lady now in our presence,
Most worthy to have it, of due congruence,
As peerless in riches, wit and beauty,
Which are but sundry qualities in you three.
But for her worthiness, this apple of gold
Is too simple a reward, a thousandfold.
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A child then capped what Paris had said by announcing that there was another reward prepared for Anne, the crown imperial, and hailing the queen as a demonstration of divine providence. The parting song to Anne concluded with the stanza:
The golden ball
Of price but small,
Have Venus shall,
The fair goddess,
Because it was
Too low and bare
For your good grace
And worthiness.
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This is the way the script ends, but at the last minute there may have been an addition. Both Hall and
The noble triumphant Coronation
tell of a golden ball being presented to Anne; Hall says it was presented by Mercury and was divided into three sections, signifying gifts which each of the goddesses gave — riches, wisdom and happiness.
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