Anne Boleyn: 500 Years of Lies

Over the years history has been keen to focus on Anne’s rivalry with the king’s next wife, Jane Seymour, with tales of fist fights, bitching and abandonment dominating the majority of media portrayals. Biographers and producers delight in homing in on this element of Anne’s story, packaging it in the contrived style of a corset-busting period drama. As a consequence, readers and viewers can be forgiven for thinking Jane Seymour was the overriding factor in Anne being cast aside by her husband and partner of ten years. But as you may now be coming to realise, real life can’t be neatly condensed into a three-act storyline. Well, I guess it can if they leave out the political wars, humanitarian efforts and international conflicts – effectively, every real reason for Anne’s demise – but in doing so they dilute and dumb down history and do a great disservice to the reader, not to mention the truth.

Of course, that’s not to say that Jane Seymour wasn’t an important element in Anne’s takedown; indeed, she was a potent ingredient in the melting pot of disaster that was starting to bubble away in this most grim of metaphorical Tudor kitchens.

While Anne was fighting her final political campaigns of 1536, she was simultaneously subjected to a tumultuous emotional attack on her so-called private life. As soon as Anne miscarried her baby at the end of January, Jane Seymour was suddenly advised to hold back from becoming Henry’s mistress in a sexual capacity. They had a better plan for her: to inspire the king to do away with his increasingly problematic wife and take Jane as his new bride.

Where a commoner marrying the monarch had once been a ridiculously unrealistic prospect, Anne’s own achievement had now left her exposed to attack from any woman who was up to the challenge. And Jane Seymour certainly was.

However, this doesn’t mean she waited in the wings until the king was single and ready to be snapped up. In fact, we have only recently started to realise just how much of a shocking crossover took place in the months leading up to Anne’s arrest, to the point that as soon as Henry heard confirmation of Anne’s death he went straight to Jane, and the following day they were betrothed. Ten days later they were married.⁴⁷¹ The timing was seen as so distasteful that it was kept from the public until the king made Parliament ‘demand’ that he remarry urgently as a matter of national safety to secure the kingdom with an heir.⁴⁷² Only then did Henry pretend that he had stumbled upon Jane Seymour and gradually introduced her to the country.

At the time of Anne’s takedown, from her arrest to the trial and, of course, her execution, Henry made sure Jane’s name was kept out of the news and away from any hint of scandal, making it one of the biggest cover-ups of the 1500s. History has been complicit in promoting the royal propaganda, painting Jane as the simple, submissive wife, who somehow floated into the king’s life in an unassuming cloud of moonbeams and innocent virtue.

Of course, it makes sense. Writers needed ‘Wife Number Three’ to be different from the hardened schemer that was Anne Boleyn, so this character description worked for them. Jane was the delicate good girl who never spoke out of turn. Placid. Obedient. Boring.

Guess what? Oh no, she wasn’t.

But don’t worry, we aren’t about to pit yet another woman against Anne, even if that’s what Tudor courtiers and historians alike have revelled in doing since 1535. But we still can’t escape the unsettling fact that everything we have previously believed to be true of Anne Boleyn – that she calculatingly pursued and played the king to secure the crown – is ironically what Jane Seymour did. And this was no malicious rumour created to suppress yet another powerful woman’s true story; we have written evidence of Jane’s actions from within her camp at the time of their taking place. However, in spite of such seemingly heartless deeds, you may find it hard to dislike Jane due to a strange sense of awe and respect that builds the more you discover about her.

‘Henry VIII’s third queen’ may have been repeatedly dismissed as a dim-witted and passive pawn, innocently placed in the king’s path. Writers simultaneously credit her with demolishing the royal marriage while being too simple to know what she was doing. (Hey, she can’t be seen to be as quick-witted as ‘Wife Number Two’.) They ingeniously skirt round this issue by making Jane a mere puppet for the power-hungry men at court. But how much of that is actually true?

Jane’s rise came at a time when she’d pretty much given up on life, because life had given up on her. She’d resigned herself to spinsterhood back home at Wolf Hall, with no marriage prospects and no hope of a career. Then she was given a lifeline: a chance of success back at court. You can almost feel the sense of having nothing to lose, and, my goodness, she went for it. Jane had played nice in the past and life had seemingly forgotten about her. Which is where we begin to understand why she was no hapless pawn in the court game of getting Anne Boleyn out; as Chapuys’s evidence will reveal, Jane calculated every move with an amazing, albeit despicable, team around her, in order to have the ultimate shot at life.

On the surface, she appeared to be your average country girl. Unlike that of her cousin Anne Boleyn, Jane’s education had nothing particularly radical about it; her recent biographer concludes she was probably taught by the family chaplain. It’s recorded that it could have been between 1527 and 1529 that Jane followed her older brother, Edward, to court.⁴⁷³ She would have been aged between nineteen and twenty-one, and this was the first time she had left her small village for court life in London. Jane would have grown up hearing all about her brother’s glamorous life serving the king’s sister, Mary Tudor, in France alongside their cousins Anne and Mary Boleyn,⁴⁷⁴ and was no doubt yearning to experience that life for herself.

It was Sir Francis Bryan, a distant cousin of the Seymours, who secured Jane her first role at court, in the household of Katherine of Aragon.⁴⁷⁵ But she was joining at a dramatic time in court history: the early stages of Katherine’s scandalous annulment from Henry VIII.

Jane was to witness all the sad events as they unfolded, including the emotional trauma Katherine endured as a result of her husband’s appalling treatment of her. It was probably the strong personal empathy Jane felt for Katherine that caused her to quickly become devoted to the queen and her daughter, Princess Mary. Chapuys later noted that Jane bore ‘great love and reverence to the Princess’.⁴⁷⁶

So, when you understand where Jane’s loyalties lay and the impact this would have had on how she viewed her cousin Anne Boleyn, you start to see why Jane may not have felt any guilt whatsoever in stealing Henry from Anne all those years later – if a husband can ever really be stolen.

Oi, give him back, for the poor man cannot speak for himself!

Of course, having seen the disturbing effects of Henry’s mistreatment of Katherine for herself, Jane couldn’t have had a very high opinion of him as husband material, which makes her designs on him in 1536 somewhat chilling.

But back in 1533, it turns out that the breakdown of the king’s marriage was to have a direct and detrimental effect on Jane’s life. When Henry finally succeeded in his quest for an annulment, Katherine was no longer entitled to a royal household. This meant her staff was hugely reduced to only ten ladies, and unfortunately Jane didn’t make the cut; she was forced to leave the glamorous Tudor court for village life at Wolf Hall once again.⁴⁷⁷ (This is now feeling surprisingly similar to Anne’s episode back at Hever Castle following the Henry Percy debacle.)

The return home would have been a devastating blow for Jane, signalling the end of her career in London with no future prospects. And who was the person she held responsible for her misery? On whom could she focus her anger and resentment? Anne Boleyn, of course.

In Jane’s eyes, it was because of Anne that she went on to live a frustratingly dreary country life for two long years, from 1533 to 1535.⁴⁷⁸ During this time, as a committed Catholic Jane would have watched the events of Anne’s reign helplessly from the sidelines as the new religious regime of the Church of England took over.

However, Jane’s prayers were finally answered in early 1535, when the perpetual knight in shining armour that was Sir Francis Bryan managed to secure her a new position back at court.⁴⁷⁹ But this time it was in the household of her cousin and queen: Anne Boleyn.

And so, we find ourselves at the root of Jane’s underlying contempt for Anne – how and why she could deliberately set out to ruin the cousin who had taken her in and given her a lifeline. Anne never saw the betrayal coming.

Contrary to popular belief, Jane didn’t initially set out to replace Anne as queen, due to the simple fact that Anne’s most recent pregnancy secured her position on the throne. But once she miscarried the baby everything changed – not just for Anne but for Jane, too. From that moment on, right up to her secret betrothal to the king, Jane was meticulously coached on how to act by those around her. At this point they believed that if Jane played it right she could replace Anne, not just in the royal bed but as the queen of England. She could be the saviour of the land, bringing England back to Catholicism and reinstating Henry’s daughter Mary as next in line to the throne.

In forcing Jane Seymour into the constraints of her caricature within the ‘six wives’ gimmick, history has been keen to tell us she wasn’t a political queen. But pursuing the crown and becoming queen in the first place was the most radically political thing Jane did.

For a girl who had been relegated to the sidelines her whole life, now that she was at the centre of the action it appears there was no way she was going to be anyone’s submissive pawn. Contemporary reports of those who supported Jane’s rise tell us she was fully complicit in her new faction’s plan, with her dramatically making a show of returning the king’s gifts and letters unopened.⁴⁸⁰

This has been interpreted by historians centuries later as Jane’s attempt to recreate Anne’s supposed success in further piquing Henry’s interest by refusing to give in to him. Of course, as we now know, that wasn’t quite how Anne ‘played’ it. It was Chapuys who reported that the king’s friends were coaching Jane⁴⁸¹ on how to deal with Henry’s complex personality (disorder), until he had before him an easy, uncomplicated, alternative bride at a time when Anne was causing him all kinds of religious and parliamentary controversies.

Chapuys wrote that Jane ‘has been well taught by those intimate with the King, who hate [Anne Boleyn], that [Jane] must by no means comply with the King’s wishes except [for accepting his hand in] marriage’. Vitally, Chapuys confirms these were instructions that Jane was ‘firm’ in following.⁴⁸²

He also detailed at this time that Jane was ‘advised to tell the King boldly how his marriage is detested by the people and none consider it lawful’.⁴⁸³ A rather underhand attempt to manipulate Henry against Anne, considering the lack of truth in this statement; for every Catholic who was against their marriage, there would have been an evangelical reformist in extreme support of it.

But Jane may very well have consoled herself with the idea that she was only doing to Anne what she had done to Katherine. But Jane didn’t know the half of it. Lest we forget, Henry had decided his relationship with Katherine was over when Anne finally gave in to his sociopathic charms. Jane, on the other hand, was purposefully setting out to split up Henry and Anne while they were both very much committed to the marriage – even if only on a political level.

But how do we know we aren’t making the same sexist presumptions about Jane Seymour that history has been guilty of in relation to Anne Boleyn?

Well, firstly, the accounts of Jane conspiring to seduce the king come from the people within the court and were recorded directly at the time, whereas Anne’s supposed seduction and apparent sexual blackmail of the king were an analysis made by historians years and, mostly, centuries after the event.

Even Wolsey’s gentleman usher Cavendish, an ardent enemy of Anne’s, details only Henry’s pursuit of her in his sixteenth-century biography of the cardinal, without even a hint of a targeted allurement from Anne.⁴⁸⁴ This would have been all too obvious an opportunity for Cavendish to paint the king as the victim and Anne as the vixen if that were the general consensus at the time; but, rather tellingly, he does not.

Secondly, these reports of a calculated seduction by Jane weren’t spiteful gossip coming from just anyone at court in an attempt to blacken her name. They came from Spanish ambassador Chapuys, to whom Jane wasn’t considered an enemy. In fact, by his own admission, Chapuys was in support of Jane replacing Anne, stating, ‘Certainly, it appears to me that if [Jane’s plan] succeed[s], it will be a great thing both for the security of [Princess Mary] and to remedy the heresies here, of which [Anne Boleyn] is the cause and principal nurse.’⁴⁸⁵

So, you see, he had no reason to lie in order to paint Jane in a bad light, which makes his reports of her actions simply that; reports, not a malicious and sexist attack similar to those made on Anne over the centuries.

In those final months it’s evident Anne could see everything was falling apart, what with her being stabbed in the back politically by those she once worked with and trusted – and then, with the worst possible timing, Henry embarking on an affair with a member of the opposition.

Now was not the time for Anne to show those scheming against her that their plan was working. They wanted Anne to act out so that Henry would run to the peaceful and loving arms of Jane Seymour. Anne needed to remain unfazed and calm, putting on an unshakable, united front with the king. But at this crucial time, she did the complete opposite.

Running on raw emotions from her miscarriage, in the midst of the Poor Law catastrophe and riled up by her sermon war cry, Anne reacted to Henry’s affair with Jane with a fury that became notorious.⁴⁸⁶ When she caught her cousin sitting on her husband’s knee,⁴⁸⁷ she reportedly went ballistic at the audacity of the two adulterers. And later, when she spotted Jane wearing a necklace from Henry, Anne was said to have lost her cool entirely, viciously ripping it from her neck. Though these stories originally come from The Life of Jane Dormer, which doesn’t feature a particularly positive account of Anne, this does ring true as a natural reaction to her cousin’s duplicity and husband’s infidelity, especially in the wake of an onslaught of personal trauma and political drama.⁴⁸⁸ In which case, you may feel inclined to take a brief moment here to scream futilely, willing Anne not to rise to the bait. Alas, we must sit by and watch as her every emotion-fuelled reaction played perfectly into her enemy’s hands. A cold-hearted schemer would have approached the situation with steely detachment, but once again may I remind you we are dealing with Anne Boleyn the human being.

She was publicly attacking the king with her chaplains, challenging his plans for the dissolution of the monasteries and yet was angry, surprised almost, when this resulted in Henry taunting her by taking another woman. Considering the warped dynamic of their relationship and knowing the way her husband worked, did Anne really expect any other outcome? So why react so damagingly to the discovery of this inevitable mistress?

Well – aside from what Jane represented religiously, and away from Henry and Anne’s now being a political match – on a personal level, whether it was rational or not, every one of his affairs would have hurt Anne’s pride. Henry was the one person who validated her entire existence by this point, and every time he chose another woman over her it was seen as a smug win for her enemies, who were so eager for the king to divorce her.

There was only so long Anne could hide behind the bravado of her relentless political attacks and ‘fight or flight’ instincts before the facade crumbled and the emotions she was so desperate to keep hidden spilled out, exposing her vulnerability. Emotions she may well have known made her appear weak and fragile to the opposition; as, indeed, they did.

Jane’s success at getting close to Henry and under Anne’s skin gave the Catholic anti-Boleyn faction that much more ammunition. They were determined to end her reign once and for all. And, rather devastatingly, they were succeeding.

Even though Jane focused all her attention on replacing Anne, she surely couldn’t have been aware that it would result in the unprecedented death of a queen. While there’s no doubt, from the sheer numbers of those involved in the lies we are about to uncover, that she must have known her faction was framing Anne, could she ever have imagined the queen’s punishment would be death? Did she merely expect Anne to be divorced like Katherine before her, or sent to a nunnery as Anne herself would go on to speculate?

I only ask as I try to pinpoint the exact moment Jane would have realised she’d had a hand in Anne Boleyn’s murder. More worryingly, at what moment did she notice Henry’s chillingly nonchalant attitude towards it? Exactly when did she become aware of the sociopathic capabilities of the man who was about to become her husband?

For a time, Jane may have revelled in giving the reformist Anne her comeuppance for the misery she had imposed on her Catholic country. But now Anne was to be executed to make way for Jane. Put to death at the hands of the man she herself was about to marry, a man she had also witnessed humiliate and discard his first wife. At this point Jane must have been terrified at what she’d got herself into. But she had come too far now; there was no going back. She was trapped in the nightmare she had helped create.

So, unsurprisingly, Jane blocked it all out, focusing instead on the monumentality of her upcoming wedding that would make her the next queen of England, and on the Henry she personally knew: the caring, loving and affectionate gentleman he was with her.

Because, let’s be honest, what was the alternative? Face up to the fact that her husband-to-be was about to murder his wife?