Anne Boleyn: 500 Years of Lies

It’s the Anne Boleyn many readers should be familiar with who moved into Wolsey’s former lodgings at York Place with the kind of heartless glee that only a Tudor super-villain could display. Confusingly, Anne is also sometimes depicted as still living with and serving the jilted queen, where she would spend her days taunting her former mistress with smarmy looks and catty remarks for no deserving reason, provoking many a haughty confrontation between the two rivals. All and anything to conjure up images of a reckless she-devil drunk on power. Never mind the evidence to the contrary. Never mind the illogicality of it all. This is the part readers and audiences live for, right? This is what they think we want to see?²⁵⁸

Actually, no.

At this point in our quest for the truth perhaps we should ask ourselves: why would Anne be smug as she took Katherine’s place beside Henry? Katherine hadn’t challenged or threatened her at this early stage, and so unless Anne had deep sadistic tendencies hidden under that evangelical activist exterior, she would have had no reason to want Katherine to suffer any more than she already had.

Though Anne finally lost the battle with her own conscience and gave in to Henry’s pursuit, it did not have to mean that she was happy about hurting Katherine in the process. So, away from the vamped-up ‘six wives’ caricature, Anne the human being is more likely to have felt highly uncomfortable at the situation – embarrassed even, to have to pass her former queen in the courtyard. That’s if they ever did.

On 25 December 1528, the French ambassador Jean du Bellay wrote: ‘The whole court has retired to Greenwich, where open house is kept both by the King and Queen . . . Mademoiselle de Boulan is there also, having her establishment separate, as, I imagine, she does not like to meet with the Queen.’²⁵⁹

A year later, on 9 December 1529, Chapuys reported that the two highest-ranking noblewomen in the land – the king’s sister Mary Tudor and Anne’s aunt the duchess of Norfolk – were summoned to watch Anne appear at the king’s side in place of the queen at a Christmas banquet.²⁶⁰ However, it’s rather telling that Anne refused to appear with him throughout the rest of the Christmas celebrations at Greenwich Palace.

Of course, this is described by most modern historians as a tactic to tempt Henry away to spend time with her alone at York Place, which is apparently what he ended up doing with most of his time by February of the following year. But why did this have to be a ‘tactic’? Why not out of dignity, and uneasiness at being paraded around as the king’s mistress while the queen was still very much part of the celebrations? For Katherine, indeed, spent Christmas with Henry that year,²⁶¹ and was still recognised as queen. She was even dining with him around the time that Cardinal Campeggio reported Henry as ‘kissing [Anne] and treating her in public as though she were his wife’.

As a sociopath without a conscience, Henry lacked the emotional compass to know not to put on such an insensitive display. Yet I can’t imagine Anne, with her conservatism and decorum, raised the way she was, being comfortable with such distasteful public scenes. No wonder she wanted to hide away in Wolsey’s former lodgings at York Place – which was later remodelled as Whitehall Palace. Anne signed up for an honourable and legitimate marriage to the king, yet here she was being flaunted round in the dreaded role of ‘mistress’ that we’ve witnessed her adamantly avoiding.

It was but a mere six months after Wolsey’s death that Anne was hit with a devastating blow, and the first of many betrayals she was to suffer in her short lifetime. Charles Brandon, the duke of Suffolk, gentleman of the king’s privy chamber and lifelong companion of her husband-to-be, secretly defected to the other side in May 1530.

Reports say Brandon felt increasingly sidelined in the king’s affections by the new Boleyn faction. He also didn’t like the way his previously high-profile princess wife Mary Tudor, whom he had controversially married back in 1515 before her return to England after being widowed by the king of France, had now been seemingly outranked by the up-and-coming Anne Boleyn.

Brandon was also yearning for the good old days, when the king preferred his company to that of any wife or mistress.

So, in a desperate bid to expose Anne and get Henry to abandon all this marriage nonsense, Brandon raked up a supposed love affair between Anne and Thomas Wyatt. Brandon was one of the men present at that infamous game of bowls years before, when the king had a bust-up with Wyatt over his flirtation with Anne. So Brandon knew there were old jealousies he could potentially play on; but as the king never seriously suspected Wyatt, Brandon’s accusations had little effect. Not in 1530, at least. Six years later, Wyatt would blame Suffolk’s spiteful little story as the main reason he ended up being arrested during the conspiracy to murder Anne Boleyn.

But Brandon’s failure cut deep. Hurt that he had once again been ignored in favour of Anne, he disappeared from court, leading to speculation that he had been banished. But not before delivering his parting shot, urging the remaining councillors to reject an idea proposed in August or September 1530 for Henry and Anne to just go ahead with their marriage and hope the pope would accept it once it was done.²⁶²

Anne’s supposed reaction to Brandon’s slanderous attempt to ruin her name and relationship with the king has become the stuff of Tudor infamy: apparently, she hit back with lurid claims of Brandon having an affair with his son’s fourteen-year-old fiancée. But that’s a very diluted version of what really happened. The accusation I’ve discovered is far more disturbing than we have ever realised.

We know that Anne’s opinion of Brandon was never very high to begin with, given his various indiscretions she had witnessed in her early years in France. But this accusation was no hot-headed retaliation for the events of 1530. In fact, it wasn’t until over a year later, in July 1531, that Chapuys was to write in a letter that Anne ‘wants to revenge herself on the duke of Suffolk, for having once brought a charge against her honour’ and so ‘accused him of meddling and copulating with his own daughter’: ‘Et pour se venger de ce que le due de sufforcq lauoit autres fois voulu charger de son honneur, luy a fait mectre sus quil se mesloit et copuloit avec sa propre fille.’²⁶³

People look for who this daughter figure could have been in 1531, with some concluding, as I say, that it was Brandon’s son’s fourteen-year-old fiancée, who Brandon did indeed go on to marry himself. But that can’t be right, as Chapuys says it was Brandon’s ‘own daughter’, which suddenly changes the accusation to one of incest.

Brandon’s daughter would have been twenty-four when Anne made this accusation. However, there is nothing in Anne’s claim to indicate she was alluding to a current affair, meaning it could very well have been an unsavoury suspicion she had been harbouring for a long time. I say this because there exists a little-known fact, rarely brought to light, that before Anne Boleyn left Margaret of Austria’s court at the end of 1514, she had been educated alongside none other than Charles Brandon’s daughter, who had been placed there at the time of his flirtation with Margaret. His daughter is believed to have been born in 1506 or 1507, and so was either seven or eight years old when she joined Anne in Mechelen;²⁶⁴ we’re always told the standard age to be educated abroad was thirteen, but in this case we have correspondence from Brandon recalling his daughter to England, proving she was indeed there.

So, did something come to light while the girls were growing up together? Did Brandon’s daughter confide in Anne? Because there is some very important detail in the wording of Anne’s accusations. She didn’t accuse Brandon of an incestuous ‘affair’ or ‘relationship’; she said he ‘meddled/molested’ and ‘copulated with his own daughter’. This does not imply consent, but abuse, which is a very serious accusation to throw at someone out of the blue a year after an argument.

While everyone is quick to presume that this was Anne dishing out distasteful insults, perhaps we need to consider that there might have been something more to it? We will never know for sure, but the fact that Anne knew his daughter for some time as a child certainly sheds a whole new light on a disturbing and uneasy debate.

Regrettably, what Anne wasn’t to realise at the time, and what we can’t fully grasp ourselves without jumping ahead to the end of her life, is that this falling-out with Brandon was one day to be the final nail in her coffin.

As it was to turn out, Brandon wasn’t the only one who betrayed Anne at around that time. In 1531, just when the battle with the pope was about to get that much tougher and Anne needed the strength and unity of those around her, one by one key members of her inner circle, including her own family members, started to turn.

It feels almost inevitable under the circumstances. Not because she was such a cruel and insufferable person, as is often implied; no, the battle lines were drawn for a different reason. Everyone’s loyalties and religious beliefs were being put to the test; were they for or against, not only the rise of this powerful and strong woman but the rise of evangelism?

As time went on, Anne began to represent so much more than just a new wife for the king. No longer the insignificant new girl at court, she was now a mature woman of thirty who had found her voice and knew what she wanted to achieve as queen. If you weren’t completely aligned with her beliefs, jealousies could bubble to the surface without warning or provocation – causing people Anne had trusted and taken into her inner circle, like Brandon, to stab her in the back. Even her own aunt the duchess of Norfolk, hurt over an affair her husband was having with Bessie Holland, one of Anne’s ladies, became extremely vocal in her disdain for the entire Boleyn family and her love for Queen Katherine. Needless to say, the duchess was asked to leave court once she had made her true feelings known.

So, how did Anne deal with these betrayals? By pretending it didn’t hurt her, of course, and fighting back with what was soon to become her trademark: the famous Boleyn bravado.

Anne is always assumed to have been cold and ruthless because she held her nerve and stood up for herself at times when even the bravest among us might crumble. Yet let’s not confuse the girl with her emotionally void fiancé. When the people she was closest to started to turn on her, it would have hit hard and hurt deeply. She would have felt increasingly isolated as those she trusted as close allies began to form factions against her – all for a position in life she never actively sought out.

But what’s the number one rule when being bullied? Don’t let them see it upsets you. So Anne toughened up. Dismissing Brandon’s accusations in 1530, she adopted a cocky little motto inspired by the recently deceased Margaret of Austria: ‘Ainsi sera, groigne qui groigne’, which roughly translates as, ‘So it will be: those who grumble will grumble.’²⁶⁵

This is the sort of defiant, Tudor equivalent of ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones, but stabbing me in the back and supporting my fiancé’s ex-wife won’t hurt me.’

Now it may appear to some that with all the drama of Wolsey’s demise, Anne had been distracted for several years by the sole obsession of bringing down this one insufferable enemy. However, all the incidents with Wolsey were unfolding at the exact same time as Anne was overseeing several almighty campaigns to free Henry from his first marriage. This, in reality, left her very little time to dedicate to giving the cardinal his comeuppance – a further indication that she was unlikely to have been the ringleader in his downfall and destruction.

You see, the first half of 1530 was taken up with researching how to escape the pope’s authority. In October 1529, Edward Foxe and Boleyn faction newbie fresh from the opposition, Stephen Gardiner, arranged a meeting between the king and Thomas Cranmer. Cranmer was the Cambridge scholar who had previously declared over dinner with the two men that Henry and Anne were wasting their time with your bog-standard canon law. This was a theological issue that needed to be approached from a different angle: by consulting the scriptures.²⁶⁶

Was this not pretty much the same thing Anne had told Henry back when she showed him Tyndale’s work in The Obedience of a Christian Man? Yes, it was – the only difference being that this time Henry was desperate and willing to try anything. So it was at this point that Henry sent Cranmer to live with Anne’s brother, George, at Durham House while Cranmer worked with George and Thomas on consulting the theology faculties of the universities of Europe.²⁶⁷

This appointment was to kick-start a personal and professional bond between Cranmer and the Boleyns – most notably Anne, who would become his patron and ally, recalling him from a mission abroad on 1 October 1532 to elevate him from the role of chaplain to her father to that of archbishop of Canterbury.²⁶⁸ Indeed, when Cranmer tried to thank the king, he was said to have replied that ‘he ought to thank Anne Boleyn for this welcome promotion’.²⁶⁹ From there, Cranmer’s bond with Anne was only to strengthen. It would be he who eventually crowned her queen of England, later becoming godparent to her firstborn with the king.²⁷⁰

And to think this all came from that one unassuming conversation over dinner with Foxe and Gardiner.

So, in 1530, three attempts were made by the Boleyn faction to make this marriage happen.

Attempt number one in June was a presentation of the results of Cranmer’s research at the universities, which, thank goodness, agreed with Henry’s case for an annulment.²⁷¹ This was immediately followed by attempt number two, which was to be an open letter to the pope signed by the elite of England, further supporting the king. After toning down the initial anti-papal message, owing to a few objections from the more reserved members of the council, Thomas Wriothesley, Cromwell’s future personal secretary, and William Brereton, the king’s groom of the privy chamber, took the petition around the country. Here, it was backed and signed by an extensive list of high-profile abbots, bishops and senior royal officials who were all in favour of the annulment, proving wrong the widespread presumption that the majority were against Henry’s subsequent marriage to Anne.

It was in light of this overwhelming response that the king floated Cranmer’s idea of throwing caution to the wind and marrying without papal approval. This is what prompted Brandon’s disapproval and all-round shock from the privy council, with advisers falling to their knees begging the king to reconsider.²⁷² That would be a no, then.

Weeks later came attempt number three: Henry was presented with the Collectanea satis copiosa,²⁷³ which the Boleyn research team had been working on to argue that there was no basis to the idea that the pope was the supreme head of spiritual matters, and that, as king, Henry VIII was already the head of the Church of England.

The power and liberation of what he was being told gave Henry and his advisers more confidence that they were in the right, fighting as they were for independence.²⁷⁴ But in private, the duke of Norfolk told Chapuys he thought this take too extreme.²⁷⁵

It’s around this time that Robert Wakefield, a scholar whose patron was none other than Thomas Boleyn, provided vital confirmation to Henry that the passage in Leviticus referred to God’s wrath specifically depriving him of sons, not just children in general.²⁷⁶

Yet by the following year, 1531, things still hadn’t progressed.

Henry and Anne had just about had enough of the pope publicly humiliating him by repeatedly undermining his power as king. So, on 7 February, Henry demanded that he be recognised immediately as ‘the sole protector and supreme head of the English church and clergy’. It was suggested they add ‘so far as the law of Christ allows’, which cleverly left it open to interpretation as to how much power Henry had.²⁷⁷ Anne’s reaction to his sudden and long overdue gumption was, apparently, as if she had ‘gained paradise’.²⁷⁸

This was it!

Henry sent George Boleyn around the country with tracts to convince the people that their king was in fact already the supreme head of the Church, and it was the pope who was taking over where he had no right. A ballsy and courageous move by the monarch, it has to be said.

So, you can imagine Anne’s confusion and mind-blowing frustration when the next two years were spent not acting on their new-found power but on blocking Katherine’s attempt at a divorce hearing in Rome, which was exactly what they’d suspected she might try following the Legatine Court.

During this time, England also surprisingly continued to push for papal approval on the advice of their only ally in Europe, Francis I, who was desperate not to disrupt his own new-found peace with Charles V.²⁷⁹

In all likelihood, part of Henry would have been relieved to stall an official break from Rome, knowing just how much of a royal pain a reformation would be. But by the end of 1532 it was becoming increasingly clear that this waiting game was never going to pay off. If England wanted freedom, Henry had to take it.

So, what would have finally given the king the courage to do this? Ironically, it looks like it was the very people Henry called out as heretics. For if the reformist undercurrent hadn’t been rumbling through England and Europe in the early 1500s, with overwhelming public support for whistle-blowers such as Martin Luther in Germany, Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples in France, Huldrych Zwingli in Switzerland and William Tyndale in England, Henry VIII would never have dared to tear his country away from Europe’s beating heart of Catholicism – not without fearing an almighty backlash and uprising from his people. If you thought the 1536 Catholic northern rebellion the Pilgrimage of Grace was bad, imagine if the whole country had joined in in unified horror?

So finally. Finally! This. Was. It . . . No, he really meant it this time!

Henry made Anne the lady marquess of Pembroke in September 1532 – an unprecedented move in itself, bestowing on a woman a male title and giving her land in her own right. But mainly, it was to ensure the king wasn’t marrying a commoner.

Prior to sealing the deal, Henry and Anne embarked on an official diplomatic meeting in Calais with their biggest, and main, supporter in Europe, King Francis I. However, with Anne’s former mistress Queen Claude having now sadly passed away, Francis had married Katherine of Aragon’s niece Eleanor, who happened to be the sister of Henry’s mortal enemy, Charles V. This meant they had to be as diplomatic as possible not to make this an official statement of France ‘taking sides’.

Much has been made of the fact that no high-ranking women came to see Anne during the Calais trip, most notably Francis’s sister, Marguerite d’Angoulême.²⁸⁰ This has been taken as firm and final evidence that Anne had not served Marguerite in France, hence the two never having been close and Anne not being influenced by her, therefore not really a devout evangelical and actually a tarty little whore.

But as we’ve just seen, delicate European diplomacy is all the explanation we really need for Marguerite’s absence and that of other French noblewomen. But far from this apparent snub meaning that Marguerite was against Anne, it was in fact while Anne’s brother was on embassy in France that Marguerite expressed an understanding of his sister and the king’s ‘Great Matter’. Indeed, far from disapproving of their union, as many have been keen to imply, Marguerite was said to be excited by the idea of the English king’s potential marriage to an evangelical reformist.²⁸¹ It was the duke of Norfolk who confirmed in 1533 that Marguerite supported Anne’s cause, and would even encourage her brother, Francis I, to support Henry.²⁸² And why wouldn’t she? With Anne’s potential to take England forward in a reformist direction, it makes perfect sense for Marguerite to be for, not against, Anne.

Now, as we’ve seen, one of the more disturbing allegations that comes up time and time again is how Anne allegedly used sex to get what she wanted with the king. Here she has been accused of repeatedly using her virginity as bait over the seven years until he made her queen (a girl would have to be pretty confident that her skills would live up to expectations after using them as a ploy for close to a decade). Some shockingly outdated schools of thought have in recent years labelled it ‘sexual blackmail’,²⁸³ somehow implying that Henry was desperate for sex – and an illegitimate child – with Anne while she heartlessly held out for the big prize. Let’s just pause for a moment to consider the senseless, not to mention appallingly sexist illogicality of this rhetoric – one that tells readers the only way a female could be favoured by Henry as highly as the men was for her to manipulate him with her sexuality. Never mind the fact that she outsmarted most of his members of the privy chamber; no, it was her body that impressed the king the most.

And of course, now Anne was meant to have used her body again to finally push Henry into action.

Yes, it is said something more monumental than a royal summit took place in Calais. Calculating the birth of Anne’s daughter, the future Elizabeth I, it’s been suggested that it was during the fateful trip to France, when storms delayed their return, that Henry and Anne slept together for the first time. But this was no consensual act of love. Anne was meant to have manipulated Henry in the belief that once she was pregnant he would have to marry her, launching us once more into wearily familiar scheming seductress territory.

They go on to argue that their theories prove true for, once the couple returned to England and the Christmas festivities were out of the way, Henry and Anne were married in a secret ceremony on 25 January 1533, her tactics having worked.

However, we run into a couple of problems with this theory straight away. Firstly, Elizabeth was born on 7 September, which means if the couple slept together in Calais in October that would have made it an epic eleven-month pregnancy. So, the dates don’t add up there; in fact, by Anne’s own calculations, she went into confinement on 26 August, which was traditionally one month before the due date – meaning she believed conception to have been sometime in late December, with Elizabeth then surprising them and arriving a couple of weeks early. Registered British midwife Judith E. Lewis backs up Anne’s calculations by explaining that if Elizabeth was born at full term, bang on the forty-week mark, she would have been conceived on 20 December.²⁸⁴

But it is the wording of the very patent that made Anne marquess of Pembroke in September that disproves the whole ‘sexual blackmail’ theory. For the patent ensured that her new title would pass to any children born to her, not just legitimate ones. So, this was both Henry and Anne acknowledging that any premarital sex would not result in a shotgun wedding but simply an illegitimate child, as they still had no confirmation they would succeed in legitimately marrying.²⁸⁵ Hence, this proves that Anne’s finally sleeping with the king out of wedlock could not have been motivated by a scheme to get pregnant and push him into marrying her.

However, if they weren’t married until 25 January and Anne believed she had conceived one month earlier, then that still leaves us with the sticky issue of sex out of wedlock. Indeed, it’s the same wording of this patent that has led other historians to presume Henry and Anne were planning on consummating their relationship before saying ‘I do.’

But why?

Is this not the same devoutly religious Anne Boleyn who saw these sorts of shenanigans as a firm ‘Je crois pas’? Where were her evangelical morals now?

Well, the couple’s secret wedding was so secret that we have two dates for when it supposedly took place. The generally accepted date of 25 January was confirmed by Archbishop Cranmer, but the chronicler Edward Hall states the royal wedding occurred earlier, on 14 November 1532, saying: ‘The king after his return, married purily the lady Anne Bulleyn, on Saint Erkenwaldes day, which marriage was kept so secret, that very few knew it, till she was great with child, at Easter.’²⁸⁶

This earlier date would certainly make more sense, given that their daughter was clearly conceived weeks later in December. It also doesn’t have the couple waiting three months for no good reason after gaining approval and support from Francis I to go ahead and wed. But given that Cranmer was closer to the couple and hence more likely to know the real date, it could very well have been that Hall predated their wedding so it didn’t appear Elizabeth was conceived out of wedlock. If so, what could justify Henry and Anne abandoning all caution and morals after seven years, rather than waiting a few more months to consummate the marriage on their wedding night?

I believe it probably came down to a rather hypocritical double standard; that by December they both saw their impending marriage as approved, not just by the king of France, but by God Almighty, and therefore it was a holy union exempt from the normal rules. Did they believe that, so long as the resulting baby wasn’t born out of wedlock, there was no harm in sleeping together now, when they knew the marriage was a certainty? Possibly.

But I think it could just be a simple case of human beings falling short of the impossible moral standards they tried to uphold. Nothing more, nothing less. Either way, the king was fully aware that sex led to babies, so their sleeping together could only have been a mutual decision. To try and place a more calculating blame solely on Anne insults the intelligence of not just the king, but history readers the world over.

Alas, this was it. Officially together after an exhausting seven-year battle.

As Wyatt reports, ‘And thus we see they lived and loved, tokens of increasing love perpetually increasing between them.’²⁸⁷

Quite. Until he decapitated her.

Even though Henry and Anne were married in the early weeks of 1533, this news was to be kept secret from the public for the time being; only a select and reliable handful of people were trusted to know about it and, indeed, attend the ceremony. The elite congregation was made up of Anne’s dependable brother, George, forever loyally by her side, her parents and omnipresent uncle the duke of Norfolk. Completing the wedding party were ‘two intimate female friends’ of Anne’s who have managed to remain nameless throughout history.²⁸⁸ Suspiciously absent was the Boleyn family’s newest ally, Archbishop Cranmer, who admitted he only heard of the wedding two weeks later. This was probably an attempt by all to keep Cranmer, the appointed new judge of Henry’s annulment, as unconnected to his new marriage as possible.²⁸⁹

Yet things couldn’t stay secret for long, and when, by the summer, word of the wedding got out, Pope Clement retaliated by declaring Henry and Anne’s marriage invalid, and hit the king with the sentence that drove fear into the hearts of all Catholics: he was to be excommunicated. But somewhat undermining the dramatic effect of his decision, he left the door open for Henry to put things right and reverse his actions by September. However, as the deadline came and went, the pope still hadn’t confirmed his sentencing, proving he was just as reluctant as Henry to start an official war.²⁹⁰ Finally, in March 1534, on the same day as the English government’s legal approval of Henry’s marriage to Anne, Pope Clement declared that he considered the king’s first marriage to Katherine to be still valid; and Henry VIII was now officially excommunicated.

So, contrary to popular belief, in the end it was actually Rome that broke with England, not England that broke with Rome.²⁹¹

But a vital shift had occurred. The king was no longer scared. Anne Boleyn and her reformist faction had sufficiently reassured him that not only were the people ready for religious reform but they passionately wanted it. So, it was in the belief that he would have unwavering public support in becoming the supreme head of the new Church of England that Henry finally made peace with the break from Rome.

Granted, he may have misjudged the situation somewhat, by presuming that the reformists would be happy with any religious regime so long as it wasn’t Catholicism. He was soon to run into problems when everyone realised that Henry’s Church was basically Catholicism with a new boss, and that it was still punishable to own a Bible written in English. Anne had been fighting for freedom of religious expression, so let’s not make the mistake of thinking she was happy to be free from the Roman Catholics only to suppress the people with the king’s new religious laws. This meant Anne’s joy at achieving what she had set out to do by marrying Henry was decidedly short-lived.

It’s hard to pinpoint at exactly what stage she would have come to the devastating realisation that her triumph in following the German Lutheran princes by establishing England’s first evangelical monarchy had been shot down in flames. Almost immediately after the wedding, England was plunged into the murky waters of a confusing, non-papal-Catholic reformation. Nevertheless, Anne was still a beacon of hope, held up by reformists as their best chance for a religious reformation in England.

Which is why reports of overwhelming hostility at her coronation on 1 June 1533 sound suspiciously like Catholic propaganda by the Spanish tabloid of the day Crónica del Rey Enrico Otavo de Ingalaterra, a publication which Ives describes as featuring ‘half-truth, rumour and nonsense’. There were certainly no local reports by eyewitnesses of negativity or booing; instead, as the Venetian ambassador reported, ‘utmost tranquility and order’. ²⁹²

But Anne didn’t have time to wallow over the failure to lure Henry to evangelism. The girl from Norfolk had been crowned queen of England. She had work to do.