The Creation of Anne Boleyn (12 page)

“Shooting [archery], singing, dancing, wrestling, casting of the bar [throwing a wooden or iron baton], playing at the recorders, flute, virginals, setting of songs, making of ballads . . . jousts and tournays. The rest of this progress was spent in hunting, hawking and shooting.”
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In 1517, at a joust in honor of the Spanish ambassadors, Henry wanted to joust against all fourteen competitors. Forbidden to do so by his councilors (an older, more cautious crew than his boy pals), he channeled his desire to show off into “a thousand jumps in the air” before the queens and ladies, exhausting his horse—at which point he continued on one ridden by his pages.
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At another joust, he forgot to pull his visor down as he advanced toward his competitor and was knocked to the ground, stunned, his eye just barely missed by the lance. Within moments he was back on his horse, ready to go again.

This was the Henry who had been raised on tales of King Arthur’s Round Table, virtuous knights, maidens in distress, and chivalrous deeds. When he was knighted—becoming Duke of York at just three and a half years old—he went through all the Arthurian rituals a grown man would have gone through, and after a purifying bath, he was told that his duty, as a knight, was to be strong in the faith of the Holy Church, to love and defend the king, and to protect all widows and oppressed maidens. Undoubtedly, his father or mother must have taken him to Winchester Cathedral, thought to be the site of Arthur’s castle and the capital of Camelot, to show him the Round Table that was still there. (When Henry became king, he had his image painted over that of Arthur’s.) Nobility, generosity, mercy, justice, and the power of true love were the stuff of his boyish fantasies.

But by 1526, when Henry began to pursue Anne, Arthurian chivalry, a deeply spiritualized ideal, had been transformed into the political “art” of courtly behavior, aimed at creating the right
impression,
even if deceptive, to achieve one’s ends. Somehow, I managed to escape college and graduate school without reading
The Book of the Courtier.
So I was surprised to discover that the version of courtly love described by Castiglione was so different from the high-minded ideals and valiant heroes of the legends I grew up with. I was raised on bedtime stories—and later, movies—with strong, pure-of-purpose male leads (which set up some unrealistic expectations of the boys I dated) from Alexander the Great (my father’s favorite) to the self-sacrificing Arthur and absurdly handsome Lancelot of Lerner and Loewe’s
Camelot.
When I thought of “courtly love,” I imagined knights on horseback worshiping ladies from afar and fighting great battles to win their love, their minds full of noble thoughts and dreams of honor. That’s how Henry the boy probably imagined chivalry, too, as court minstrels performed and sang of the heroic exploits of Jason, Hector, Charlemagne, Arthur, Lancelot, and Galahad. But by the time Henry was born, the printing press was competing with oral traditions for the hearts and minds of would-be courtiers, and along with print came popular books of “instructions” for courting that, like all guidebooks, replaced romance with formula. This is the genre that Castiglione’s
Book of the Courtier
belongs to. It is not so much a celebration of chivalry as it is an advice book on how to “perform” it.

It’s full of clever, deceptive strategies for seduction, from ostentatiously “burning sighs” and “abundant tears,” to singing outside her house at night, to consulting books teaching men “how women are to be duped in these matters.” How could any girl escape such an onslaught of “snares,” Castiglione wonders (through one of the characters in his fictional conversations about the virtues and conduct of the ideal courtier). “I could not in a thousand years rehearse all the wiles that men employ to bring women to their wishes, for the wiles are infinite . . .”
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Castiglione’s jaded, ironic tone makes it clear how he regards these practices: as a kind of socially sanctioned harassment (he didn’t have the word, but he sure gets close to the concept) in which it was acceptable to dissemble, badger, and lie in order to connive the woman into falling in love with her suitor. Among the more cynical tactics recommended was the fictional suspension of the social positions of lover and beloved. Ignoring actual rank, swearing total allegiance, the lover is advised to address the beloved with deep humility, to be abject before her and totally submissive. But it’s all a ploy designed to take advantage of the woman’s vanity and gullibility. Or, if she was cleverer or more cynical, to engage her in a pleasurable fiction.

Scholars are in dispute about just how widely practiced “courtly love” was. Some insist that it was just a literary tradition, spread throughout Western Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries largely via the troubadours of southern France, that had little impact on actual courtship practice. This is almost certainly true for most classes in medieval and Renaissance England, but when it came to the better-educated class, the line between “literary” and “actual” is harder to maintain. Poetry, music, and pageants celebrating courtly love were regular entertainments at Henry’s court, and both Henry and his best-educated courtiers (those who could read Italian) eagerly sought copies of
The Book of the Courtier
when it was published in 1528. Such published treatments of courtly love were, moreover, based on actual court behavior (in the case of Castiglione, that of the Duke of Urbino; in the case of Andreas Capellanus’s
The Art of Courtly Love,
Queen Eleanor’s court at Poitiers). It is highly likely that whether or not Henry actually read Castiglione, he was familiar with the practices Castiglione describes.

Earlier treatises, such as
The Art of Courtly Love,
had treated love, in true Platonic fashion, as a god who seizes and obsesses the lover, putting his soul in a state of turmoil. (“When a lover suddenly catches sight of his beloved his heart palpitates”; “Real jealousy always increases the feeling of love”; “He whom the thought of love vexes eats and sleeps very little”; “A true lover is constantly and without intermission possessed by thought of his beloved.”
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) The beloved, on his or her part (depending on whether it’s Plato or Capellanus), is more detached, cool, and inclined to play hard to get. Overheated and possessed, the lover must then learn how to manage his passion so it will not self-destruct in rash action, jealousy, or carnality. Castiglione, in contrast, is less concerned with the state of the lover’s soul than honing his skill at seducing the beloved. It is she who is to be “managed,” not the lover’s tumultuous passions. And in the service of that goal, all manner of deception and manipulation is permitted.

There were plenty of critics of this degeneration. Even for Sir Thomas Malory, whose
Le Morte d’Arthur,
published in 1485, was the chief basis for the English version of the Arthurian legend, the “fresh and temperate” love of Lancelot for Guinevere, which lasted for years, was the stuff of fairy tales. (“Today,” Malory writes, “men cannot love seven nights but they must have their desires.”
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) But it was a fairy tale that still could inspire. By the time Thomas Wyatt wrote his poem “Of the Courtier’s Life” (1539), he has nothing but cynicism for the possibility of living an honorable life at court.

I cannot frame my tongue to feign,
To cloak the truth, for praise without desert
Of them that list all vice for to retain.
I cannot honour them that set their part
With Venus, and Bacchus, all their life long;
Nor hold my peace of them, although I smart.
I cannot crouch nor kneel to such a wrong;
To worship them like God on earth alone,
That are like wolves these sely lambs among.
I cannot with my words complain and moan,
And suffer nought; nor smart without complaint:
Nor turn the word that from my mouth is gone.
I cannot speak and look like as a saint;
Use wiles for wit, and make deceit a pleasure;
Call craft counsel, for lucre still to paint.
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Wyatt’s poem is not only a protest against pragmatic deception to achieve worldly advancement, it also expresses disgust at those who “set their part with Venus, and Bacchus”—that is, those for whom love has become a game of pleasure rather than the driving force behind honorable actions and spiritual striving. In Europe, Francis’s court had the worst reputation for dissolute courtly behavior, but Wyatt, whose most famous poem wrenchingly laments the executions of the men with whom Anne had been accused and condemned, which he watched from a window in the Bell Tower, had lost whatever faith he had in the English court to behave more honorably. “These bloody days have broken my heart,” he wrote; a world had been shattered for him.
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Where does Henry stand in all this? We find him somewhere between Arthurian honor, which served and protected women as one of its highest goals and for which a king stood nobly and patiently by while his best knight and his wife engaged in a long affair, and a coup d’état that ruthlessly sent a queen and several of the king’s best buddies to their deaths without hard evidence of any sort. Raised on the romance of one set of ideals, he was capable of setting aside his dislike of letter writing to pen seventeen love letters to Anne, throbbing with longing for her presence, agony over her absence, and full of declarations of submission and obedience to her wishes, as in this one, in which Henry offers to make Anne his
maîtresse en titre
(official mistress—a form of extramarital monogamy).

On turning over in my mind the contents of your last letters, I have put myself into great agony, not knowing how to interpret them, whether to my disadvantage, as you show in some places, or to my advantage, as I understand them in some others, beseeching you earnestly to let me know expressly your whole mind as to the love between us two. It is absolutely necessary for me to obtain this answer, having been for the whole year stricken with the dart of love, and not yet sure whether I shall fail or find a place in your heart and affection, which last point has prevented me for some time from calling you my mistress; because, if you only love me with an ordinary love, that name is not suitable for you, because it denotes a singular love, which is far from common. But if you please to do the office of a true loyal mistress and friend, and to give up yourself body and heart to me, who will be, and have been, your most loyal servant (if your rigour does not forbid me) I promise you that not only the name shall be given you, but also that I will take you for my only mistress, casting off all others besides you out of my thoughts and affections, and serve you only. I beseech you to give an entire answer to this my rude letter, that I may know on what and how far I may depend. And if it does not please you to answer me in writing, appoint some place where I may have it by word of mouth, and I will go thither with all my heart.

No more, for fear of tiring you,

Written by the hand of him who would willingly remain yours,

H.R.
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“I beseech you,” “if you please to do,” “fear of tiring you,” “your most loyal servant,” “serve you only.” Certainly sounds as if she has him wrapped around her extra little finger. But even at this stage of the relationship, with Henry still besotted with his as-yet-unconquered prize, he was an instrumental thinker—and had been from the beginning of his reign. One of his earliest acts, after he became king, had been to execute two of his father’s ministers on fictitious charges of treason, purely in the interests of enhancing his own PR with the people and projecting the image of a new broom sweeping clean. When newly married to Katherine, he had written to her father, King Ferdinand II of Aragon: “Day by day, her inestimable virtues shine forth, flourish and increase, so that even if we were still free, it is she that we would choose.”
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This statement, claims Starkey, proves that Henry was actually in love with Katherine, and not simply—as
Anne of the Thousand Days
puts it—that “England married Spain.” But . . . this letter was to King Ferdinand! Katherine’s father! Henry’s father-in-law! If that isn’t enough to raise doubts about the candor of the sentiment, we’ve got Henry, some years later, using exactly the same rhetorical flourish to prove to Rome that his motives for divorce from Katherine were pious. Were it not for his grievous doubts that the marriage had been against divine law, he assured Campeggio, he would with great joy marry Katherine all over again.

And as touching the Queen, if it be adjudged the law of God that she is my lawful wife, there was never thing more pleasant nor more acceptable to me in my life, both for the discharge and clearing of my conscience and also for the good qualities and conditions the which I know to be in her. For I assure you all, that beside her noble parentage of which she is descended, she is a woman of the most gentleness, of most humility and buxomness, yea and of all good qualities appertaining to nobility, she is without comparison, as I this twenty years almost have had the true experiments, so that
if I were to marry again, if the marriage might be good I would surely choose her above all other women.
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[Emphasis mine.]