The Creation of Anne Boleyn (4 page)

All the neighborhood assembled to see her and pay her honor; and it is incredible what affection has been shown to her along the whole route. Notwithstanding that it has been forbidden on pain of death to call her Queen, they shouted it out at the top of their voices, wishing her joy, repose, and prosperity, and confusion to her enemies. They begged her with hot tears to set them to work and employ them in her service, as they were ready to die for the love of her.
²⁸

The contrast is almost Hollywood-ready: the sullen, disrespectful observers of Anne’s procession; the cheering throngs, ready to die for their true queen as she was led away from her rightful throne. And there is undoubtedly some truth in it. Katherine was extremely beloved and Anne was the Other Woman, so she certainly had strikes against her. But “the people” didn’t record or publish their sentiments themselves, and virtually every report of their virulent animosity toward Anne is open to question. When Venetian diplomat Francesco Sanuto writes that “it is said” that a mob of seven to eight thousand women attempted to seize and kill Anne (she escaped by boat), it sounds implausible, especially since he is the only diplomat to mention it, and it’s odd that none of the mob was apprehended or punished (Sanuto says it’s because they were women—which certainly didn’t stop Henry in other cases.
²⁹
) Similarly, the routine depiction of Anne’s coronation procession as attended by throngs of resentful, sullen townspeople who refused to remove their hats for her seems to be based on an anonymous account whose details of Anne’s dress alone are a giveaway that the description was written with a poison pen.

Though it was customary to kneel, uncover, and cry “God save the King, God save the Queen,” whenever they appeared in public, no one in London or the suburbs, not even women and children, did so on this occasion. One of the Queen’s servants told the mayor to command the people to make the customary shouts, and was answered that he could not command people’s hearts, and that even the King could not make them do so . . . [The queen’s] dress was covered with tongues pierced with nails, to show the treatment which those who spoke against her might expect. Her car was so low that the ears of the last mule appeared to those who stood behind to belong to her. The letters H. A. were painted in several places, for Henry and Anne, but were laughed at by many. The crown became her very ill, and a wart disfigured her very much. She wore a violet velvet mantle, with a high ruff of gold thread and pearls, which concealed a swelling she has, resembling goître.”
³⁰

I’ll discuss the wart and the goiter, which pop up regularly in descriptions of Anne penned by her enemies, in the next chapter. The most insidious claims, though, are not nearly so transparently fantastical as a king’s consort with severe disfigurements or a dress pierced with nails, but come from those whose hostility to Anne rests on the “monstrosity” of her character rather than her looks. In this, later defenders of “the faith” such as Nicholas Sander, as we’ll see, played a large role. But by then—1585—the battle lines between Catholic and Protestant were more clearly drawn than in 1530, and the polemical nature of
The Rise and Growth of the Anglican Schism
is pretty transparent. Chapuys, in contrast, writing when the conflict over church authority was still muddied by the domestic scandal of the divorce proceedings, has not been seen as a propagandist, but as a not-quite-objective recorder of events. Yet anyone who does read his letters objectively can see that he was the founding father of anti-Anne propaganda. His aim: to convince (and reassure) Charles that Katherine’s rival was so full of “iniquity and detestable wickedness”
³¹
that Henry was sure to eventually see through her and get rid of her, while at the same time scaring and inciting Charles with talk of Anne’s “importunate and malignant cravings”
³²
that “will not be satisfied until she sees the end of both the mother and the daughter.”
³³

How accurate were Chapuys’ reports? It’s almost impossible to say because he is often the sole reporter of events. But what is clear is that his interests were served by painting the worst picture possible of Anne and that he worked hard to construct it. He had an informal network of “conservative” (i.e., pro-Rome, pro-Katherine, pro-Imperial) nobles who would meet with him secretly to convey the latest anti-Anne gossip, which he then relayed to the emperor as “word from a trustworthy source.” And although there is no evidence that he played a direct role in the plot to charge Anne with treason, he “carefully watched all courtly signs of rejection leading up to her fall and exerted small pushes of encouragement, particularly with Cromwell”
³⁴
and declared it “wonderful” when she was arrested.
³⁵
Chapuys was even willing to foment war between England and Spain if that was the only way to get Anne out of the picture and (as he saw it) keep Katherine and Mary out of harm’s way and restore relations between Henry and Rome.

“Englishmen, high and low . . .” he wrote to Charles, “would wish Your Majesty to send here an army with which to destroy the poisonous influence of the Lady [Anne] and her adherents, and make a new reformation of all this kingdom . . . the moment this accursed Anne sets her foot firmly in the stirrup she will try to do the Queen all the harm she possibly can, and the Princess also. . . . Indeed, I hear she has lately boasted that she will make of the Princess a maid of honour in her Royal household, that she may perhaps give her too much dinner on some occasion, or marry her to some varlet, which would be an irreparable evil.”
³⁶

Chapuys’ hostility toward Anne is obvious in every communication from the very start of his service. Even more strikingly, until Chapuys’ arrival, the
Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII
contain no negative personal reports about Anne, except for a not very flattering description of her physical appearance by Francesco Sanuto, Venetian ambassador to France, in 1532. As soon as Chapuys arrived, “Madam Anne” became “the concubine,” and everything that the pro-Katherine forces saw as dishonorable in Henry’s behavior became the fault of Anne’s “perverse and malicious nature.”
³⁷
“It is she who now rules over, and governs the nation; the King dares not contradict her,” he wrote to Charles in November of 1535—an extraordinary (and unbelievable) statement that paints the formidable Henry as nothing more than a pussy-whipped hubby.
³⁸
In particular, Chapuys saw Anne’s continual goading as the cause of Henry’s shabby treatment of Princess Mary. Anne undoubtedly was unsettled by Mary, whose insistence on her status as princess threatened Elizabeth’s claims to succession. And Henry truly did treat his first daughter terribly, refusing to let her see her mother even when Katherine was dying, and turning the coldest of shoulders to his once-beloved child when she would not acknowledge his marriage to Anne. But Mary was as unbudgeable and self-righteous as her mother, and she and Henry remained locked in a contest of wills long after Anne was dead. Yet for Chapuys, every action against Mary was Anne’s fault alone, as she steered the king away from his affection for the princess and plotted Mary’s ruin. Chapuys could even turn evidence of Anne’s good nature into a demonstration of her scheming nature. When Anne (not the king, who, as reported by the French ambassador to Chapuys, refused to speak to Mary) made overtures of friendship to Mary, Chapuys suggested to Charles that it was a ruse to enable Anne to “execute her wicked will . . . with less suspicion under color of friendship.”
³⁹

The idea that Anne was plotting to murder both Katherine and Mary was a special obsession of Chapuys’. In 1534 he wrote to Charles that:

Nobody doubts here that one of these days some treacherous act will befall [Katherine] . . . the King’s mistress has been heard to say that she will never rest until he has had her put out of the way . . . These are, indeed, monstrous things, and not easily to be believed, and yet such is the King’s obstinacy, and the wickedness of this accursed woman (Anne), that everything may be apprehended.
⁴⁰

Later that year, after a planned meeting between Henry and Francis had been postponed, Chapuys told Charles it was because Henry was afraid to leave Anne alone in England.

A gentleman worthy of credit has this day sent me word that the Queen’s [
sic
] mistress has said more than once, and with great assurance, that the very moment the King crosses over [to France] to hold his interview with king Francis, and she remains governess of the kingdom, she will certainly cause the death of the said Princess by the sword or otherwise. And upon Rochefort, her brother, saying that by doing so she might offend the King, she answered him that she cared not if she did, even if she were to be burnt or flayed alive in consequence.
⁴¹

Just who the “gentleman worthy of credit” was is never revealed, as is almost always the case with Chapuys’ reports (in another, he writes that “A gentleman told me yesterday that the earl of Northumberland told him that he knew for certain that [Anne] had determined to poison the Princess”
⁴²
). It’s always “a trustworthy source” or “a gentleman” or “central gentlemen” or “a certain personage” whom Chapuys credits his information to. But Katherine’s supporters did not ask for references, and Chapuys, spreading these tales around court and encouraging Katherine and Mary’s suspicions of Anne, was able to generate an atmosphere of hostility toward Anne.

“The more ill used [Katherine and Mary] could appear,” writes Loades, “the more indignant their many supporters would become, and the more opprobrium would be heaped on the Queen, since everyone, for good reasons, was anxious to avoid blaming Henry. And so the myth of ‘that goggle-eyed whore Nan Bullen,’ promoting heresies and driving a besotted king to further tyranny and brutality, took root in the popular imagination.”
⁴³

It’s a shockingly short trip from the popular imagination to the official historical record. Both of Anne’s early biographers, Paul Friedmann (1884) and James A. Froude (1891), despite acknowledging that “Chapuis . . . may have exaggerated” (Friedmann) and that “Chapuys was not scrupulous about truth” (Froude) go on to give his stories credit.
⁴⁴
Froude is circumspect and ambiguous, saying that Chapuys’ account “shows the reputation which Anne had earned for herself, and which in part she deserves.”
⁴⁵
(Which part, one wants to know, but Froude doesn’t say.) Friedmann, astonishingly, goes even further: “There can be no doubt that [Chapuys’] account [that Anne was planning to murder Mary] is substantially true.”
⁴⁶
No doubt? The plot to murder Katherine had, by Friedmann’s times, been disproved, when the symptoms that Katherine’s physician claimed showed poison (a suspicion he immediately reported to Chapuys) were declared by medical authorities to be indicative of cancer. You would think that would be enough to cast at least a shadow of doubt on “the plot to murder Mary.” Albert Pollard is similarly hyperbolic in his assessment of Anne: “The new Queen’s jealous malignity passed all bounds”; he then goes on to quote Chapuys on how deeply “the people” resented Anne’s treatment of Mary.
⁴⁷

It is Chapuys, too, who is largely responsible for our ideas about the decline of Anne and Henry’s relationship. In a letter of September 3, 1533—just a few days before Elizabeth was born—he reports how Anne, “very jealous of the King, and not without legitimate cause, made use of certain words which he (the King) very much disliked, telling her that she must shut her eyes and endure as those who were better than herself had done, and that she ought to know that he could at any time lower her as much as he had raised her.”
⁴⁸
This speech has made its way into virtually every later biography, historical fiction, and film, probably due to its foreboding nature in light of later events and because it signals such a startling turnaround in Henry’s treatment of Anne. But as irresistibly drama friendly as it is, there’s little corroboration for it. Chapuys never explains the “not without legitimate cause” nor how he happened to be present at this argument (if indeed he was). His real purpose in “reporting” the incident (which even he admitted was “love quarrels”) is revealed at the end of the letter, when he adds that “those who know the King’s nature and temper consider the above events as of good omen and a sign that the King will soon begin to think of recalling the Queen [Katherine].”
⁴⁹
Chapuys was always working this angle with Charles and, when he could, orchestrating anti-Anne sentiment and activity around Henry’s court.