EP 01 - Henry VIII: the King, his wife, his lover, the French

Henry VIII: the King, his wife, his lover, the French

- Episode 01 -

Anne Boleyn did not hold out on Henry - it’s a fact

DOWNLOAD

LISTEN

Anne Boleyn did not hold out on Henry – it’s a fact

Wednesday 29 June 2022

ALL HISTORY CAFÉ LINKS

LISTEN TO Henry VIII: the King, his wife, his lover, the French

Henry VIII, around 1516, by Flemish artist, aged 25. When he died in 1547 he weighed about 178kg. Sarah Bryson expands on his physical decline

Maybe you’re thinking that Henry VIII’s break with Rome is a sort of national treasure that nobody would ever think of changing – the romantic story of his affair with Anne Boleyn and his trouble getting a divorce. Well for years now historians have thought something else entirely must have been going on.

What we discover, among other things, is that, although for years Henry went on begging the pope for a divorce, we’re no longer sure that, for some of that time at least, he necessarily wanted one.

The first thing we can do is decide what we don’t know. You could call it tamping down our evidence. And what we discover straight away is that we know much less than we imagined about Anne Boleyn. Most of what we’ve been told is based on evidence that’s just far too flimsy to take seriously.

When Henry had Anne executed in 1536, he seems to have destroyed every image and scrap of paper relating to Anne Boleyn that he could get his hands on. There isn’t even a portrait that we can be sure represents how she looked.

Anne Boleyn may be of the best-known figures in British history. But we know remarkably little about her. We know that she was rather old to be an unmarried maid at Court and that she had grown up in France and could have been mistaken for French. That, as we shall see, is key to understanding why Henry began his flirtation with her, probably in 1527.

What we do know is that the most important part of the story – that Anne Boleyn refused to become Henry’s mistress and pushed him into divorce – was an INVENTION.

#44 Episode 01 - Anne Boleyn did not hold out on Henry - it's a fact

Nobody knows what Anne Boleyn looked like. Henry destroyed all images of her. Jodie Foster Smith, second from left in C5 drama; and other screen Annes

In 2010 historian George Bernard published research on a document that proves that the story that Anne held out on Henry is just not true.

It’s among papers that Henry sent to the Pope in 1527. Historians have known about this document for many years - but only in a nineteenth century copy. Bernard went back to the original. And there he discovered a few crucial words the nineteenth century editor had left out.

In them Henry freely admits to the Pope that he’s been sleeping all along with the woman he wants to marry. Well there’s no doubt that he means Anne Boleyn. The 19^th century editor had either deliberately or accidentally missed these words. It’s tempting to think that was because he was a Church of England clergyman, and Anne was then regarded as something of a Church of England heroine. You couldn’t go spoiling the old myth about how chaste she’d been, resisting the advances of the lustful king.

The myth that Anne held out against Henry’s advances first appears in 1535, the year before she died. It was fabricated by a distinguished Catholic theologian, later to be Archbishop of Canterbury. He was a cousin of the king. His name was Reginald Pole. What he was trying to do was to give Henry a face-saving way of returning to the Church of Rome.

Henry could, suggested Pole, put all the blame on Anne. It was Anne who had held out on him. She was the one who had insisted on marriage. She had entrapped him and forced him into this crazy scheme of taking over the church. Henry had been foolish, but he wasn’t really to blame. It was not beyond repair. Henry could still extricate himself, put Anne aside, and return to the true faith. And all without much loss of face.

By that time Henry was already getting weary of Anne and the next year, 1536, he had her investigated for adultery and executed. Pole seized his chance. Within days of her death, Pole who was in Italy, sent his book, De Unitate, to Henry. Now surely, Pole hoped, he would seize the moment to get himself out of the mess he’d created with his break with Rome.Henry did not. Instead Henry had Pole's family in England tortured and executed for treason.

Some of you may have heard of Reginald Pole's mother, the Catholic martyr, 'Blessed Margaret Pole'. Penelope's house at her Catholic school was called Poles. Her father didn't get the connection and addressed his first (and only?) letter to her as Sticks House. 😀

Anne Boleyn did not hold out on Henry - it's a fact

Katherine of Aragon, painted by Michael Sittow, as the 'sinner' Mary Magdalene (Mary M has been rehabilitated, now we need to do the same for Katherine)

Historians know much more about Henry’s first wife, the Spanish Queen Katherine. But very little is written about her and the public knows even less.

As soon as you get to know Katherine a little bit better you realise that we need to take her a lot more seriously. Everyone who saw them agreed that the party-loving young Henry and Katherine his queen got on exceedingly well. She wasn’t, whatever the later myth, a religious bore. She went hunting with Henry and taught him to hunt with hawks, like the Spanish did.

She had herself painted with her hair down as the sinner Mary Magdalene and complained that, on religious fast days, she couldn’t get meat to eat at court.

Now it’s true that, while she was young, before her marriage to Henry, Katherine had acquired a reputation for harsh religious fasting. But Giles Tremlett has suggested that all this might not have been a question of too much piety, but of anorexia. And it wouldn’t have been at all surprising. You recall that she was first married to Henry’s brother. Well, he had died in 1502. She was then quickly engaged to marry Henry. But they didn’t in fact marry until 1509. In the meantime Katherine was kept at the English court. She was 17 in 1502 and was made to live in miserable conditions, largely ignored not only at court in England but also by her Spanish family.

Although oddly her father Ferdinand of Castile did make young Katherine his ambassador - but this was while he took years negotiating her dowry with her father-in-law Henry VII.

Anyway, after the marriage, far from trailing along as Henry’s dull and distant Spanish shadow, Katherine was a major influence at court. Historian Michelle Beer has recently made a detailed study of Katherine’s role as Henry’s queen. She found that, in the early years of his reign, Henry often and actively looked to Katherine for advice.

When he went campaigning in France in 1513 he named her as regent and governess, to govern in his absence, rather than any of his Privy Councillors. Beer found Katherine’s name all over the administrative documents of those months. There was no doubt who was in charge.

Katherine's wedding ring from her marriage to Henry in 1509, 2 months after he became King. He was 18, she was 24. Their initials H and K were carved all over their royal palaces.

By 1526-7 when Henry's Cardinal Wolsey suddenly began to distance himself from the Spanish queen, Katherine’s carefully cultivated royal magnificence had become completely entangled with Henry’s own. She had always been Henry’s queen and partner in power in a way that Anne Boleyn could never be.

And all this changes the way we need to think about Henry’s campaign for a divorce. Henry was proposing to jettison a major English landowner, a leading statesman and diplomat, an enormously influential, widely connected, hugely popular and deeply informed player at his court. She had negotiated the marriage of their daughter Mary to her uncle Charles V - the most powerful man in Europe.

Henry’s basic conundrum, as it had been for his father, was that his neighbours the French and the Spanish were vastly larger and wealthier than he was. From their perspective, the English were a feeble island nation, less significant in international diplomacy than Venice. The only way for the English to make themselves matter was to sign up to an alliance with one or other of these huge European neighbours.

Now fortunately France and Spain were more-or-less constantly at loggerheads and frequently at war. So both of them were usually willing to consider an English alliance. They saw it as a way to interdict the Channel for the other one - perhaps even to raise a second front of attack.

Sending Katherine away (asking for a divorce) wasn’t about having a boy to succeed Henry, or having more fun in the royal bedroom. It was a political earthquake.

Above all, this was about a major split with England’s long-standing allies the Spanish and making a new alliance with the French. It had profound implications for England’s foreign policy, her trade and perhaps even her security.

And so it's very surprising to us is that Henry’s divorce isn’t always examined primarily in the context of his European diplomacy.

Photos & read more - all episodes here

View All Episodes