EP 06 - Henry VIII: the King, his wife, his lover, the French

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

- Episode 08 -

Anne Boleyn - Henry’s MacGuffin

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Anne Boleyn - Henry's MacGuffin

Saturday 20 August 2022

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LISTEN TO HENRY VIII SERIES

How to dress like Anne Boleyn as inspired by Six the Musical
[as in Six Wives]

Anne - what Hitchcock called a MacGuffin? Necessary to the plot but unimportant in herself

We’ve been asking why Henry VIII broke with the Church of Rome and we’ve been deciding that it had much less to do with Anne Boleyn than people have always thought.

Now we know that Anne has a lot of fans. But the more we understand this story, the more we have come to think of her as … well … as a MacGuffin.

A MacGuffin – as those of you who are film fans will know, and especially if you’re fans of Hitchcock - is something that is necessary to the plot and the motivation of the characters, but which is unimportant in itself.

The memory of Anne Boleyn has changed and evolved over time. There’s a very readable account of just when and how by historian Susan Bordo – and you can find details of it on our website.

In brief, immediately after her execution on trumped up charges of adultery with 100 men including her brother, the Catholic Reginald Pole invented the story that she held out on Henry in order to force the whole divorce from Katherine and split with Rome.

Historian George W Bernard however has turned up evidence from 1527 of Henry writing to the pope to say he was sleeping with the woman he wanted to marry and had slept with her sister.

When Anne’s daughter Elizabeth I became queen the Protestant writer Foxe invented another far-fetched story: that it had been Anne who had first drawn Henry to Protestantism. Foxe claimed that the ‘entire nation is indebted to her’ for its Protestant religion.

There is no documentary evidence for any of this.

The Protestant recasting of Anne in Elizabeth’s reign provoked an inevitable riposte from Catholic writers. Most notorious was the English Catholic priest, Nicholas Sander. He created the image of Anne as a witch, hideous and deformed.

Burgundian court dress - this is Anne's boss, Margaret of Austria as a young girl ,so some years before Anne went to Antwerp but it gives you the idea

Yet to be married 21 year old Anne was cast as the virtue Perseverance at Henry's court in 1522

Just about the earliest trace we have of Anne Boleyn (pronounced Bullen) is in 1513 or 1514, when she was sent to the Burgundian Court in Antwerp as a fille d’honneur. A maid of honour.

The Burgundian Court had for generations been the fashionable place to go and Anne’s father, Thomas Boleyn, who was then a minor English courtier, probably thought it was the best finishing school for his daughters Anne and Mary.

George W Bernard puts the typical age for new filles d’honneur at 12 or 13, which puts Anne’s date of birth around 1501. It’s the best guess we have. Aged 14 or thereabouts Anne was sent to France as lady’s maid to the 16 year old French queen, Claude.

She didn’t come back to England until she was an adult in 1521 and was naturally very French in her manners and way of speaking. Cardinal Wolsey had called her back after coming up with the idea of marrying her off to an Irishman, James ‘the Lame’ Butler, in order to give the Boleyns claims to an important Irish title.

In the end the marriage idea came to nothing. Anne’s father took the title for himself!

The first record we have of Anne Boleyn at Henry’s court was in a pre-Lent, Shrovetide pageant or Disguising in 1522. She appeared as one of eight lady virtues, defending their honour against Henry and his crew, who were disguised as Amorousness, Nobleness, Youth and other manly qualities.

Anne played ‘Perseverance’. Perhaps, at the age of 22 and two years after her sister Mary’s marriage (Mary probably continued as the King’s mistress after her arranged society marriage), and with no match in sight for herself, perhaps someone thought it might be good casting?

2 years into her affair with Henry, Anne already had many enemies - perhaps not surprising she only survived 3 years as queen

Beaulieu Palace, Essex, 1580, totally rebuilt by Henry after buying it from Anne's father in 1516 long before he ever met her. [Penelope went to school there but the nuns never mentioned 'protestant' Anne!]

Rusticated from court for smuggling a letter to Queen Katherine hidden in an orange

So much historical writing about Anne is, as the American historian Lacy Baldwin Smith put it many years ago, just ‘tradition.’ Or we’re trying to make historical bricks out of documentary straw.

The point is – that none of us really knows. There’s no really reliable documentary evidence that Henry took any interest in Anne Boleyn until the summer of 1527. That’s when the chance survival of some accounts show Henry giving her gifts at Beaulieu while he was there on his summer progress.

And then Henry then sends his secretary, William Knight, on a scary mission to Rome to ask Pope Clement for permission to marry her. It is in the documents Knight was carrying that Henry makes it perfectly plain that he is already sleeping with Anne. So by the summer of 1527 Anne was Henry’s new mistress.

In July 1528 Anne was back in Hever Castle. And there she went down with the dreaded sweating sickness. Henry sent his … second-best doctor.

But all the while, Katherine continued to live at court, stitching Henry’s shirts, exchanging letters every three days. Henry went on ‘visiting her apartments’ until at least late 1529. By then Anne was screaming at Henry in front of everyone else that she was wasting her time with him – ‘farewell to my time and youth spent to no purpose at all.’

By now Anne had plenty of enemies at court. In October 1529 the French ambassador reported that Anne’s father was going round court complaining that people didn’t love ‘la demoiselle’ any more.

Anne’s own uncle, the Duke of Norfolk (her aristocratic mother’s brother), was openly going around saying he wished they’d get back to the Spanish alliance. He claimed he would rather have lost one of his hands than get mixed up in the divorce. Then his wife was rusticated from court for a while for smuggling a letter to Katherine, hidden in an orange.

For more about that summer at Beaulieu read The rise and fall of Anne Boleyn by American historian Retha Warnicke

At her coronation Anne was given St Edward’s crown, which had only ever been worn by monarchs. [Elizabeth II wore it]

It was forbidden on pain of death to call Katherine queen

Henry finally lets Anne get pregnant in November 1532. He’d given Anne the title the Marchioness of Pembroke a few months before. He then marries her, probably in January 1533, in secret because his French allies disapproved.

It could be seen as nothing more than the best of a bad job. We say that because without a papal divorce no serious royal family would allow their daughters to marry him. But Henry needed a new heir to replace Mary, whom his divorce was making illegitimate.

12 April 1533 was Holy Saturday, the day before Easter Sunday. In the evening Anne went to the Solemn Easter vigil in the Chapel Royal. She made no effort at all to hide the fact that she was now five months pregnant. The effect was perhaps not quite what she had hoped.

Charles V’s ambassador reported that ‘all the world is astonished at it, for it looks like a dream and even those who took her part know not whether to laugh or cry.’

Across England people were leaving church services in protest when they were asked to pray for Anne. It was forbidden, on pain of death, to call Katherine queen but they were still cheering her, and her daughter Mary, wherever they went.

Henry had Anne crowned six weeks later, on 1 June 1533. The celebrations were elaborate. Everything was intended to show London’s crowds that England’s most powerful people, and Henry’s most powerful allies, approved of his new wife. It was, you suspect, much more for show than real.

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