PREFACE
O NE question is asked whenever Anne Boleyn’s name comes up - did she really commit adultery? Was she, while married to Henry VIII, being serviced by a stable of lovers which included the king’s best friend and her very own brother? For this she was beheaded, and five men with her, but what if Anne was innocent? Henry must then be a multiple murderer. The case has been fiercely contested for the best part of five centuries and certainly makes good copy. Shakespeare put a carefully edited version of Anne’s courtship and marriage on the stage, and since then, plays, opera, fiction, popular biography, film and, most recently, television have made capital of a story linking the most famous of English kings with sex, scandal and wife-killing.
So why yet another book about Anne Boleyn, beyond feeding a popular obsession, especially since I wrote about her at length twenty years ago? The answer is that Anne Boleyn was so much more important than the circumstances of her execution - a macabre story which yeomen warders of the Tower of London retail with glee to spectators at the scaffold site on Tower Green (incidentally many yards from the real spot). And awareness of that importance is steadily increasing over the years. The chronological narrative remains, but not our understanding of it. It is only a decade ago that I discovered the reason she had to die, and even less since what we knew about her life as queen was revolutionized by the publication of Henry VIII’s inventory. We have also learnt and are learning more and more about the world in which she lived and particularly about the royal court which was the milieu for her success and her destruction. For instance, her preoccupation with glamour, which older historians despised as feminine weakness, has now been recognized as a concern with ‘image’, ‘presentation’ and ‘message’ which was as integral to the exercise of power in the sixteenth century as it is in the modern world.
Seeing Anne only through the prism of her final hours produces manifest distortion but, like most people, I began there. Indeed, my interest was not in Anne herself but in the career of one of those who died with her, William Brereton from Malpas in Cheshire. In no way could I see him as her ‘lover’ - his wife certainly did not - so I was challenged to explain how he became involved in Anne’s destruction. Enquiry revealed that the reason for the deaths of Anne, Brereton and the others was not sexual excess but politics. Their fate is explained by what happened not in the bedroom, but in the corridors of power.
I have sometimes described Anne Boleyn as the third woman in my life, after my immediate family, and it is true that once she interests you, fascination grows, as it did for men at the time, and finally for Henry himself. Thus, being able to explain her destruction merely provokes another question. Why was Anne queen in the first place? Until the last thirty years po-faced historians preferred to ignore this. The Victorian J. A. Froude held that ‘It would have been well for Henry VIII if he had lived in a world in which women could have been dispensed with; so ill, in all his relations with them, he succeeded.’ A. F. Pollard, who dominated Tudor history in the years before the Second World War, wrote that Anne’s ‘place in English history is due solely to the circumstance that she appealed to the less refined part of Henry’s nature; she was pre-eminent neither in beauty nor in intellect, and her virtue was not of a character to command or deserve the respect of her own or subsequent ages.’
Yet is it credible that the woman Henry VIII pursued single-mindedly for six years should be so worthless? And why did Henry marry one of his own subjects? It was a virtual rule among Western monarchs to marry for political advantage - almost always a foreign princess. If carnal desire was what drove Henry, society had mechanisms other than marriage to deal
O NE question is asked whenever Anne Boleyn’s name comes up - did she really commit adultery? Was she, while married to Henry VIII, being serviced by a stable of lovers which included the king’s best friend and her very own brother? For this she was beheaded, and five men with her, but what if Anne was innocent? Henry must then be a multiple murderer. The case has been fiercely contested for the best part of five centuries and certainly makes good copy. Shakespeare put a carefully edited version of Anne’s courtship and marriage on the stage, and since then, plays, opera, fiction, popular biography, film and, most recently, television have made capital of a story linking the most famous of English kings with sex, scandal and wife-killing.
So why yet another book about Anne Boleyn, beyond feeding a popular obsession, especially since I wrote about her at length twenty years ago? The answer is that Anne Boleyn was so much more important than the circumstances of her execution - a macabre story which yeomen warders of the Tower of London retail with glee to spectators at the scaffold site on Tower Green (incidentally many yards from the real spot). And awareness of that importance is steadily increasing over the years. The chronological narrative remains, but not our understanding of it. It is only a decade ago that I discovered the reason she had to die, and even less since what we knew about her life as queen was revolutionized by the publication of Henry VIII’s inventory. We have also learnt and are learning more and more about the world in which she lived and particularly about the royal court which was the milieu for her success and her destruction. For instance, her preoccupation with glamour, which older historians despised as feminine weakness, has now been recognized as a concern with ‘image’, ‘presentation’ and ‘message’ which was as integral to the exercise of power in the sixteenth century as it is in the modern world.
Seeing Anne only through the prism of her final hours produces manifest distortion but, like most people, I began there. Indeed, my interest was not in Anne herself but in the career of one of those who died with her, William Brereton from Malpas in Cheshire. In no way could I see him as her ‘lover’ - his wife certainly did not - so I was challenged to explain how he became involved in Anne’s destruction. Enquiry revealed that the reason for the deaths of Anne, Brereton and the others was not sexual excess but politics. Their fate is explained by what happened not in the bedroom, but in the corridors of power.
I have sometimes described Anne Boleyn as the third woman in my life, after my immediate family, and it is true that once she interests you, fascination grows, as it did for men at the time, and finally for Henry himself. Thus, being able to explain her destruction merely provokes another question. Why was Anne queen in the first place? Until the last thirty years po-faced historians preferred to ignore this. The Victorian J. A. Froude held that ‘It would have been well for Henry VIII if he had lived in a world in which women could have been dispensed with; so ill, in all his relations with them, he succeeded.’ A. F. Pollard, who dominated Tudor history in the years before the Second World War, wrote that Anne’s ‘place in English history is due solely to the circumstance that she appealed to the less refined part of Henry’s nature; she was pre-eminent neither in beauty nor in intellect, and her virtue was not of a character to command or deserve the respect of her own or subsequent ages.’
Yet is it credible that the woman Henry VIII pursued single-mindedly for six years should be so worthless? And why did Henry marry one of his own subjects? It was a virtual rule among Western monarchs to marry for political advantage - almost always a foreign princess. If carnal desire was what drove Henry, society had mechanisms other than marriage to deal
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