with that. Indeed, what baffled contemporaries abroad was his apparent determination to marry a mistress, and the few who knew he didn’t sleep with her failed to understand why not. And was Anne, as Pollard and most historians have implied, merely Henry’s obsession; had she nothing to say for herself? The ‘other woman’ in the most shattering marriage break-up in history, she ousted an entrenched queen of many years’ standing, hugely respected. And what did she then make of that victory? Surely there was more to the role of second wife than producing a famous daughter and failing to produce a son.
There was also a public dimension which followed on being first Henry’s fiancée and later his queen. Under her encouragement, royal policy took directions which continue to shape the English constitution today. Anne was also an active and effective politician, the destroyer of Thomas Wolsey, Henry’s great minister, and it was in order to avoid the same fate that the cardinal’s successor, Thomas Cromwell, determined to destroy Anne first. Equally significant was Anne’s personal religious commitment. It laid the foundations blocks of Protestant England and set the scene for the monumental changes that produced the religious settlement of her daughter, Elizabeth I. Pollard went wildly astray in claiming that Anne was intellectually inadequate. She read deeply in theology, the intellectual topic of the day, and her artistic taste was highly developed. She was, in fact, the first royal consort to embrace and promote the new fashion which we call Renaissance art.
Pursuing Anne gave Henry VIII years of frustration. Frustration is likewise the lot of her biographer. Anne succeeded by exploiting the rules and conventions of politics and high society, but ‘influence’ leaves no paper trail, no evidence of its passage. Manipulation can only be inferred from consequences. No one knows what Anne said to Henry in bed. Anne, moreover, left no journal, no memoranda and very few letters, so her inner life must similarly be inferred from externals, for instance, what she believed from what she chose to read and promote. To make matters even more difficult, Anne was such a contentious figure that much of the evidence of observers is either adulatory or bitterly hostile. Writing a biography of Anne Boleyn has all the challenge, excitement and confusion of police detection. It is no surprise that conclusions differ. Yet although we cannot recover Anne in sharp focus, she does come through as more than two-dimensional, more than a silhouette. She was the most influential and important queen consort this country has ever had. Indeed, Anne deserves to be a feminist icon, a woman in a society which was, above all else, male-dominated, who broke through the glass ceiling by sheer character and initiative.
How one would have felt about her is another matter. Captivating to men, Anne was also sharp, assertive, subtle, calculating, vindictive, a power dresser and a power player, perhaps a figure to be more admired than liked. But against that is Anne’s greatest distinctiveness, something she shares with only one other English queen: she married for love. Her relationship with Henry was deeply personal in a way kings had risked only once before, and never did again until the twentieth century. The couple’s attempt to have an affectionate marriage, with perceptible hints of modernity in the context of a Tudor court, explains much of the life and death of Anne Boleyn. It also means that the more we understand Anne, the more we understand the greatest puzzle of the Tudor century, the personality of her husband Henry; as the saying goes, ‘it takes two to make a marriage.’
This book is structured in four parts. ‘Background and Beginnings’ deals with Anne’s origins, her education, her launch into English court life and the reasons for the impact she made. That leads on to a discussion of the romantic relationships which she
There was also a public dimension which followed on being first Henry’s fiancée and later his queen. Under her encouragement, royal policy took directions which continue to shape the English constitution today. Anne was also an active and effective politician, the destroyer of Thomas Wolsey, Henry’s great minister, and it was in order to avoid the same fate that the cardinal’s successor, Thomas Cromwell, determined to destroy Anne first. Equally significant was Anne’s personal religious commitment. It laid the foundations blocks of Protestant England and set the scene for the monumental changes that produced the religious settlement of her daughter, Elizabeth I. Pollard went wildly astray in claiming that Anne was intellectually inadequate. She read deeply in theology, the intellectual topic of the day, and her artistic taste was highly developed. She was, in fact, the first royal consort to embrace and promote the new fashion which we call Renaissance art.
Pursuing Anne gave Henry VIII years of frustration. Frustration is likewise the lot of her biographer. Anne succeeded by exploiting the rules and conventions of politics and high society, but ‘influence’ leaves no paper trail, no evidence of its passage. Manipulation can only be inferred from consequences. No one knows what Anne said to Henry in bed. Anne, moreover, left no journal, no memoranda and very few letters, so her inner life must similarly be inferred from externals, for instance, what she believed from what she chose to read and promote. To make matters even more difficult, Anne was such a contentious figure that much of the evidence of observers is either adulatory or bitterly hostile. Writing a biography of Anne Boleyn has all the challenge, excitement and confusion of police detection. It is no surprise that conclusions differ. Yet although we cannot recover Anne in sharp focus, she does come through as more than two-dimensional, more than a silhouette. She was the most influential and important queen consort this country has ever had. Indeed, Anne deserves to be a feminist icon, a woman in a society which was, above all else, male-dominated, who broke through the glass ceiling by sheer character and initiative.
How one would have felt about her is another matter. Captivating to men, Anne was also sharp, assertive, subtle, calculating, vindictive, a power dresser and a power player, perhaps a figure to be more admired than liked. But against that is Anne’s greatest distinctiveness, something she shares with only one other English queen: she married for love. Her relationship with Henry was deeply personal in a way kings had risked only once before, and never did again until the twentieth century. The couple’s attempt to have an affectionate marriage, with perceptible hints of modernity in the context of a Tudor court, explains much of the life and death of Anne Boleyn. It also means that the more we understand Anne, the more we understand the greatest puzzle of the Tudor century, the personality of her husband Henry; as the saying goes, ‘it takes two to make a marriage.’
This book is structured in four parts. ‘Background and Beginnings’ deals with Anne’s origins, her education, her launch into English court life and the reasons for the impact she made. That leads on to a discussion of the romantic relationships which she
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