Table of Contents Epigraph Dedication Title Page Copyright Page PREFACE TITLES AND OFFICES PART I - BACKGROUNDS AND BEGINNINGS Chapter 1 - A COURTIER’S DAUGHTER Chapter 2 - A EUROPEAN EDUCATION Chapter 3 - DÉBUT AT THE ENGLISH COURT Chapter 4 - SOURCES Chapter 5 - PASSION AND COURTLY LOVE Chapter 6 - A ROYAL SUITOR PART II - A DIFFICULT ENGAGEMENT Chapter 7 - A MARRIAGE ARRANGED Chapter 8 - ANNE BOLEYN AND THE FALL OF WOLSEY Chapter 9 - STALEMATE, 1529 — 1532 Chapter 10 - THE TURNING-POINT, 1532 — 1533 Chapter 11 - WEDDING NERVES Chapter 12 - A CORONATION AND A CHRISTENING PART III - ANNE THE QUEEN Chapter 13 - A ROYAL MARRIAGE Chapter 14 - INFLUENCE, POWER AND WEALTH Chapter 15 - IMAGE Chapter 16 - ART AND TASTE Chapter 17 - LIFE AT COURT Chapter 18 - THE ADVENT OF REFORM Chapter 19 - PERSONAL RELIGION PART IV - A MARRIAGE DESTROYED Chapter 20 - THE RIVAL, 1535 — 1536 Chapter 21 - THE RESPONSE, JANUARY — APRIL 1536 Chapter 22 - THE COUP, APRIL — MAY 1536 Chapter 23 - JUDGEMENT Chapter 24 - FINALE EPILOGUE NOTES BIBLIOGRAPHICAL ABBREVIATIONS INDEX ‘The best full-length life of Anne Boleyn and a mounment to investigative scholarship.’ David Starkey, author of Elizabeth ‘Magnificently researched. Eric Ives has written the finest, most accurate study of Anne Boleyn we are ever likely to posses. He leaves no stone unturned in his quest to discover the truth. Never has the historical Anne been so satisfyingly portrayed.’ John Guy, author of My Heart is my Own: The Life of Mary Queen of Scots ‘This is a moving and compelling account by an author who is the absolute master of his subject. I read it with great excitement and admiration.’ Susan Bridgen, University of Oxford For Ruth © 2004 by E. W. Ives 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA 108 Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 lJF, UK 550 Swanston Street, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia The right of E. W. Ives to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher. First published 2004 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ives, E. W. (Eric William), 1931- The life and death of Anne Boleyn: ‘the most happy’ / Eric Ives. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index. ISBN 0-631-23479-9 (alk. paper) 1. Anne Boleyn, Queen, consort of Henry VIII, King of England, 1507- 1536. 2. Great Britain-History-Henry VIII, 1509-1547-Biography. 3. Henry VIII, King of England, 1491- 1547-Marriage. 4. Queens-Great Britain-Biography. I. Tide. DA333.B61845 2004 942.05’2’092-dc22 2003021527 A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library. Set in 10.75 on 13.5 pt by Kolam Information Services Pvt. Ltd, Pondicherry, India Printed and bound in the United Kingdom by TJ International, Padstow, Cornwall For further information on Blackwell Publishing, visit our website: http://www.blackwellpublishing.com PREFACE ONE 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 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 had or is supposed to have had, and hence to her agreement to marry the king. ‘A Difficult Engagement’ looks at the oft-told history of Henry VIII’s attempt to free himself to marry, but with a focus on Anne which undermines male-dominated interpretations of tradition. Part III, ‘Anne the Queen’, examines Anne’s marriage and consequent lifestyle, offering a picture of what it meant to be the consort of an English king at a magnification well in excess of what is possible for almost all her predecessors. Illustrating this is a nearly complete display of such visual evidence as has survived, which, in turn, supports detailed discussions of Anne’s portraiture, of her role as an artistic patron, of the day-to-day context of royal living and of her mind and beliefs. The final section, ‘A Marriage Destroyed’, concentrates on the closing months of the queen’s life, demonstrating the sudden and unexpected nature of her fall, the coup which precipitated it, the dishonesty of the case against her and the tensions of her last days. Tudor history (especially court history) is a minefield of possible confusion arising from family names, changing peerage titles and the fluctuations of office- holding. I have therefore provided a brief explanatory list. Relationships can be equally confusing, so family trees of the royal houses of Europe, the nobility of Henry VIII’s court, and the Boleyn and Howard families are also included. In the index individuals are cross-referenced to a main entry under the family name. A full bibliography of relevant material would be impossibly large, but a list of titles frequently cited and therefore abbreviated can be found before the index. Other works have been cited in full in the notes. Where the place of publication is not given, London must be understood. Spelling in quotations has been modernized. No biographer of Anne Boleyn comes to the subject without debts. Particularly since the 450th anniversary of Anne’s execution in 1986, a significant number of monographs and papers have opened or reopened issues affecting every stage of her life. Many of these contributions are discussed in the body of the text or figure in the notes, and my particular debt to James Carley and Gordon Kipling will be obvious. Not everyone is persuaded by my picture of Anne, and I am especially grateful to George Bernard for jousts which have sharpened up my analysis. Two substantial studies within discussions of Henry VIII’s complete matrimonial record deserve special mention - Antonia Fraser’s The Six Wives of Henry VIII and, more recently, David Starkey’s Six Wives: The Queens of Henry VIII. I do not always agree with them, but scholarship would be poorer without work of such quality. Furthermore, it is to Starkey that we owe the publication of The Inventory of King Henry VIII, henceforth an absolutely vital text. I have also benefited much from regular communication with Bob Knecht, particularly the chance to bounce off issues in sixteenth-century England against the situation in France and vice versa. Many scholars and friends have helped me with particular points of difficulty, including Alan Douglas, Marguerite Eve, Joan Glanville, John Guy, Gary Hill, Richard Hoyle, Mme Nicole Lemaitre, Virginia Murphy, Geoffrey Parnell, Peter Ricketts and Barry Young. Over many years of studying the Tudor court and especially Anne Boleyn, I have also incurred considerable debts for the use of manuscripts and other material: to His Grace the Duke of Northumberland and to the archivist at Alnwick Castle, Dr Colin Shrimpton, for ready access to the Percy papers; to His Grace the Duke of Buccleuch and Queensberry for the use of the miniature of Anne Boleyn by John Hoskins; to Mr Robert Pullin for his generous help with the Hever Castle collection; to the Eyston family for access to its papers; to Patricia Collins at the Burrell Collection for introducing me to Anne’s needlework. Many librarians, curators and their staffs have willingly assisted and advised, especially Miss Janet Backhouse, lately of the British Library Department of Manuscripts; the staffs of Special Collections, the Barber Institute and the Shakespeare Institute, all of the University of Birmingham, notably Miss Christine Penney and two erstwhile colleagues, Dr Ben Benedikz and Dr Susan Brock; Dr Christiane Thomas of the Osterreichisches Staatsarchiv, Vienna, and Dr Christian Müller of the Kunstmuseum Basel. Whatever merit this biography has is owed, in great measure, to the kindnesses of those named and others unnnamed. Its faults and longueurs are mine, and more than the dedicatee would have passed had she been here to subject the text to her eagle eye. TITLES AND OFFICES IN the nearly forty years of Anne Boleyn’s story, it is inevitable that office- holders and ranks altered. The following list sets out the principal identifications; for further details, see the index and the family trees.