Read The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn Online
Authors: Eric Ives
The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn (10 page)
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There is, however, a resolution of this pictorial game of ‘find the lady’. The key is an Elizabethan ring belonging to the Trustees of Chequers, the prime minister’s country residence. The ring itself is mother-of-pearl, the shank is set with rubies and the bezel carries the monogram ‘E’ in diamonds. It was previously in the possession of the Home family, having, it is said, been given from the English royal treasures by James I to the then Lord Home.
29
The head of the ring is hinged and opens to reveal two enamel portraits, one of Elizabeth
circa
1575 and one of a woman in the costume of Henry VIII’s reign, wearing a French hood (plate 7). The portrait is minute - the ring itself is only 175 millimetres across — but not only is Anne by far the most likely woman of the previous generation to be thus matched with Elizabeth, the face mask is quite clearly that of the sitter in the Hever and National Portrait Gallery paintings. Two important conclusions follow. First, the late Elizabethan ‘Kings and Queens’ image of Anne is pushed back some twenty years. Even more significant, that image must have been accepted in Elizabeth’s court as a likeness of the queen’s mother. Elizabeth herself could obviously have had no clear recollection of Anne’s face, but others around her had known Henry’s second wife well.
29
The head of the ring is hinged and opens to reveal two enamel portraits, one of Elizabeth
circa
1575 and one of a woman in the costume of Henry VIII’s reign, wearing a French hood (plate 7). The portrait is minute - the ring itself is only 175 millimetres across — but not only is Anne by far the most likely woman of the previous generation to be thus matched with Elizabeth, the face mask is quite clearly that of the sitter in the Hever and National Portrait Gallery paintings. Two important conclusions follow. First, the late Elizabethan ‘Kings and Queens’ image of Anne is pushed back some twenty years. Even more significant, that image must have been accepted in Elizabeth’s court as a likeness of the queen’s mother. Elizabeth herself could obviously have had no clear recollection of Anne’s face, but others around her had known Henry’s second wife well.
How does the Chequers enamel compare with the 1534 medal? There is a forty-year interval between them and the head-dresses are different, but the sitter is evidently the same - long oval face, high cheek-bones, strong nose and a decided chin: a face of character, not beauty. There is thus an authenticated sequence for Anne Boleyn, comprising the medal, the Chequers enamel and the Hever/NPG pattern.
With such a tiny ring it is hard to be certain, but between it and particularly the National Portrait Gallery example there seems to have been a prettying up and a loss of spirit.
30
Fortunately, the sequence also has the effect of corroborating a seventeenth-century miniature in the collection of the Duke of Buccleuch and Queensberry. Charles I had this copied as ‘Anne Boleyn’ by John Hoskins the elder
(c.
1590-1664/5), and it is endorsed ‘from an ancient original’ (plate 3).
31
How ‘ancient’ it is impossible to say. Although the relationship to examples in the NPG pattern is evident, these were only thirty years old or perhaps less. It is more likely that Hoskins had access to an earlier image of the kind from which the NPG image originated. A full-length portrait of Anne was owned by Lord Lumley in 1590 and existed as late as 1773.
32
Could it even be that Hoskins’ source was or was derived from a Holbein painting now lost?
33
Speculation apart, the Hoskins is important because it preserves what a highly talented seventeenth-century miniaturist made of the image, and though again further softened, it is the best depiction of Anne we are likely ever to have, failing the discovery of new material. Portrait medal - Chequers ring — Hever/NPG pattern - Hoskins miniature: the chain is complete. We have the real Anne Boleyn.
30
Fortunately, the sequence also has the effect of corroborating a seventeenth-century miniature in the collection of the Duke of Buccleuch and Queensberry. Charles I had this copied as ‘Anne Boleyn’ by John Hoskins the elder
(c.
1590-1664/5), and it is endorsed ‘from an ancient original’ (plate 3).
31
How ‘ancient’ it is impossible to say. Although the relationship to examples in the NPG pattern is evident, these were only thirty years old or perhaps less. It is more likely that Hoskins had access to an earlier image of the kind from which the NPG image originated. A full-length portrait of Anne was owned by Lord Lumley in 1590 and existed as late as 1773.
32
Could it even be that Hoskins’ source was or was derived from a Holbein painting now lost?
33
Speculation apart, the Hoskins is important because it preserves what a highly talented seventeenth-century miniaturist made of the image, and though again further softened, it is the best depiction of Anne we are likely ever to have, failing the discovery of new material. Portrait medal - Chequers ring — Hever/NPG pattern - Hoskins miniature: the chain is complete. We have the real Anne Boleyn.
Of the other alleged likenesses opinion must be left to judge. There is little to reinstate either Holbein drawing, but the Bradford painting is not impossible to reconcile with the authoritative image, especially as the sitter appears somewhat older. Moreover, as we have seen, that was the likeness chosen for engraving and printing in 1618. What is ruled out is the latest candidate as a likeness of Anne Boleyn, a portrait miniature assigned to the Flemish artist Lucas Hornebolte and found in two versions, in the Royal Ontario Museum and in the Buccleuch collection. The sitter is quite unlike the subject of the Chequers ring. There is also a difficulty about the date, for the Toronto miniature gives the sitter’s age as ‘in the 25th year’ and it seems likely that the earliest English examples of portrait miniatures were not produced until 1527. Furthermore, since early duplicate miniatures seem limited to royal persons, Anne would hardly seem yet to quality.
34
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Establishing a reliable image for Anne Boleyn only accentuates the evidence of contemporaries that her attraction was not outstanding natural beauty. What, then, explains her power? In the first place she radiated sex. The heir of the earl of Northumberland would try to break a six-year-old engagement for her; Sir Thomas Wyatt would become passionately involved; and it was the inability of a Flemish musician to stand the heady atmosphere around her that would help to bring Anne to destruction. As for Henry, the king’s own letters show how explicit was his desire:
Mine own sweetheart, this shall be to advertise you of the great loneliness that I find here since your departing - for I assure you methinketh the time longer since your departing now last, than I was wont to do a whole fortnight. I think your kindness and my fervencies of love causeth it; for otherwise I would not have thought it possible that for so little a while it should have grieved me ... wishing myself (especially of an evening) in my sweet-heart’s arms, whose pretty dugs I trust shortly to kiss.
35
That Anne was aware of her attractiveness to men seems obvious. While in France her place beside the retiring French queen would have kept her away from most of the notorious licentiousness which flourished in Francis I’s own household. Nevertheless, Anne cannot but have been made aware of her power during such visits as Claude did make to a court which was much more explicitly erotic than those at London or Brussels. William Forrest, writing in 1558, recalled that ‘no tatches [guile] she lacked of loves allurement’, while days after her death de Carles waxed lyrical about her expressive eyes:
... eyes always most attractive
Which she knew well how to use with effect,
Sometimes leaving them at rest,
And at others, sending a message
To carry the secret witness of the heart.
And truth to tell, such was their power
That many surrendered to their obedience.
36
Yet sexuality was only part of Anne Boleyn’s attraction. What made her stand out was sophistication, elegance and independence, in fact the continental experience and upbringing which we have explored. De Carles wrote:
To France, which brought her such fortune,
Ah! what honour, What a debt
She owed to the skill
Of those from whom she had learned such accomplishments,
Which have since made her queen of her own people.
She was happy, but how more happy
If she had trodden the way of virtue,
And had kept to the direction of the way
Which her honourable mistress had shown her.
37
France and Queen Claude, and, one might add, Margaret of Austria: these had made the difference. There were other foreign ladies at the English court. Some, now ageing, had come over with Katherine of Aragon, but among the English there was nobody with a tithe of the continental polish of Anne Boleyn. One of Wolsey’s servants who had known her remembered how she stood out among the other women at court ‘for her excellent grace and behaviour’.
38
A less than enthusiastic Protestant writer of the next generation told how ‘albeit in beauty she was to many inferior, but for behaviour, manners, attire and tongue she excelled them all, for she had been brought up in France.’
39
A Catholic account of the same period stressed that ‘she was in the prime of her youth’, and as well as her musical abilities ‘had her Latin and French tongue’.
40
True, one of her chaplains recalled that she used to lament her ignorance of Latin, but the two memories are not incompatible; it was polite convention to plead inadequacy - her daughter did, and she was an excellent Latinist.
41
Even the recusant tradition remembered her elegance and gave her credit for it, if for nothing else: ‘She was the model and the mirror of those who were at court, for she was always well dressed, and every day made some change in the fashion of her garments. But as to the disposition of her mind ...’
42
38
A less than enthusiastic Protestant writer of the next generation told how ‘albeit in beauty she was to many inferior, but for behaviour, manners, attire and tongue she excelled them all, for she had been brought up in France.’
39
A Catholic account of the same period stressed that ‘she was in the prime of her youth’, and as well as her musical abilities ‘had her Latin and French tongue’.
40
True, one of her chaplains recalled that she used to lament her ignorance of Latin, but the two memories are not incompatible; it was polite convention to plead inadequacy - her daughter did, and she was an excellent Latinist.
41
Even the recusant tradition remembered her elegance and gave her credit for it, if for nothing else: ‘She was the model and the mirror of those who were at court, for she was always well dressed, and every day made some change in the fashion of her garments. But as to the disposition of her mind ...’
42
Anne Boleyn had style, and continental style at that. George Wyatt might look back and write of ‘the graces of nature graced by gracious education’, but Carles declared at the time: ‘no one would ever have taken her to be English by her manners, but a native-born Frenchwoman.’
43
And she took the English court by storm.
43
And she took the English court by storm.
4
SOURCES
A
NNE Boleyn is the most controversial woman ever to have been queen consort of England. Disagreement among historians in more recent times only continues a controversy which began as soon as she was seriously linked with Henry VIII, was then subsumed in the adulation or vituperation which surrounded her daughter and finally became a crux in the confrontation between Protestant and Catholic controversialists. The consequence, as we have already seen, is that from the first there have been partisan disagreement even on simple points of fact.
NNE Boleyn is the most controversial woman ever to have been queen consort of England. Disagreement among historians in more recent times only continues a controversy which began as soon as she was seriously linked with Henry VIII, was then subsumed in the adulation or vituperation which surrounded her daughter and finally became a crux in the confrontation between Protestant and Catholic controversialists. The consequence, as we have already seen, is that from the first there have been partisan disagreement even on simple points of fact.
To Roman Catholics, it was not just that in order to satisfy his lust Henry had displaced his rightful wife in favour of Anne Boleyn, and broken with the true Church. Anne herself was soon being blamed for what had happened. Reginald Pole claimed that she had never loved Henry and described her as ‘the cause of all evil’ and ‘the person who caused all this’.
1
George Cavendish, in the confidence that God, through the accession of Mary, had restored right rule to England, produced a series of
Metrical Visions
in which over forty victims of political disaster, from Wolsey onwards, lament their ill fortune; Anne declares:
1
George Cavendish, in the confidence that God, through the accession of Mary, had restored right rule to England, produced a series of
Metrical Visions
in which over forty victims of political disaster, from Wolsey onwards, lament their ill fortune; Anne declares:
I may be compared in every circumstance
To Athalia who destroyed David’s line,
Spared not the blood by cruel vengeance
Of God’s prophets, but brought them to ruin:
Murder asketh murder, by murder she did find,
So in like wise resisting my quarrel
How many have died and ended pareil [the same].
2
By the accession of James I, an analysis preserved in the papers of those incorrigible recusants, the Treshams of Rushton, could attribute all the sufferings of Roman Catholics under Elizabeth’s penal laws to the fact that Anne ‘did beget a settled hatred of them against her and hers’:
Anne Boleyn, the bane of that virtuous and religious Queen Katherine, the ruin of many pious, worthy and famous men who favoured not that unlawful marriage, the first giver of entrance to the Protestant religion and the principal cause of her husband’s dissolving of religious houses and slaughtering multitudes of religious people as not favouring her marriage with Henry VIII in the lifetime of his first wife.
Anne had been ‘of bad parentage, of bad fame afore her marriage, and afterwards executed for adultery’.
3
3
Very understandably, the descendants of Thomas More had a particularly nice line in insult. Sir Thomas, so we are told, dismissed worldly status as vanity, but we cannot assume that his family was as sanctified; one blow of the axe had put an end to their bright prospects and undone the patient social climbing of three generations.
4
William Roper, the chancellor’s son-in-law, claimed that it was Anne’s personal vendetta against More which encouraged Henry to demand that he conform.
5
It was More’s nephew, William Rastell, religious exile and (briefly) judge of the court of Queen’s Bench, who gave currency in his lost Life of his uncle to the lie that Henry VIII was Anne Boleyn’s father.
6
He also alleged - with obvious echoes of Herodias, Salome and Herod — that Anne put on a great banquet for Henry at Hanworth, where she ‘allured there the king with her dalliance and pastime to grant unto her this request, to put the bishop [Fisher] and Sir Thomas More to death’.
7
In his edition of More’s English works, Rastell even edited out remarks by Sir Thomas which were favourable to the queen. What More had written in a letter to Thomas Cromwell in March 1534 was:
4
William Roper, the chancellor’s son-in-law, claimed that it was Anne’s personal vendetta against More which encouraged Henry to demand that he conform.
5
It was More’s nephew, William Rastell, religious exile and (briefly) judge of the court of Queen’s Bench, who gave currency in his lost Life of his uncle to the lie that Henry VIII was Anne Boleyn’s father.
6
He also alleged - with obvious echoes of Herodias, Salome and Herod — that Anne put on a great banquet for Henry at Hanworth, where she ‘allured there the king with her dalliance and pastime to grant unto her this request, to put the bishop [Fisher] and Sir Thomas More to death’.
7
In his edition of More’s English works, Rastell even edited out remarks by Sir Thomas which were favourable to the queen. What More had written in a letter to Thomas Cromwell in March 1534 was:
So am I he that among other his Grace’s faithful subjects, his Highness being in possession of his marriage and this noble woman really anointed queen, neither murmur at it nor dispute upon it, nor never did nor will, but without any other manner meddling of the matter among his other faithful subjects, faithfully pray to God for his Grace and hers both long to live and well, and their noble issue too, in such wise as may be to the pleasure of God, honour and surety to themselves, rest, peace, wealth and profit unto this noble realm.
As edited by Rastell this became:
So am I he that among his Grace’s faithful subjects, his Highness being in possession of his marriage, will most heartily pray for the prosperous estate of his Grace long to continue to the pleasure of God.
8
That More should have recognized Anne as ‘really anointed queen’ was unthinkable; worse still, it must not be admitted that a saint had described a whore as ‘noble’. To Catholics, the deaths of Anne and those accused with her and, later, of Cromwell, ‘and most of all those who procured his death’, were blood sacrifices to expiate More’s murder, and the drops which fell from their bleeding corpses on to his grave at the door of the Tower chapel, ‘peace offerings, or rather, confessions of the wrong they had done him’.
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