Almost everybody knows something about Anne Boleyn or thinks that they do. She was the motivation behind Henry VIIIâs break from the Church of Rome. She enthralled the King so deeply that he was prepared to wait years to make her his Queen (or to get her into his bed). She slept with her brother. She slept with hundreds of men. She was asexual. She was a witch. She had a sixth finger and an unsightly deformation on her neck. She was sexually irresistible. She would do anything for power. She was a martyr. She was a sinner. She was a sexual harassment victim. She was the original femme fatale. She was a proto-feminist icon. There are as many Anne Boleyns as there are tellers of her story.
There are few English queensâindeed, few women in historyâwhose biographies have been as contested as that of Anne Boleyn. Even to this day, almost nothing about Anne Boleyn is agreed upon by either historians or novelists, from facts such as the year of her birth (1501 or 1507/08), to more vexed questions about how to interpret her reign and her downfall. Given that almost everything about the life, reign and death of Anne Boleyn has become a matter for debate, it is not surprising that she has become a favourite subject of novelists, poets, playwrights and, more recently, producers of movies, television shows and popular musicals. The elasticity of her story provides great imaginative latitude for historical fiction . Anne Boleynâs life is just remote enough to render it a colourful subject for historical fiction , yet its very familiarity renders it strangely comforting. Even a schoolchild can remember the old rhyme âdivorced-beheaded-died-divorced-beheaded-survivedâ and place Anne Boleyn in her position as the scandalous second wife. Beyond the fact of her coronation and execution, however, the real Anne Boleyn remains lost to history, unable to inscribe any kind of coherent narrative on the bare facts of her life. Indeed, there is so much room for interpretative latitude that her story can lapse into incoherence: so various are the Anne Boleyns that we have access to, it is hard to ascertain what actually happened and what it means. Even Shakespeare seems confused: his Anne Boleyn is variously a devout and modest woman, and a sexual temptress who engages in double-entendre-laden banter. The constructedness of history and the impact of the subjective vantage point of the teller on our understanding of historical truth are rarely as transparent as when any attempt is made to impose coherent meaning on the story of Anne Boleyn.
Some have attributed the ongoing fascination of Anne Boleyn, and the temptation to reinscribe her into literature and culture, to the elemental or universal qualities of her narrative. In her account of the development of the mythology of Anne Boleyn, for example, Susan Bordo argues that the
The recognisable, satisfying cycle that Bordo recognises here, quite apart from its purported resemblance to a Lifetime movie, perhaps accounts for the deluge of Tudor fiction that began to appear from the mid-twentieth century onwards.2 Other scholars have affirmed the seemingly timeless nature of the story of Boleynâs rise and fall, with Julie Crane seeing a link between that narrative and medieval morality plays. She writes that the story of Anne Boleyn seems to be âa confirmation that the wheel of fortune was still turning, capriciously, dealing out favours as carelessly as the condemned Queen had been accused of doing.â3 However understandable the impulse to universalise Boleynâs story might be, these attempts mostly fail to account for the very historic specificity of Boleynâs narrative. Part of Boleynâs appeal is surely her specific place within the court of Henry VIII and the rupture with the Catholic Church that Henryâs desire to take her as his wife precipitated. How can we account for a woman who apparently had so much sexual and emotional appeal she had the power to cleave King and country from the control of the Catholic Church, yet whose downfall was so complete she became the first English queen consort to face the executioner? What is clear is that no matter how the details of Anne Boleynâs life and death are interpreted, whether she is the universal âother womanâ or the powerless Tudor queen consort caught up in the web of a psychopathic, tyrannical king, she continues to speak to us as an avatar of feminine power and sexuality. Indeed, one might apply Joseph Roachâs concept of âitâ to Anne: she has âthe power of apparently effortless embodiment of contradictory qualities simultaneously: strength and vulnerability, innocence and experience, and singularity and typicality among them.â4 It is perhaps that ability to hold together contradictory meanings that has ensured the durability of her image as historical actor and celebrity. Anne can simultaneously be femme fatale and victim, predator and prey, religious reformer and cynic.story of her rise and fall is as elementally satisfying â and scriptwise, not very different from â a Lifetime movie: a long-suffering, postmenopausal wife; an unfaithful husband and a clandestine affair with a younger, sexier woman; a moment of glory for the mistress; then lust turned to loathing, plotting, and murder as the cycle comes full circle.1
Like most women of history, the immediate posthumous reputation of Anne Boleyn was largely inscribed by men whose religious and political interests shaped their interpretations of her personality, her relationship with Henry VIII, and the causes of her downfall. As the woman who prompted the English Reformation, insofar as the Kingâs âgreat matterâ was the immediate cause of the split from the Vatican, Anne was useful to Protestants as a martyr to the reformist cause.5 She appears in John Foxeâs The Acts and Monuments of the Church (known colloquially as Foxeâs Book of Martyrs), first published in 1563, in which she is deified as one of the martyrs of Protestantism.6 However, Anneâs commitment to religious reform, whatever its degree, was also convenient as a tool for Catholic propagandists as they could attribute what they saw as the blame for the Reformation to her pernicious sexual influence over Henry. If the Reformation was about Henryâs sexual urges, rather than any genuine religious conviction, then the case against the schism was manifestly easier to prosecute. Moreover, one of the few contemporary sources about Anne is the correspondence of the staunchly Catholic Spanish ambassador, Eustace Chapuys, a personal friend of both Queen Catherine and Princess Mary. In these dispatches, Anne is frequently referred to as âthe concubine.â Nicholas Sandersâs The Rise and Growth of the Anglican Schism (1573) is perhaps the most significant example of such polemic. It is in this text that some of the most notorious myths about Anne arose: namely, that she had a goitre on her chin and an extra finger, and, most startling, that she was actually Henryâs daughter through an affair that he had had with her mother, Elizabeth Boleyn.7 Anneâs sexual appeal, and her perceived errant sexuality, has always been at the centre of her fascination, and so the most convenient means by which Sanders, can attack her is to cast doubt on that appeal. Sanders could account for Anneâs sexual hold over the King, despite physical deformities that would have been understood in the early modern period to indicate moral and/or sexual degeneracy, because of the rumours of witchcraft that have swirled around her since the sixteenth century, despite the fact that Anne was never actually tried for witchcraft. That Anne has been unable to elude charges of witchcraft, even in contexts where the connotations of âwitchâ have shifted significantly, is borne out by the fact that J.K. Rowling has her portrait appear in the corridor of Hogwarts in the Harry Potter seriesâa magical forerunner to the contemporary students.
Since her execution on 19 May 1536, Anneâs life and body has been a site upon which competing religious, political and sexual ideologies have been inscribedâa practice that continues to this day. In her 2017 Reith Lectures, Hilary Mantel, author of the award-winning historical novels Wolf Hall (2009), Bring Up the Bodies (2012) and The Mirror and the Light (2020), in which Anne plays a key role, addressed the ongoing fascination of the story of Anne Boleyn, arguing that âyou can tell the story and tell it. Put it through ...