ellemoncoeuranavera:
“We tend to think about Anne Boleyn in black-and-white terms. So, she’s either a sexual predator, or she’s sexually chaste; she’s either pious, or she’s worldly; she’s either innocent or sophisticated. And yet, actually, what I’ve learned here is that her French education, her time at the French court, was such that it prepared her to be a much more complex character than that.
“Her nine years on the continent transformed her from a teenage girl into an extremely desirable woman. The Anne that emerges back in England is one who’s been shaped by many different influences. Who is both pious and worldly; who’s both sophisticated and something of an innocent. She’s one who can both play musical instruments, who can sing, who can dance, who can speak French, who is sophisticated and witty, who’s been exposed to a world of cosmopolitan glamour. And she’s such an attractive prospect because, precisely because, she’s so complex.”
– Dr. Suzannah Lipscomb, on the effect of Anne Boleyn’s formative years on the continent, Henry & Anne: The Lovers Who Changed History
I definitely agree with Lipscomb’s assertion that people too often view Anne as a superficial figure, both thanks in part to television, film, literature (TOBG, Philippa Gregory’s works, and oversimplified analyses of historical events), and, most odiously of all, the perusal of primary sources (which are, admittedly, usually the most accurate accounts of people/events in history) from individuals who have a clear antipathy and vendetta against the subject of their writing, and their words being taken, at nominal value, as gospel. In Anne’s case, a few being Eustace Chapuys (whose credibility and verisimilitudinous I called into question in a https://ellemoncoeuranavera.tumblr.com/post/180022089505/it-is-chapuys-too-who-is-largely-responsible
%20%20″>post from a few weeks ago), Nicholas Sanders, an embittered Elizabethan Catholic exile and author of the anti-Protestant De origine ac progressu schismatis Anglicani (Of the Origin and Progression of the English Schism), and Jane Dormer, Duchess of Feria, a close friend and confidante of Mary I, and, after the queen’s death, married Gómez Suárez de Figueroa y Córdoba, 1st Duke of Feria, and became a protector of English, Irish, and Scottish Catholics seeking asylum in Spain.
An oft-quoted part of Sanders’s De origine, which is often thought to have been written in response to John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (which depicts Anne in a positive light, albeit a false one, as https://alicehoffmans.tumblr.com/post/179676943078/would-you-consider-anne-boleyn-a-feminist-martyr
%20%20″>she was not a martyr [thank you to @alicehoffmans for pointing this out!]), is concerning Anne’s appearance. Keen to blacken Anne’s name as much possible, he writes:
Anne Boleyn was rather tall of stature with black hair and an oval face of sallow complexion, as if troubled with jaundice. She had a projecting tooth under her upper lip, and on her right hand, six fingers. There was a large wen (tumor or wart) under her chin, and therefore to hide its ugliness, she wore a high dress covering her throat.
Though the wen, projecting tooth, and jaundiced-appearance have, by-and-large, faded from the popular conscience, the myth of a sixth finger continues to persist like the proverbial sword of Damocles. From Emily Pooley’s wax reconstruction (which the sculptor says is included to highlight the Catholic propaganda used against Anne), to famous portraits, and even a mention in the critically acclaimed Steel Magnolias, the specter of the dreaded sixth finger has remained at the forefront of many peoples’ beliefs about Anne. This is largely due to the fact that many historians have failed to peer beyond face value at Sanders’s outlandish claim, and not use their critical thinking skills to 1) ask the question of, if she had a vestigial finger, how would she have been selected to serve as one of Catherine of Aragon’s ladies-in-waiting? Especially when, during earlier times and in the Tudor period, such structures would have been regarded as satanic and would have marked Anne out as a witch, 2) surely Henry would have not been so ardently determined to marry Anne and have issue with her if she did have an additional finger? and 3) if Chapuys, who is undoubtedly one of the most quoted/“trusted” primary sources concerning Anne and all things Henrician, does not mention the additional digit, then surely the idea of its existence should be taken with a healthy dose of incredulity. Ultimately, the iconography of Anne Boleyn possessing a sixth finger permeates because of many historians and scholars’ failure to denounce and identify Sanders as an unreliable source and, because of such negligence, the idea is disseminated to media consumers and, authors, who put such an icon of Anne in their works, allow the legend of the sixth finger persists.
As for Jane Dormer, it has become deeply ingrained the popular psyche that Anne Boleyn was a violent woman, for which there is little-to-no basis. This subsequently accreted character trait of Anne’s has its basis in a chronicle written by Lady Jane herself. In The Life of Jane Dormer, Duchess of Feria, there is a brief mention of an incident that allegedly occurred between Anne Boleyn and Jane Seymour, her successor as Henry’s third wife. According to Dormer, she was:
[by her Uncle Francis Bryan] placed… with the Lady Anne Boleyn, the Queen, in whose service the king affected her, for which there was often much scratching and bye blows between the queen and her maid [Jane Seymour].
The first thing to do is to acknowledge the improbability of this event actually having come to pass. Dormer, herself, was born on 6 January 1538, over 18 months after Anne had been executed, so she could not have been an eyewitness to the supposed altercation. Secondly, Dormer most likely heard this story from Susan Clarencieux, another staunch supporter, and friend of Mary I, who had served Mary from 1525 to 1533 as a maid of honor, and again from 1536 after Mary had signed the Oath of Supremacy. Given Susan’s closeness and affinity to Mary, it isn’t too farfetched to believe that Clarencieux could have fabricated the story of Anne being violent towards Jane Seymour/being an abusive person in general, as the vast majority of Englishmen and women blamed Anne for Henry’s neglectful treatment of Mary. Consequently, this brief statement has had immense repercussions for Anne’s portrayal as a person in literature and the media. For example, in Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, during a conversation between Mary Boleyn and Thomas Cromwell, after Cromwell tells Mary he has a son, she replies, saying:
We know. Anne has all the Cardinal’s men in her little black book. She’s forever writing, devising punishments. She pinches me, you know. Want to see my bruises? When she’s Queen her enemies will feel it. You’d do well to keep in her good books. And out her bad ones.
Furthermore, in the live action TV show Wolf Hall, Anne is even shown to have slapped Jane Boleyn (neé Parker), Viscountess Rochford, when there’s absolutely no historical evidence for such an event occurring. In The Tudors, however, we get a more empathetic view of the conflict that Dormer alludes to in her chronicle, with Anne snatching a necklace (with a miniature of the King within it) from Jane Seymour’s neck so harshly that it cuts her hand, while she’s in near tears over her failing marriage.
Anne’s iconography of being a violent woman has been largely carried by Jane Dormer’s chronicle, which has so little evidence to any event of the sort actually transpiring that it’s immensely frustrating to see Anne being depicted as a harsh, termagant woman who possessed no other qualities. Yes, Anne made threats against Mary during her tenure as queen, but these were all born out of frustration and empty ones at that, for the majority of Christendom did not recognize her marriage and daughter as legitimate, the omnipresent pressure to produce a male heir, and the undoubtedly ever-looming specter of Mary and Catherine and their supporters–like a shadow cast before the sun– most definitely would’ve made Anne feel insecure about her station as queen. It is so easy to forget that Anne was a woman with many facets: both pious and indulgent, kind and charming yet sardonic, in love with the Gospel and dedicated to Reform, but also in love with the majesty of a crown and the man who came with it.
The best way to sum up this (rather long!) post, I feel, is to quote Gareth Russell, who said of Anne:
Anne Boleyn was neither saint nor villain; she was not even, either by the standards of her own time or the eras to come, a particularly bad person. In fact, it is my own personal assessment that her virtues overwhelmingly outweighed her vices, but her neuroses just about outweighed her talents. Today, people often see only the feud with Katherine of Aragon or with Mary Tudor, the fabricated rivalry with her sister, Mary Stafford, or the prurient, ridiculous pornography that constituted her downfall. Assessments of her character have become established as fact on no surer foundation than the virtue of repetition. Others see only a great, resolute politician – a 16th century Margaret Thatcher – a woman in a man’s world, devoid of weakness, hesitation and feminine softness. We have not yet troubled to look properly at her charities, her friendships and the tidal wave of compliments that were hers in the days before notoriety drowned her. We ignore her controversial attendance at a Requiem Mass for the butchered Cardinal Fisher, her locking of herself in her oratory and bursting into tears at the news of Katherine of Aragon’s death or the commendable image of a woman horrified, repulsed and disgusted by the burning to death of heretics. And that, in the 16th century, is something surely to her credit, no matter how much we attempt to contextualise it. She was, without doubt, a mass of contradictions – much good, some bad. But that, in the end, is something we must allow to her, for it is the most quintessential fundamental of what it means to be human, to be alive, and these contradictions, the subtleties and nuances, are important – more than important, in fact – for they remind us that this extraordinary woman really lived and that this repellently fascinating story, really, really happened.
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