The Afterlife of Anne Boleyn: Representations of Anne Boleyn in Fiction and on the Screen [1st ed.] 9783030586126, 9783030586133

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The Afterlife of Anne Boleyn Representations of Anne Boleyn in Fiction and on the Screen

Stephanie Russo

Queenship and Power Series Editors Charles E. Beem University of North Carolina Pembroke, NC, USA Carole Levin University of Nebraska Lincoln, NE, USA

This series focuses on works specializing in gender analysis, women's studies, literary interpretation, and cultural, political, constitutional, and diplomatic history. It aims to broaden our understanding of the strategies that queens—both consorts and regnants, as well as female regents—pursued in order to wield political power within the structures of male-­ dominant societies. The works describe queenship in Europe as well as many other parts of the world, including East Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Islamic civilization. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14523

Stephanie Russo

The Afterlife of Anne Boleyn Representations of Anne Boleyn in Fiction and on the Screen

Stephanie Russo Macquarie University Sydney, NSW, Australia

ISSN 2730-938X        ISSN 2730-9398 (electronic) Queenship and Power ISBN 978-3-030-58612-6    ISBN 978-3-030-58613-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58613-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Heritage Image Partnership Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For Alessio Sebastian Russo Whose story is just beginning

Acknowledgements

This project has been long, exhausting, surprising, strange and fantastic. I now have more Tudor novels than I know what to do with, and a serious storage problem. To Anne Boleyn: thank you for giving me the best academic project of my life. You asked that your story be treated kindly. I hope that I have done that. One of the most pleasant parts of this project has been meeting my new friend, Marian Kensler, who runs the excellent Boleyn Books website. Marian is the real Anne Boleyn expert; I feel very much like an impostor following in her wake. Marian has been the most enthusiastic and generous reader of my work, and I am completely in her debt for the interest she has taken in this book since the beginning. I am entirely certain that she will find at least three new Anne Boleyn books the day after I submit this manuscript. Thank you to my excellent research assistant, Sebastian Sparrevohn, who now knows more than he ever wanted to about Anne Boleyn. I told you this project was weird. Thank you to Associate Professor Hsu-Ming Teo, who is truly my soulmate in trash and who provided an extremely valuable suggestion that has made this book much better. Thanks are also extended to my high-flying friend Dr Alys Moody for her perceptive help and support right from the beginning of this project. Thanks are also extended to my other colleagues in the Macquarie University Department of English for their collegiality and insights. My writing group has also consistently provided excellent advice and put up with me talking about Anne Boleyn over chicken schnitzel and vii

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margarita bowls for hours: thanks to Dr Ellie Crookes, Dr Kirstin Mills, Hilary Locke, Dr Sabina Rahman and Dr Helen Rystrand. Thanks are also extended to my friends and colleagues for their ongoing support: Dr Michelle Hamadache, Dr Jimmy Van, Dr Roberta Kwan, Merril Howie, Daniel Carrigy, Dr Daozhi Xu, Dr Aiyana Altrows, Dr Hélène Sirantoine, Dr Marina Gerzic, Dr Kylie Mirmohamadi, Dr Kelly Gardiner, Dr Catherine Padmore, Jacqui Grainger, Associate Professor Clare Monagle, Professor Malcolm Choat, Dr Rachel Yuen-Collingridge and Dr Laura Saxton. Thanks to Professors Jerome de Groot and Sharon Ruston for saying nice things about my work in its early days. Thanks to Natalie Grueninger for letting me come on her Talking Tudors podcast and talk about Anne Boleyn fiction. Thanks to the Faculty of Arts PACE team for the snacks and for giving my coats the attention they deserve. To my students, thanks for thinking I am sometimes a tiny bit cool. To Mischa Parkee, the best bookseller and primary school teacher in Australia, thanks for flying the flag for women’s writing. The staff at the Macquarie University Library have been extremely generous with their time, even though my constant requests for obscure Inter-Library Loans must surely have tried their patience. I am also indebted to the Macquarie University Faculty of Arts Research Office, who supported this project with an Outside Studies Program and a Mid-­ Career Fellowship Grant, as well as a Publication Subsidy Grant. Special thanks are extended to Dr Estelle Paranque. Her edited collection, Remembering Queens and Kings, is the reason why I wrote this book in the first place. Royal studies scholars have been so warm and inviting as I have stepped into this new (to me) field. Thanks to Dr Elena Woodacre, Dr Valerie Schutte, Dr Jessica Hower and Dr Zita Rohr, in particular. Thank you to the Palgrave Macmillan Queenship and Power team, especially Professor Carole Levin and Megan Laddusaw. Thank you to Beth Nauman-Montana for her work on the index to this book. Work coming out of this project has been published in the following journals: a/B: Auto/Biography Studies, Parergon, Clio and Girlhood Studies. Thanks to Professor Susan Broomhall for being such a pleasure to work with at Parergon. Thanks also to Dr Ann Smith at Girlhood Studies for being so lovely. Work coming out of this project will also appear in the upcoming The Routledge Companion to Love, and I extend my thanks to Professor Ann Brooks for her kind invitation to take part. This project also informed my

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forthcoming chapter on the afterlives of the Tudor consorts, to be included in the Tudor and Stuart Consorts edition of the English Consorts: Power, Influence, Dynasty project. Thanks to Dr Aidan Norrie for his assistance with this project. Thank you to Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss for writing Six and to the fantastic Australian cast (in particular, Kala Gare, who plays Anne). It’s absurd that a fantastic musical about the subject of this project came out while I was writing it; we should all be so blessed. Thank you to Meghan Markle and Beyoncé, our true queens. Bow down. My extended thanks are due to my kind and patient editor, Mr Lance Branwell, who hates almost all the texts I discuss in this book and thinks that almost none of them should have been written (with the exception of Six). Sorry for reacting badly when you told me to do the thing that I later did when Hsu-Ming told me to do it. Thank you to my parents, Carmelo and Lorraine Russo, for their support over all these years. My nephew Alessio has provided the best possible distraction from all things Boleyn; thanks for coming along at just the right time and being so irresistibly cute.

Contents

1 The It Girl of Tudor England  1 2 Anne Boleyn in the Sixteenth Century 21 3 Anne Boleyn in the Seventeenth Century 49 4 Anne Boleyn in the Long Eighteenth Century 71 5 Anne Boleyn in Nineteenth-Century Historical Fiction101 6 Anne Boleyn on the Nineteenth-Century Stage131 7 Anne Boleyn from 1900 to 1950153 8 Anne Boleyn from 1950 to 2000181 9 Anne Boleyn in Twenty-First-Century Historical Fiction209 10 Anne Boleyn in Twenty-First-Century Transgeneric Fiction239

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11 Anne Boleyn in Film and Television267 12 Conclusion293 Appendix297 Index305

CHAPTER 1

The It Girl of Tudor England

Almost everybody knows something about Anne Boleyn or thinks that they do. She was the motivation behind Henry VIII’s 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 queens—indeed, few women in history—whose 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 Boleyn’s 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 © The Author(s) 2020 S. Russo, The Afterlife of Anne Boleyn, Queenship and Power, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58613-3_1

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“divorced-beheaded-died-divorced-beheaded-survived” 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 story of her rise and fall is as elementally satisfying – and scriptwise, not very different from – 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

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 Boleyn’s 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 “a confirmation that the wheel of fortune was still turning, capriciously, dealing out favours as carelessly as the 1  Susan Bordo, The Creation of Anne Boleyn: A New Look at England’s Most Notorious Queen (Boston: Mariner Books, 2014), xiii. 2  Steve Donoghue hyperbolically complains that “somewhere in the world, a new Tudor novel is being written every 1.3 minutes”: an exaggeration, no doubt, but one that feels not far away from the truth. Steve Donoghue, “From the Archives: Extravagant Things,” Open Letters Monthly, August 2017, http://openlettersmonthly.com/july08-extravagant-things/

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condemned Queen had been accused of doing.”3 However understandable the impulse to universalise Boleyn’s story might be, these attempts mostly fail to account for the very historic specificity of Boleyn’s narrative. Part of Boleyn’s appeal is surely her specific place within the court of Henry VIII and the rupture with the Catholic Church that Henry’s 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 Boleyn’s life and death are interpreted, whether she is the universal “other woman” 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 Roach’s concept of “it” to Anne: she has “the power of apparently effortless embodiment of contradictory qualities simultaneously: strength and vulnerability, innocence and experience, and singularity and typicality among them.”4 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. 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 King’s “great matter” 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 Foxe’s 3  Julie Crane, “Whoso List to Hunt: The Literary Fortunes of Anne Boleyn,” in The Female Figure in Contemporary Historical Fiction, ed. K. Cooper and E. Short (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 76 (76–91). 4  Joseph Roach, It (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 8. 5  Historians have disagreed about the nature of Boleyn’s religious convictions. Maria Dowling has written that “extensive evidence points to her personal piety and her protection and advancement of evangelicals, besides her use of radical theology as a political weapon” (Maria Dowling, “Anne Boleyn and Reform,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 35, no. 1 [1984]: 30). However, G.W. Bernard claims that she was much more conventional in her faith, arguing that “what she revealed in the Tower through her belief in good works and her attachment to the sacraments was a deeply conventional Catholicism” (G.W. Bernard, “Anne Boleyn’s Religion,” The Historical Journal 36, no. 1 [1993]: 20). E.W. Ives instead claims

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The Acts and Monuments of the Church (known colloquially as Foxe’s Book of Martyrs), first published in 1563, in which she is deified as one of the martyrs of Protestantism.6 However, Anne’s 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 Henry’s 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 “the concubine.” Nicholas Sanders’s 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 Henry’s daughter through an affair that he had had with her mother, Elizabeth Boleyn.7 Anne’s 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 Anne’s 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 “witch” have shifted significantly, is borne out by the fact that J.K. Rowling has her portrait appear in that any attempts to assign a label on Boleyn’s reformist tendencies is impossible as “early reform was an orientation, a matter of heart, not of creedal statements and defined categories,” but also summaries her religious convictions as “reformist, bible-based, humanist, Francophile, committed” (Eric Ives, “Anne Boleyn and the Early Reformation in England: The Contemporary Evidence,” The Historical Journal 37, no. 2 (1994): 393). The debate over the nature and extent to which Boleyn was an evangelical is an excellent example of how contested almost every detail of her life has been. 6  John Foxe, The Unabridged Acts and Monuments Online (Sheffield: HRI Online Publications, 2011). 7  Nicholas Sanders, Rise and Growth of the Anglican Schism, ed. David Lewis (London: Burns and Oates, 1877).

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the corridor of Hogwarts in the Harry Potter series—a magical forerunner to the contemporary students. Since her execution on 19 May 1536, Anne’s life and body has been a site upon which competing religious, political and sexual ideologies have been inscribed—a 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 “you can tell the story and tell it. Put it through hundreds of iterations. But still, there seems to be a piece of the puzzle missing.”8 The story of the rise and fall of Anne Boleyn, Mantel suggests, is so fundamentally strange and compelling that it resists inscription, even as it has been constantly revisited and reinterpreted by historian and novelist alike. That sense that there is something to the story that remains undiscovered, Mantel argues, accounts for the seemingly endless drive to provide the “answer” to the problem of Anne Boleyn. Of course, we can also account for the persistence of interest in Anne to the evergreen interest in the lives of royalty. However, Anne’s appeal does seem to transcend the appeal generated by other queens, and even other Henrician queens. Katherine Howard, for example, has not elicited the amount of interest as Anne Boleyn, even though they met the same grizzly end. As Sarah Gristwood has recently argued, too, the sixteenth century boasts no shortage of queens who were able to exercise political power in a variety of ways, but none has had anywhere near the posthumous glamour or appeal of Anne Boleyn.9 The image of a woman raised high, only to be (literally) cut down, is one that has had uneasy resonance across centuries, and there is something specific about the precise iteration of Anne’s rise and fall that continues to speak to contemporary audiences. In an age that purports to be socially progressive, yet still exhibits an obvious unease with the relationship of women to power, especially when that story is refracted through sex, Anne’s story seems to take on ever more symbolic weight. This book is the story of those hundreds of iterations of Anne Boleyn. It attempts to account for the myriad literary representations of Anne 8  Hilary Mantel, “The BBC Reith Lectures: The Day Is for the Living,” BBC, 2017, http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08tcbrp 9  Sarah Gristwood, Game of Queens: The Women Who Made Sixteenth-Century Europe (Philadelphia: Basic Books, 2016).

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Boleyn that have appeared across the centuries in order to trace the way that she has become a symbol for a variety of conflicting ideas about women and power. This book takes as its focus literary and screen representations of Anne Boleyn, and thus academic and popular historical accounts are included only where they directly shape subsequent literary representations. Retha Warnicke’s work on Anne Boleyn, for example, has an unmistakeable influence on the novels of Philippa Gregory, which I discuss in Chap. 9.10 There are many novels in which Anne Boleyn appears as either a major or a minor character, with more appearing every year. In order to manage this immense corpus of material, I take as my focus only those texts in which Anne appear as a major character in her own right, and have excluded those novels in which she appears as a minor character in narratives about her daughter’s reign. As I will show, Anne Boleyn has also become something of an icon for the social media age, and Anne Boleyn fanfiction has become increasingly popular, especially in the wake of Natalie Dormer’s sexually charged portrayal of Anne in the Showtime television series, The Tudors. I have not included Anne Boleyn fanfiction in this volume, although I have included a wide range of self-­published material. While I have endeavoured to cover most texts that imaginatively construct Anne from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, the chapters that deal with twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature are necessarily incomplete accounts, due to the sheer volume of the corpus.11 I have selected key texts and patterns that have shaped the literary afterlife of Anne Boleyn or those which are particularly interesting in the way in which they treat the intersection of gender, sex, religion and power. I have also excluded a consideration of stage productions of Anne’s story; while I do explore dramatic representations of Anne, I focus on plays as they are written, rather than in performance. For practical reasons, I have had to focus on Anglophone writings about Anne and have also excluded any consideration of Anne’s representation in opera and music (although I do briefly consider the pop musical Six in the Conclusion to this volume). This volume moves chronologically through the history of representations of Anne Boleyn, as historical fictions increasingly look back at earlier

10  Retha Warnicke, The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn: Family Politics at the Court of Henry VIII (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 11  I have included an Appendix at the back of this volume listing all known twentieth- and twenty-first-century fictional treatments of Anne’s life.

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fictions about Anne, and so any other organisation of the material would be incoherent. In my analysis of the literature about Anne Boleyn, I have made reference to historical consensus regarding her life, but this volume does not advance a particular “case” as to what accounts for her spectacular rise and fall. While Susan Bordo’s The Creation of Anne Boleyn, for instance, tests what Bordo terms the “mythology” against either the historical record or her own impressionistic sense of what Anne must have been like, this book maintains that Anne is essentially unknowable and that no account of her personality is any more authoritative than the next.12 I have, however, taken as a given the by-now widely accepted view that she was innocent of the specific charges of adultery and incest laid against her at her trial. Rather than re-litigating historical fact, this volume is interested in Anne’s role in the collective memory of the Anglophone world. As Jan Assmann and John Czaplicka write, “which past becomes evident in that [cultural] heritage and which values emerge in its identificatory appropriation tells us much about the constitution and tendencies of a society.”13 This book, therefore, in excavating Anne’s place in the collective memory of Tudor England, is less interested in historical “fact” than the means by which history is put to use for a range of social, cultural, political and ideological ends. While studies of the afterlife of Henry, Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots exist, this book is, somewhat surprisingly, the first full-length academic study of literary and cultural representations of Anne Boleyn.14 There is no end of studies that attempt to parse historical fact from legend, but this volume does not seek to chart a path between history and fiction. Instead, I take as my central point of concern the generation and re-­ articulation of these very myths, in the belief that the mythology around Anne Boleyn is perhaps even more interesting, revealing and instructive than the woman herself.

 Bordo, The Creation of Anne Boleyn: A New Look at England’s Most Notorious Queen.  Jan Assmann and John Czaplicka, “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity,” New German Critique 65 (1995): 133. 14  Mark Rankin, Christopher Highley, and John N. King, Henry VIII and His Afterlives: Literature, Politics, and Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2009); Thomas Betteridge and Thomas S.  Freeman, Henry VIII and History (Farnham: Ashgate, 2002); Nicola J.  Watson and Michael Dobson, England’s Elizabeth: An Afterlife in Fame and Fantasy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Jayne Elizabeth Lewis, Mary Queen of Scots: Romance and Nation (London: Routledge, 1998). 12 13

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Chapter 2, “Anne Boleyn in the Sixteenth Century” traces some of the earliest early modern literary representations of Anne Boleyn, focusing especially on the sonnets of her contemporary Thomas Wyatt, as well as poetry and prose written about Anne during the reigns of Mary I and Elizabeth I. Anne Boleyn’s first appearances in literature were as vexed and variable as the historical accounts. The extent to which she appears as a subject of Petrarchan devotion in the sonnets of Thomas Wyatt is still a matter of critical debate.15 I argue that these poems, in which she appears as the enticing, but untouchable icon of courtly devotion, have had a formative role in later literary representations of the Queen.16 While Wyatt’s Anne Boleyn might be the epitome of the courtly love-object, she is also consistently associated with violence: the world surrounding the crown is beset by dangers so that the adoration of even the most exalted of lovers is no guarantee of safety. The image of Anne, then, has always been contradictory and beset by conflicting understandings of what it is to be desired by royalty: the sexual interest she elicits in the King is the means by which she will be elevated above all others, but the very nature of royalty means that her role as queen is always under threat. In Chap. 3, “Anne Boleyn in the Seventeenth Century,” I turn to dramatic accounts of the life and death of Anne. While writing about Anne no longer had the same vexed political status as it did during the previous century, the seventeenth century is notable for its lack of representations of Anne. An unusual strategy also emerged in the seventeenth century, in which Anne’s story was dramatised by stealth: writers told stories that clearly resembled Anne’s narrative, but were putatively “about” other women. Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam is one such text, in which Anne’s story is disguised under a Biblical tale. This chapter also considers William Shakespeare and John Fletcher’s Henry VIII, which is unusual in that it presents us with a largely flat, unremarkable image of Anne, especially in comparison to the dynamic portrait of Catherine of

15  Richard Harrier has limited the poems which reference Anne Boleyn to three, for example (Richard Harrier, The Canon of Sir Thomas Wyatt’s Poetry [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975]), while Retha Warnicke argues that the only clear reference to Boleyn occurs in the poem “Whoso List to Hunt” (Retha M. Warnicke, “The Eternal Triangle and Court Politics: Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn, and Sir Thomas Wyatt,” Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies 18, no. 4 [1986]: 572). 16  Kenneth Muir and Patricia Thomson, Collected Poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1969).

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Aragon, who dominates the play.17 However, while Anne Boleyn is not the emotional centre of Henry VIII, the play concludes with Cranmer prophesying the accession of Elizabeth and her Protestant regime. Shakespeare and Fletcher, as well as Wyatt, align Henry with David, and thus, despite her near invisibility, Anne Boleyn becomes a Bathsheba figure, tempting the King away from religiosity to pleasurable excess. However, it is also Anne who secures England’s destiny as a Protestant nation. The complex, contradictory nature of these representations of Anne Boleyn suggests a profound ambivalence about both Henry VIII as King and the role of Anne Boleyn in his reign. The disjunction inherent within this image of Anne Boleyn as simultaneously religious reformer and sexual temptress reveals much about the fragility of English Protestantism at the time and suggests the ongoing inability to fully account for her hold on the historical imagination. Chapter 4, “Anne Boleyn in the Long Eighteenth Century,” charts the movement away from religious polemic towards a focus on the emotional and affective in representations of Anne. John Banks’s Vertue Betray’d (1682) exemplifies the tendency for religious polemicists to use Anne as a propagandistic tool: as the title suggests, this play represents Boleyn as an entirely virtuous, pious, innocent victim.18 The way that Anne was used in late seventeenth-century drama reflects the tumultuous political circumstances of the era. However, the eighteenth century marked the period of the rise of the novel and, accordingly, there was a developing recognition of the capacity of literature to convey a measure of psychological realism. Women writers like Madame d’Aulnoy and Sarah Fielding, accordingly, began to address the question of what it felt like to be Anne Boleyn, and a more nuanced vision of her lived experience as a woman began to be the focus of much of the literature. For the first time, too, Henry’s desire for Anne is conceived of as a problem that Anne had to actively manage. In these accounts, Henry VIII is often portrayed as a sexual predator, thus anticipating later feminist readings of the stories of Henry’s wives.19 Sarah Fielding’s account of Anne Boleyn, which appears as the last chapter in Henry Fielding’s Journey from This World to the Next (1743), is p ­ articularly 17  William Shakespeare and John Fletcher, King Henry VIII, ed. Gordon McMullan (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2000). 18  John Banks, Vertue Betray’d: Or, Anna Bullen (London: R. Wellington, 1715). 19   See, for example, Karen Lindsey, Divorced, Beheaded, Survived: A Feminist Reinterpretation of the Wives of Henry VIII (Reading: Addison-Wesley, 1995).

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notable here, as Sarah Fielding allows Anne to “speak” from beyond the grave and narrate her own story.20 Fielding’s text marks the first time that Anne’s interiority is foregrounded. What is at issue for Fielding is not the historicity of Anne Boleyn, but instead the affective dimension of the story of a woman whose sexuality precipitated both her rise and her fall. Her only “sin” is her attempt to negotiate this dangerous world of sexual threat through a kind of courtly flirtation that attempts to deflect sexual fulfilment, but instead goes dangerously awry. It is the eighteenth century, therefore, from which contemporary images of Anne Boleyn as simultaneously sexual temptress and victim derive. The women writers of the eighteenth century were the first to intuit that Anne could be an avatar of the impossible bind of femininity: unable to access any form of power beyond their sexuality, yet punished for deploying it. In Chap. 5, “Anne Boleyn in Nineteenth-Century Historical Fiction,” I examine Victorian representations of Anne Boleyn in historical fiction, focusing specifically on the ways in which Anne became a problematic figure for nineteenth-century writers and historians. Writing about Anne Boleyn during this period was inevitably shaped by shifting understandings of the significance of the monarchy as an institution. The power of the monarch had been radically transformed over the centuries since the reign of Henry VIII: as David Cannadine writes, from the mid-eighteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, “it was no longer acceptable for kings (and, occasionally queens) to rule; the best they could hope for was that they might be allowed to continue to reign.”21 By the reign of Victoria, the political power that the monarch was able to wield had been heavily circumscribed, and so the institution of monarchy was in a period of symbolic transition. It was in the nineteenth century, therefore, that the royal family came to be understood as a family.22 As Cannadine writes, 20  Sarah Fielding, “Wherein Anna Boleyn Relates the History of Her Life,” in A Journey from This World to the Next, ed. Henry Fielding (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 102–17. 21  David Cannadine, “From Biography to History: Writing the Modern British Monarchy,” Historical Research 77, no. 197 (2004): 293. 22  Linda Colley has argued that the domestication of the monarchy was initiated by George III, who was known colloquially as “Farmer George.” However, George IV was disliked by the populace, largely because of his treatment of his wife and his notorious array of mistresses, so any association of the monarchy with domestic morality had largely lapsed by the time Queen Victoria ascended the throne. See Linda Colley, Britons (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005).

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constitutional monarchy is perhaps inherently feminine because “those historic male functions of god and governor and general” were removed, leaving greater stress on “family, domesticity, maternity and glamour.”23 Queen Victoria positioned herself and her increasingly numerous family as an affective, domestic model for the nation. The meaning of the monarchy had shifted so profoundly that these same interests were projected backwards into writings about historical monarchs. Thus, we see in nineteenth-­ century writing about queens a focus on their domestic lives and interests. Agnes Strickland’s Lives of the Queens of England (1843) is concerned with such quotidian subjects as the amount of needlework performed by each queen.24 The queen was the angel of the house writ large—the matriarch of the nation who should provide a moral exemplar for all women. One of the consequences of the affective turn in history writing was a new interest in women’s lives, so at the same time as thinking about the monarchy shifted towards thinking about the family, the domestic lives of women in the past became of interest to writers of history and historical fiction. Another pattern in nineteenth-century historical fiction about Anne is a focus on what has come to be known as Tudor horror.25 Tudor horror stories emphasise the violence of the Tudor court and often focus on the stories of women who suffered and died within the walls of the Tower of London and other historic monuments associated with that period in history. Thus, stories about three tragic executed queens—Anne Boleyn, Lady Jane Grey and Mary Queen of Scots—became immensely popular. These texts often played up the inherently Gothic dimensions of the historical narrative by overlaying an element of the supernatural so that ghosts and other supernatural beings are accepted as part of the landscape of the Tudor world. In William Harrison Ainsworth’s 1842 Windsor Castle, for instance, Anne’s story is juxtaposed with the story of Herne the Hunter, a supernatural being who haunts the court of Henry VIII.26 Gothic novels about Anne, however, are often far more interested in the supernatural elements of the narrative than they are about Anne, who is  Cannadine, “From Biography to History: Writing the Modern British Monarchy,” 303.  Agnes Strickland, Lives of the Queens of England, from the Norman Conquest, Vol. II, 4th ed. (London: H. Colburn, 1854). 25  Billie Melman, “The Pleasures of Tudor Horror: Popular Histories, Modernity and Sensationalism in the Long Nineteenth Century,” in Tudorism: Historical Imagination and the Appropriation of the Sixteenth Century, ed. Tatiana C. String and Marcus Bull (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 37–56. 26  W.H. Ainsworth, Windsor Castle (London: Collins Clear-Type Press, n.d.). 23 24

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often relegated to the background of stories about men, homosocial relationships and adventures. What Tudor horror narratives do demonstrate, however, is a profound ambivalence about history, in which the assumption of the inherent violence of the Tudor past is considered both titillating and disturbing. Chapter 6, “Anne Boleyn on the Nineteenth-Century Stage,” explores a wide range of dramatic representations of Anne’s story, from closet dramas to popular melodramas and burlesques. These plays often emphasise Anne’s passivity: she is commonly represented as a helpless victim of Henry’s tyranny. The saintly Annes of the nineteenth-century stage have so resolutely fallen out of favour that most of the texts in this chapter are almost completely unknown today. Henry Hart Milman’s Anne Boleyn: A Dramatic Poem (1826), for instance, marks a return to the religious polemic of earlier centuries, with Anne being used as a figure of virtuous Protestantism, besieged by corrupt and avaricious Catholic plotters.27 For many Victorian playwrights, Anne was an appealing image of virtue-in-­ distress—a woman who could play on the sentiments of the Victorian audience. For others, however, Anne was a symbol for a new mode of femininity. Anna Dickinson, in her play Anne Boleyn, or a Crown of Thorns (1876), represents Anne as a kind of forerunner for the first generation of feminists: she has agency, intelligence and power, but is ultimately defeated by patriarchal forces.28 Dickinson, a first-wave feminist activist, was so enamoured of Anne, who she saw as a woman “like herself,” that she withdrew the play from circulation rather than have another woman take the role.29 The contention that the author somehow “understands” Anne more authentically than others would become a mainstay of historical fiction into the next century. In Chap. 7, “Anne Boleyn from 1900 to 1950,” I focus on Anne Boleyn’s transformation into the heroine of historical love stories. In her 1912 novel The Favor of Kings, Mary Hastings Bradley wrote that she wanted to “offer the Anne Boleyn of this story, a very human girl.”30 This impulse—to make the Tudor queen, however remote in history her life  H.H. Milman, Anne Boleyn: A Dramatic Poem (London: John Murray, 1826).  Anna E.  Dickinson, Anne Boleyn or A Crown of Thorns: A Tragedy in Four Acts, ed. Marian Kensler, 1876. 29  Stacey A. Stewart, “Nothing Ladylike About It: The Theatrical Career of Anna Elizabeth Dickinson” (University of Maryland, College Park, 2004), 91. 30  Mary Hastings Bradley, The Favor of Kings (New York and London: D. Appleton and Company, 1912), viii. 27 28

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might be, understandable to the presumably female readers of romantic fictions—animates much of the writing about Anne Boleyn in the first half of the twentieth century. While these novels differ in their assessment of Anne’s culpability in her downfall, the Anne that emerges out of historical love stories is always recognisably modern, and here we see most obviously the impulse to universalise her story. The Anne Boleyn of romantic novels might fret over her appearance and outfits or worry about whether Henry’s attentions are motivated by genuine love or passing sexual fancy. This emphasis on reader identification with Anne means that the role of religion, which was central to earlier accounts, is largely overlooked or ignored altogether. While the Tudor court is invested with glamour, many of these fictions are largely free of contextual specificity. Interestingly, too, in much of the twentieth-century writing on Anne, there is a tendency to take as a given that she utilised her sexuality as a tool in order to fulfil her ambitions. While authors ascribe different moral judgements to her actions, what is assumed is that Anne deliberately wielded her sexuality as a weapon; she thus becomes a sixteenth-century forerunner to the femme fatales of the period. What also emerges out of the fiction of the first part of the twentieth century is the standardisation of an accepted narrative about Anne: she was genuinely in love with Henry Percy, was divided from him by either Henry or Cardinal Wolsey (or both) and thus became crazed with ambition. In Chap. 8, “Anne Boleyn from 1950 to 2000,” I explore how the rise of second-wave feminism affected the ways in which Anne was represented. Taking up the assumption that Anne was motivated by ambition, the second half of the twentieth century often imagined Anne as a second-­ wave feminist career girl who focused on ambition at the expense of love and lived to regret it. As Miriam Elizabeth Burstein has noted, “such Annes follow a pattern formalized by the late 1950s in which Anne is vengeful, near hysterical, frequently asexual, and power mad.”31 The tendency to characterise Anne as conniving or manipulative suggests that the only way she can be proscribed agency is in a sexual context: the only way to transform Anne from victim to agent is through the power of her sexuality. Despite the rise of second-wave feminism, or perhaps because of it, anxieties clearly persist about Anne’s pursuit of power, and these anxieties reveal much about contemporary attitudes towards women’s power. 31  Miriam Elizabeth Burstein, “The Fictional Afterlife of Anne Boleyn: How to Do Things with the Queen, 1901–2006,” Clio 37, no. 1 (2007): 3.

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Novels in which Anne is presented as almost wholly unsympathetic also appear at this time. These novels are usually focalised by the women who surrounded Anne and most commonly centre on the experiences of her sister Mary. Anne is defined through opposition to her more domestic, compliant—and blonde—sister. Philippa Gregory’s The Other Boleyn Girl (2001) should thus be considered the apotheosis of these established ways of writing about Anne.32 Chapter 9, “Anne Boleyn in Twenty-First-Century Historical Fiction,” explores the explosion of popularity of Anne Boleyn historical novels since the turn of the century. In the wake of Gregory’s novel, the television series The Tudors and Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy (2009–20), stories about Anne became ever more plentiful.33 However, the rise of the internet and self-publishing platforms during the first two decades of the century also resulted in the fragmentation of ways of representing Anne’s story. While the previous century had deeply ingrained presumptions about Anne’s character, twenty-first-century novels about Anne are diverse in their interests. While some novels reflect the postfeminist ethos of the 2000s, other novels imagine Anne as a proto-feminist icon. Religion also reappears as a force in Anne’s story in the twenty-first century with the rise of Christian publishing. Anne and Henry’s relationship is also far more likely to be represented as a love match in the twenty-first century reflecting, I argue, the desire to defend Anne from the charges of unfeminine ambition often levelled against her. This chapter also explores Anne’s transformation into an avatar of proto-feminism for the internet generation, as recently explored by Susan Bordo and Mickey Mayhew.34 I argue that the duelling ideologies of resistance and victimisation that have led to such disparate accounts of Anne in the past render her uniquely attractive to a young feminist audience. As young women attempt to navigate a purportedly postfeminist landscape that seems to offer the promise of freedom, while at the same time tying much of their worth to repressive sexual ideologies, it is little wonder that so many have found something admirable in the story of an intelligent, spirited woman undone by her sexuality.  Philippa Gregory, The Other Boleyn Girl (London: HarperCollins, 2011).  Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall (London: 4th Estate, 2009); Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies (London: 4th Estate, 2012); Hilary Mantel, The Mirror and the Light (London: 4th Estate, 2020). 34  Bordo, The Creation of Anne Boleyn: A New Look at England’s Most Notorious Queen; Mickey Mayhew, “Skewed Intimacies and Subcultural Identities: Anne Boleyn and the Expression of Fealty in a Social Media Forum” (London South Bank University, 2018). 32 33

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In Chap. 10, “Anne Boleyn in Twenty-First-Century Transgeneric Fiction,” I will explore Anne’s recent appearances in fiction that crosses generic boundaries, such as Young Adult fiction, time-travel and other science-fiction narratives, Gothic mash-ups and counterfactual histories. I argue that these texts often reflect the contemporary desire to “save” Boleyn from her fate through fiction: an inability, perhaps, to countenance the reality of what happens to the troublesome, unruly woman. Sarah Morris’s Le Temps Viendra (2012–13), in particular, hinges on the main character’s (also named Anne) obsessive interest in Anne Boleyn and her desire to save Boleyn from her fate through a complicated time-travel plot that sees the contemporary Anne travel from an Anne Boleyn fan conference to the royal court of 1527.35 The reality of Boleyn’s execution is so horrific that fiction becomes the tool by which she is retrospectively spared, providing readers with the comforting illusion that fiction, at least, has the power to redress historical gendered injustice. However, other texts, such as Anne Boleyn ghost narratives or Gothic mash-ups in which she is represented as a vampire or another supernatural being, often present us with the spectacle of unresolved, perhaps unresolvable, historical guilt. In other transgeneric novels, such as Hannah Capin’s The Dead Queens Club (2019), Anne’s ability to speak to the present becomes literal as she is transformed from sixteenth-century Tudor queen to contemporary high-school girl.36 Many of the novels explored in this chapter are surprising, even downright odd, but in their insistence on reading Anne’s story through the lens of the present, they only make more apparent the inherent presentism of all fictional representations of Anne. In Chap. 11, “Anne Boleyn in Film and Television,” I explore the first century of screen representations of Anne’s narrative. Anne has consistently been a favoured subject for film and television, from the first silent shorts based on scenes from Shakespeare and Fletcher’s play Henry VIII to recent popular television series. The film adaptations of Anne’s story build on the image of Anne found in historical romantic fiction, with Anne of the Thousand Days (1969), in particular, replicating the meta-­narrative about Anne characteristic of novels of the period.37 However, while in 35  Sarah Morris, Le Temps Viendra: A Novel of Anne Boleyn, Volume 1 (Spartan Publishing, 2012); Sarah Morris, Le Temps Viendra: A Novel of Anne Boleyn, Volume 2 (Spartan Publishing, 2013). 36  Hannah Capin, The Dead Queens Club (Sydney: HQ Young Adult, 2019). 37  Charles Jarrott, Anne of the Thousand Days (United Kingdom: Hal Wallis Productions, 1969).

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novels Anne’s sexuality is often under-emphasised in favour of her lust for power, in most film adaptations her sexuality is emphasised. This chapter focuses on three waves of screen adaptations of Anne’s story: the initial “classic” Hollywood depiction of her story (1933’s The Private Life of Henry VIII), the 1970s revival (Anne of the Thousand Days and other 1970s productions) and the twenty-first-century adaptations produced in the wake of the 1998 film Elizabeth, and, particularly, the Showtime series The Tudors (2007–10). What unites all screen Annes is that she is assumed to be an intelligent, spirited and agentic woman; she is rarely imagined to be either passive or helpless. This book traces the literary afterlife of a specific woman, but in doing so, it inevitably tells a much wider story. The ways in which Anne Boleyn was represented tell us how England has thought about itself at a time of civil and religious turmoil. The long-standing construction of England as a rational Protestant haven against the decadent Catholicism of mainland Europe could, after all, be played out through competing accounts of Anne’s central role in the Anglican Schism. However, perhaps more importantly to modern audiences, the ways in which representations of Anne have shifted over time tell us much about how women’s power, especially where it intersects with sexuality, has been conceptualised. While Anne’s power was a product of her sexual relationship with the King, and the extent to which she was able to exercise individual power is debatable, what is important is the perception that she had an outsize influence on the Tudor court. Queenship was, after all, one of the few mechanisms for women in the medieval or early modern periods to exercise any degree of political power, and even this power was problematic, circumscribed and subject to suspicion and hostility. As one of the few women whose power did not derive from inheritance, Anne is a particularly interesting study of a range of complex and contradictory attitudes towards women in power and, particularly, the legitimacy of female power. These resonances are enhanced by the fact that it was Anne’s daughter Elizabeth who would most fully come to embody and redefine female political power in the period. The real Anne Boleyn might be elusive, lost to history and forever unknowable, but the literary Anne Boleyn has much to reveal to us about the still vexed intersection of ideologies of gender, sexuality and power.

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References Primary Sources Ainsworth, W.H. Windsor Castle. London: Collins Clear-Type Press, n.d. Banks, John. Vertue Betray’d: Or, Anna Bullen. London: R. Wellington, 1715. Benger, Elizabeth. Memoirs of the Life of Anne Boleyn, Queen of Henry VIII. Third Edit. Philadelphia: A. Hart, 1850. Bradley, Mary Hastings. The Favor of Kings. New York and London: D. Appleton and Company, 1912. Capin, Hannah. The Dead Queens Club. Sydney: HQ Young Adult, 2019. Dickinson, Anna E. Anne Boleyn or A Crown of Thorns: A Tragedy in Four Acts. Edited by Marian Kensler, 1876. Fielding, Sarah. “Wherein Anna Boleyn Relates the History of Her Life.” In A Journey from This World to the Next, edited by Henry Fielding, 102–17. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Foxe, John. The Unabridged Acts and Monuments Online. Sheffield: HRI Online Publications, 2011. Gregory, Philippa. The Other Boleyn Girl. London: HarperCollins, 2011. Jarrott, Charles. Anne of the Thousand Days. United Kingdom: Hal Wallis Productions, 1969. Mantel, Hilary. Bring Up The Bodies. London: 4th Estate, 2012. ———. “The BBC Reith Lectures: The Day Is for the Living.” BBC, 2017. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08tcbrp. ———. The Mirror and the Light. London: 4th Estate, 2020. ———. Wolf Hall. London: 4th Estate, 2009. Milman, H.H. Anne Boleyn: A Dramatic Poem. London: John Murray, 1826. Morris, Sarah. Le Temps Viendra: A Novel of Anne Boleyn, Volume 1. Spartan Publishing, 2012. ———. Le Temps Viendra: A Novel of Anne Boleyn, Volume 2. Spartan Publishing, 2013. Muir, Kenneth, and Patricia Thomson. Collected Poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1969. Sanders, Nicholas. Rise and Growth of the Anglican Schism. Edited by David Lewis. London: Burns and Oates, 1877. Shakespeare, William, and John Fletcher. King Henry VIII. Edited by Gordon McMullan. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2000. Strickland, Agnes. Lives of the Queens of England, from the Norman Conquest, Vol. II. 4th ed. London: H. Colburn, 1854.

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Secondary Sources Assmann, Jan, and John Czaplicka. “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity.” New German Critique 65 (1995): 125–33. Bernard, G.W. “Anne Boleyn’s Religion.” The Historical Journal 36, no. 1 (1993): 1–20. Betteridge, Thomas, and Thomas S. Freeman. Henry VIII and History. Farnham: Ashgate, 2002. Bordo, Susan. The Creation of Anne Boleyn: A New Look at England’s Most Notorious Queen. Boston: Mariner Books, 2014. Burstein, Miriam Elizabeth. “The Fictional Afterlife of Anne Boleyn: How to Do Things with the Queen, 1901–2006.” Clio 37, no. 1 (2007): 1–26. Cannadine, David. “From Biography to History: Writing the Modern British Monarchy.” Historical Research 77, no. 197 (2004): 289–312. Colley, Linda. Britons. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. Crane, Julie. “Whoso List to Hunt: The Literary Fortunes of Anne Boleyn.” In The Female Figure in Contemporary Historical Fiction, edited by K. Cooper and E. Short, 76–91. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Donoghue, Steve. “From the Archives: Extravagant Things.” Open Letters Monthly, 2017. http://openlettersmonthly.com/july08-extravagant-things/. Dowling, Maria. “Anne Boleyn and Reform.” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 35, no. 1 (1984): 30–46. Gristwood, Sarah. Game of Queens: The Women Who Made Sixteenth-Century Europe. Philadelphia: Basic Books, 2016. Harrier, Richard. The Canon of Sir Thomas Wyatt’s Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975. Ives, Eric. “Anne Boleyn and the Early Reformation in England: The Contemporary Evidence.” The Historical Journal 37, no. 2 (1994): 389–400. Lewis, Jayne Elizabeth. Mary Queen of Scots: Romance and Nation. London: Routledge, 1998. Lindsey, Karen. Divorced, Beheaded, Survived: A Feminist Reinterpretation of the Wives of Henry VIII. Reading: Addison-Wesley, 1995. Mayhew, Mickey. “Skewed Intimacies and Subcultural Identities: Anne Boleyn and the Expression of Fealty in a Social Media Forum.” London South Bank University, 2018. Melman, Billie. “The Pleasures of Tudor Horror: Popular Histories, Modernity and Sensationalism in the Long Nineteenth Century.” In Tudorism: Historical Imagination and the Appropriation of the Sixteenth Century, edited by Tatiana C. String and Marcus Bull, 37–56. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Rankin, Mark, Christopher Highley, and John N.  King. Henry VIII and His Afterlives: Literature, Politics, and Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2009.

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Regis, Pamela. A Natural History of the Romance Novel. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. Roach, Joseph. It. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007. Stewart, Stacey A. “Nothing Ladylike About It: The Theatrical Career of Anna Elizabeth Dickinson.” University of Maryland, College Park, 2004. Warnicke, Retha. The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn: Family Politics at the Court of Henry VIII. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Warnicke, Retha M. “The Eternal Triangle and Court Politics: Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn, and Sir Thomas Wyatt.” Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies 18, no. 4 (1986): 565–79. Watson, Nicola J., and Michael Dobson. England’s Elizabeth: An Afterlife in Fame and Fantasy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

CHAPTER 2

Anne Boleyn in the Sixteenth Century

Representing Anne Boleyn in literature or in history in the sixteenth century was a political act. Any attempt to grapple with her rise and fall would inevitably be shaped by whoever was on the throne at the time. For Thomas Wyatt, the writer who wrote the first poetry about Anne, the ability to write about Anne was circumscribed by her status as Henry’s favourite and future wife. Later in the century, one’s perspective on Anne was inevitably shaped by the escalating religious conflicts over the English Reformation. Much has been written about the impact of the dispatches of the Spanish ambassador, Eustace Chapuys, on the subsequent reputation of Anne Boleyn.1 For Chapuys, Anne was the “Concubine,” the whore who had displaced the saintly Catherine of Aragon from her rightful position as Queen. Chapuys helped to shape many of our conceptions of Anne as a woman of dangerous and disruptive sexuality.2 My aim in this book is to consider literary representations of Anne, rather than the contemporary archival documents. In this chapter, nonetheless, I touch on some of the historiography that appeared in the first century after Anne’s birth, especially those pieces of historical biography, such as William 1  For a good account of the impact of Chapuys’s writings on Anne’s historiography, see Lauren Mackay, Inside the Tudor Court: Henry VIII and His Six Wives Through the Writings of the Spanish Ambassador Eustace Chapuys (Stroud: Amberley, 2014). 2  Elizabeth Norton has compiled a useful selection of Chapuys’s diplomatic dispatches dealing with Anne’s rise and fall in The Anne Boleyn Papers. Elizabeth Norton, The Anne Boleyn Papers (Gloucestershire: Amberley, 2013).

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Latymer’s chronicle, Nicholas Sanders’s The Rise and Growth of the Anglican Schism and George Wyatt’s response to that text, which have been particularly formative in shaping Anne’s subsequent representations in literary texts. This chapter is not a comprehensive study of every reference to Anne Boleyn in sixteenth-century writing, but it does trace many of the most interesting and important representations of Anne’s rise and fall: writings that would indelibly shape her literary afterlife to come.

Thomas Wyatt, Courtly Love and the Petrarchan Sonnet Anne Boleyn’s literary afterlife began in her lifetime; she was so naturally a subject for literature that she began to be memorialised while she still lived. The man responsible for laying the groundwork for so much of what we still believe about Anne Boleyn was also the most important early Tudor poet, Sir Thomas Wyatt. Wyatt was writing within a literary culture centred around the court and still heavily influenced by the courtly love tradition. While Wyatt’s poetry was circulated in manuscript during his lifetime, it was only printed after his death in Richard Tottel’s 1557 collection of verse Songs and Sonnets—a text in which a variety of poems written to and across a literary network based in the Henrician court was collected. As Curtis Perry writes of these kinds of writings, “many literary texts were written with a specific circle of acquaintances in mind.”3 Wyatt was producing verse written to be understood and appreciated by a small group of like-minded courtiers and aristocrats. It was a form of poetry designed to draw attention to the poet for their mastery of language, and for their knowledge of prestigious literary forms associated with international courts, such as the sonnet. In attempting to disentangle the problem of determining to what extent we can “see” Anne Boleyn in Wyatt’s poems, we must consider the literary culture of the period. It is important to remember that the assumption that lyric poetry is writing about the self is a modern understanding, and one that maps quite unevenly onto medieval and early modern poetry. Wyatt was writing poetry not to be published, but to be circulated amongst a small group of courtly friends. These readers would understand the references within, not necessarily as keys to unlocking the state of Wyatt’s heart (although the possibility 3  Curtis Perry, “Court and Coterie Culture,” in A Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture (Malden: Blackwell, 2003), 108 (106–118).

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cannot be discounted) but as references to court stories, gossip and other poems. It is poetry about the poet as much as it is poetry about the purported subject of the poem. More importantly, Wyatt was writing within the courtly love tradition, in which failure in love is assumed because the object of desire is usually married or promised to somebody else: courtly love was the rhetoric of frustration, of love eternally unconsummated. The courtly love tradition was not about finding sexual fulfilment, but about the power of chaste love to inspire glorious deeds in service of the remote lady. In adapting the love sonnets of Petrarch, as we shall see, Wyatt was borrowing another, related discourse of frustrated love, in which love can only ever result in flights of poetic fancy, rather than physical consummation. The Elizabethan sonneteers were to transform the Petrarchan love sonnet into the great poetry of narcissism, in which the speaker’s love for the woman was less important than the ability of this love to produce great poetry that would confer immortality on the poet.4 In the particular case of Thomas and Anne, both partners had other claimants to their affections. Wyatt had been married to Elizabeth Brooke in 1520, but the couple seem to have separated due to her infidelity in 1525/26; he may have been living as a single man, but he could offer Anne nothing. The courtly lover, as he appeared in poetry, walked the difficult line between passionate desire and chaste devotion. Thomson neatly summarises the contradictory discourses of the courtly love ethos: On the one hand, Anne has appeared as the disdainful princesse lontaine, from whom her henchmen can expect only ‘pity’. On the other, she is the possible (not certain) mistress of Wyatt, her social inferior […] All Tudor courtly comment and love poetry is informed with similar contradictions. On the one hand the humble suitor expects only his small share of grace. On the other he aims at seduction […] The courtly lover can sue humbly and sneer in turn.5

4  As R. Howard Bloch writes, this narcissism was a persistent feature of love poetry from the medieval courtly love tradition, arguing that the “depreciation of the feminine lurks just below the surface of the courtly idealization of women.” R.  Howard Bloch, Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991), 148. 5  Patricia Thomson, Sir Thomas Wyatt and His Background (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1964), 29.

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Wyatt, acutely aware of his poetic forebears in the medieval tradition, is writing a type of love poetry in which the socially superior woman always rejects the socially inferior man, usually because of a pre-existing marriage. The speaker is inevitably disappointed, but still maintains his devotion to the untouchable lady. Whether or not Wyatt was following Anne around silently resenting her involvement with the King is rather beyond the point: this is not poetry about Anne the woman, but Anne the embodiment of an ideal femininity (albeit a contradictory and often misogynist one). Suzannah Lipscomb has argued that it was the contradictions embedded in courtly love rhetoric that led to Anne’s downfall, writing that [e]lite women had to balance their role as desired courtly beloved with their need to preserve sexual honour and chastity, and it was always finely poised. A vivacious, flirtatious woman such as Anne Boleyn could easily shift from the accepted position as desirable but passive into the unacceptable desiring and active.6

The impossibility of a love that is both desiring and chaste, passionate and distant, flirtatious and unconsummated ultimately undoes Anne. It also has the effect of giving us an Anne that seems mired in contradiction: she is sexually available and alluring, and yet always beyond reach and untouchable. Retha Warnicke argues that viewing Anne Boleyn through the lens of courtly love can only ever be misguided, based as it is on modern interpretations of the discourse by historians and literary scholars, because its conventions do not align with any evidence of Anne’s actual behaviour.7 However, beyond the applicability of courtly love discourse to Anne’s actual life, which remains contested, what remains true is that Anne has been read through the lens of the poetry of this tradition, in which she is made to embody and represent ideas about gender and sexuality that may have very little to do with what she was in life. The fact that Thomas Wyatt knew and interacted with Anne does not make his reliance on literary types any less true. Wyatt was essentially using the figure of Anne, with all that she represented, as the embodiment of an idea, but subsequently, that 6  Suzannah Lipscomb, “The Fall of Anne Boleyn: A Crisis in Gender Relations?”, in Henry VIII and the Court: Art, Politics and Performance, ed. Suzannah Lipscomb and Thomas Betteridge (Surrey: Ashgate, 2013), 305 (287–305). 7  Retha M. Warnicke, “The Conventions of Courtly Love and Anne Boleyn,” in State, Sovereigns and Society in Early Modern England: Essays in Honour of A.J. Slavin, ed. Charles Carlton et al. (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1998), 114 (103–118).

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idea has been mined as if it is the key to unlocking something about Anne as a woman. That Wyatt was writing within a discourse that placed women into a very specific type has not prevented an intense interest in trying to work out the true nature of Anne and Wyatt’s relationship. That Anne Boleyn and Thomas Wyatt’s paths crossed is beyond dispute. Their family estates were close to each other in Kent, and they certainly knew each other, although given that Anne went overseas to serve in the court of Margaret of Austria while quite young, it is likely that their acquaintance would have begun in court, rather than in childhood.8 However, almost everything else about their relationship, such as it was, is contested. A short survey of the historical sources that suggest a liaison of some type between Anne and Wyatt is illustrative here. The Catholic writer Nicholas Harpsfield gives a particularly salacious account of their love story, apparently gleaned from a conversation with a merchant by the name of Antonio Bonvisi and recorded in a manuscript that, while written during the reign of Mary, began to be circulated in 1584. According to Harpsfield, when Wyatt realised that Henry was serious about Anne, he went to the King to warn him about Anne’s lewd behaviour: “I know not so much by hear-say as by my own experience as one that have had my carnal pleasure with her.”9 In Nicholas Sanders’s Catholic polemic, Rise and Growth of the Anglican Schism, published in 1585, Wyatt does not tell the King of his affair, but instead tells the entire court, with the Duke of Suffolk then subsequently passing the information on to the King.10 Wyatt’s recent biographer, Nicola Shulman, suggests that the germ of Sanders’s stories about Anne and Wyatt originate in a story by Eustace Chapuys about a gentleman of the court who had been banished twice for dalliances with the Queen.11 The Spanish Cronica del Rey Enrico recounts a lurid tale in which Wyatt

8  As Eric Ives writes, Anne left for Brussels when Wyatt was barely ten years old, so it is reasonable to assume that they met at court in the 1520s. Eric Ives, The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn (Malden: Blackwell, 2004), 67. 9  Nicholas Harpsfield, A Treatise on the Pretended Divorce between Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon (Camden Society, 1878), 332. 10  Nicholas Sanders, Rise and Growth of the Anglican Schism, ed. David Lewis (London: Burns and Oates, 1877), 23–28. 11  Nicola Shulman, Graven with Diamonds. The Many Lives of Thomas Wyatt: Poet, Lover, Statesman, and Spy in the Court of Henry VIII (Hanover: Short Books, 2013), 99.

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describes a sexual encounter with Anne to the King in an attempt to get out of prison.12 By way of contrast, Gilbert Burnet, Bishop of Salisbury, refuted Sanders’s claims about Anne’s relationship with Wyatt line by line in his History of the Reformation—an obvious attempt to provide a counterpart to Catholic slanders of Anne.13 The most significant refutation of Sanders’s story, however, comes from Thomas Wyatt’s grandson, George Wyatt, writing in the late 1590s. George Wyatt suggests that Thomas Wyatt did fall in love with Anne, but Anne “rejected all his speech of love.”14 George Wyatt then relates a tale in which Thomas purloins a small jewel that has fallen out of Anne’s pocket, which he wears around his neck. Later, over a game of bowls, the King, crowing over his victory, shows Thomas that Anne is wearing his ring. Thomas then takes out the jewel that he has stolen from Anne, which makes the King believe that “I have been deceived.”15 However, Anne clears up the matter to the King’s satisfaction, and Thomas bows gracefully out of Anne’s story. The story allegedly came from one of Anne’s ladies-in-waiting, Anne Gainsford, but it could just as easily come from the annals of Arthurian legend, so neatly does it conform to the conventions of courtly love.16 Two high-born men— although one with a much greater status than the other—compete for the favour of a beautiful woman. The highest status man will inevitably win and the lesser man retreats. There is also the threat of danger here: the mere existence of a competitor opens the courtly lady up to suspicion and sows the seeds for what is to come. It is impossible to know whether any of this is true, but it does make for an excellent story. What is manifestly clear in all the sixteenth-century sources is that each writer had a specific ideological, usually religious, purpose that drove him to either affirm or deny reports of a relationship between Anne and Wyatt, and thus construct Anne as either the wronged victim or lascivious whore.  Shulman, 97.  Gilbert Burnet, The History of the Reformation of the Church of England (London: Printed for T.H. for Richard Chiswell, 1681). 14  George Wyatt, “Extracts from the Life of the Virtuous Christian and Renowned Queen Anne Boleigne,” in The Life of Cardinal Wolsey, by George Cavendish, His Gentleman Usher (London: Harding and Lepard, 1827), 425 (417–449). 15  Wyatt, 427. 16  As Ives notes, the story is almost identical to a story about Charles Brandon stealing a ring from Margaret of Austria, with whom he once flirted. Ives, The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn, 82. 12 13

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As Susan Brigden perceptively writes, “behind all the rumours lay the imagined romantic imperative that the most brilliant man at court and the most brilliant woman should fall for each other.”17 Interestingly, there is evidence that Wyatt, at least initially, was of the group in court that supported Catherine of Aragon during the negotiations for her divorce. In 1527, Catherine of Aragon asked Wyatt to translate a text of Petrarch’s De remediis utriusque fortunae, a task that clearly did not quite agree with Wyatt, for he instead presented her with a translation of Plutarch’s Quiet of Mind.18 Again, however, history cannot provide the answer: it is entirely possible that Thomas Wyatt was serving both mistresses at the same time, or one, or the other. Greg Walker has suggested that a good place to settle is that “at some time in the mid-1520s, prior to Anne’s attracting the eye of the King, Wyatt was her suitor.”19 Eric Ives agrees, arguing that the poetry suggests that “Wyatt became one of a number of Anne’s acknowledged courtly suitors, found himself emotionally involved but drew only a limited response.”20 However, Patricia Thomson was not so convinced, summing up the evidence for a relationship as “an accumulation of references in his poems and of sometimes more, sometimes less, reliable reportage, taken in combination with his imprisonment in 1536.”21 It is certainly true that Wyatt was amongst the men arrested with Anne in May 1536, although he was soon released, and it is not clear what specific charges were brought against him or the exact circumstances of his release, although his friendship with Thomas Cromwell may have been a factor here. What we are left with, as we are so often with Anne, is a tangle of mythology. Thomas Wyatt still frequently appears in historical novels about Anne Boleyn, either as spurned or secret lover, as I will show in subsequent chapters.22  Susan Brigden, Thomas Wyatt: The Heart’s Forest (London: Faber & Faber, 2012), 149.  Greg Walker suggests that Wyatt probably did not want to be seen as translating a text that discussed “the responsibilities of the virtuous soul in an unjust world,” lest it be seen as a comment on the Queen’s marital situation at the time. Greg Walker, Writing Under Tyranny: English Literature and the Henrician Reformation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 284. 19  Walker, Writing Under Tyranny: English Literature and the Henrician Reformation, 286. 20  Ives, The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn, 76. 21  Thomson, Sir Thomas Wyatt and His Background, 21. 22  For more on historical fiction about Anne and Wyatt, see Stephanie Russo, “The Poet and the Queen: Thomas Wyatt and Anne Boleyn in Historical Biofiction,” A/b: Auto/ Biography Studies, forthcoming. 17 18

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One of the poems most frequently read in light of Wyatt’s purported love for Anne is the sonnet that begins, “If waker care if sodayne pale Coolour.”23 It is well known that Wyatt changed the wording of this poem so that instead of referring to the “Brunet that did set the country in such a rore,” the poem reads “Brunet that set my welth in such a rore” to avoid making too obvious a link between the poem and Anne.24 It is hard to imagine another brunette overturning the countryside at the time. However, Retha Warnicke has disputed this identification of Anne as the “Brunet,” instead arguing that it is more likely that Wyatt was referring to his estranged wife and that country meant Kent, not England as a whole.25 If, however, the “Brunet” is Anne, then we have a poem that presents us with a vision of Anne as a dark and enticing temptress, a woman of controlled and uncontrollable sexuality. The lover that Wyatt’s speaker now favours is the blonde “Phillis,” potentially a reference to Wyatt’s mistress, Elizabeth Darrell, who became his lover in 1537. The “unfayned chere of Phillis” has now captured the heart of the speaker, who swears his allegiance to this much less tempestuous lover.26 As Shulman notes, Wyatt “sets up a system of opposites by calling one woman ‘Brunet’ and relying on his readers to know (as they would) that his current mistress is blonde.”27 This image of Anne as a raven-haired beauty whose dark good looks and sexual allure have the power to unsettle an entire kingdom is one that becomes increasingly dominant in the history of representations of Anne. The rather more prosaic Phillis eerily seems to prefigure the allure of Jane Seymour to Henry: the comparatively meek and compliant blonde will overturn the appeal of the more spirited brunette. Perhaps, when we evince the desire to read Anne into this poem, we are relying on our knowledge that Anne was fated always to be replaced by a more compliant blonde, whether that be Elizabeth Darrell or Jane Seymour. The poem that begins “Some tyme I fled the fyre, that me so brent” has also sometimes been understood as a reference to Anne’s trip to Calais in 1532, at which history suggests Anne finally submitted to Henry’s sexual 23  Kenneth Muir and Patricia Thomson, Collected Poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1969), 78. 24  Muir and Thomson, 78. 25  Retha M. Warnicke, “The Eternal Triangle and Court Politics: Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn, and Sir Thomas Wyatt,” Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies 18, no. 4 (1986): 572. 26  Muir and Thomson, Collected Poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt, 78. 27  Shulman, Graven with Diamonds, 103.

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advances.28 The suggestion here is that Wyatt once had to flee to escape his love for Anne, but now, his love quenched, he must follow her and her royal lover to Calais. The poem, like so much of Wyatt’s love poetry, moves between desire and frustration, and between pursuit and renunciation. Raymond Southall, assuming that this poem is indeed about Anne, writes of this poem that “Wyatt remarks that his desire for Anne is given fresh life and is also satisfied […] and expresses trepidation in the last three lines at the thought that the king, ill enough done by already, may discover how very badly he is being used.”29 The last three lines certainly express romantic frustration at the same time that they suggest that Wyatt’s speaker has moved on: “And he may se that whilome was so blynde / And all his labor now he laugh to scorne. / Mashed in the breers that erst was all to torne.”30 Again, however, such connections between Wyatt and Anne are strained because there is some disagreement about whether Wyatt actually accompanied the couple on this trip. Richard Harrier suggests that there is some persuasive, but limited, evidence that Wyatt was in attendance on Anne and Henry in Calais, and states that, again, we may instead have another poem about Wyatt’s estranged wife, rather than an expression of bitterness towards Anne.31 Francesco Petrarca’s Rime sparse, composed of 366 poems written over approximately 40 years from 1327 to 1368, charts his love for the (possibly) married Laura, whom he famously met on Good Friday 1327 and fell in love with at first sight. The sequence charts his painful, frustrated desire for Laura, which stretches beyond her death, but the poems are as much about sacred love and poetic glory as they are about profane love. Wyatt’s most famous poem, and the one easiest to associate with Anne, “Whoso List to Hunt,” is based on Petrarch’s Rime 190, “Una candida cerva,” a poem in which Petrarch depicts Laura as a deer who eludes capture through death: she is white, pure and eternally out of reach. Petrarch’s sonnet is largely concerned with sacred love: for Petrarch, Caesar is analogous to God, not an earthly authority. The Petrarchan lover does not have to fear a tyrannical ruler, but he does have to fear the death of Laura and her spiritual commitment to sacred over profane love. In its focus, then,  Muir and Thomson, Collected Poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt, 44.  Raymond Southall, The Courtly Maker: An Essay on the Poetry of Wyatt and His Contemporaries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964) 43–44. 30  Muir and Thomson, Collected Poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt, 44. 31  Richard C.  Harrier, “Notes on Wyatt and Anne Boleyn,” The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 53, no. 4 (1954): 584. 28 29

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Petrarch’s poem is very different to that of Wyatt’s, with its images of consumption and the endless hunt. Brigden outlines the differences between Petrarch’s sonnet and Wyatt’s adaptation: Petrarch’s transcendental vision of a white doe in green pastures evokes his beloved Laura, and her heavenly enfranchisement. Her lord, her God has made her free in death, and her very whiteness is emblematic of her purity, her sublimity […] In Wyatt’s sonnet we find a radical, remarkable transmutation. The dream vision is debased to an elemental hunt: enamelled spring is become high summer. There is no white, no green. It is open season on the “hynde”, the “Diere” who is so “dear”, beloved and costly, prey to nameless, numberless huntsmen.32

In Petrarch’s sonnet, the words written around the doe’s neck—“Let no one touch me” and “It has pleased my Caesar to make me free”—stress not only her untouchability but also her freedom.33 The case for Anne is very different. It seems beyond dispute that “Whoso List to Hunt” is about Anne Boleyn, whatever the actual status of their relationship or lack thereof. The poem has become one of the most famous exemplars of English Petrarchism. What is remarkable about “Whoso List to Hunt” is the extent to which the same ways of understanding Anne’s role in the cultural imagination as are captured in this poem continue to appear throughout the five centuries since her death, as if she is frozen in time, trapped in the same untouchable mystique that Wyatt so unforgettably represents. However, in other, more subtle ways, the poem gives us an Anne Boleyn that would become increasingly popular in the historiography of the twentieth century. Notably, Karen Lindsey’s Divorced, Beheaded, Survived represents Anne as a victim of persistent sexual harassment, and Lindsey specifically cites “Whoso List to Hunt” as evidence for this thesis: “There could be no refuge from the royal assault; no one would risk protecting her from Henry’s chase. She could run, hide, dodge for a time, but the royal hunter would eventually track down his prey. And he would destroy her.”34 We persistently read Wyatt’s poems “about” Anne Boleyn as an  Brigden, Thomas Wyatt: The Heart’s Forest, 156.  Francesco Petrarca and Robert M. Durling, Petrarch’s Lyric Poems: The Rime Sparse and Other Lyrics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976), 190. 34  Karen Lindsey, Divorced, Beheaded, Survived: A Feminist Reinterpretation of the Wives of Henry VIII (Reading: Addison-Wesley, 1995), 59. 32 33

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artefact of the Petrarchan sonnet sequence tradition and thus romanticise it, but what sometimes remains unsaid is the extent to which the Anne Boleyn that appears in Wyatt’s poetry is a victim, a woman whose fate is foreshadowed even when she is at the height of her power. “Whoso List to Hunt” is, in some ways, the apotheosis of the courtly love tradition: the lover pines after a woman he can never have because she is tied to a man whose position (in this case, vastly) outranks his. However, here the speaker’s ability to perform the heroic deeds that would ordinarily win the loved one’s admiration, if not her love, is limited, if not completely foreclosed. For “Cesars I ame:” she is the property of a man so powerful that the speaker cannot present a challenge.35 There is nowhere for the speaker to go and nothing for him to do. The Anne Boleyn in this poem is voiceless, trapped, untouchable and wholly controlled by men. She may have the glamour of being “Caesar’s,” but she is also completely powerless. She is the ultimate Petrarchan object of desire: endlessly enticing and entrancing, and always slipping out of the grasp of the lover. Wyatt’s Anne has no power or agency. She is simply an object of desire, blank, her desires and wishes unknown and unknowable. For a poem about the desire that she inspires, Anne Boleyn is absent from the most famous poem in which she appears. In fact, Anne is absent from all of Wyatt’s poems that apparently reference her. What is important is that men desire her and that she is owned, or passed, between men. The image of Anne as the hind so elusive that Wyatt’s speaker compares trapping her to “seke to hold the wynde” is one of danger: she might be beyond the reach of the hunter, but she is still constantly hunted.36 While the words written around the neck of the doe in Petrarch’s poem emphasise her freedom, here the words “graven in diamonds” around Anne’s neck do nothing of the kind. The hunt will continue, and the doe is not free as much as she is trapped. The focus of “Whoso List to Hunt” is not Anne, but Wyatt’s speaker. In her discussion of the multiple meanings of “deer,” “dear” and “diere” (the original spelling in the Egerton manuscript), Anne Ferry argues that this is not about the speaker giving up, but instead about the speaker’s persistence: “He will pursue his exhausting course, taking bitter satisfaction only in sharing its humiliation with equally

 Muir and Thomson, Collected Poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt, 5.  Muir and Thomson, Collected Poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt, 5.

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unsuccessful rivals.”37 The hind must continually seek to outrun the hunters who continually watch her, not to satisfy her own desires, but to retain her purity for her owner. For all the courtly, Petrarchan apparatus of the poem, this poem is one of sexual threat: the hind is always in danger, beset by all around her and perpetually an object to be conquered. The last two lines of the sonnet are particularly interesting and symbolically dense. The words “Noli me tangere” are lifted from Christ’s injunction to Mary Magdalene in the Garden in John 20:17. The form and content of the Petrarchan poem necessitate Anne being placed in the position of Christ, warning the speaker (and all men) away. However, although Anne here borrows words said to Mary Magdalene by Christ, Mary Magdalene is a rather more fitting touchstone for the Anne Boleyn of popular imagination: the sexually promiscuous woman singled out by the love of a powerful man. “For Caesar’s I Am” is a reference to the inscriptions allegedly found on the collars of the hounds of Caesar: an image that ties Anne to ideas of violence, entrapment and barely restrained wildness. Shulman argues that the reference to Caesar is also a reference to Matthew 22:21: “Render unto Caesar those things that are Caesar’s.” As Shulman writes, “the lines elide Anne Boleyn and the Church into a single entity belonging to the king.”38 While this identification would suggest a later date of composition than is usually given for this poem—post-1532, instead of 1527—if Shulman is correct, this allusion to the Reformation would make the poem an important piece of reformation literature, and the literary companion-­ piece to Holbein’s auspicious depiction of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, thought to show, by a similar process of overlaid analogies, the very same thing: Anne Boleyn identified with Henry VIII’s new Church.39

While this reading is speculative, it is certainly attractive and foreshadows the central role that Anne would take, after her death, in discussions of the English Reformation by Catholics and Protestants alike.40 37  Anne Ferry, The “Inward” Language: Sonnets of Wyatt, Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1983). 38  Shulman, Graven with Diamonds, 109. 39  Shulman, 110. 40  There is a long tradition of scholarship on the way that Henry VIII utilised iconography of himself as King David and/or Solomon. See, for example, John N. King, Tudor Royal Iconography: Literature and Art in an Age of Religious Crisis, ed. Daniel Williams (Princeton:

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The very last lines of the poem, however, “and wylde for to hold though I seem tame,” return us to the realm of the sexual.41 She is “wild” and untamed, despite her powerlessness. Stephen Greenblatt raises another interesting symbolic possibility here. He argues that “wild” also suggests “the medieval tradition of the wild man or wild woman: a being who has fallen away from a state of tameness or civilization to the savage condition of animal, a creature dissolute, licentious, and potentially violent, living outside the bounds of human convention, living outside human bonds.”42 For Anne Boleyn to evoke this image of the wild woman suggests a dangerous instability at the heart of her image: she is enmeshed in the world of the Tudor court, yet seems somehow to stand outside it, and threatening to it. Constantly placed in the position of hunted, Anne has little choice but to appear “wild”; she is wild because others have inscribed that value upon her. Intriguingly, there may be a Wyatt poem that seems to give us an Anne who speaks. Richard Leighton Greene has argued that the carol “Grudge on who liste, this ys my lott,” which appeared in the Devonshire Manuscript, is about Anne’s love of Henry.43 He bases this attribution on the resemblance between the first line and Anne’s short-lived motto, used for a few months in 1530, “Ainsi sera, groigne qui groigne,” which roughly translates to “you can complain all you like, but this is how it is going to be”—surely one of the most idiosyncratic and delightful queenly mottos in English history.44 Greene also points out that the fourth line of the second verse of the carol may have actually inspired the use of Anne’s later motto, “the most happy”: “But makis me happiest that euer was.”45 However, the attribution of this poem to Wyatt has been repeatedly called into question, and it is now widely assumed that Wyatt was not the author.46 Shulman suggests that even if the poet was not Wyatt, the Princeton University Press, 1989); Kevin Sharpe, Selling the Tudor Monarchy: Authority and Image in Sixteenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009); Pamela Tudor Craig, “Henry VIII and King David,” in Early Tudor England: Proceedings of the 1987 Harlaxton Symposium (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1989), 183–205. 41  Muir and Thomson, Collected Poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt, 5. 42  Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 147. 43  Muir and Thomson, Collected Poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt, 224. 44  Richard Leighton Greene, “A Carol of Anne Boleyn by Wyatt,” The Review of English Studies 25, no. 100 (1974): 437–39. 45  Greene, 439. 46  Harrier, The Canon of Sir Thomas Wyatt’s Poetry, 54.

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r­ eferences to “it”—“Yf yt were not”—point to Catherine of Aragon as an impediment to Anne and Henry’s love and, further, that the reference to “mirth” suggests a pun on the word “girth,” and thus a reference to Anne’s (future) fecundity.47 The last stanza suggests that “my mirthe shulde doble ons or twise, Yf yt were not”—a very Tudor joke about what Anne and Henry hoped for so fervently.48 Eric Ives writes that “a bold hypothesis would seize on the personal allusions and suggest Anne as the performer of the song.”49 The carol suggests a private joke, written for and performed amongst friends who would well understand and sympathise with the speaker. Beyond Wyatt’s possible authorship, it is a tantalising suggestion of an Anne commanding her court, defending her position as the queen-in-waiting and presenting the former queen as an annoying problem that refused to go away. This Anne is one rarely seen in the literature, even today, for this is an Anne who is self-aware, knowing and funny: she is playing up her situation, gossiped about by all, for laughs. If “Whoso List to Hunt” is the poem written at the zenith of Anne Boleyn’s power, then Wyatt’s “Who lyst his welthe and eas Retayne” is the poem of her downfall. The haunting refrain “circa regna tonat” or “around the throne the thunder rolls” is lifted from Seneca’s Phaedra, in which the peace of life in the country is contrasted with the dangerous and tumultuous lives of those who live at court.50 As with “Whoso List to Hunt,” Anne is entirely absent from the poem. The focus is, instead, on Wyatt’s response: “These blodye dayes haue brokyn my hart; / My lust, my youth dyd then departe.”51 Moreover, Wyatt seems unwilling to name what he is talking about: instead, the speaker complains that “the bell towre showed me suche sight / That in my hed stekys day and nyght,” leaving the reader to imagine for themselves what that “sight” might be.52 As Ruth Ahnert writes, “at the very moment the poem seems to be about to describe an execution, it doubles back on itself and describes the impact of the sight on the poem’s narrator.”53 What is important about “Who lyst his welthe  Shulman, Graven with Diamonds, 148.  Muir and Thomson, Collected Poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt, 225. 49  Ives, The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn, 142. 50  Muir and Thomson, Collected Poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt, 187. 51  Muir and Thomson, 187. 52  Muir and Thomson, 187. 53  Ruth Ahnert, “Inscribed in Memory: The Prison Poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt,” in Henry VIII and the Court: Art, Politics and Performance, ed. Thomas Betteridge and Suzannah Lipscomb (Surrey: Ashgate, 2013), 156 (145–161). 47 48

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and eas Retayne” for a consideration of Wyatt’s poetry, then, is not the glimpse we get of Anne at her execution, but the way in which it captures the terror of life in the reign of Henry VIII. We can read, then, Wyatt’s vagueness over what, exactly, he is mourning as an impulse towards self-­ preservation. Anne’s uncanny absence from poems that have always been read through her becomes less about a kind of unthinking misogyny and more of a reflection of the precarity of her position. There is another poem that seems to dramatise Wyatt’s grief over the deaths of the men executed with Anne, “In morning wyse syns daylye I increase.” In this poem, the speaker gives an account of the qualities of the five men and laments their loss. He does not mention Anne. However, most critics, following Richard Harrier, believe that this poem has been misattributed to Wyatt.54 In any event, the absence of Anne in “In morning wyse” means that she is not characterised as either victim or temptress: she is nothing. Whether this poet is by Wyatt or by some other unnamed poet, again what becomes clear is the impact of tyranny upon representations of Anne. Whoever wrote this poem was taking an extraordinary risk in lamenting the loss of men executed for treason, but even then Anne cannot be talked about. The poem thus reflects the extent to which Anne became a non-person, to use Eric Ives’s term, immediately after her execution, any reference to her scrubbed out as if she had never existed.55 For decades after her death, certainly, Anne disappears from the pages of literature.

Elizabethan Annes: The Wars of Religion In the later sixteenth century, representations of Anne were facilitated and shaped by Elizabeth’s presence on the throne. As Susan Bordo says, “Elizabeth’s ascension to the throne brought Anne’s Protestant defenders out of the closet, determined not just to exonerate her of the charges that brought her down, but also to create a new martyr to their cause.”56 William Latymer and John Foxe were two of her most enthusiastic Protestant defenders. To Protestant writers, Anne was not the heroine of romance. Leaving aside the conventions of courtly love entirely, they  Harrier, The Canon of Sir Thomas Wyatt’s Poetry, 72.  Ives, The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn, 365. 56  Susan Bordo, The Creation of Anne Boleyn: A New Look at England’s Most Notorious Queen (Boston: Mariner Books, 2014), 139. 54 55

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focused on another aspect of Anne’s life: her role in the English Reformation. William Latymer’s chronicle of Anne is important because he was one of the few people writing about Anne in the sixteenth century who knew her, besides Thomas Wyatt.57 Latymer served as her chaplain from at least early 1536 to her death in May.58 That Latymer was acquainted with Anne does not mean, however, that his account should be given the status of fact. Latymer was writing for Elizabeth and was expressly writing in vindication of Anne. Latymer announces as such in his dedication of the chronicle to Elizabeth: “I coulde not but rememnre the excellente vertues, and princelye qualities wherewith your majesties dearest mother, the moste gracious ladye, queen Anne, was adornid and beautifyed in the tyme of his majesties noble regne.”59 Dowling argues that Latymer had two major aims: “to rehabilitate Anne, and to advise Elizabeth by presenting her mother as an exemplar.”60 This account is quite clearly a corrective, written at a point at which it was not certain the extent to which Elizabeth was dedicated to the Protestant cause, and so Latymer’s text functioned as a plea that Elizabeth follow in the footsteps of her mother.61 Latymer’s Anne is the very model of religious piety. As Latymer would have it, from the moment of her coronation, she “beganne ymediatly […] to converte her whole thought, ymaincaion and indevour to the godly order, rule and government of suche as was committed to attende her highness in all her affayers.”62 She seems to have little interest in courtly games, instead spending her time on virtuous activities, such as charitable pursuits and exhorting her servants to behave in a pious manner.63 As Dowling writes, “Latymer obliquely corrects the popular image of Anne as a frivolous, flirtatious hoyden, depicting itself a rather sombre figure of 57  Alexander Ales, the Scottish Lutheran, wrote Queen Elizabeth a long letter about the fall of her mother in 1559, recounting a story in which Anne pleaded for mercy from her husband while holding Elizabeth and affirming Anne’s reformist credentials. Ives, The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn, 325. 58  Maria Dowling writes that there are two records of Latymer as chaplain to Anne Boleyn, both from early 1536. Maria Dowling, “William Latymer’s Cronickille of Anne Bulleyne,” Camden Fourth Series 39 (1991): 28. 59  Dowling, 46. 60  Dowling, 30. 61  As Dowling shows, however, many of Latymer’s assertions about Anne’s religiosity were gathered from eyewitness accounts and so cannot merely be discounted. Dowling, 43–44. 62  Dowling, 48. 63  Dowling, 49.

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womanly rectitude.”64 This Anne is a severe and rather censorious woman who spends her time sewing for the poor and judging the behaviour of her ladies-in-waiting, rather than flirting.65 So pious—and firmly evangelical— is Latymer’s Anne that she asks her chaplains to watch the behaviour of the men and women of her court and to “instruct them the waye to vertue and grace.”66 It is John Foxe, however, who arguably did the most in rehabilitating Anne’s image, given the success of his Protestant martyrology. As Jesse Lander writes of Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, it is “routinely, and no doubt appropriately, invoked by modern scholars as one of the central documents of Elizabethan Protestant culture.”67 Steven Mullaney has shown, too, that Foxe was not simply reflecting the religious changes of the English Reformation, but actually participating in it.68 By 1571, every Archbishop in England was ordered to keep a copy of the text alongside the Bible in their cathedrals. Acts and Monuments was frequently read aloud and became recommended reading for women and children.69 In terms of widespread dissemination of a portrait of Anne Boleyn, there are few texts that compare. John Foxe first wrote about Anne Boleyn in his 1559 Rerum in ecclesia gestarum and gave a revised account in the first edition of Acts and Monuments. In the Rerum, Anne is described as a true religious reformer: “a young woman, not of ignoble family, but much more ennobled by beauty, as well as the most beautiful in all true piety and character.”70 The account that appears in the 1563 Acts and Monuments is extended, but again, from Anne’s first appearance in the text, she is praised  Dowling, 30.  Dowling, 54. Dowling also draws attention to the fact that Latymer’s representation of Anne distributing alms to the poor on Maundy Thursday echoes William Forrest’s paean to Catherine of Aragon, History of Grisild the Second, and thus, Latymer draws on a literary precedent for queenly almsgiving. Dowling, 32. 66  Dowling, 50. 67  Jesse M.  Lander, Inventing Polemic: Religion, Print, and Literary Culture in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 58. 68  Steven Mullaney, “Reforming Resistance: Class, Gender, and Legitimacy in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs,” in Print, Manuscript and Performance: The Changing Relations of the Media in Early Modern England, ed. Arthur F. Marotti and Michael D. Bristol (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2000), 238–9 (235–251). 69  John N.  King, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and Early Modern Print Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 320. 70  Translation taken from T.S.  Freeman, “Research, Rumour and Propaganda: Anne Boleyn in Foxe’s ‘Book of Martyrs,’” The Historical Journal 38, no. 4 (1995), 799. 64 65

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as the first person who prompted Henry to think about religious reform: “by whose godly meanes and moste vertuous councell, the kynges minde was dailye inclined better and better.”71 Like Latymer, Foxe stresses Anne’s charitable works, representing her distributing alms to poor families, as well as poor scholars at Cambridge.72 The story from Latymer about Anne and her ladies sewing clothes for the poor is also echoed by Foxe.73 In the 1563 edition of Acts and Monuments, Foxe, like Latymer, provides almost no accounting for the circumstances of Anne’s fall. Foxe merely says that “she was caste into the Towre, together with her brother the lord Rochford, and diuers others, which shortly after were executed.”74 In the 1583 edition, however, there is more emphasis placed on how Henry was hoodwinked by the Catholics who plotted against Anne, precisely because of her advocacy for reform.75 In all of these editions, Foxe includes the full text of Anne’s execution speech, lifted from Hall’s chronicle. The inclusion of her execution speech is important because, as Allison Machlis Meyer writes, “[t]he version of Anne’s scaffold speech that Foxe has chosen to reproduce allows him to construct her as an obedient subject while also using her own careful language to subtly suggest her innocence.”76 One might perceive Foxe’s representation of Anne as the perfectly obedient wife as an over-corrective: a transparent attempt to whitewash rather more problematic aspects of her past. However, as Megan Hickerson has shown, the female martyrs are hardly simply the flat paragons of virtue that they might appear at first glance: they are “often disobedient, opinionated, articulate, aggressive, and/or immodest.”77 Foxe’s Anne has agency and power, valued for her intelligence and discernment by the King, even if he does finally become susceptible to those who seek to destroy Anne.78 71  John Foxe, The Unabridged Acts and Monuments Online (Sheffield: HRI Online Publications, 2011), Book 3, Page 564. 72  Foxe, Book 3, page 565. 73  Foxe, Book 3, Page 565. 74  Foxe, Book 3, Page 581. 75  Foxe, Book 8, Page 1106. 76  Allison Machlis Meyer, “Multiple Histories: Cultural Memory and Anne Boleyn in Actes and Monuments and Henry VIII,” Borrowers & Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation IX (2015): 7–8. 77  Megan L. Hickerson, Making Women Martyrs in Tudor England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 7. 78  As Nick K. Crown has perceptively argued, too, this portrait of Anne as an active proponent of Protestantism functioned as a means of shoring up Elizabeth’s power: Nick K. Crown,

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Despite Anne’s emergence as an icon of Protestant martyrdom, she nonetheless presented a challenge for writers keen to flatter Queen Elizabeth by praising her mother, because at the same time they had to deflect blame for Anne’s death from Henry. Later Elizabethan writing about Anne Boleyn stresses the figure of Anne-as-mother, while largely eliding or avoiding Henry altogether. Elizabethan playwright and poet Ulpian Fulwell’s The Flower of Fame, published in 1575, is transparently a piece of political propaganda. An account of the reign of Henry VIII, Fulwell includes the inset poem, “A Commemoration of Queene Anne Bullayne,” in which he calls upon poets to write “in prayse of this most noble Queene/king Henries lawfull mate.”79 Anne is presented as nothing short of a saint: “Her inward gifts and outward grace / all others did excel […] so that it plainly did appere / from heavenly throne she camee.”80 In a second poem, “An Epitaph on the deathe of Queene Anne Bullayne,” Fulwell writes about how grief for Anne is mitigated by thinking about the birth of Queen Elizabeth: “And were it not thy royall Impe / did mitigate our payne: / The sorror for thy fatall day, / wee vneth could sustayne.”81 Anne is again used as a political tool to obtain favour with the Queen.82 Anne is the image of divine perfection, sent from heaven to produce Elizabeth, and now back in heaven, her job done. Crucially, too, there is little to no critique of Henry here: it is as if Anne’s death happened despite Henry. As Meyer writes, Fulwell “structures her death as an active leave-­ taking […] this act of raising her royal daughter from her own ashes suggests that no other explanation for her death might be necessary.”83 It is a convenient strategy for Fulwell, and one that imagines Anne as nothing short of a quasi-mystical being. It also positions Anne, strangely, as a queen regnant, rather than a queen consort: it assumes a level of power

“Catholic, Anglican, and Puritan Representations of Royal Martyrs,” Royal Studies Journal IV, no. 1 (2017). 79  Ulpian Fulwell, The Flower of Fame, Containing the Bright Renowne, & Moste Fortunate Raigne of King Henry the VIII (London: William Hoskins, 1575), 40. 80  Fulwell, 40. 81  Fulwell, 42. 82  As Edward Wright notes, “fervent those these tributes may appear, they are still very much the conventional compliments of the humble admiring artist to a distinguished monarch whose reign has been consistently glorious.” Edward Clarence Wright, “The English Works of Ulpian Fulwell” (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1970), 109. 83  Meyer, “Multiple Histories,” 11.

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and agency for Anne to single-handedly shape and control the fate of England. A text that traverses similar ground to that of Fulwell is Christopher Ocland’s Εἰρηναρχία (“The Government of Peace”), which was printed in 1582. This poem was the second in a trilogy which commenced with Anglorum Praelia in 1580 and finished with the 1589 Elizabethaeis. As the titles suggest, these works were written in explicit and fulsome praise for Elizabeth.84 In Εἰρηναρχία, Ocland begins with an account of Henry and Anne’s marriage, in which he validates Henry’s anxieties about his marriage to Catherine: “The Lady Anne, a damsel bright, with Henry linked fast / In sacred wedlock was, his conscience prick’t and mov’d at last.”85 The Catholic Church is represented as monstrous throughout, and the Reformation characterised as a purging “cleane from filty mosse and superstition.”86 However, by far the most interesting aspect of this poem is the account of Anne’s prophetic dream, which is taken from a report in Holinshed’s Chronicles.87 Morpheus, in the rather unusual guise of her grandfather, visits Anne to warn her that she will be dead within a month: her downfall is not blamed upon Henry, but the machinations of the Pope’s “wilie fautors.”88 Morpheus gives Anne a potted history of the sixteenth century to the reign of Elizabeth: “Elizabeth through wondrous actes to stars shall lift thy name / Both of her selfe, and mightie sier, and most renowned dame.”89 Ocland thus neatly sidesteps placing the blame on Henry and constructs Anne as posthumously vindicated by the glory of the Elizabethan age, extending upon Fulwell’s portrait of grief vindicated by the promise of the future. Ocland’s Anne dies knowing every detail of what will ensue for Henry and for England, and thus knows that she is securing England’s transition into a Protestant nation.

84  As Dana F. Sutton outlines in her introduction to the text, Ocland was a schoolmaster whose 1580 Anglorum Praelia became a set Latin teaching text in Elizabethan grammar schools. Christopher Ocland and Dana F. Sutton, “Εἰρηναρχία,” 2007, http://www.philological.bham.ac.uk/ocland/ 85  Ocland and Sutton, lines 19–20. 86  Ocland and Sutton, line 192. 87  The inset narrative of this dream was excerpted as The Pope’s Farwel, or, Queen Anne’s Dream Containing a True Prognostick of Her Own Death in the seventeenth century, suggesting that Ocland’s account remained popular. Ocland and Sutton, “Introduction.” 88  Ocland and Sutton, line 310. 89  Ocland and Sutton, lines 390–1.

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If Protestant writers found Anne to be a useful tool, then so did Catholic writers. Nicholas Sanders’s The Rise and Growth of the Anglican Schism, written around 1573 and published in 1585 in Latin, is the source of most of the blackest rumours about Anne. In the preface, Sanders says that Anne was “the sister of one, and the daughter of another woman, both then alive, with whom Henry had been living in sin; besides, she was considered, not without many good reasons, to be Henry’s own child.”90 Sanders also provides a long description of Anne’s appearance: Anne Boleyn was rather tall of stature, with black hair, and an oval face of a sallow complexion, as if troubled with jaundice. She had a projecting tooth under the upper lip, and on her right hand six fingers. There was a large wen under her chin, and therefore to hide its ugliness she wore a high dress covering her throat […] She was handsome to look at, with a pretty mouth, amusing in her ways, playing well on the lute, and was a good dancer […] But as to the disposition of her mind, she was full of pride, ambition, envy and impurity.91

Sanders’s account conforms neatly with centuries of misogynist writings about female sexuality: her perverse sexuality manifests itself on her body. As Susan Bordo writes, “Sander … wallowed in descriptions of Anne’s body as the deformed but alluring gateway that ensnared Henry and led him through the doors of heresy.”92 In Sanders’s text, Anne’s downfall is precipitated when she miscarries a “shapeless mass of flesh,” and her subsequent decision to sleep with her brother and give “herself up to a lewd life.”93 Sanders’s story about Anne’s miscarriage of a deformed foetus warrants pause because it was Sanders who popularised this particular piece of Boleyn mythology, which appears in some regularity in historical fictions. Eric Ives writes that the story is as “little worthy of credence as his assertion that Henry VIII was Anne’s father.”94 However, Retha Warnicke has argued for the veracity of Sander’s story, pointing out that Anne’s supposed deformed child would have been

 Sanders, Rise and Growth of the Anglican Schism, clxvi.  Sanders, 25. 92  Bordo, The Creation of Anne Boleyn: A New Look at England’s Most Notorious Queen, 140. 93  Sanders, 132–33. 94  Ives, The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn, 297. 90 91

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a strong indicator of witchcraft to the sixteenth-century mind.95 Warnicke’s acceptance of Sander’s account was subsequently popularised in Philippa Gregory’s 2001 novel The Other Boleyn Girl. As Roland Hui writes, however, while Warnicke and others have taken up the reference to the deformed foetus as evidence that Anne was tied to witchcraft in the popular imagination, “Sander’s purpose … may not have been to portray a physically repellent creature, but an attractive one (with some flaws) whose appearance masked her wickedness.”96 As we have seen, George Wyatt’s biography of Anne Boleyn, written towards the end of the century, was written to correct accounts such as that of Sanders. George Wyatt was writing not only to defend his grandfather’s honour but to seek advancement. His father, Thomas Wyatt the Younger, had been executed as a traitor during the reign of Queen Mary, and his machinations very nearly caused the execution of Elizabeth as well. Accordingly, George was anxious to ingratiate himself. However, as Shulman says, the Life of Anne Boleigne was “neither well done nor widely read.”97 Wyatt’s biography was privately circulated until its publication with George Cavendish’s The Life of Cardinal Wolsey (originally published in 1641) in the early nineteenth century. It has, however, had a surprisingly long afterlife: many of the most repeated stories in twentieth- and twenty-first-century historical fiction about Anne have their origins in George Wyatt’s biography. Wyatt’s first description of Anne is characteristic of the tone of his account: “In this noble imp, the graces of nature graced by gracious education, seemed even at first to have promised bliss unto her aftertimes.”98 Wyatt frames Anne as the reluctant recipient of the king’s affections, largely because of her esteem for Catherine of Aragon.99 Wyatt also affirms Anne’s reformist credentials, repeating the story that she gave Henry a copy of William Tyndale’s Obedience of a Christian Man, and like Latymer and Foxe, he represents her spending most of her time sewing shirts for 95  Retha Warnicke, The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn: Family Politics at the Court of Henry VIII (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 1–5. 96  Roland Hui, “Anne of the Wicked Ways: Perceptions of Anne Boleyn as a Witch in History and in Popular Culture,” Parergon: Journal of the Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies 35, no. 1 (2018): 105. 97  Shulman, Graven with Diamonds, 92. 98  Wyatt, “Extracts from the Life of the Virtuous Christian and Renowned Queen Anne Boleigne,” 423. 99  Wyatt, 428.

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the poor and distributing alms.100 The last image is the book’s most striking. Wyatt describes the blow of the sword at Anne’s execution having an almost bodily effect on those who saw it: “those about her could not but seem to themselves to have received it upon their own necks, she not so much as shrieking at it.”101 While most earlier sixteenth-century writing had rather glossed over the horror of Anne’s execution, George Wyatt allows us to experience the blow with and for Anne. It is a remarkably bodily account. George Wyatt’s biography appears as part of George Cavendish’s biography of Wolsey, but there is another representation of Anne that appears in that manuscript. Anne is one of the subjects of Cavendish’s Metrical Visions, a series of tragic poems. The subtitle of this series of poems neatly announces it subject matter: “concerning the fortunes and fall of the most eminent persons of his time.”102 Amongst the other subjects of the poems were the men executed with Anne. As might be expected of Cavendish, Wolsey’s gentleman-usher and biographer, the poem spoken by Anne does not treat Anne kindly. It opens with Anne lamenting her fate: “Oh how infurtunat I ame at this day, / That raygned in joy, and now in endle payn, / The world universal hathe me in disdain.”103 The poem ends with Anne seeking penance and forgiveness through the sword: “Mercy, noble prynce, I crave for myn offence;/The sharpened sword hathe made my recompence.”104 The most interesting moment of the poem comes when Anne compares herself to the Biblical figure Athalia, the daughter of King Ahab and Queen Jezebel.105 Athalia, or Athaliah, seized the throne of Judah after the assassination of her son, Ahaziah, and in turn executed all the other possible claimants to the throne. However, her grandson Jehoash returned to Judah, overthrew Athaliah, and executed her.106 It is an interesting touchstone for Anne because Athaliah is known for establishing the worship of

 Wyatt, 438, 443.  Wyatt, 449. 102  George Cavendish, “Metrical Visions,” in The Life of Cardinal Wolsey, by George Cavendish, His Gentleman Usher (Chiswick: C. Whittingham, 1825), lxxiii. 103  Cavendish, 39. 104  Cavendish, 46. 105  Cavendish, 41. 106  The story of Athaliah is told in 2 Kings 8:16–11:16 and 2 Chronicles 22:10–23:15. 100 101

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Baal during her reign as queen regnant.107 The allusion is clear: just as the wicked Athaliah turned her people to the pagan worship of Baal, so too did Anne make England turn towards heretical Protestantism. Christopher Highley notes that Anne is compared to Herodias, Herod’s half-niece and second wife, as well as to Salome, Herodias’s daughter, in Nicholas Harpsfield’s A Treatise on the Pretended Divorce Between Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon.108 Highley also notes that Anne was compared to Jezebel, the most famous wicked queen of the Old Testament, by both Reginald Pole and Harpsfield, and that these analogies between Anne and Jezebel were later extended to cover Elizabeth by Nicholas Sanders.109 Elizabeth was later again compared to Jezebel in a series of political poems published in Antwerp called De Jezebelis in 1587–88. Jezebel was, like her daughter Athaliah, associated with the worship of Baal. While it is not known precisely when Harpsfield and Cavendish were writing, it is likely that they were composing A Treatise and Metrical Visions almost contemporaneously.110 Cavendish, then, is participating in a Catholic tradition of paralleling Anne, and later Elizabeth, with notoriously “wicked” Biblical queens. Cavendish’s poem might seem a piece of conventional morality: the guilty, unchaste wife Anne weeps for her sins and seeks absolution. However, as Elizabeth Belgau-Human has written, the poem’s complexity is registered by its apparent ability to capture a moment both before and beyond Anne’s execution: “Anne Boleyn speaks from beyond her death and expects the repetition of it; she refers to the ‘sharped sword’ with which she was executed, while at the same time begging for mercy.”111 It is as if Anne is confronting the possibilities of her own literary afterlife. 107  For a good account of Biblical and historical writing about Athaliah, including her association with the worship of Baal, see Linda Sue Schearing, “Models, Monarchs and Misconceptions: Athaliah and Joash of Judah” (Emory University, 1992). 108  Christopher Highley, “‘A Pestilent and Seditious Book’: Nicholas Sander’s Schismatis Anglicani and Catholic Histories of the Reformation,” Huntington Library Quarterly 68, no. 1–2 (2005): 163–4. 109  Highley, 170. 110  A.S.G. Edwards’s assessment is that Cavendish commenced work on Metrical Visions no earlier than June of either 1552 or 1553 and that he made some additions after November 1558. A.S.G.  Edwards, “The Date of George Cavendish’s Metrical Visions,” Philological Quarterly 53, no. 1 (1974): 128–32. Highley suggests that Harpsfield was writing in the 1560s and 1570s, in exile. Highley, “A Pestilent and Seditious Book,” 151. 111  Elizabeth M.A.  Belgau-Human, “Unreal Presences: The Reanimated Corpus and Tudor Historical Narratives” (Saint Louis University, 2009), 157.

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Conclusion By the end of the sixteenth century, then, much of the texture of Anne’s afterlife was established. She had been compared to figures from Christ to Jezebel, and from Guinevere to Laura. She was either Protestant martyr, working quietly to spread the cause of reform, or the Concubine, the whore who destroyed Catholicism in England. It is the perpetual trap for women: virgin or whore. What is remarkable about so many of the earliest representations of Anne is her absence: there is little attempt to grapple with the fact that a real woman lay behind these competing ways of understanding her life and death. In reading the different accounts of Anne written across the century, even by people who knew, or at least met her, one is left with a sense of her elusiveness: the more you read, the less you seem to know. In the seventeenth century, her story would shift to a form uniquely suited to carry the grand spectacle and tragedy of her life: the stage.

References Primary Sources Burnet, Gilbert. The History of the Reformation of the Church of England. London: Printed for T.H. for Richard Chiswell, 1681. Cavendish, George. “Metrical Visions.” In The Life of Cardinal Wolsey, by George Cavendish, His Gentleman Usher. Chiswick: C. Whittingham, 1825. Dowling, Maria. “William Latymer’s Cronickille of Anne Bulleyne.” Camden Fourth Series 39 (1991): 23–65. Foxe, John. The Unabridged Acts and Monuments Online. Sheffield: HRI Online Publications, 2011. Fulwell, Ulpian. The Flower of Fame, Containing the Bright Renowne, & Moste Fortunate Raigne of King Henry the VIII. London: William Hoskins, 1575. Harpsfield, Nicholas. A Treatise on the Pretended Divorce between Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon. Camden Society, 1878. Muir, Kenneth, and Patricia Thomson. Collected Poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1969. Ocland, Christopher, and Dana F.  Sutton. “Εἰρηναρχία,” 2007. http://www. philological.bham.ac.uk/ocland/. Petrarca, Francesco, and Robert M.  Durling. Petrarch’s Lyric Poems: The Rime Sparse and Other Lyrics. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976. Sanders, Nicholas. Rise and Growth of the Anglican Schism. Edited by David Lewis. London: Burns and Oates, 1877.

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Wyatt, George. “Extracts from the Life of the Virtuous Christian and Renowned Queen Anne Boleigne.” In The Life of Cardinal Wolsey, by George Cavendish, His Gentleman Usher, 417–49. London: Harding and Lepard, 1827.

Secondary Sources Ahnert, Ruth. “Inscribed in Memory: The Prison Poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt.” In Henry VIII and the Court: Art, Politics and Performance, edited by Thomas Betteridge and Suzannah Lipscomb, 145–61. Surrey: Ashgate, 2013. Belgau-Human, Elizabeth M.A. “Unreal Presences: The Reanimated Corpus and Tudor Historical Narratives.” Saint Louis University, 2009. Bloch, R.  Howard. Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991. Bordo, Susan. The Creation of Anne Boleyn: A New Look at England’s Most Notorious Queen. Boston: Mariner Books, 2014. Brigden, Susan. Thomas Wyatt: The Heart’s Forest. London: Faber & Faber, 2012. Craig, Pamela Tudor. “Henry VIII and King David.” In Early Tudor England: Proceedings of the 1987 Harlaxton Symposium, 183–205. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1989. Crown, Nick K. “Catholic, Anglican, and Puritan Representations of Royal Martyrs.” Royal Studies Journal IV, no. 1 (2017): 15–35. Edwards, A.S.G. “The Date of George Cavendish’s Metrical Visions.” Philological Quarterly 53, no. 1 (1974): 128–32. Ferry, Anne. The “Inward” Language: Sonnets of Wyatt, Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1983. Freeman, T.S. “Research, Rumour and Propaganda: Anne Boleyn in Foxe’s ‘Book of Martyrs.’” The Historical Journal 38, no. 4 (1995): 797–819. Greenblatt, Stephen. Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. Greene, Richard Leighton. “A Carol of Anne Boleyn by Wyatt.” The Review of English Studies 25, no. 100 (1974): 437–39. Harrier, Richard. The Canon of Sir Thomas Wyatt’s Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975. Harrier, Richard C. “Notes on Wyatt and Anne Boleyn.” The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 53, no. 4 (1954): 581–84. Hickerson, Megan L. Making Women Martyrs in Tudor England. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Highley, Christopher. “‘A Pestilent and Seditious Book’: Nicholas Sander’s Schismatis Anglicani and Catholic Histories of the Reformation.” Huntington Library Quarterly 68, no. 1–2 (2005): 151–71.

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Hui, Roland. “Anne of the Wicked Ways: Perceptions of Anne Boleyn as a Witch in History and in Popular Culture.” Parergon: Journal of the Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies 35, no. 1 (2018): 97–118. Ives, Eric. The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn. Malden: Blackwell, 2004. King, John N. Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and Early Modern Print Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. ———. Tudor Royal Iconography: Literature and Art in an Age of Religious Crisis. Edited by Daniel Williams. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989. Lander, Jesse M. Inventing Polemic: Religion, Print, and Literary Culture in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Lindsey, Karen. Divorced, Beheaded, Survived: A Feminist Reinterpretation of the Wives of Henry VIII. Reading: Addison-Wesley, 1995. Lipscomb, Suzannah. “The Fall of Anne Boleyn: A Crisis in Gender Relations?” In Henry VIII and the Court: Art, Politics and Performance, edited by Suzannah Lipscomb and Thomas Betteridge, 287–305. Surrey: Ashgate, 2013. Mackay, Lauren. Inside the Tudor Court: Henry VIII and His Six Wives Through the Writings of the Spanish Ambassador Eustace Chapuys. Stroud: Amberley, 2014. Meyer, Allison Machlis. “Multiple Histories: Cultural Memory and Anne Boleyn in Actes and Monuments and Henry VIII.” Borrowers & Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation IX (2015): 1–37. Mullaney, Steven. “Reforming Resistance: Class, Gender, and Legitimacy in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs.” In Print, Manuscript and Performance: The Changing Relations of the Media in Early Modern England, edited by Arthur F. Marotti and Michael D. Bristol, 235–51. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2000. Norton, Elizabeth. The Anne Boleyn Papers. Gloucestershire: Amberley, 2013. Perry, Curtis. “Court and Coterie Culture.” In A Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture, 106–18. Malden: Blackwell, 2003. Russo, Stephanie. “The Poet and the Queen: Thomas Wyatt and Anne Boleyn in Historical Biofiction.” A/b: Auto/Biography Studies, forthcoming 2020. Schearing, Linda Sue. “Models, Monarchs and Misconceptions: Athaliah and Joash of Judah.” Emory University, 1992. Sharpe, Kevin. Selling the Tudor Monarchy: Authority and Image in Sixteenth-­ Century England. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. Shulman, Nicola. Graven with Diamonds. The Many Lives of Thomas Wyatt: Poet, Lover, Statesman, and Spy in the Court of Henry VIII. Hanover: Short Books, 2013. Southall, Raymond. The Courtly Maker: An Essay on the Poetry of Wyatt and His Contemporaries. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964. Thomson, Patricia. Sir Thomas Wyatt and His Background. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1964.

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Walker, Greg. Writing Under Tyranny: English Literature and the Henrician Reformation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Warnicke, Retha. The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn: Family Politics at the Court of Henry VIII. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Warnicke, Retha M. “The Conventions of Courtly Love and Anne Boleyn.” In State, Sovereigns and Society in Early Modern England: Essays in Honour of A.J. Slavin, edited by Charles Carlton, Robert L. Woods, Mary L. Robertson, and Joseph S. Block, 103–18. New York: St Martin’s Press, 1998. ———. “The Eternal Triangle and Court Politics: Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn, and Sir Thomas Wyatt.” Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies 18, no. 4 (1986): 565–79. Wright, Edward Clarence. “The English Works of Ulpian Fulwell.” University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1970.

CHAPTER 3

Anne Boleyn in the Seventeenth Century

After the death of Elizabeth and the accession of James VI and I, writing about Anne Boleyn became theoretically “easier”: one did not have to manage the particularly tricky dance of writing about the circumstances of her life and death without offending her daughter. As the war of religion played out across Europe during the tumultuous seventeenth century, however, Anne continued to be a useful ideological tool for Catholics and Protestants alike. Anne Boleyn’s story also began to haunt the margins of dramatic works seemingly about other historical subjects. Anne Boleyn’s story continued to be so intensely fascinating, and equally so contested, that her image lurks behind the stories of women whose circumstances echoed hers. The early seventeenth century was the great age of the theatre: there seems little coincidence that all the texts that consider Anne Boleyn during this period are dramas. Michael Hattaway attributes the rise of the English theatre to James Burbage’s construction of a theatre in Shoreditch, “the most significant permanent construction dedicated to dramatic performance in England since Roman times.”1 There was also an extensive English tradition of medieval drama that Shakespeare and his contemporaries were building upon, as Helen Cooper notes.2 Historical material was a common subject in both the medieval dramatic tradition, 1  Michael Hattaway, “Playhouses and the Role of Drama,” in A Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture, ed. Michael Hattaway (Malden: Blackwell, 2003), 133 (133–147). 2  Helen Cooper, Shakespeare and the Medieval World (London: Bloomsbury, 2013).

© The Author(s) 2020 S. Russo, The Afterlife of Anne Boleyn, Queenship and Power, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58613-3_3

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and Shakespeare’s history plays had been popular successes. In terms of reach, the drama was a much more democratic form, accessible by a wider group of people than poetry or historical writing: more people would have come to Anne Boleyn’s story through the stage than would have had access to writings by Thomas Wyatt. However, if writing about Anne Boleyn became feasible after the death of Elizabeth, and the history play was at its zenith of popularity, then one might expect more dramatic representations of Anne. When one considers, too, the volume of seventeenth-century writing about Elizabeth, it seems doubly surprising that Anne is conspicuous by her absence in seventeenth-­century English theatre. Writing about the development of Elizabeth’s afterlife in the seventeenth century, John Watkins argues that “her principal cultural function – the satisfaction of a perpetual bourgeois fantasy for a lost age of charismatic absolutism – developed in the century that opened with James I’s assertions of divine right and ended with the limitation on the Crown’s prerogative that followed the Glorious Revolution.”3 Alongside a serious engagement with Elizabeth’s social, literary and political afterlife ran a nostalgia—or a critique—of the Henrician court. Samuel Rowley’s 1605 play When You See Me, You Know Me, for example, brought Henry VIII to the stage. However, Anne does not appear in that play as it opens with a pregnant Jane Seymour and goes on to represent Catherine Parr in detail (while largely eliding the reigns of Anne of Cleves and Katherine Howard).4 In Shakespeare and Fletcher’s 1613 play, Henry VIII: All Is True, the most important seventeenth-century representation of the King’s divorce, Anne Boleyn is surprisingly peripheral to the action. As we will see, her role in the play is minimal, especially when compared with that of Catherine of Aragon. Privileging Katherine and Jane amongst Henry’s wives seems counter-intuitive to modern audiences, more used to seeing both, but especially Jane Seymour, as conventionally feminine and submissive foils to Anne. Anne’s life, with 3  John Watkins, Representing Elizabeth in Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 4  Susan Frye writes that Henry VIII desentimentalises Rowley’s play by replacing Henry’s strongly voiced affection for the two queens to whom he remained married with his affection for the two queens he would divorce on the way to producing a son. In doing so, Shakespeare and Fletcher produce a much darker vision of the role of queens in the court of Henry VIII. Susan Frye, “Queens and the Structure of History in Henry VIII,” in A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works, Volume IV, ed. Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard (London: Blackwell, 2003), 430 (427–444).

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its dramatic reversals of fortune, seems tailor-made for the stage. Why, then, is she barely on it, even when her husband and the other wives loom large in early seventeenth-­century drama? One potential way of addressing the missing presence of Anne Boleyn in writing about the Henrician court in the early seventeenth century is to think about the ways in which she haunts plays seemingly about other subjects. This tendency to write about Anne Boleyn without specifically addressing Anne as such is manifested in Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam, Richard Brome’s The Queen and Concubine and, arguably, Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. That Anne’s story is often dwelt upon obliquely suggests that she still presents a problem to seventeenth-century writers: Victoria Brooks has called this tendency to represent Anne while not representing Anne as a “strategy of evasion.”5 Elizabeth might be dead, but Anne’s association with transgressive sexuality lingers. James, too, was also a Tudor, and it might have been considered somewhat difficult to draw too much attention to the circumstances under which Elizabeth’s mother came to the throne. It is here we may also see the lingering effects of the virgin/whore dichotomy. The theatre was a medium which demanded rich, nuanced characters. The monstrous, sexually voracious Anne of Catholic propaganda could not be represented on the stage in Protestant England, while the pious, judgemental Anne of Protestant propaganda was, perhaps, rather too flat. There seems to be little drama to be mined out of the Foxean Anne, quietly and virtuously sewing shirts for the poor. There were, in other words, no existing ways of thinking about Anne that went beyond the demands of religious polemic. The ongoing problem of how to represent Anne is best encapsulated by her ambiguous treatment in Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Henry VIII. In that play, she is, on the surface, a victim of Henry’s lusts: she has little to no agency, and so when Henry’s gaze falls upon her, she has no choice but to comply. Her role as mother to a Protestant lineage that culminates in James seems, in this reading, to have been a happy accident. However, such a reading fails to account for the persistently sexual imagery which accrues around her, which suggests a far more knowing, and potentially manipulative, Anne. Even Shakespeare and Fletcher, then, struggle to transcend existing models of thinking about what Anne signifies. Anne continued to be such a 5  Victoria Brooks, “Performing the Mistress: The Emergence of the Modern Mistress on the Early Modern Stage” (King’s College London, 2019), 197.

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difficult figure to dramatise that it was only later in the seventeenth century, after the Restoration, and especially after the Glorious Revolution, that writers were free to reinvent a new Anne Boleyn.

Biblical Queens: Elizabeth Cary Dramas focusing on Biblical figures and, particularly, dramas that took as their central subject the tyranny of Herod became increasingly popular in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the literary tradition, three distinct Biblical Herods—Herod the Great, Herod Antipas and Herod Agrippa—were often collapsed into one Herod, avatar of tyranny and lust. Plays such as George Buchanan’s Baptistes, sive calumnia (1541–44) were ostensibly about Herod’s marital travails, but were often also a coded way of commenting upon Henry’s divorce. Given the Old Testament origins of Henry’s attack of conscience about his marriage to Catherine—the injunction that a man must not marry his brother’s wife came from Leviticus—there is little wonder that there was an increased interest in the Old Testament at this time. As Barry Weller and Margaret Ferguson write, too, “the major allegorical riches of the gospel versions of this story […] are the parallels they suggest, on the one hand, between a composition figure of Herod (both Antipas and the ten-times-married Herod the Great) and Henry VIII, and, on the other, between a composite figure of a dangerous woman (Herodias, Salome, and also, potentially, Mariam) and Anne Boleyn.”6 As I argued in Chap. 2, Anne Boleyn was often compared to Biblical “wicked” queens, such as Athaliah and Jezebel, in Catholic works. Sometimes, the parallels between these Biblical tales and the dramas of the Henrician court are overt. One of the reasons that Herod Antipas’s marriage to Herodias was so scandalous was that she was already married to his half-brother. Further, Herodias was the half-niece of Herod Antipas. Sanders had notoriously argued that Anne was Henry’s daughter.7 Elizabeth Cary’s 1613 play The Tragedy of Mariam, the Fair Queen of Jewry, the first published play by a woman in English literary history, is part of this tradition of writing about Herod while at the same time 6  Barry Weller and Margaret W. Ferguson, “Introduction,” in The Tragedy of Mariam, The Fair Queen of Jewry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 31 (1–59). 7  Nicholas Sanders, Rise and Growth of the Anglican Schism, ed. David Lewis (London: Burns and Oates, 1877), clxvi.

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thinking about Henry VIII. Cary’s Anne Boleyn is a covert one. Elizabeth Cary was a Catholic, but the writing of this play predates her conversion in 1626. It is likely, though, that Cary may have been a secret Catholic from a much earlier age, as the biography of her written by one of her daughters suggests.8 Cary’s conversion, even if it postdates the play, might suggest a rather hostile view of Anne. However, the Anne that lurks behind The Tragedy of Mariam is complex: Cary looks forward to the much more psychologically complex Annes of the eighteenth century. This complexity of representation has its roots in the fact that the role of Anne seems to be played by both Mariam and Salome at different points in the play. Mariam is the king’s second wife, the woman for whom he has displaced his first wife, Doris. By the end of the play, Herod has ordered her execution. The parallels to Anne Boleyn are unmistakeable. However, Salome also occupies the Anne Boleyn position. Salome is the adulterous wife, the woman who plots against her husband. As Weller and Ferguson write of the multiple parallels to Anne, Anne Boleyn, like Cary’s characters Mariam and Salome, broke the cardinal rule for women to be chaste, silent, and obedient; and Anne, like Mariam a second wife abhorred and openly denounced by the cast-off first wife, was executed for adultery by her ‘tyrannical’ husband.9

That Anne had been either virgin or whore in writing of the sixteenth century is covertly acknowledged by Cary, who makes her both. When we first meet Mariam, she is anticipating the death of Herod with ambivalence and reflects that “more I owe him for his love to me / the deepest love that ever yet was seen: / Yet had I rather much a milkmaid be, / than be the monarch of Judea’s queen.”10 However, moments later, she is weeping for the supposed death of Herod. When we first meet Salome, by way of contrast, she is lamenting the very existence of her husband, as she has fallen in love with Silleus, and proclaims that they should have the right to divorce their husbands: “He loves, I love; what then can be the

8  Barry Weller and Margaret W. Ferguson, eds., “The Lady Falkland, Her Life by One of Her Daughters,” in The Tragedy of Mariam, The Fair Queen of Jewry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 183–275. 9  Weller and Ferguson, 32. 10  Elizabeth Cary, The Tragedy of Mariam, The Fair Queen of Jewry, ed. Barry Weller and Margaret W. Ferguson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), I.I, 71.

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cause / Keeps me [from] being the Arabian’s wife.”11 Immediately, both women seem to reflect something of Anne’s character or, at least, the different ways Anne’s character had hitherto been constructed. Mariam is Anne-as-victim, the woman who never wanted to be queen, and ambivalent about her queenship. Salome is Anne-as-temptress, the woman of unrestrained and socially disruptive desires. Cary’s characterisation of both Mariam and Salome is more complex, however, than such dichotomies would suggest. Mariam and Salome have both been involved in divorces: Mariam has been the cause of Doris’s divorce from Herod, while Salome divorces Constabarus. The chorus also implicitly aligns Mariam and Salome at the end of Act III, suggesting that Mariam’s private distaste for Herod is as offensive as Salome’s public rejection of her husband: “T’is not enough for one that is a wife / To keep her spotless from an act of ill: / But from suspicion she should free her life, / And bare herself of power as well as will.”12 When Herod accidentally says Mariam’s name when he means to say Salome in Act IV, the slip of the tongue suggests that these women are, in fact, mirror images of each other.13 As Weller and Ferguson argue, Cary places an overt demand for women’s right to divorce in the mouth of the lustful and villainous Salome, while making a more oblique, and equally interesting, argument that, if the occasion demands principled disobedience, a “virtuous” woman like Mariam should be able to follow her conscience.14

Mariam is innocent of the crimes for which she is executed, like Anne, but she does offer her own quiet resistance to the king, mirroring representations of Anne as a woman whose spirited speech both attracted Henry’s interest and secured her downfall. The Tragedy of Mariam variously presents Mariam as innocent and culpable, not guilty of adultery, but certainly resistant to Herod’s tyranny.15 It seems apt that the first woman to inscribe  Cary, I.IV, 80.  Cary, III, chorus, 113. 13  Cary, IV.II, 117. 14  Weller and Ferguson, 35. 15  Nancy Gutierrez writes that Mariam refuses Herod’s construction of her as a Petrarchan mistress, saying that “it is the female character, Mariam, not the male character, Herod, who has the power of creation: she fashions herself as she wants to be in spite of his sonnetdefining language and in spite of his Machiavellian policy.” If we extend this analogy to Anne, which Gutierrez does not do, this Anne is one that resists the way she was inscribed 11 12

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an avatar of Anne Boleyn into print is the first to resist the tendency to represent her as either virgin or whore. If we read both Salome and Mariam as facets of Anne Boleyn, then the Anne who emerges is virtuous and rebellious, chaste and desiring. Cary’s Anne looks forward to the more complex representations of Anne still to come, but she is also not Anne. Anne is absent from a play that seems to be “about” her rise and fall.

Overt and Covert Annes in Shakespearean Drama The year 1613 was an auspicious one for representations of Anne Boleyn, for it was on 29 June 1613 that, during one of the first performances of William Shakespeare and John Fletcher’s Henry VIII, the Globe Theatre caught fire and burnt down.16 Appropriately enough, the fire apparently ignited during the scene in which Henry arrives at Wolsey’s banquet and falls in love with Anne; 100 years later and on stage, Anne is still causing fireworks at the Henrician court. Shakespeare’s principal sources for the play were Holinshed’s 1587 Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland, Edward Hall’s 1550 The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Famelies of Lancaster and York and Foxe’s Acts and Monuments.17 Rowley’s When You See Me, You Know is also considered one of the sources of Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Henry VIII, and is probably referred to in the Prologue: “Only they / that come to hear a merry, bawdy play, / A noise of targets, or to see a fellow / In a long motley coat guarded with yellow, / Will be into Wyatt’s poetry. Nancy A.  Gutierrez, “Valuing Mariam: Genre Study and Feminist Analysis,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 10, no. 2 (1991): 241. 16  In an interesting reading of a letter by Sir Henry Wotton about the destruction of the Globe, William Leahy lingers on Wotton’s description of the play as making Henry VIII’s court appear “ridiculous,” arguing that “by the mere staging of Anne Boleyn, the spectacular nature of the procession is undermined, traditional notions of hierarchy and heredity are questioned and demystified, and all greatness is rendered familiar to a contemporary audience, if not ridiculous.” Leahy suggests that while the pageantry of the play, especially in relation to Anne, is taken seriously today, that was by no means the case for a Jacobean audience. William Leahy, “‘You Cannot Show Me’: Two Tudor Coronation Processions, Shakespeare’s King Henry VIII and the Staging of Anne Boleyn,” EnterText 3, no. 1 (2003): 142. 17  Allison Machlis Meyer gives a comprehensive account of the impact of Foxe on Henry VIII, arguing that “Foxe … provide[s] Shakespeare and Fletcher with important precedents for their emphasis on Anne’s function as a reproductive vessel for Tudor offspring.” Allison Machlis Meyer, “Multiple Histories: Cultural Memory and Anne Boleyn in Actes and Monuments and Henry VIII,” Borrowers & Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation IX (2015): 15.

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deceived.”18 The prologue of Shakespeare and Fletcher’s play, with its subtitle “All Is True,” seems to set up the play as a reflection of historical truth: “Such as give / Their money out of hope they may believe / May here find truth, too.”19 The play, however, takes numerous liberties with history, reordering events and compressing time in order to suit dramatic purposes. The notion of truth is consistently interrogated throughout the play, with the “truth” of character motivations increasingly hard to decipher. As William M. Baillie writes, “the play is ‘true’ in showing that we cannot know the truth of motives.”20 If Henry’s “truth” is unclear, then the truth about Anne Boleyn is even less clear in this play: the Anne Boleyn of this play is as elusive as any Anne Boleyn, before or since, despite the fact that this was Anne’s first foray into the world of drama. What most audiences note immediately about Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Henry VIII is that Anne, as a character, is rather thin, especially in comparison to Katherine of Aragon, who is the play’s central female character.21 Anne is such a fleeting presence in Henry VIII that one of the first important critical reappraisals of the play mentions Anne only once in passing.22 In fact, Anne appears in only three scenes, and in one of those scenes, she is entirely silent.23 The play is marked by its interest in displays of pageantry, from the Field of the Cloth of Gold scene at the beginning of the play to Elizabeth’s christening at the end, and one of these key set-­ pieces is Anne’s coronation. However, Anne is entirely silent through this pageant and does not appear at all at Elizabeth’s christening scene, although the decision to omit Anne from this scene reflects the fact that mothers often did not attend the christening of their children in the early modern period. In the play’s epilogue, the audience is told that the play’s worth is “only in / The merciful construction of good women, / For such 18  William Shakespeare and John Fletcher, King Henry VIII, ed. Gordon McMullan (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2000), Prologue 13–17. 19  Shakespeare and Fletcher, Prologue 7–9. 20   William M.  Baillie, “Henry VIII: A Jacobean History,” Shakespeare Studies 12 (1979): 248. 21  I follow recent critical consensus, and Gordon McMullan in his Arden Shakespeare edition of the text, in attributing the play to both Shakespeare and John Fletcher. 22  Howard Felperin, “Shakespeare’s Henry VIII: History as Myth,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 6, no. 2 (1966): 225–46. 23  Kim Noling notes that Anne has just 58 lines in the play compared to Catherine of Aragon’s 374. Kim H. Noling, “Grubbing Up the Stock: Dramatizing Queens in Henry VIII,” Shakespeare Quarterly 39, no. 3 (1988): 299.

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a one we showed ’em.”24 The epilogue does not name this good woman, and it could well refer to either Katherine or Elizabeth, although it is most often taken to mean Katherine. Even when Anne appears on stage in the early seventeenth century, she is silent and blank. As Rebecca Quoss-­ Moore writes, “Anne’s containment becomes a central concern of the play”: a preoccupation she attributes to Anne’s capacity to become a “locus for the shifts caused by Henrician reform in both church and state.”25 In this reading, Anne’s power is contained by her enigmatic silences. Of course, Anne’s silence throughout the play opens up space for the audience to interpret her character as they wish. Shakespeare and Fletcher, then, tacitly acknowledge the interpretative potential of Anne: her seemingly endless ability to reflect whatever the audience might want to see. The decision to foreground Katherine rather than Anne might seem an idiosyncratic one, especially when one considers that the play ends with an extended panegyric, delivered by Cranmer, on the coming Protestant Golden Age of Elizabeth. The Jacobean context of the play is important to consider here. In November 1612, James’s eldest son, Prince Henry Frederick, considered by many to be the great hope of militant Protestantism, died. McMullan calls the public display of grief prompted by this event comparable to the public mourning that followed the death of Princess Diana.26 As Baillie notes, one of the fears of Protestants in 1613 was the possibility of a Catholic marriage for the new heir, Prince Charles: a fear that was eventually realised when Charles married Henrietta Maria in 1625.27 However, in February 1613, Princess Elizabeth married the Elector Palatine, one of the most prominent Protestant monarchs in continental Europe, and this marriage prompted a period of rejoicing amongst Protestants.28 The play was thus written against both a frustration of Protestant hopes for a Europe-wide Reformation (the Prince’s death) and renewed hopes in the promise of Elizabeth’s marriage. The  McMullan, “Introduction,” Epilogue 9–11.  Rebecca M.  Quoss-Moore, “The Political Aesthetics of Anne Boleyn’s Queenship in Henry VIII,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Shakespeare’s Queens, ed. Kavita Mudan Finn and Valerie Schutte (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 271 (271–293). 26  McMullan, “Introduction,” 63. 27  Baillie, “Henry VIII: A Jacobean History,” 250. 28  R.A. Foakes suggests that Henry VIII may have been written for performance at court celebrations for this marriage, but there is no direct evidence that this was the case. William Shakespeare, King Henry VIII, ed. R.A. Foakes (London: Arden Shakespeare, 1957), xxxi. 24 25

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play also alludes to other topics of interest to the Jacobean court of 1613: the play’s focus on divorce recalls the divorce negotiations taking place between the Earl of Essex and Frances Howard.29 Like Shakespeare’s other, better-known histories, it is a play calculated to appeal to the contemporary interests of the audience as much as it aims to represent history. Mark Rankin has also suggested that there was a cult of nostalgia for the Henrician court at the time, seen in both this play and Rowley’s earlier play, and that much of this nostalgia was centred on the resonances of the kingships of Henry and James. He writes that “Henry VIII … prefigures James’s own approach to questions of obedience and authority.”30 The end of the play certainly looks forward to James as the inheritor of Elizabeth’s greatness: Nor shall this peace sleep with her, but as when The bird of wonder dies, the maiden phoenix, Her ashes new create another heir As great in admiration as herself, So shall she leave her blessedness to one, When heaven shall call her from his cloud of darkness, Who from the sacred ashes of her honour Shall star-like rise as great in fame as she was And so stand fixed.31

The image of Elizabeth as a “maiden phoenix” was one taken directly from celebrations welcoming James and Anne into London in 1603–04.32 The image links the three queens that appear in the play—Katherine, Anne Boleyn and Elizabeth—who all fail to bear male children, with James appearing out of the ashes of Elizabeth’s queenship. As John Watkins notes, too, the image of James as Elizabeth’s quasi-son was a commonplace in Stuart panegyrics.33 Moreover, James was married to a foreign woman, Anne of Denmark, who may have been a Catholic: this play is 29  Donna B. Hamilton writes extensively about the connections between Shakespeare and Fletcher’s play and the Howard family (of which Anne Boleyn was a member) both in Henry’s time and in 1612–13. Donna B. Hamilton, Shakespeare and the Politics of Protestant England (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1992), 173–180. 30  Mark Rankin, “Henry VIII, Shakespeare, and the Jacobean Royal Court,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 51, no. 2 (2011): 360. 31  Shakespeare and Fletcher, King Henry VIII, 5.4.39–47. 32  Frye, “Queens and the Structure of History in Henry VIII,” 431. 33  Watkins, Representing Elizabeth in Stuart England, 30.

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certainly more interested in the sufferings of another foreign-born Catholic queen, Catherine of Aragon, than the woman who gave birth to Elizabeth. This scene, then, is about James as Elizabeth’s heir, not about Elizabeth and her own mother. In the first scene in which Anne Bullen, as she is known throughout the play, appears, she is at a banquet for Cardinal Wolsey, at which her role is to be decorative and receive attentions from the men who surround her.34 Anne is immediately set up as the object of desire, the beautiful courtly woman who dazzles all the men who surround her. As soon as the King arrives, he claims Anne from all other potential suitors, calling her, “The fairest hand I ever touched. O Beauty, / Till now I never knew thee.”35 Anne’s predicament—passed between men who respond to her only as a sexual object—parallels her wordless, hunted state in Wyatt’s “Whoso List to Hunt.” By the end of this short scene, in which Anne hardly speaks, the King is claiming Anne’s kisses: “I were unmannerly to take you out / And not to kiss you.”36 What is not clear from this scene is whether Anne actively seeks the King’s attention or merely passively receives them: it is possible to read this scene as manifesting either the image of Anne-the-­ victim or Anne-the-temptress. As Linda Micheli writes, “Anne seems extraordinary only in her beauty, which has attracted the notice of the King and thus given her unexpected prominence in the affairs of state.”37 Certainly, in this first scene, Anne is only as important or interesting as her sexual appeal. Shakespeare and Fletcher do, however, give Anne a more substantial scene: the scene in which she discusses the divorce of Katherine and Henry with the Old Lady. The scene mirrors the similarly suggestive scene between Juliet and her Nurse in Romeo and Juliet. Anne presents herself as innocent, while the Old Lady teases her about Henry’s true motivations for divorcing Katherine. Anne expresses sympathy for the Queen’s fall and, in an obviously ironic moment, compares divorce to execution: “Yet if that quarrel and Fortune do divorce / It from the bearer, ’tis a suffering panging / As soul and body’s severing.”38 This image of soul and body severing is a peculiarly apt image, too, for the twin strands of Anne’s  Shakespeare and Fletcher, King Henry VIII, 1.4.27–29.  Shakespeare and Fletcher, 1.4.75–6. 36  Shakespeare and Fletcher, 1.4.95–6. 37  Linda McJ. Micheli, “‘Sit By Us’: Visual Imagery and the Two Queens in Henry VIII,” Shakespeare Quarterly 38, no. 4 (1987): 460. 38  Shakespeare and Fletcher, King Henry VIII, 2.3.14–5. 34 35

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literary afterlife up to this point: she is either soul or body, religious icon or sexual object. Anne’s conversation with the Old Lady becomes increasingly loaded with sexual innuendo. Anne declares, “By my troth and maidenhead, I would not be a queen.”39 The Old Lady clearly does not believe her: “Beshrew me, I would / And venture maidenhead for’t; and so would you, / For all this spice of your hypocrisy.”40 Anne protests, but the Old Lady persists that “[i]n faith, for little England / You’d venture an emballing.”41 The sexual implication is clear, and the role of queen becomes purely sexual. The wordplay throughout hinges on the queen/ quean pun: the word “quean” meant prostitute. The Old Lady’s suspicions about Anne and Henry’s relationship are proven correct when the Lord Chamberlain arrives to tell her that she has been granted the title of Marchioness of Pembroke by the King. Anne responds that “I do not know / What kind of my obedience I should tender. / More than my all is nothing”: if one is aware that “nothing” was a slang term for vagina in the early modern period, the link between Anne’s queenship and her sexuality is further underlined.42 Retha Warnicke has described Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Anne as an “innocent object of the affections of the king.”43 However, the persistent sexual allusions and wordplay that accrue around Anne, and which are often spoken by Anne, suggests that Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Anne is not as innocent as she might seem. Even the Old Lady is surprised by the news of Anne’s swift elevation, and she had already suspected Anne of sexual impropriety or, at least, suspected that Anne was capable of using her body to win herself a crown. It is from this point onwards in the play that we are only given access to what others believe about Anne. Famously, from the moment that Anne agrees to be Henry’s queen, she falls completely silent. The space left by Anne is replaced by others talking about Anne, giving the audience their interpretations of Anne’s character and motivations. As Noling writes, “[f]or Anne, being queen is more a function of others’ perceptions than of

 Shakespeare and Fletcher, 2.3.23–4.  Shakespeare and Fletcher, 2.3.24–6. 41  Shakespeare and Fletcher, 2.3.46–7. 42  Shakespeare and Fletcher, 2.3.65–67. 43  Retha M. Warnicke, “Anne Boleyn in History, Drama, and Film,” in “High and Mighty Queens” of Early Modern England: Realities and Representations, ed. Carole Levin, Jo Eldridge Carney, and Debra Barrett-Graves (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 241 (240–255). 39 40

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her own actions.”44 That version of queenship will not be the active queenly mediatrix modelled by Katherine. Instead, Anne’s queenship is reduced solely to the mechanisms of the body. From the moment that it becomes clear that Anne will be queen, Chamberlain prophecies that the glory of Anne’s queenship will be her motherhood of Elizabeth: “Who knows yet / But from this lady may proceed a gem / To lighten all this isle.”45 Even the Gentleman who discusses Anne’s coronation reduces her to pure body.46 The people who celebrate her coronation echo Anne’s sexuality and fecundity: “Great-bellied women / That had not half a week to go, like rams / In the old time of war, would shake the press / And make ’em reel before ’em.”47 Anne was heavily pregnant at the time of her coronation: Shakespeare and Fletcher elide this fact, but allude to it by making the coronation a celebration of the pregnant female body. As was also so memorably the case in “Whoso List to Hunt,” Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Anne becomes the passive body that others inscribe meaning upon. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Anne’s coronation scene, in which we are given detailed stage descriptions of the procession and Anne’s appearance, but no actual speech: “A canopy, borne by four of the Cinque Ports; under it, the Queen [ANNE] in her robe, in her hair, richly adorned with pearl; crowned.”48 As Carney writes of Anne’s coronation scene, “there is no need for her to say anything. She is a symbol of beauty and fertility, a vessel, pure icon.”49 However, others have read Anne’s  Noling, “Grubbing Up the Stock: Dramatizing Queens in Henry VIII,” 301.  Shakespeare and Fletcher, King Henry VIII, 2.3.77–9. Chamberlain’s reference to Anne’s future children opens us the possibility that Anne is already pregnant at this stage, as Lee Bliss points out. Lee Bliss, “The Wheel of Fortune and the Maiden Phoenix of Shakespeare’s King Henry the Eighth,” ELH 42, no. 1 (1975): 7. 46  Shakespeare and Fletcher, 4.1.45–47. 47  Shakespeare and Fletcher, King Henry VIII, 4.1.76–79. As Amy Appleford notes, “the single substantive attribute Shakespeare gives Anne […] is her popularity with the common folk of the city.” Amy Appleford, “Shakespeare’s Katherine of Aragon: Last Medieval Queen, First Recusant Martyr,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 40, no. 1 (2010): 156. This portrait of Anne as a popular queen differs markedly from Eustace Chapuys’s description of the crowd’s reaction to Anne’s coronation: “altogether a cold, poor, and most unpleasing sight to the great regret, annoyance, and disappointment not only of the common people but likewise of all the rest, so much so that public indignation has apparently increased by one half since the said coronation.” Elizabeth Norton, The Anne Boleyn Papers (Gloucestershire: Amberley, 2103), 219. 48  Shakespeare and Fletcher, 4.1.36.8–10. 49  Jo Eldridge Carney, “Queenship in Shakespeare’s Henry VIII: The Issue of Issue,” in Political Rhetoric, Power, and Renaissance Women (Albany: State University of New  York Press, 1995), 195 (189–202). 44 45

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silent coronation scene as a vision of feminine power, drawing on the Biblical resonances between the coronation of queens and the Virgin Mary’s role as Queen of Heaven. Ruth Vanita compares three key scenes at the end of the play—Anne’s coronation, Katherine’s deathbed vision and Elizabeth’s christening—to three scenes “which would be familiar to the audience from Church iconography: the Coronation or mystical marriage of Mary, the Assumption, and the Presentation of the Virgin.”50 Hugh Richmond suggests yet another symbolic resonance here, suggesting a link between Anne’s coronation scene and Cleopatra’s barge scene in Anthony and Cleopatra.51 The sheer cluster of associations that accrue around Anne reinforce her ability to take on often wildly incongruous images of femininity. She can thus simultaneously act as Virgin Mary, entering into a mystical marriage, and Cleopatra, the scandalous queen who disrupted the fate of nations with her sexuality. Describing Anne as England’s first Renaissance queen and Katherine as the last medieval queen, Gaywyn Moore writes that [m]arried, pregnant, and crowned before Katherine of Aragon leaves the stage, her performed body acts as a substitute for Katherine’s in Henry’s bed, and thus as a substitute mother of the realm’s heir, and a sharer, with Katherine and Henry, in the monarchical body politic through her coronation. Her queenship becomes both less complicated and more so: her pregnant, crowned body a cipher for queenship that simplifies the office to sex, birth, and ceremony, while at the same time it highlights the revolving door of Henry’s queen consort position.52

Part of Anne’s fascination, then, lies in tracing the way she disrupted ideas of medieval queenship. Anne could not bolster Henry’s position through anything but her body and the promise of what that body could deliver. While Katherine can and does speak throughout the play, Anne is mostly silent, subsumed by the demands of her body. However, Anne’s very doubling of Katherine ensures a situation where the role of queen becomes 50  Ruth Vanita, “Mariological Memory in ‘The Winter’s Tale’ and ‘Henry VIII,’” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 40, no. 2 (2000): 329. 51  Hugh M. Richmond, “The Feminism of Shakespeare’s Henry VIII,” Essays in Literature 6, no. 1 (1979): 15. 52  Gaywyn Moore, “‘You Turn Me into Nothing’: Reformation of Queenship on the Jacobean Stage,” Mediterranean Studies 21, no. 1 (2013): 41–2.

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simply a matter of bodies replacing other bodies, when the earlier body proved defective in some way. Both Katherine and Anne “failed” to produce sons and so became replaceable: Katherine proved difficult to replace, but the very fact of her replacement set Anne up to follow a dangerous precedent. The death-knell of Anne’s queenship is sounded when the Old Lady teases Henry about the gender of Anne’s child.53 Despite Cranmer’s christening speech about the promise of Elizabeth, the audience well knows the consequences of Anne’s failure to produce a son. Anne may also hover behind another late Shakespeare play, his late romance The Winter’s Tale: like Cary’s Anne, the Anne of The Winter’s Tale is covert. This play, adapted from Robert Greene’s 1588 Pandosto, has some obvious plot parallels with the story of Anne and Henry, although here the outcome is rather different. Hermione is accused of adultery with Polixenes by her husband, Leontes, and thrown into jail. In the interim, she has given birth to a baby girl, Perdita, who has seemingly been abandoned. The Oracle of Delphi declares that Leontes will have no heir, and his son Mamillius dies. Hermione falls into a faint and Paulina, her friend, reports that she is dead. Sixteen years later, Prince Florizel, the son of a Lord, falls in love with a lowly servant girl: the girl is, of course, Perdita, and Leontes is overjoyed by the return of his daughter. At the end of the play, Paulina reveals a statue of Hermione, and suddenly, the statue comes to life and Hermione is restored. Eric Ives has argued that the charges against Hermione (and the ‘evidence’ on which they were based) have definite echoes of the charges against Anne Boleyn. There are also affinities between the bastardized Elizabeth and Perdita, not least the identification of each with the Spring and the goddess Flora.54

However, Ives was not the first to notice these parallels. In 1769, Horace Walpole wrote in his essay “Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third”: The Winter Evening’s Tale, which was certainly intended (in compliment to queen Elizabeth) as an indirect apology for her mother Anne Boleyn … the subject was too delicate to be exhibited on the stage without a veil; and it was too recent, and touched the queen too nearly, for the bard to have  Shakespeare and Fletcher, King Henry VIII, 5.1.163–166.  Eric Ives, “Shakespeare and History: Divergences and Agreements,” Shakespeare Survey 38 (1985), 24. 53

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v­ entured so home an allusion on any other ground than compliment. The unreasonable jealousy of Leontes, and his violent conduct in consequence, form a true portrait of Henry the Eighth, who generally made the law the engine of his boisterous passions … The Winter Evening’s Tale was therefore in reality a second part of Henry the Eighth.55

More recently, M.  Lindsay Kaplan and Katherine Eggert agree that the play parallels the case of Anne Boleyn, but argue that “The Winter’s Tale entertains reminiscences both of the long-dead Anne and of her lately deceased daughter Elizabeth in order to expand consideration of the plight of the sexually slandered woman outside these defunct episodes.”56 If The Winter’s Tale does intentionally echo the story of Anne, then this version has a happy ending: a Henry restored to his senses, an Anne Boleyn saved from the block and an Elizabeth married. Critics have long seen a connection between Catherine of Aragon’s self-­defence in Henry VIII and Hermione’s speech at her trial in The Winter’s Tale.57 However, arguably Anne is a more fitting parallel for Hermione because Anne and Hermione have been accused of the same crime.58 In documentary evidence about Anne’s trial—albeit manuscripts composed well after her death—Anne was said to have defended herself with “an excellent quick witt, and being a ready speaker, did so answeare to all obiections, that, had the Peeres given in their verdict according to the expectacion of the assembly, shee had been acquitted.”59 In The Winter’s Tale, Hermione asserts her innocence of the charge of adultery: Since what I am to say must be but that Which contradicts my accusation, and The testimony on my part no other But that comes from myself, it shall scarce boot me To say ‘not guilty’. Mine integrity Being counted falsehood shall, as I express it, 55  Horace Walpole, Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard III, ed. P.W. Hammond (Gloucester: Sutton, 1987), 108–9. 56  M.  Lindsay Kaplan and Katherine Eggert, “‘Good Queen, My Lord, Good Queen’: Sexual Slander and the Trials of Female Authority in ‘The Winter’s Tale,’” Renaissance Drama 25 (1994): 97. 57  Richmond, “The Feminism of Shakespeare’s Henry VIII,” 15. 58  Sir Henry Norris, one of the men accused of adultery with Anne, was one of the King’s closest friends, and so he may align with Polixenes. 59  Elizabeth Norton, The Anne Boleyn Papers, 338.

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Be so received. But thus: if powers divine Behold our human actions – as they do – I doubt not then but innocence shall make False accusation blush and tyranny Tremble at patience.60

It is hard not to think about Anne asserting her innocence from the same charges at her trial. However, where Henry VIII failed to reconsider, at least as far as we know, Leontes does come to regret his rash condemnation of his wife, whom he believes to be dead.61 Leontes does get the opportunity to redeem himself in ways that eluded Henry VIII: he first regains the lost daughter, Perdita, and then regains Hermione herself. As Kaplan and Eggert argue, “Hermione’s plight is replicated and redeemed in her daughter’s, just as Anne Boleyn’s reputation came to be absorbed and recuperated in Elizabeth’s, and subsequently shadowed in the next Elizabeth, the Stuart princess.”62 Again, however, Anne is only a shadow: a suggestion of a happier ending.

Other Shadow-Annes Anne is visible in shadowy form in another play of the seventeenth century: Richard Brome’s play The Queen and Concubine. While the play was first printed in 1659, it may have been written decades earlier, in around 1635–40. Ostensibly about the marital travails of a fictional Sicilian king called Gonzago, The Queen and Concubine quite consciously calls to mind Anne. The king puts aside his devoted wife, Eulalia, to marry his mistress Alinda, only to cool on her when she shows signs of mental instability. The Queen and Concubine, like The Winter’s Tale, has the happy ending which history could not provide, although in this case the happy ending belongs to the Catherine of Aragon character, Eulalia. Alinda-Anne is not executed, but instead repents of her ambition and retires to a nunnery. Brome’s happy ending is perhaps a consequence of his source material; just as Shakespeare relied on Pandosto for the happy ending of The Winter’s Tale, The Queen and Concubine is an adaptation of Robert Greene’s prose romance Penelope’s Web (1587). In her introduction to the online edition 60  William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, ed. John Pitcher (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2010), 3.2.20–31. 61  Shakespeare, 3.2.231–235. 62  Kaplan and Eggert, “‘Good Queen, My Lord, Good Queen’,” 101.

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of The Queen and Concubine, Lucy Monro argues that the play appropriates both Greene, and Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Henry VIII, but is also engaged in thinking through of the role of the queen consort in light of the role of Queen Henrietta Maria in court politics of the period.63 Alinda is described as a “veiled concubine” in the list of dramatis personae of Brome’s play; as Brooks has argued, this identification recalls Eustace Chapuys’s frequent use of the term to talk about Anne.64 The Alinda-Anne figure is ruthless in her ambition, and as cruel as any other representation of Anne, before or since. She tries to murder Catherine-­ Eulalia and is even complicit in the execution of her own father, Sforza. Sforza comments, “She has swallowed an Ambition / That will burst her.”65 Alinda’s first soliloquy reflects her single-minded pursuit of power: “My breast breeds not a thought that shall not flie / The lofty height of towering Majesty.”66 Brome’s depiction of a power-hungry Anne is thus not materially different from other negative depictions of Anne. However, what is unusual about The Queen and Concubine is that Gonzago loses his crown as a result of his treatment of Eulalia. The play concludes with Gonzago’s abdication and withdrawal into a monastery. The play therefore does not punish its Anne-surrogate with execution, but instead suggests that Gonzago is just as culpable for social upheaval as Alinda. As Brooks says, both Gonzago-Henry and Alinda-Anne are “cankers at the heart of the state that must be purged so as to regain social equilibrium.”67 Alinda does not even enjoy the only triumph afforded Anne Boleyn: it is Eulalia’s child, rather than Alinda’s, who will take over the kingdom and restore peace. The shadow-Anne of The Queen and Concubine withdraws as almost every aspect of her story is rewritten: no longer mother to a triumphant Protestant lineage, instead she is shut up in a Catholic nunnery.

63  Lucy Munro, “‘In Lieu of Former Wrongs’: An Introduction to The Queen and Concubine,” Richard Brome Online, 2010, https://www.dhi.ac.uk/brome/viewOriginal. jsp?play=QC&type=CRIT 64  Brooks, “Performing the Mistress: The Emergence of the Modern Mistress on the Early Modern Stage,” 251. 65  Richard Brome, The Queen and Concubine: A Comedie (London: A.  Crook and H. Brome, 1659), 15. 66  Brome, 19. 67  Brooks, “Performing the Mistress: The Emergence of the Modern Mistress on the Early Modern Stage,” 261.

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Conclusion As England fell into Civil War and the theatres were closed during the Interregnum, Anne Boleyn seems to have receded from public consciousness. Even representations of Elizabeth became rather thin on the ground during this period. While Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Henry VIII remained popular throughout the centuries, it was only in the later seventeenth century that Anne Boleyn returned to the stage in a new production, in John Banks’s Vertue Betray’d. It was in the long eighteenth century that a new form, associated with women’s stories and affective experiences, the perfect vehicle for an imaginative exploration of the interiority of Anne Boleyn, emerged: the novel. With the explosion of the popular print market, representations of Anne became more plentiful, in genres from poetry to the secret history. It would be in the long eighteenth century, and particularly after the Glorious Revolution, that new, more complex visions of Anne could finally emerge. The problems posed by Anne were not so acute in a postStuart world, and new literary forms allowed a more sentimental Anne to emerge. These forces set the stage for her transition in the popular imagination from Henry’s most problematic wife to Henry’s most popular queen.

References Primary Sources Brome, Richard. The Queen and Concubine: A Comedie. London: A. Crook and H. Brome, 1659. Cary, Elizabeth. The Tragedy of Mariam, The Fair Queen of Jewry. Edited by Barry Weller and Margaret W.  Ferguson. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Sanders, Nicholas. Rise and Growth of the Anglican Schism. Edited by David Lewis. London: Burns and Oates, 1877. Shakespeare, William. King Henry VIII. Edited by R.A. Foakes. London: Arden Shakespeare, 1957. ———. The Winter’s Tale. Edited by John Pitcher. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2010. Shakespeare, William, and John Fletcher. King Henry VIII. Edited by Gordon McMullan. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2000. Walpole, Horace. Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard III. Edited by P.W. Hammond. Gloucester: Sutton, 1987. Weller, Barry, and Margaret W. Ferguson, eds. “The Lady Falkland, Her Life by One of Her Daughters”. In The Tragedy of Mariam, The Fair Queen of Jewry, 183–275. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.

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Secondary Sources Appleford, Amy. “Shakespeare’s Katherine of Aragon: Last Medieval Queen, First Recusant Martyr.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 40, no. 1 (2010): 149–72. Baillie, William M. “Henry VIII: A Jacobean History.” Shakespeare Studies 12 (1979): 247–66. Bliss, Lee. “The Wheel of Fortune and the Maiden Phoenix of Shakespeare’s King Henry the Eighth.” ELH 42, no. 1 (1975): 1–25. Brooks, Victoria. “Performing the Mistress: The Emergence of the Modern Mistress on the Early Modern Stage.” King’s College London, 2019. Carney, Jo Eldridge. “Queenship in Shakespeare’s Henry VIII: The Issue of Issue.” In Political Rhetoric, Power, and Renaissance Women, 189–202. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995. Cespedes, Frank V. “‘We Are One in Fortunes’: The Sense of History in ‘Henry VIII.’” English Literary Renaissance 10, no. 3 (1980): 423–38. Cooper, Helen. Shakespeare and the Medieval World. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. Felperin, Howard. “Shakespeare’s Henry VIII: History as Myth.” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 6, no. 2 (1966): 225–46. Frye, Susan. “Queens and the Structure of History in Henry VIII.” In A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works, Volume IV, edited by Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard, 427–44. London: Blackwell, 2003. Gutierrez, Nancy A. “Valuing Mariam: Genre Study and Feminist Analysis.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 10, no. 2 (1991): 233–51. Hamilton, Donna B. Shakespeare and the Politics of Protestant England. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1992. Hattaway, Michael. “Playhouses and the Role of Drama.” In A Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture, edited by Michael Hattaway, 133–47. Malden: Blackwell, 2003. Ives, Eric. “Shakespeare and History: Divergences and Agreements.” Shakespeare Survey 38 (1985). Kaplan, M.  Lindsay, and Katherine Eggert. “‘Good Queen, My Lord, Good Queen’: Sexual Slander and the Trials of Female Authority in ‘The Winter’s Tale.’” Renaissance Drama 25 (1994): 89–118. Leahy, William. “‘You Cannot Show Me’: Two Tudor Coronation Processions, Shakespeare’s King Henry VIII and the Staging of Anne Boleyn.” EnterText 3, no. 1 (2003): 132–44. McMullan, Gordon. “Introduction.” In King Henry VIII, edited by Gordon McMullan, 1–199. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2000. Meyer, Allison Machlis. “Multiple Histories: Cultural Memory and Anne Boleyn in Actes and Monuments and Henry VIII.” Borrowers & Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation IX (2015): 1–37.

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Micheli, Linda McJ. “‘Sit By Us’: Visual Imagery and the Two Queens in Henry VIII.” Shakespeare Quarterly 38, no. 4 (1987): 452–66. Moore, Gaywyn. “‘You Turn Me into Nothing’: Reformation of Queenship on the Jacobean Stage.” Mediterranean Studies 21, no. 1 (2013): 27–56. Munro, Lucy. “‘In Lieu of Former Wrongs’: An Introduction to The Queen and Concubine.” Richard Brome Online, 2010. https://www.dhi.ac.uk/brome/ viewOriginal.jsp?play=QC&type=CRIT. Noling, Kim H. “Grubbing Up the Stock: Dramatizing Queens in Henry VIII.” Shakespeare Quarterly 39, no. 3 (1988): 291–306. Norton, Elizabeth. The Anne Boleyn Papers. Gloucestershire: Amberley, 2013. Quoss-Moore, Rebecca M. “The Political Aesthetics of Anne Boleyn’s Queenship in Henry VIII.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Shakespeare’s Queens, edited by Kavita Mudan Finn and Valerie Schutte, 271–93. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Rankin, Mark. “Henry VIII, Shakespeare, and the Jacobean Royal Court.” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 51, no. 2 (2011): 349–66. Richmond, Hugh M. “The Feminism of Shakespeare’s Henry VIII.” Essays in Literature 6, no. 1 (1979): 11–20. Vanita, Ruth. “Mariological Memory in ‘The Winter’s Tale’ and ‘Henry VIII.’” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 40, no. 2 (2000): 311–37. Warnicke, Retha M. “Anne Boleyn in History, Drama, and Film.” In “High and Mighty Queens” of Early Modern England: Realities and Representations, edited by Carole Levin, Jo Eldridge Carney, and Debra Barrett-Graves, 240–55. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Watkins, John. Representing Elizabeth in Stuart England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Weller, Barry, and Margaret W.  Ferguson. “Introduction.” In The Tragedy of Mariam, The Fair Queen of Jewry, 1–59. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.

CHAPTER 4

Anne Boleyn in the Long Eighteenth Century

The eighteenth century marks a shift in patterns of representing Anne away from the sacred towards the secular. While Anne was still a convenient tool for a variety of complex political and ideological purposes, it was in the eighteenth century that a more complex Anne began to emerge: an Anne that was neither simply martyr nor whore. It is not especially surprising that it was in the long eighteenth century in which more psychologically nuanced portraits of Anne were written, given that this was the period that marked the rise of the novel, with its focus on the sentimental, the domestic, the personal and the affective; elements of experience usually gendered female. Mark Salber Phillips writes that in the eighteenth century, “there is evidence that many writers reconceived the reader’s engagement with the historical narrative in more inward and sentimental terms.”1 Indeed, Robert Mayer has argued that the novel developed out of historical writing at the time, writing that the historical discourse of seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England … featured a taste for the marvellous, a polemical cast, a utilitarian faith, a dependence upon personal memory and gossip, and a willingness to tolerate dubious material for practical purposes, all of which led to the allowance of fiction as a means of historical representation.2 1  Mark Salber Phillips, Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740–1820 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 103. 2  Robert Mayer, History and the Early English Novel: Matters of Fact from Defoe to Bacon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 4.

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As such, the boundaries between the novel and history are quite difficult to parse: texts that present themselves as history read like novels and vice versa. In the age of the sentimental novel, Anne’s story was well-suited to the interests of writers who wished to critique the patriarchal order, the marriage market and the ways in which female sexuality was conceptualised. The eighteenth century also, crucially, marked the first time that women started to represent Anne openly in their fictions. While Elizabeth Cary may have been thinking about Anne when writing The Tragedy of Mariam, it was not a play about Anne. What unites women’s accounts of Anne is their representation of Anne as a victim of Henry’s sexual appetites. As such, they anticipate Karen Lindsey’s argument that “[t]oday, Henry’s approach to Ann [sic] would be instantly identifiable as sexual harassment.”3 Madame d’Aulnoy, Elizabeth Tollet, Sarah Fielding, Mary Hays and even the young Jane Austen stress how insistent Henry was in his pursuit of Anne, and the extent to which her emotions were either engaged elsewhere or entirely unmoved by the King. Tollet is the sole exception here in presenting an Anne wholly in love with Henry. It is notable that the eighteenth century sees the first movements away from a consideration of Anne’s religiosity. These texts are, instead, far more interested in the way that Anne’s life was shaped and destroyed by men. Sarah Fielding’s Anne directly addresses the extent to which she has been made a tool by both sides of the religious divide, seemingly looking forward from her position beyond the grave to assess her literary afterlife by complaining that she has been made “the continual Subject of the Cavils of contenting Parties.”4 As Christopher Johnson notes of Fielding’s account, “this most other-worldly of texts is, ironically, concerned entirely with this world and Boleyn’s mortal experiences.”5 The women who wrote about Anne in the eighteenth century were much less interested in using Anne as a means by which to prosecute religious conflicts than their male predecessors, instead focusing on Anne’s experience as a woman in the 3  Karen Lindsey, Divorced, Beheaded, Survived: A Feminist Reinterpretation of the Wives of Henry VIII (Reading: Addison-Wesley, 1995), 58. 4  Sarah Fielding, “Wherein Anna Boleyn Relates the History of Her Life,” in A Journey from This World to the Next, ed. Henry Fielding (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 102 (102–117). 5  Christopher D.  Johnson, “History, Fiction, and the Emergence of an Artistic Vision: Sarah Fielding’s Anna Boleyn Narrative,” New Perspectives on the Eighteenth Century 6, no. 1 (2009): 29.

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patriarchal world of the Henrician court. Many of the writers of the long eighteenth century take up a question that has continued to fascinate modern readers: what did it feel like to be Anne Boleyn? The affective nature of fiction, and the resources of the novel that developed in the eighteenth century, allowed a closer consideration of the imagined interiority of Anne.

The Historical Novel and the She-Tragedy: Madame d’Aulnoy and John Banks Marie-Catherine Le Jumel de Barneville, known as Madame d’Aulnoy, is mostly known today for her fairy tales. However, she also specialised in secret histories of historical figures, a genre to which we will return.6 Her interest in this genre perhaps accounts for why a French woman was so interested in the life of an English queen: a queen executed for sexual transgression is tailor-made for the secret history, with its focus on uncovering the supposed “truth” behind history’s most notorious scandals. Susan Bordo describes d’Aulnoy’s narrative of Anne’s life as “a ‘real life’ dystopian version of the fairy-tale form she favoured  – clever, generous and beautiful girl, wicked king, but no happy ending.”7 John Banks would lift many plot elements from d’Aulnoy for his play Vertue Betray’d, most notably the relationship between Anne and Henry Percy, and the (entirely fictional) role of Elizabeth Blount, one of Henry’s former mistresses, in the downfall of Anne. English readers would therefore be familiar with the contours of d’Aulnoy’s narrative of Anne’s life.8 Madame d’Aulnoy’s account of Anne is also a very early example of the genre that would come to be known as the historical novel. Jerome de Groot has argued persuasively that Marie-Madeleine de Lafayette’s The Princess of Cleves is “the first historical fiction that might be considered a 6  Melvin D. Palmer describes d’Aulnoy as occupying “an important place in the history of French-English prose fiction in the formative years that saw the rise of the modern novel.” Melvin D.  Palmer, “Madame d’Aulnoy in England,” Comparative Literature 27, no. 3 (1975): 237. 7  Susan Bordo, The Creation of Anne Boleyn: A New Look at England’s Most Notorious Queen (Boston: Mariner Books, 2014), 147. 8  There is no historical evidence that Blount had any role in the downfall of the Queen. Bessie Blount was married to Gilbert Tailboys after the dissolution of her affair with the King in 1519–20 and had little further involvement with the Tudor court. See Elizabeth Norton, Bessie Blount: Mistress to Henry VIII (Stroud: Amberley, 2011).

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‘novel.’”9 The Princess of Cleves was published in 1678, only two years before d’Aulnoy’s novel. Anne is mentioned in passing in The Princess of Cleves: “[Elizabeth] ought to be attractive if she is like Anne Boleyn, her mother. Never was there a more amiable woman or one more charming both in appearance and disposition. I have been told that her face was exceptionally vivacious, and that she in no way resembled most English beauties.”10 John Watkins writes that “the twin forces driving the development of the French novel—general aristocratic resentment of Bourbon absolutism and the particular resentment experienced by women excluded from the political sphere—converged in a recurrent interest in Elizabeth Tudor.”11 This interest in Elizabeth naturally extended into an interest in her mother. Watkins’s description of the narrative elements that often structure accounts of these French novels about Elizabeth also exactly describes Madame d’Aulnoy’s narrative of Anne’s rise and fall: They all situate [Elizabeth] among a specific cast of stock characters and in a set of recurrent plots about the conflict between arranged and affective marriages: a pair of young, attractive aristocratic lovers; a jealous, typically older woman who orchestrates their downfall; a corrupt minister who manipulates the ruler he ostensibly serves; and a libidinous monarch who desires one of the young lovers.12

Anne becomes part of a French critique of absolutism, written in response to the rule of Louis XIV, but what distinguishes Anne from Elizabeth is that Elizabeth holds power within this world, while Anne falls victim to Henry’s tyranny. D’Aulnoy’s heavily fictionalised narrative of the life of Anne Boleyn is found in the deceptively titled The Novels of Elizabeth, Queen of England, Containing the History of Queen Ann of Bullen. While Elizabeth might seem to be the focus of the text, she appears only in the framing device that surrounds Anne’s story. D’Aulnoy’s Elizabeth has, rather improbably, been shielded from an awareness of the circumstances of her mother’s death and entreats the Duke of Northumberland to help her understand  Jerome de Groot, The Historical Novel (London: Routledge, 2009), 12.  Marie-Madeleine de Lafayette, The Princess of Cleves, ed. John D. Lyons, Norton Cri (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1994), 43. 11  John Watkins, Representing Elizabeth in Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 160. 12  Watkins, 161. 9

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why her father executed her mother.13 D’Aulnoy clearly signals that this is a woman’s story, about a woman and intended for a female narratee: Elizabeth seeks her mother’s story, saying, “[S]he should be very glad that the Duke of Northumberland would relate it, he having been a witness to the great of those things which did conduct to that wicked Action.”14 What emerges is a complex and nuanced representation of the ways in which male power shapes the lives of the women around them, from the perspective of a woman whose sexuality precipitates both her rise and her fall, and addressed to a woman whose denial of her sexuality became central to her power. Anne may have fallen, but Elizabeth is the glorious manifestation of her posthumous victory. The end of the novel affirms that “the Princess Elizabeth her daughter, who now governs England with so great splendour and glory, inherits her Vertue as well as the Crown, which is her undoubted right.”15 In The Novels of Elizabeth, Queen of England, it is Henry Percy (here spelt Piercy) who is Anne’s true love: the first time that he is specifically named as such in historical fiction. The tragedy of Anne’s life is amplified by her separation from the man she truly loves. D’Aulnoy’s Anne only agrees to marry Henry because the King of France, her parents and Percy himself advise her that she must consent to the will of the King.16 By stressing Henry’s overwhelming power over Anne, d’Aulnoy shifts the focus of earlier representations from an examination of Anne’s behaviour to that of Henry, and thus, the novel becomes a critique of untrammelled masculine authority. Henry becomes the cruel tyrant of fairy tale. D’Aulnoy presents Anne as a nuanced figure: she possesses both moral fortitude and an intense sexuality. In this account, however, so free is Anne of any kind of political ambition that she does not even register jealousy when the King transfers his affections to Jane Seymour, instead telling Norris that “she should be so far from perplexing her self with an incommodious Jealousie, that she should be joyful to see him search his satisfaction.”17 D’Aulnoy’s Anne is not perfect, however: she persists in loving Percy and declaring that love, even after her marriage to the King. 13  Madame d’Aulnoy, The Novels of Elizabeth Queen of England, Containing the History of Queen Ann of Bullen. Faithfully Rendered into English by S.H. (London: Mark Pardoe, 1680), 3. 14  D’Aulnoy, 3. 15  D’Aulnoy, 133. 16  D’Aulnoy, 83. 17  D’Aulnoy, 89.

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She also accuses Percy of inconstancy in love, not accepting his excuse that he only married another in order to protect her from the King’s jealousy.18 Anne is a woman capable of jealousy and anger but not, crucially, over Henry, because she neither loves the King nor covets the role of queen. She is, instead, the victim of men’s covetousness and fickleness. Despite d’Aulnoy’s interest in the mechanisms of patriarchal power, she nevertheless makes a woman primarily responsible for Anne’s downfall. Elizabeth Blount, Henry’s former mistress, is, in this account, consumed by jealousy and hatred towards Anne and “caused a hundred things to be published against the Vertue of this Princess,” despite the fact that the historical Blount’s affair with Henry ceased many years before Anne’s marriage.19 D’Aulnoy suggests that women in the court are set up to be competitors for sexual attention from men, because that is the only means by which they can obtain power. It is Anne’s sexual appeal that pulls her into this world of power politics, and it is the way that men presume that they are authorised to act upon their desires for her that causes her downfall. This representation of Anne as constantly preyed upon was probably a deliberate attempt to counteract accusations at her trial that she possessed inordinate sexual desires. However, it is notable that as soon as women start writing about Anne, a portrait of Anne that recognises the uniquely difficult position they faced within a culture that both presumed their sexual availability, while at the same time punishing that availability, emerged. As befits a story narrated to her grown daughter, Anne’s final thoughts are for Elizabeth.20 While Anne might have been defeated by the machinations of jealous, aggressive men and women who seek to shore up their power through the weaponisation of their sexuality, it is the virginal Elizabeth who is a living testament to Anne’s worth as a woman and as a queen. It is surely significant that Anne, the persistent victim of men’s sexual desires, can only find vindication in the life of a woman who famously remained a virgin. D’Aulnoy’s final assessment of Anne is that she “was altogether worthy of that Grandeur to which she was raised.”21 It is an account that demonstrates the dangerous stakes for women of

 D’Aulnoy, 66–7.  D’Aulnoy, 91. 20  D’Aulnoy, 128. 21  D’Aulnoy, 133. 18 19

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courtly power games, as well as one that celebrates women’s power by stressing the female lineage that passed from Anne Boleyn to Elizabeth. John Banks takes up the basic shape of Madame d’Aulnoy’s account in his play Vertue Betray’d, or Anna Bullen, written in 1682. Banks, however, returns to an interest in Anne’s religious beliefs, a consideration of which was largely lacking in d’Aulnoy’s work. In Vertue Betray’d, Anne is the virtuous “Lutheran” victim of Catholic plots, largely orchestrated again by Wolsey and Elizabeth Blunt.22 As Glenn Baugher has documented, the play was immensely successful and was staged frequently into the middle of the eighteenth century.23 It is one of the earliest examples of the sub-­ genre of she-tragedy. John Banks was an inaugurator of this tradition: as well as Vertue Betray’d, his plays The Unhappy Favourite, or the Earl of Essex (1681), The Island Queens, or the Death of Mary Queen of Scotland (1863) and The Innocent Usurper, or the Death of the Lady Jane Grey (1684) are considered the originators of the form.24 As might be surmised, these plays frequently focused on the travails of tragic queens. Robert Hume describes Banks’s plays as “noble tearjerkers”: these were plays designed to place virtuously suffering woman at the centre of the action in order to inspire pity and sympathy from the audience.25 Paula de Pando Mena argues that the play’s popularity into the eighteenth century is accounted for by the focus on women: “The denunciation of tyranny was extrapolated to the domestic realm, and female audiences welcomed Banks’s allegory with the same enthusiasm as Whig supporters had originally done.”26

22  Wolsey explicitly describes Anne as a “Lutheran Queen” in his first soliloquy in the play. John Banks, Vertue Betray’d: Or, Anna Bullen (London: R. Wellington, 1715), 3. 23  Glenn Baugher gives an account of the play’s performance history of the play over 84 years and notes that the play went through 13 print editions from 1681 to 1781. Glenn Baugher, “John Banks and the Revival of the English History Play in the Restoration” (Tulane University, 1972), 18–19. 24  Laura Brown writes that “Banks’s recourse to the female protagonist is the essential catalyst in his skilful and surprising equation of English history and private pathos.” Laura Brown, English Dramatic Form, 1660–1760: An Essay in Generic History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 97. 25  Robert D. Hume, The Development of English Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 217. 26  Paula De Pando Mena, “Emasculated Subjects and Subjugated Wives: Discourses of Domination in John Banks’s Vertue Betray’d (1682),” Sederi: Yearbook of the Spanish and Portuguese Society for English Renaissance Studies 16 (2006): 170.

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The immediate context in which the play was written was the Exclusion Crisis of 1678–81, in which three (unsuccessful) bills were presented to parliament in order to exclude Charles II’s brother, James, from inheriting the throne on account of his Roman Catholicism. At the beginning of Banks’s play, he attempts to explicitly frame the work as apolitical: “There’s not one Slander in his modest Play: / He brings before your Eyes a modern story, / Yet meddles not with either Whig or Tory.”27 However, as Miller-Tomlinson shows, all of Banks’s she-tragedies were written during or in response to the Exclusion Crisis, reflecting a Whig response to these political struggles, and so are deeply engaged in the political culture of the time. As she writes, Vertue Betray’d takes up issues at the center of the debate, including Charles’ decadent court and perceived tendencies towards absolutism, rumours of Catholic plots to control the succession and widespread hopes that a legitimate Protestant claimant might be found to replace the duke of York [James] in the succession.28

The play thus taps into contemporary anxieties about the influence of Charles II’s French mistresses, his involvement with the French court of Louis XIV, and desire to limit the role of Parliament. Henry VIII becomes an avatar for Charles II, just as he had previously been associated with James I. The play also subtly alludes to the execution of Charles I. When Anne is condemned to death by a Henry more interested in sleeping with Jane Seymour than ensuring the stability of his kingdom, she exults in the prospect of joining a lineage of royal martyrs: “Let me amongst your glorious, happy Train, / Free from this hated World, and Traitor’s Reign.”29 Referencing a lineage of royal martyrs would inevitably bring to mind the most recent royal martyr. Tomlinson-Miller writes that “Anne reworks the Stuart trope of royal martyrdom as the persecution of true Protestant subjects by an arbitrary and irreligious monarch strongly associated with the Stuarts themselves.”30 The courageous death of Charles I is thus  Banks, Vertue Betray’d: Or, Anna Bullen, prologue.  Tracey Miller-Tomlinson, “Pathos and Politics in John Banks’ Vertue Betray’d, or Anna Bullen (1682),” Restoration and Eighteenth Century Theatre Research 23, no. 1 (2008): 49. 29  Banks, 51. 30  Miller-Tomlinson, “Pathos and Politics in John Banks’ Vertue Betray’d, or Anna Bullen (1682),” 58. 27 28

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t­ransformed into a Whig critique of arbitrary power. Anne’s life is, once again, employed as a means of political critique linked to Protestantism; Susan Bordo has described the play as an “undisguised grenade in the Protestant/Catholic culture wars.”31 In keeping with the form of the she-tragedy, Anne is presented in Vertue Betray’d as a tragic, entirely virtuous woman callously divided from the love of her life, Henry Piercy (sic), by the tyrannical and lascivious Henry. When we first meet Anne, she is lamenting her lack of interest in the pomp which surrounds her: “Despair turns all alike that comes to me, / Blind to the pomp that glads all Eyes but mine, / Deaf to its charms, and dead to all it Glories.”32 This Anne has so little ambition that she cannot even fake interest in the accruements of power that surround her. Moreover, Henry describes her as coldly chaste, even frigid.33 The pure, virtuous love of Henry Piercy and Anne is thus contrasted to the selfish, transitory lusts of the King. While d’Aulnoy’s Anne occasionally acts hastily or angrily, Banks’s Anne is nothing but virtuous, kind and temperate. If Henry is a tyrant in The Novels of Elizabeth, in Vertue Betray’d he is nothing short of a violent rapist: “thou bring’st to my Remembrance / How all Complaisances to me were dragg’d / And forc’d from her, like Mirth from one in Torture!”34 He plots with Wolsey to overthrow Anne under the guise that he has doubts about the legitimacy of their union, but admits that he simply wants to get rid of Anne because he has already been tempted by the beauty of Jane Seymour, whom Wolsey has placed before Henry to  turn his attentions away from Anne.35 As Anne well knows, Henry is nothing but changeable, and so her position was always ever going to be temporary: “The King’s Inconstancy / Begins to shew its Janus Face again.”36 While Henry, Wolsey and Blunt are motivated by their most selfish and base desires (sex, money, power, revenge), the empathetic and compassionate Anna, Piercy and Diana, his wife, are consistently unselfish and kind. The audience is asked to look upon their goodness and emulate them, just as their goodness inspires others in the play with pity and compassion.  Bordo, The Creation of Anne Boleyn: A New Look at England’s Most Notorious Queen, 143.  Banks, Vertue Betray’d: Or, Anna Bullen, 6. 33  Henry says that Anna’s “chastity [is] cold as the Frozen Stream”: he does not consider relevant the fact that he has forced himself upon her. Banks, 15. 34  Banks, Vertue Betray’d: Or, Anna Bullen, 18. 35  Banks, 16. Like d’Aulnoy, Banks has Wolsey active in plotting the downfall of Anne, despite the fact that Wolsey had died three years before Anne even became queen. 36  Banks, 33. 31 32

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Anne goes to her death with an almost superhuman fortitude and acceptance. The only point at which she objects to Henry’s accusations is the point at which he accuses her of incest with her brother: “Take all in recompence from Anna Bullen! / ’Tis yours; but do not rob me of my Fame / Nor stain my virtue with so foul a guilt.”37 Anne’s total submission to the will of her husband, despite his tyranny, is positioned as unambiguously good and a model to be emulated. Owen writes that Vertue Betray’d has a “fervent commitment to Protestantism and patriotism, without going as far as to sanction resistance to tyranny.”38 It was important for Whig supporters to balance a critique of tyrannical kings with a public show of submission to these very same kings, in order to avoid accusations of republicanism. Anne must submit to the will of her husband, in bed or at the scaffold, and Banks has her do so willingly: “Tell all the Saints, and Cherubims, and Martyrs, / Tell all the wrong’d, that now are righted there, / Till it shall reach the high Imperial Ear, / That Anna Bullen is a coming streight.”39 As in The Novels of Elizabeth, the play looks forward to the reign of Elizabeth, with Anne telling the young Princess Elizabeth that Thou little Child, Shalt live to see thy Mother’s Wrongs o’er-paid In many Blessings on thy Woman’s State. From this dark Calumny, in which I set, As in a cloud, thou like a Star shall rise, And awe the Southern World.40

What is remarkable about Vertue Betray’d is that Banks gives the young Elizabeth a chance to speak herself about her mother’s death. Elizabeth was not yet three at the time of her mother’s execution, but Banks makes her rather older in order to give her a pathetic scene in which she confronts Wolsey and her father about the death of her mother. In a scene designed to wring sympathy from the audience, she asks her father why her mother must die, and also takes the opportunity to express her firmly

 Banks, 50.  Susan J.  Owen, Restoration Theatre and Crisis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 273. 39  Banks, Vertue Betray’d: Or, Anna Bullen, 59. 40  Banks, 61. 37 38

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Protestant religious beliefs.41 Henry, however, does not find this scene affecting. While Shakespeare and Fletcher had Cranmer prophecy the coming Elizabethan Golden Age, here Banks brings Elizabeth herself onto the stage to prophecy her own glorious Protestant reign. Anne’s last action in the play is again to inspire goodness in others, in an unexpectedly grotesque fashion. After her head is cut off, it falls onto Elizabeth Blunt’s lap.42 In Vertue Betray’d, the head of Anne prompts an empathic response even in the callous Blunt, and so Anne achieves posthumous justice. In turn, Henry’s eyes are opened to the true villainy of Wolsey.43 Anne’s virtue is so powerful, even in death, that it has the power to prompt others to behave virtuously.44 The Catholic Wolsey has been destroyed, the future of the Protestant Reformation is assured and even Henry (ahistorically, given the subsequent events of his reign) seems to have been personally reformed. Banks’s Anne resembles that of the Elizabeth martyrologists, but Banks brings to Anne’s story an affective dimension: she is a tragic queen to be wept over. This focus on Anne-as-­ victim would be carried into representations of Anne in one of the most popular late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century genres of historical writing: the secret history.

Secret Histories: Crouch and Somers Writers of “secret histories,” histories that combined historical writing with elements of the novel, life writing and scandal memoir, have often been written off as little more than hacks. As Eve Tavor Bannet writes, “disdain for secret histories unites historians and literary critics across disciplinary boundaries.”45 However, as she also notes, “secret history was a coherent Enlightenment genre that straddles modern disciplines.”46 The abuses of power within governments and courts were often the subject of the secret history, making the Henrician court a rich source for authors of  Banks, 56.  Banks, Vertue Betray’d: Or, Anna Bullen, 65. 43  Henry evidently means here that he will no longer be guided by favourites. Banks, 65. 44  Miller-Tomlinson argues that the end of the play demonstrates that the “source of effective political action [is] affective experience.” Miller-Tomlinson, “Pathos and Politics in John Banks’ Vertue Betray’d, or Anna Bullen (1682),” 64. 45  Eve Tavor Bannet, “‘Secret History’: Or, Talebearing Inside and Outside the Secretorie,” Huntington Library Quarterly 68, no. 1–2 (2005): 375. 46  Bannet, 375. 41 42

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secret histories to mine. Secret histories reached the zenith of their popularity in the last decades of the seventeenth century and the early decades of the eighteenth, and often took as their subject a critique of arbitrary power, and an associated fear of Catholic plotting, which functioned as a justification for the overthrow of the Stuarts in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. These concerns shape the secret histories of the Henrician court, in which Catholic machinations, as well as the tyranny of Henry, are the twin causes of Anne’s fall. The secret history also has a close relationship with the novel: as Rebecca Bullard writes, the similarities include “an interest in private scenes of intrigue and sensitivity towards the relationship between fact and fiction.”47 As Rachel Carnell has shown, the term “secret history” was used by both writers of what we now term histories, as well as writers whose works we would now label as romans à clef.48 The secret history brings history into the bedroom, uniting a concern with the public and private through its exploration of the hidden private motivations for political events and manoeuvrings. One such secret history, The Unhappy Princesses, was written by “R.B.,” a pseudonym used by the English printer and historian Nathaniel Crouch, and first published in 1710. The first part recounts the story of Anne Boleyn—“The Secret History of Queen Anne Bullen”—while the second is about Lady Jane Grey. The first half of “The Secret History of Queen Anne Bullen” accordingly takes as its focus the complex negotiations of the King’s divorce and the rise and fall of Cardinal Wolsey. Robert Mayer argues that Crouch’s principal audience was “the people”: ordinary Londoners who would have been unlikely to pick up more “serious” historiographical texts.49 There is not much that is truly new or even “secret” about The Unhappy Princesses, but the low price (1 s) and relatively short length of the piece suggests that it was a work tailored to appeal to a reader who may not have had access to the story of Anne Boleyn in any other 47  Rebecca Bullard, “Secret History, Politics and the Early Novel,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Eighteenth-Century Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 3 (1–19). 48  Rachel Carnell, “Slipping from Secret History to Novel,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 28, no. 1 (2015): 2. William B. Warner also demonstrates the slippage between early novels and secret histories, arguing that both were treated with scepticism because they were associated with sexual scandal. William B.  Warner, Licensing Entertainment: The Elevation of NovelReading in Britain, 1684–1750 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). 49  Robert Mayer, “Nathaniel Crouch, Bookseller and Historian: Popular Historiography and Cultural Power in Late Seventeenth-Century England,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 27, no. 3 (1994): 395.

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way. Crouch also uses other textual strategies frequently used by writers of secret histories in order to lend authenticity to their work, such as the inclusion of documents and letters from the period.50 Crouch suggests in his foreword that his motivations for writing are primarily didactic: “Both the stories are very instructive and serious; and possibly some young Persons may be inclined to read them, rather than the Production of those vain and frothy Wits.”51 However, this aim seems undermined by the material presented: there is little message to be gleaned from this tale beyond a general warning to avoid becoming entangled with tyrannical Kings. Crouch’s Anne Boleyn is virtuous and pure, at most a trifle more flirtatious than advisable. However, she is put to death because the King had transferred his affections to Jane Seymour.52 There seems, then, very little that Anne could have done differently. His preface makes more sense, however, when one considers, as Mayer writes, that Crouch “presented his popular histories as a means of self-improvement and social advancement.”53 The non-elite reader could cheaply access historical knowledge that might otherwise remain inaccessible, and thus Crouch “helped created a cultural space in which historiography could be popularized and still retain the ancient dignity of history.”54 Crouch was an aggressive marketer of his own books, and it is likely that more readers were encountering Anne’s story in the form of these secret histories than other contemporary historical writing. Crouch is also quite explicitly motivated by religious considerations. He describes Anne’s role in the Reformation glowingly: “Great Endeavours were now us’d for having the Bible Translated into English, that the People should no longer be kept in Darkness and blind Obedience.”55 The Unhappy Princesses was written 22 years after the Glorious Revolution, but concern about Catholicism is everywhere apparent in the text. As Rebecca Bullard writes, Crouch’s sympathy towards Anne is part of the generic structure of the secret history:

50  Bannet writes that secret histories were actually more likely to include letters and documents than more traditional histories during this period. Bannet, “‘Secret History’,” 392. 51  R.B., The Unhappy Princesses in Two Parts. (London: A.  Bettesworth and C.  Hitch, 1733), 4. 52  R.B., 59. 53  Mayer, “Nathaniel Crouch, Bookseller and Historian: Popular Historiography and Cultural Power in Late Seventeenth-Century England,” 395. 54  Mayer, 417. 55  R.B, 57–8.

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“They put women centre stage in the political history of nations.”56 While he does not examine the implications of Henry’s divorce of Catherine for the inevitable replacement of Anne, what Crouch perhaps inadvertently demonstrates is the status of queens as tradeable commodities. Another secret history of the Henrician court, The True Secret History of King Henry the Eighth, was written by Baron John Somers. This secret history of the Henrician court was part of a much longer work called The True Secret History of the Lives and Reigns of All the Kings and Queens of England, first published in 1702. Somers was a prominent Whig lawyer and statesman, and, like Crouch, was writing in defence of the Glorious Revolution. Somers cannot help editorialising from the beginning: his first mention of Anne in the “official” history is to note that she was beheaded for “pretended … Adultery.”57As was the case in The Unhappy Princesses, Somers’s Anne is basically good, but falls victim to Henry’s sexual appetites and the machinations of Cardinal Wolsey. As with Crouch, too, Somers casts doubts on Catherine’s virginity prior to her marriage with Henry; this again seems tied to the Whig secret history’s suspicion of Catholic plots.58 Somers sees Anne as a key player in bringing about the English Reformation, noting approvingly that “the black Mists of Popish Ignorance and Error beginning to vanish, as soon as the bright Beams of Light and Truth began to spread its Inlightning Rays.”59 However, while Somers might regard Anne as a positive force for religious change, his secret history demonstrates little real interest in her. So rushed is his account of Anne’s reign that the three years between her marriage to Henry and her fall are covered in a few sentences. Instead, once again, Anne is used to pursue a political point: in the secret histories, her story is used to critique the arbitrary tyranny of the Stuarts and the importance of shoring up Protestant rule against the perceived threat posed by Catholics.

 Bullard, “Secret History, Politics and the Early Novel,” 2.  John Somers, “The True Secret History of King Henry the Eighth,” in The True Secret History of the Lives and Reigns of All the Kings and Queens of England (London: D. Browne, 1730), 175 (175–214). 58  Somers comments that “if the Reader can believe [that Katherine did not consummate her marriage with Arthur], I must acknowledge he has a stronger Faith in that particular, than I have.” Somers, 187. 59  Somers, 191. 56 57

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Sentimental Poetry: Tollet and Whitehead Anne appeared in two strikingly similar poems in the early eighteenth century. Both poems construct Anne as the exemplar of eighteenth-century sensibility. G.J. Barker-Benfield describes sensibility as a paradigm, “meaning not only consciousness in general but a particular kind of consciousness, one that could be further sensitized in order to be more acutely responsive to signals from the outside environment and from inside the body.”60 The eighteenth-century culture of sensibility valued emotional receptivity, both in terms of one’s own emotions and in sympathetic engagement with the emotions of others. Elizabeth Tollet’s 1724 collection, Poems on Several Occasions, with Anne Boleyn to Henry VIII.  An Epistle, concludes with a long poem in which Anne addresses Henry from the Tower, lamenting her fate and grieving over her lost love. Elizabeth Tollet is very little known as a poet today; she is principally remembered, if at all, for her encounters with Isaac Newton and her interest in representing Newtonian imagery in her poetry.61 Tollet’s Anne is a woman whose downfall is caused by her excessive love, a love that endures beyond Henry’s condemnation of her. It is a poem suffused with the language of excessive feeling and is clearly designed to evoke an emotional response in the reader. “Anne Boleyn to King Henry VIII” opens with Anne in the Tower, waiting for her execution.62 Early in the poem, Anne ponders that “alike ’tis vain / or to suppress my Sorrows, or complain / Of Woes that Language never can contain,” establishing the poem’s theme of captivity and loss.63 This Anne was manifestly not motivated by ambition: “’Tis true that never durst my bashful Eye, / Much less my humble Thoughts have soar’d so high.”64 However, Tollet’s Anne has learnt through bitter experience that “The Conquest won, away the Victor flies, / to seek Variety in other Eyes.”65 Fara argues that the poem is a “cry of experience,” 60  G.J.  Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), xvii. 61  Patricia Fara, “Elizabeth Tollet: A New Newtonian Woman,” History of Science 40, no. 2 (2002): 169–87. 62  Fara has pointed out that many of Tollet’s poems are set in the Tower; her father’s house was enclosed in its walls. Fara, 176. 63  Elizabeth Tollet, Poems on Several Occasions, with Anne Boleyn to Henry VIII. An Epistle. (London: John Clarke, 1724), 72. 64  Tollet, 73. 65  Tollet, 74.

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s­uggesting that Tollet was drawing on an empathic connection between the imprisoned Queen and the emotional and intellectual oppression of women in her own time.66 Certainly, Anne does think about the difference definitions of “honour” for men and women, noting that “in Womankind she wears a diff’rent Dress, / Frailty to guard, and Passion to suppress.”67 Tollet’s early adoption of the language of sympathy and sensibility may be traced to her interest in Newton; Newton was one of the thinkers who explained the “psychoperceptual scheme” that underlay eighteenth-­ century theories of sensibility.68 Tollet writes with a deep consciousness of the sense of entrapment that would have been felt by many women, and her poem seems calculated to play on the sympathies of female readers: Anne sighs, cries and laments her imprisonment. Barker-Benfield writes that “one of the best-known representations of the literature of sensibility is the figure of ‘virtue in distress,’ the virtue a woman’s, and her distress caused by a man.”69 Tollet’s Anne is precisely this model of virtue-in-­ distress. Tollet’s portrait of an Anne undone by excessive love also anticipates the critique deployed by Mary Wollstonecraft at the end of the eighteenth century in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in which she argues that women are educated into being slaves to their emotions and thus become dependent on men who abuse them.70 As Anne says, it is “Love determined me, and Love alone, / to Tempt the flipp’ry Grandeur of a Throne.”71 So universal is Anne’s experience that she predicts that a similar fate will befall Jane Seymour.72 It is the fate of women to love too deeply, even when they know that the man in question will inevitably betray them. Tollet’s poem seems to have been somewhat inspired by Banks’s Virtue Betray’d, reflecting that play’s enduring popularity into the eighteenth century. However, while Banks’s play was interested in Anne’s role as a symbol of Protestant virtue, Tollet’s interest lies within Anne’s interiority and demonstrates only limited interest in her religious beliefs. Tollet’s  Fara, “Elizabeth Tollet: A New Newtonian Woman,” 177.  Tollet, Poems on Several Occasions, with Anne Boleyn to Henry VIII. An Epistle, 76. 68  Barker-Benfield, xvii. 69  Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain, xviii. 70  Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Deidre Shauna Lynch, Norton Critical Edition (New York: Norton, 2009). 71  Tollet, 75. 72  Tollet, 78. 66 67

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Anne is also not as straightforwardly virtuous as Banks’s Anne. Tollet’s Anne is innocent and good, but she is also guilty of being too susceptible to Henry’s advances, a failing which she connects to women’s propensity for excessive sensibility: “Unhappy Beauty! Of our Woes the spring! / Of all our Vanities the vainest Thing! / Fondly by our unthinking Sex desir’d; / The more endanger’d as the more admired!”73 Tollet’s afterward to her poem also stresses Anne’s innocence, while at the same time refusing to represent her as a flat image of perfection: To her Wit and engaging Behaviour she ow’d her Advancement; her Ruin partly to the King’s inconstancy, and partly to Reasons of State […] Tho’ it cannot be deny’d that her immoderate Fondness for being admired, the usual Result of a French Education, as well as the implacable Malice of a Party who apprehended her Favour to the Reformation, contributed to her Fall.74

Anne’s fall represents the absolute power men have over the women who love them, and the dangerous, often fatal, consequences this emotional and sexual dependence may have. Another very similar poem, with the same title, appeared in 1743, although this time authored by a male writer. William Whitehead’s Ann Boleyn to Henry the Eighth: An Epistle is dedicated to a “Mrs. Wright of Romely, in Derbyshire,” on the occasion of her wedding.75 Whitehead’s poem, like Tollet’s earlier version, announces itself as a poem of sensibility from its opening lines: Whitehead’s Anne notes, “If sighs could soften, or Distress could move / Obdurate Hearts, and Bosoms dead to Love, / Already sure these Tears had ceased to flow, / And Henry’s Smiles relieve’d his Anna’s Woe.”76 Henry’s problem is his lack of sensibility: his inability to be moved, as the ideal man of sensibility should be, by Anne’s lamentations in the Tower. Whitehead’s Anne also laments the lost possibility of a humbler life and attributes her rise solely to Henry’s desire for her and the emotion it inspired: “Yet, when thus rais’d, I taught my chase Desires / To know their Lord, and burn with equal Fires.”77 Again, Whitehead’s Anne knows  Tollet, 77.  Tollet, 82. 75  William Whitehead, Ann Boleyn to Henry the Eighth (London: R. Dodsley, 1743), 5. 76  Whitehead, 7. 77  Whitehead, 8. 73 74

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that charms, “too cheaply yielded, [are] too quickly lost,” and sounds a note of warning to Jane Seymour.78 One of the only significant narrative difference in this poem is Anne’s desire that she be killed by nature before Henry can put her to death: “Nature’s Power prevent the dire Decree, / And my lov’d Lord without a crime be free.”79 Aside from this small difference, Tollet’s and Whitehead’s poems are so similar that they read as virtually identical in terms of emotional content, perhaps because of their similar reliance on Banks and the language of sensibility. However, Whitehead’s Anne has some control over her choices, albeit limited ones, while Tollet’s Anne is entirely helpless.

Sarah Fielding’s Posthumous Anne Sarah Fielding’s account of Anne Boleyn, published in 1749, represents a significant turn in representations of Anne Boleyn. Following Tollet and Whitehead, it also does not place Anne’s role in Catholic/Protestant religious conflict at the centre of the narrative. As I have shown above, Fielding’s Anne explicitly complains about the extent to which she had been used as a tool for religious polemic: a clear signal to the reader that this account of Anne would be shaped by very different ideological motivations. Anne had spoken for herself in poetry and on the stage, but in these forms, the focus had been on Anne speaking within lyrical or dramatic modes at a particular moment in time, such as at her death, or in public settings. First-person narration in the novel allowed Fielding to consider Anne’s interiority to a much greater extent: Anne is given the chance to give her perspective on her life, from its beginning to its end. Anne’s first words in Fielding’s narrative—“I am going now truly to recount a Life”—invite the reader to share and empathise with Anne’s story.80 Fielding’s narrative constitutes one of the final chapters of Henry Fielding’s A Journey from This World to the Next. However, this particular chapter has been persuasively attributed to Sarah Fielding, and her authorship is now widely accepted.81 The conceit of Henry Fielding’s novel is  Whitehead, 11.  Whitehead, 13. 80  Fielding, “Wherein Anna Boleyn Relates the History of Her Life,” 102. 81  F.J. Burrows and A.J. Hassall, “Anna Boleyn and the Authenticity of Fielding’s Feminine Narratives,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 21 (1988): 429–45. 78 79

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that of a journey through the afterlife, and this contrivance allows Sarah Fielding to allow Anne to speak to her own experiences from beyond the grave. The opportunity to speak to the ghost or spirit of Anne Boleyn has proven a tantalising prospect to many later writers: there is a certain mystique in the idea of being able to ask a posthumous Anne about her life.82 Fielding’s account is far more intimate than previous writing about Anne and, unusually, takes as its focus Anne’s childhood and life before her marriage to Henry. Fielding is also apparently rather less interested in Anne’s final years, with the section covering her downfall covering less than 2 pages of a total of 16. Like d’Aulnoy, Fielding is interested in uncovering the psychology of Anne, and accordingly, while her Anne is an innocent victim of Henry’s tyranny, she is also not completely flawless. Christopher Johnson has explicitly connected Fielding’s short account of Anne’s life to her interest in the novel’s capacity to capture psychological realism: “Fielding’s largely  – and recognizably novelistic  – purposes, [were] to explore the inner workings of her characters’ minds and to offer her readers a clear warning against the dangers of vanity and pride.”83 The use of the first-­ person narrative voice is central to Fielding’s endeavour as it allowed her to focus on the affective experiences of Boleyn in a way that a third-person account could never accomplish. Her primary focus is on Anne’s mostly unhappy experiences with men, representing her as analogous to an eighteenth-­century coquette. Anne describes her awareness of the power of her sexuality over men: “my vanity grew strong, and my Heart fluttered with joy at every Compliment paid to my beauty.”84 Her first love is an unnamed nobleman of the French court (an invention of Fielding) who “gave every thing he said and did such an Air of Tenderness, that every Woman he spoke to, flattered her self with being the Object of his Love.”85 However, she soon learns that men quickly tire of the women they pursue, and the man grows cold.86 Anne also admits to her aptitude in the art of pleasing men: “I observed that most Men generally liked in Women what 82  For more on ghost narratives related to Anne, see Stephanie Russo, “At the Border of Life and Death: The Ghost of Anne Boleyn,” Parergon: Journal of the Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 37.2 (2020), forthcoming. 83  Johnson, “History, Fiction, and the Emergence of an Artistic Vision: Sarah Fielding’s Anna Boleyn Narrative,” 34. 84  Fielding, “Wherein Anna Boleyn Relates the History of Her Life,” 102. 85  Fielding, 103. 86  Fielding, 104.

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was most opposite to their own characters.”87 She begins to cultivate artifices designed to attract male attention, but she does so because she has learnt through bitter experience that such stratagems are necessary in order to navigate the world of which is a part. Anne’s deployment of her sexuality is a survival strategy. What Fielding effectively does, then, is to use Anne as a means by which to stage a critique of courtship and marriage in a rigidly patriarchal social order. Fielding is acutely aware that economic forces compel women to seek an eligible match, while at the same time cultural norms required that they not appear either too available to advances made to them or too eager to secure an eligible husband. Elizabeth Goodhue reads Fielding’s narrative as satirical and writes that she represents Anne as “neither angel nor a whore, she speaks as a woman whose experiences on the marriage market makes her justified in satirizing coquettish men and critiquing the patriarchal political system that confers value on women solely for their beauty.”88 Henry Percy, in this account, causes all Anne’s misfortunes, for when he asks Anne to meet him at court, she catches the eye of the King, and two days later, Percy is told by Wolsey never to think of her again. Percy’s love of Anne is represented as rather limp as he quickly renounces his claim on her, which prompts Anne to consider that “if he could part with me, the matter was not much.”89 She is a valuable commodity of exchange and so can simply be passed along to the most powerful man who expresses interest in possessing her. It is noteworthy, too, that Henry is, oddly, all but absent from Anne’s narration of her life story. He is simply described as “amorous” and otherwise ignored except insofar as he is the shadowy figure who facilitates her rise and fall.90 What is clear, though, is how deftly Anne manages him, prompting her to ruefully note that “nothing is easier than to make a Man angry with a Woman he wants to be rid of, and who stands in the way between him and his Pleasures.”91 She is also rather manipulative: she admits that whenever the divorce from Catherine is mentioned, “I used such Arguments against it, as I thought the most likely to make him the  Fielding, 106.  Elizabeth Goodhue, “At the Margins of Menippean Dialogue: Sarah Fielding’s ‘History of Anne Boleyn’ and the Muted Female Figures of Lucian’s Satiric Underworld,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 29, no. 2 (2010): 266. 89  Fielding, “Wherein Anna Boleyn Relates the History of Her Life,” 111. 90  Fielding, 112. 91  Fielding, 114. 87 88

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more eager for it.”92 Anne has no real regard for Henry, but is eager to secure the divorce because it will ensure her position. As Goodhue writes, “Fielding allows England’s most famous surrogate queen to voice concern about the degree to which marital and political economies depend on reducing women to the status of silent objects and encouraging women’s complicity with that reduction.”93 Anne feels nothing for the King, but as a result of his interest in her, she must manoeuvre to hold the interest of the King in order to win the marital game that ultimately destroys her. It is a representation of marriage and courtship that would have been well understood by a female reader of the eighteenth century, and Fielding is one of the first women to intuit Anne’s twenty-first-century emergence as a feminist icon. As Lawrence Stone has famously argued, the eighteenth century saw the gradual shift in public perceptions towards marriage so that it was transformed from an economic arrangement to the affective union we understand it to be today, although later historians have disputed some of his findings.94 Much of women’s writing from across the eighteenth century, most notably that of Frances Burney, Jane Austen and Mary Wollstonecraft, was interested in staging a similar critique of marriage and courtship as that of Fielding.95 Even while definitions of marriage were shifting, then, it was clear that many women still saw themselves as objects of exchange within the marriage market and could therefore relate to Anne’s struggles with men.

 Fielding, 112.  Goodhue, “At the Margins of Menippean Dialogue,” 279. 94  Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1977). Ralph Houlbrooke notes that Stone has been critiqued for focusing on the upper classes and for assuming that the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were low in affect. Ralph Houlbrooke, “Lawrence Stone,” The History of the Family 5, no. 2 (2000): 149–51. 95  There have been countless titles examining the portrayal of marriage and courtship in the writings of eighteenth-century women writers. For a representative sample, see Eve Tavor Bannet, The Domestic Revolution: Enlightenment Feminisms and the Novel (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000); Ruth Perry, Novel Relations: The Transformation of Kinship in English Literature and Culture, 1748–1818 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Chris Roulston, Narrating Marriage in Eighteenth-Century England and France (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010); Stephanie Russo, Women in Revolutionary Debate: Female Novelists from Burney to Austen (Houten: Brill, 2012); Laura E. Thompson, The Matrimonial Trap: Eighteenth-Century Women Writers Redefine Marriage (Lanham: Bucknell University Press, 2014). 92 93

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Fielding’s interest in the psychological complexity of Anne is also manifested in her representation of Anne’s shifting relationship to queenship. Anne is initially not happy about the possibility of becoming queen, largely because of her experiences in the French court.96 However, as her coronation draws nearer, her attitude changes, as “my Heart fluttered, and my Eyes were dazzled with the View of being seated on a Throne.”97 At the end of her account, Anne is welcomed into Elysium as the judge Minos considers that “whoever had suffered being a Queen for four Years, and been sensible during all the time of the real Misery which attends that exalted Station, ought to be forgiven whatever she had done to obtain it.”98 It is a vision of queenship that sees the role as inherently dangerous and manifestly not to be desired; that one should not desire the responsibilities of monarchy is still, even today, a message not often seen in historical fiction and drama, which so often represents royalty as inherently glamorous and desirable. Anne may have played a high stakes game in attempting to shore up her own power, but, Fielding suggests, she should be exonerated from any accusations of bad behaviour because the position of queen carries with it so much inherent misery. It is a remarkably balanced view of Anne, which neither brushes aside her least attractive behaviour nor casts blame on Anne for those actions she felt compelled to take.

Women Worthies and Women’s History That Anne Boleyn became somewhat popular amongst mid-eighteenth-­ century women, who may have shared the sympathetic engagement clearly felt by both Elizabeth Tollet and Sarah Fielding, is registered by a number of small appearances she made across the writing and art of the century. In the early 1740s, the prominent Bluestocking Elizabeth Montagu—the “Queen of the Blues”—had herself painted as Anne Boleyn by Christian Friedrich Zincke.99 In 1772, a short biography of Anne Boleyn appeared in the Lady’s Magazine, in which it is noted that “whatever were her faults,  Fielding, “Wherein Anna Boleyn Relates the History of Her Life,” 110.  Fielding, 110. 98  Fielding, 117. 99  Elizabeth Montagu, Letters of Mrs Elizabeth Montagu, with Some of the Letters of Her Correspondents Vol. 1, 3rd edition (London, 1810). Humberto Garcia writes that Montagu often “saw herself as an English queen.” Humberto Garcia, “Re-Orienting the Bluestockings: Chivalric Romance, Manliness, and Empire in Joseph Emin’s Letters,” Huntington Library Quarterly 81, no. 2 (2018): 251. Montagu also identified with Elizabeth I. Emma Major, 96 97

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it is certain that she fell a victim only to the King’s extraordinary desire of marrying another.”100 The very inclusion of this short biography in a magazine designed for consumption by women suggests that there was a growing interest amongst women readers in the life and death of Anne Boleyn. Biography and the novel have long been entwined: there is a large body of scholarship theorising the way that the novel emerged out of biographical writing in the eighteenth century.101 The eighteenth century marked the first time Anne’s biography was written by women. Mary Hays’s account of the life of Anne Boleyn is found within her landmark 1803 multi-volume work of feminist history, Female Biography, the first history of women to be written since Christine de Pizan’s City of Ladies in 1405. While this text is not a piece of fiction, it is worth considering here in light of the generic slipperiness between biography and the novel at the time. In the preface, Hays explains that “my pen has been taken up in the cause, and for the benefit, of my own sex.”102 She thus explicitly positions the text as part of an attempt to celebrate the biographies of prominent women, as well as to educate her female readers about women’s history. Anne Boleyn is also featured in Matilda Betham’s Biographical Dictionary of Celebrated Women, published in 1804.103 However, Betham’s entry on Anne is focused on Henry’s attempts to secure a divorce, as well as the circumstances of her downfall, and is less interested in Anne herself. As Arianne Chernock has noted, authors of “women-worthy” literature during the period of the American and French Revolutions often used biographies of notable women to “tout women’s intellectual capacities and to underscore their nation’s continuing obligation to serve and promote

Madam Britannia: Women, Church, and Nation, 1712–1812 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 11–14. 100  “The Life of Anne Boleyn,” The Lady’s Magazine (London, June 1772), 247. This short biography was extracted from Biographium Faemineum: The Female Worthies (1766), a compilation of biographies by S. Crowder and J. Payne. 101  For an excellent summary of the relationship between biography and the novel in the eighteenth century, including how early novelists commented on the links between the forms, see J. Paul Hunter, “Biography and the Novel,” Modern Language Studies 9, no. 3 (1979): 68–84. 102  Mary Hays, Female Biography; Or, Memoirs of Illustrious and Celebrated Women, of All Ages and Countries. Alphabetically Arranged. (London: Richard Phillips, 1803), I.iii. 103  Matilda Betham, Biographical Dictionary of Celebrated Women (London: B. Crosby & Co., 1804), 1804.

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women’s interests.”104 Hays is thus situating her work squarely within the revolutionary “rights of women” debate of the 1790s, precipitated by philosophers such as Mary Wollstonecraft. Biographies of individual women were combined as part of a political project to advance the cause of women at a time when political and social change seemed possible. Female Biography is consciously modelled on Pierre Bayle’s Historical and Critical Dictionary (1697), in which he tried to recuperate the life stories of those figures whose lives were either ignored or distorted by history and, indeed, Bayle was one of Hays’s key sources for her entry on Anne. However, in focusing on female lives, Hays extends Bayle’s project to uncover how “women attested in historical records had been criticized, ignored, trivialized, manipulated and mistrusted.”105 Hays’s focus is, unusually amongst women writing about Anne in the eighteenth century, Anne’s involvement in courtly politics. There is also no romantic backstory: a prior engagement to Henry Percy is here only concocted by Henry as a means by which to justify annulling his marriage to Anne. Like the Henry represented by d’Aulnoy and Fielding, Hays’s Henry is a man who cannot accept sexual rejection and yet is titillated by the thrill of the chase.106 Remarkably, Hays notes that “in becoming the concubine of the king, she would perhaps have committed an action less reprehensible, than in being the cause of the dethronement and humiliation of the queen.”107 Hays’s account is very clear about the forces behind Anne’s downfall. She argues that the fault lies with Henry: “with the removal of these obstacles, his love, which opposition had served but to inflame, began to languish and visibly decay.”108 Her assessment of Anne’s character is that she was simply too enthusiastic a player in the game of courtly romance: “No real stigma has been thrown on the conduct of Anne, but a certain levity of spirit and gaiety of character … rendered her manners unguarded.”109 Indeed, Hays’s argument here anticipates the assessment 104  Arianne Chernock, “Gender and Politics of Exceptionalism in the Writing of British Women’s History,” in Making Women’s Histories: Beyond National Perspectives, ed. Pamela S. Nadell and Kate Haulman (New York: NYU Press, 2013), 122 (115–136). 105  Gina Luria Walker, “The Invention of Female Biography,” Enlightenment and Dissent 29 (2014): 87. 106  Hays, Female Biography; Or, Memoirs of Illustrious and Celebrated Women, of All Ages and Countries. Alphabetically Arranged, II.10. 107  Hays, II.10. 108  Hays, II.12. 109  Hays, II.14.

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of the contemporary historian Greg Walker, who argues that “the kind of flirtatious gossip that seemed to flourish in [Anne’s] household was in the end her undoing.”110 In 1821, Hays produced another account of the life of Anne, which appears in her Memoirs of Queens, Illustrious and Celebrated. This account repeats the themes of Hays’s earlier biography, with Hays commenting that Henry’s interest in Anne was “stimulated by her opposition.”111 Her emphasis on Henry as a sexual aggressor is reiterated, as she writes that “[Anne’s] most effectual justification was the marriage of the king with Jane Seymour on the day following her immolation.”112 Anne’s execution was not about her moral failings, but, Hays suggests, maliciously concocted to facilitate Henry’s speedy marriage to her replacement—another reminder of women’s powerlessness as a commodity on the marriage market. Hays makes no attempt to embody Anne’s voice within the mechanisms of fiction, but still focuses on the affective experience of the Queen. She acknowledges what she perceives as the importance of character in attracting women to history, saying that women’s “understandings are principally accessible through their affections: they delight in minute delineations of character.”113 Anne is represented as an intelligent, measured woman whose only fault was her propensity to adopt the mode of courtly flirtation that she had been exposed to as a lady-in-waiting at the French court. Hays is also psychologically astute enough in her representation of Henry to demonstrate that it was Anne’s French glamour and wit that both attracted Henry’s interest and caused her downfall. Hays thus stresses the sympathetic dimensions of Anne’s story at the same time as she asserts Anne’s ongoing capacity to enthral and beguile: female readers are invited to react to the tale of Hays’s spirited, magnetic Boleyn in the same way as they would the heroines of their favourite sentimental novels.

110  Greg Walker, “Rethinking the Fall of Anne Boleyn,” The Historical Journal 45, no. 1 (2002): 26. 111  Mary Hays, Memoirs of Queens, Illustrious and Celebrated (London: T. & J.  Allman, 1821), 78. 112  Hays, 86. 113  Hays, Female Biography; Or, Memoirs of Illustrious and Celebrated Women, of All Ages and Countries. Alphabetically Arranged, I.iv.

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Conclusion A copy of Female Biography was in the library of Jane Austen’s sister-in-law at Godmersham.114 It is tempting to speculate that Hays’s account of Boleyn’s life influenced Austen’s juvenile work, The History of England, written in 1791 when she was just 15. In that work, Austen declares of Anne that “this amiable Woman was entirely innocent of the crimes with which she was accused, of which her Beauty, her Elegance, and her Sprightliness were sufficient proofs.”115 Austen has, as usual, tongue firmly planted in cheek here, but her representation of Anne’s character is an excellent summation of Anne’s literary afterlife in the eighteenth century. By the eighteenth century, Anne’s status as a victim of Henry’s arbitrary tyranny was firmly established. Eighteenth-century Annes managed to be both victimised and flirtatious, ambitious and wronged. The eighteenth century also saw the emergence of an Anne that could be made to speak for women and to women about the limited roles and opportunities available to them within patriarchal society. In the nineteenth century, religion would re-emerge as a central dimension of Anne’s story, but so too did the range of Anne Boleyns available for consumption multiple wildly.

References Primary Sources “The Life of Anne Boleyn.” The Lady’s Magazine. London, June 1772. Austen, Jane. “The History of England.” In The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jane Austen: Juvenilia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Banks, John. Vertue Betray’d: Or, Anna Bullen. London: R. Wellington, 1715. Betham, Matilda. Biographical Dictionary of Celebrated Women. London: B. Crosby & Co., 1804. D’Aulnoy, Madame. The Novels of Elizabeth Queen of England, Containing the History of Queen Ann of Bullen. Faithfully Rendered into English by S.H. London: Mark Pardoe, 1680.

114  Gina Luria Walker, “Pride, Prejudice, Patriarchy: Jane Austen Reads Mary Hays,” Fellows’ Lecture, Chawton House Library, 2010, www.southhampton.ac.uk/english/ news/2010/03/11_pride_prejudice_patrarich.page 115  Jane Austen, “The History of England,” in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jane Austen: Juvenilia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 181.

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Fielding, Sarah. “Wherein Anna Boleyn Relates the History of Her Life.” In A Journey from This World to the Next, edited by Henry Fielding, 102–17. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Hays, Mary. Female Biography; or, Memoirs of Illustrious and Celebrated Women, of All Ages and Countries. Alphabetically Arranged. London: Richard Phillips, 1803. ———. Memoirs of Queens, Illustrious and Celebrated. London: T. & J. Allman, 1821. Lafayette, Marie-Madeleine de. The Princess of Cleves. Edited by John D. Lyons. Norton Cri. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1994. Montagu, Elizabeth. Letters of Mrs Elizabeth Montagu, with Some of the Letters of Her Correspondents Vol. 1. 3rd edition. London, 1810. R.B. The Unhappy Princesses in Two Parts. London: A.  Bettesworth and C. Hitch, 1733. Somers, John. “The True Secret History of King Henry the Eighth.” In The True Secret History of the Lives and Reigns of All the Kings and Queens of England, 175–214. London: D. Browne, 1730. Tollet, Elizabeth. Poems on Several Occasions, with Anne Boleyn to Henry VIII. An Epistle. London: John Clarke, 1724. Whitehead, William. Ann Boleyn to Henry the Eighth. London: R. Dodsley, 1743. Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Edited by Deidre Shauna Lynch. Norton Cri. New York: Norton, 2009.

Secondary Sources Bannet, Eve Tavor. “‘Secret History’: Or, Talebearing Inside and Outside the Secretorie.” Huntington Library Quarterly 68, no. 1–2 (2005): 375–96. ———. The Domestic Revolution: Enlightenment Feminisms and the Novel. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. Barker-Benfield, G.J. The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-­ Century Britain. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992. Baugher, Glenn. “John Banks and the Revival of the English History Play in the Restoration.” Tulane University, 1972. Bordo, Susan. The Creation of Anne Boleyn: A New Look at England’s Most Notorious Queen. Boston: Mariner Books, 2014. Brown, Laura. English Dramatic Form, 1660–1760: An Essay in Generic History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981. Bullard, Rebecca. “Secret History, Politics and the Early Novel.” In The Oxford Handbook of the Eighteenth-Century Novel, 1–19. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Burrows, F.J., and A.J. Hassall. “Anna Boleyn and the Authenticity of Fielding’s Feminine Narratives.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 21 (1988): 429–45.

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Carnell, Rachel. “Slipping from Secret History to Novel.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 28, no. 1 (2015): 1–24. Chernock, Arianne. “Gender and Politics of Exceptionalism in the Writing of British Women’s History.” In Making Women’s Histories: Beyond National Perspectives, edited by Pamela S. Nadell and Kate Haulman, 115–36. New York: NYU Press, 2013. Csengei, Ildiko. Sympathy, Sensibility and the Literature of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Fara, Patricia. “Elizabeth Tollet: A New Newtonian Woman.” History of Science 40, no. 2 (2002): 169–87. Garcia, Humberto. “Re-Orienting the Bluestockings: Chivalric Romance, Manliness, and Empire in Joseph Emin’s Letters.” Huntington Library Quarterly 81, no. 2 (2018): 227–55. Goodhue, Elizabeth. “At the Margins of Menippean Dialogue: Sarah Fielding’s ‘History of Anne Boleyn’ and the Muted Female Figures of Lucian’s Satiric Underworld.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 29, no. 2 (2010): 263–89. Groot, Jerome de. The Historical Novel. London: Routledge, 2009. Houlbrooke, Ralph. “Lawrence Stone.” The History of the Family 5, no. 2 (2000): 149–51. Hume, Robert D. The Development of English Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976. Hunter, J. Paul. “Biography and the Novel.” Modern Language Studies 9, no. 3 (1979): 68–84. Ives, Eric. The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn. Malden: Blackwell, 2004. Johnson, Christopher D. “History, Fiction, and the Emergence of an Artistic Vision: Sarah Fielding’s Anna Boleyn Narrative.” New Perspectives on the Eighteenth Century 6, no. 1 (2009): 19–33. Lindsey, Karen. Divorced, Beheaded, Survived: A Feminist Reinterpretation of the Wives of Henry VIII. Reading: Addison-Wesley, 1995. Maitzen, Rohan. “This Feminine Preserve: Historical Biographies by Victorian Women.” Victorian Studies 38, no. 3 (1995): 371–93. Major, Emma. Madam Britannia: Women, Church, and Nation, 1712–1812. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Mayer, Robert. History and the Early English Novel: Matters of Fact from Defoe to Bacon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. ———. “Nathaniel Crouch, Bookseller and Historian: Popular Historiography and Cultural Power in Late Seventeenth-Century England.” Eighteenth-­ Century Studies 27, no. 3 (1994): 391–419. Mena, Paula De Pando. “Emasculated Subjects and Subjugated Wives: Discourses of Domination in John Banks’s Vertue Betray’d (1682).” Sederi: Yearbook of the Spanish and Portuguese Society for English Renaissance Studies 16 (2006): 161–75.

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Miller-Tomlinson, Tracey. “Pathos and Politics in John Banks’ Vertue Betray’d, or Anna Bullen (1682).” Restoration and 18th Century Theatre Research 23, no. 1 (2008): 46–65. Norton, Elizabeth. Bessie Blount: Mistress to Henry VIII. Stroud: Amberley, 2011. Owen, Susan J. Restoration Theatre and Crisis. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Palmer, Melvin D. “Madame d’Aulnoy in England.” Comparative Literature 27, no. 3 (1975): 237–54. Perry, Ruth. Novel Relations: The Transformation of Kinship in English Literature and Culture, 1748–1818. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Phillips, Mark Salber. Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740–1820. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. Roulston, Chris. Narrating Marriage in Eighteenth-Century England and France. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010. Russo, Stephanie. “At the Border of Life and Death: The Ghost of Anne Boleyn.” Parergon: Journal of the Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies 37, no. 2 (2020). ———. Women in Revolutionary Debate: Female Novelists from Burney to Austen. Houten: Brill, 2012. Stone, Lawrence. The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1977. Thompson, Laura E. The Matrimonial Trap: Eighteenth-Century Women Writers Redefine Marriage. Lanham: Bucknell University Press, 2014. Walker, Gina Luria. “Pride, Prejudice, Patriarchy: Jane Austen Reads Mary Hays.” Fellows’ Lecture, Chawton House Library, 2010. www.southhampton.ac.uk/ english/news/2010/03/11_pride_prejudice_patrarich.page. ———. “The Invention of Female Biography.” Enlightenment and Dissent 29 (2014): 79–136. Walker, Greg. “Rethinking the Fall of Anne Boleyn.” The Historical Journal 45, no. 1 (2002): 1–29. Warner, William B. Licensing Entertainment: The Elevation of Novel-Reading in Britain, 1684–1750. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Watkins, John. Representing Elizabeth in Stuart England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

CHAPTER 5

Anne Boleyn in Nineteenth-Century Historical Fiction

The eighteenth century gave rise to an increasing complexity in representations of Anne Boleyn, but in the nineteenth century, representations of Anne became ever more plentiful and diverse. Anne could, seemingly, be used for virtually any purpose by any writer in any genre, so capacious was her capacity to signify. Anne appears in genres from the Gothic and the realist novel to melodrama, burlesque and pantomime. Anne could also be represented as anything from Protestant martyr to power-crazed femme fatale. While the period does see a return to religiously inflected portraits of Anne, largely absent from eighteenth-century texts, nineteenth-century representations of Anne are varied and often strange. From the nineteenth century onwards, the sheer volume of representations of Anne means that only a partial account can be attempted. In this chapter, I focus on Anne’s role in the historical novels of the period, while in the next, I turn to theatrical representations of her story. The proliferation of writing about Anne Boleyn in the nineteenth century is partially accounted for by the rise of antiquarianism and medievalism in the mid- to late-eighteenth century. As Rosemary Sweet writes, antiquarianism was related to history as a discipline, but “whilst the antiquary would freely acknowledge his studies to be a contribution to historical learning,” antiquarianism was still “subordinate.”1 Nevertheless, the emerging figure of the antiquarian opened up a space for enthusiasm for history outside the boundaries of 1  Rosemary Sweet, Antiquaries: The Discovery of the Past in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London: Hambledon and London, 2004), 2.

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traditional historiography—an important development for our purposes since so many of those writers interested in Anne Boleyn were women— and points to the excitement about history characteristic of the period. Many literary forms popular in the period were dependent on this new interest in history and, particularly, medieval history. Thomas Percy’s 1765 Reliques of Ancient English History is often commonly attributed with inaugurating the interest in medieval ballads that led to both the development of the Gothic and Romanticism. Gothic novels were routinely set in the medieval period, and the Romantics produced poems that looked to medieval legends and ideas, such as James Macpherson’s Ossian poems, Robert Burns’s “Tam o’Shanter” or Keats’s “La Belle Dame Sans Merci.” Elizabeth Fay argues that the use of history by the medievalists of the Romantic period marked a shift in the uses of history, writing that “history is no longer irrelevant to present times; it begins to provide an imaginative field of potential solutions to the crises of the now.”2 For an England grappling at the beginning of a new century with the social unrest caused by the French Revolution and the outbreak of the Napoleonic Wars, and ruled by a King whose grip on sanity was slipping, thinking about the past became a way of grappling with the uncertainties of the present. Moreover, Stephen Bann has argued that immediately following the French Revolution, from being a literary genre whose “borders” were open to other forms of literature, history became over half a century or so the paradigmatic form of knowledge to which all others aspired. The “historical novel” set the pace for the novelists of the 1820s; the “historical genre” (genre historique) forced its way into the traditional modes of painting at the same time and remained there for half a century. Not content with invading and assimilating traditional media, the representation of history became the practice of new, intense modes of popular spectacle.3

Bann conceptualises Romanticism, then, as evincing what he calls a “desire” for history, which had the effect of democratising history.4 Given this climate of intense interest in the past, as well as the unique position 2  Elizabeth Fay, Romantic Medievalism: History and the Romantic Literary Ideal (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 2. 3  Stephen Bann, Romanticism and the Rise of History (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1995), 4. 4  Bann, 5.

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that the medieval and early modern past had in England’s conceptualisation of itself into the reign of Victoria—herself an enthusiastic medievalist—it is hardly surprising that it seems like Anne Boleyn is everywhere in the nineteenth century. Anne’s role in the English Reformation also helps to explain why she became so popular to such a wide range of nineteenth-century writers. As Thea Tomaini writes, “[b]ecause the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries were often accepted as part of the ‘Medieval’ period in the popular imagination, the Reformation was an important aspect in academic discussions of national character.”5 As the woman who stood at the fulcrum of the English Reformation, Anne Boleyn was repeatedly turned to as a way of thinking about English national character. While religion is only of marginal interest in eighteenth-century representations, then, Anne’s religious beliefs again became a key facet of writing about her life. This movement back to religion is legible when read against events and movements such as the conflicts over Catholic Emancipation and the Oxford Movement, which sought to restore aspects of Catholicism into Protestant worship. What is at issue for many nineteenth-century writers is the extent to which Anne sits at the pivot point between the medieval and the modern. In their discussion of the term “Tudorism,” which they posit as existing alongside the more familiar “medievalism,” Tatiana C. String and Marcus Bull pay close attention to “the different ways in which the sixteenth century has been positioned in relation to, and has thereby implicitly contributed towards constructions of, the medieval, or Gothic, or premodern, or pre-industrial, of dark-age, or feudal, or primate, or traditional.”6 They highlight the fact that while some in the nineteenth century saw the sixteenth century as “the late, late medieval show,” others saw the period as a time of “profound change—not necessarily for the better, even disturbing in its effects, but ineluctable and directed.”7 As they note, the Catholicism of the medieval is at issue here: it could potentially be troubling, or at least complex, to grapple with England’s Catholic past in its Protestant present.8 To present the medieval period as a time of lost 5  Thea Tomaini, The Corpse as Text: Disinterment and Antiquarian Enquiry, 1700–1900 (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2017), 12. 6  Tatiana C. String and Marcus Bull, “Introduction,” in Tudorism: Historical Imagination and the Appropriation of the Sixteenth Century, ed. Tatiana C.  String and Marcus Bull (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 3 (1–12). 7  String and Bull, 5, 6. 8  String and Bull, 8.

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greatness for England would be to accept its Catholicism, and this proposition would be anathema to some and highly desirable to others. Peter Mandler argues that Tudorism, or what he describes as the cult of the “Olden Time,” becomes increasingly distinct from medievalism in the nineteenth century by virtue of a “dual critique of an overly complacent and elite-led Whig interpretation, but also of an overly romantic and elite-­ led medievalism.”9 The Olden Time is roughly the period from the Wars of the Roses through to the Civil War: as Mandler notes, this period centres on the “Merrie England of Good Queen Bess.”10 Anne occupies an interesting position amongst the emergence of this form of Tudorism. Anne predates the apotheosis of the “Merrie England” trope, but as Elizabeth’s mother, and Good King Hal’s wife, she is also at the centre of it. Mandler notes that medievalist fantasies were “revealed as such by simple reminders of the true state of the kingdom before the reign of Henry VIII,” but writing about Anne reveals that such reminders actually turn on the life and death of Anne Boleyn as the key moment towards a Whiggish narrative of progress.11 In Elizabeth Benger’s 1821 Memoirs of the Life of Anne Boleyn, the pre-Reformation past is described as “strange to our sympathies, and repulsive to our conceptions of the English character.”12 Benger goes to write that “we recoil from the image of England, entrammelled by ignorance and superstition, abetting persecution and oppression, and submitting with pusillanimous baseness to become alternately the minister and the victim of tyranny and injustice.”13 At the end of her biography, however, Benger notes that because of Anne, “the principles of the Reformation gained ground” and “the people became more sensible of their obligations to the woman who had ever warmly supported the cause of humanity and truth.”14 This somewhat apologetic attitude towards the past, and the sense that Anne had a key, even foundational, role in bringing England out of superstition, recurs frequently in nineteenth-century writings about Anne. If Tudorism can be 9  Peter Mandler, “Revisiting the Olden Time: Popular Tudorism in the Time of Victoria,” in Tudorism: Historical Imagination and the Appropriation of the Sixteenth Century, ed. Tatiana C. String and Marcus Bull (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 14 (13–35). 10  Mandler, 14. 11  Mandler, 24. 12  Elizabeth Benger, Memoirs of the Life of Anne Boleyn, Queen of Henry VIII, Third Edit (Philadelphia: A. Hart, 1850), 19. 13  Benger, 20. 14  Benger, 320.

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conceived of as a separate, related series of representational practices to medievalism—a difference that largely hinges on anxieties about the Catholic past—then Anne Boleyn stands at the exact point where the medieval meets the modern. The very violence of Anne’s death was also a source of fascination for nineteenth-century readers. In the wake of the French Revolution, with the guillotine bringing industrial-style efficiency to the practice of execution, the historical imagination was caught by stories of famous beheadings. When thinking about the execution of Marie Antoinette, for instance, we might reasonably suppose that her English contemporaries might have thought about their own beheaded queens. As Tomaini writes, Anne Boleyn emerged as a figure of liminality, whose death bridged the Tudor past with more recent events […] for the nineteenth century, Anne’s death provided an important distinction between the ‘brutal’ Tudor past and the ‘civilised’ present, for which public violence, and namely beheading, had been redefined in recent memory.15

Billie Melman has shown, too, that Tudor horror became an increasingly central element of nineteenth-century Tudorism, writing that “popular Tudorism became pivotal in a culture of history which developed around a new definition of horror, a new sensationalism, and a set of images and collective practices revolving around the prison, dungeon, and gallows.”16 As one of the Tower’s most notorious victims, and one of its most famous ghostly inhabitants, Anne became a central figure in this understanding of the Tudor past.17 The rise in interest in Tudor tourism, and particularly in visits to the Tower of London, cemented Anne as a key topic of fascination.

 Tomaini, The Corpse as Text: Disinterment and Antiquarian Enquiry, 1700–1900, 113.  Billie Melman, “The Pleasures of Tudor Horror: Popular Histories, Modernity and Sensationalism in the Long Nineteenth Century,” in Tudorism: Historical Imagination and the Appropriation of the Sixteenth Century, ed. Tatiana C. String and Marcus Bull (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 42 (37–56). 17  For a summary of Anne’s supposed hauntings of the Tower and other Tudor locations, see Alison Weir, The Lady in the Tower: The Fall of Anne Boleyn (New York: Ballantine Books, 2010), 349–354. I have also written about Anne Boleyn ghost narratives in Stephanie Russo, “At the Border of Life and Death: The Ghost of Anne Boleyn,” Parergon: Journal of the Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 37.2 (2020), forthcoming. 15 16

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One of the nineteenth-century writers who used Anne Boleyn as a character in a novel, William Harrison Ainsworth, was central to this growing fascination with the violence that took place in the Tower. Ainsworth’s 1840 novel The Tower was about the life and death of Lady Jane Grey in which, Melman argues, Ainsworth and the illustrator George Cruikshank “exploited the prison and scaffold lore which embodied in the mixed and uneven form of modernity and articulated this lore into an organizing image of Tudor history.”18 Ainsworth was to write about Anne’s execution in his 1842 Windsor Castle, again linking nostalgia for the past and its physical remains—the novel includes a volume-length digression about the history of Windsor Castle—with the Tudor horror of the scaffold, as well as a supernatural Gothic tale. The sheer spectacle and brutality of Anne’s death continued to haunt and compel people throughout the nineteenth century, creating a vision of the Tudor past that centred on images of violence and, crucially, images of female suffering. The Tudor period’s three executed queens—Anne Boleyn, Lady Jane Grey and Mary Queen of Scots—increasingly became linked as sentimentalised figures of female suffering, despite the very different circumstances of their lives and deaths.19 There is another, far more contemporary reason for an increasing fascination with Anne Boleyn in the nineteenth century. The trial of Queen Caroline for adultery in 1820 would inevitably recall Anne’s trial and execution nearly 300 years earlier. As Mary Spongberg has shown, the links between Caroline and Anne were made quite explicit: “The fate of Anne Boleyn […] was used in legal argument and political debate, as well as in the avalanche of porno-propaganda that erupted during the Regency.”20 Moreover, Spongberg also demonstrates that Anne was used by Lucy Aikin in her 1818 Memoirs of the Court of Elizabeth, and in Benger’s memoir, to present a “covert critique of the link between a king’s desire to 18   Melman, “The Pleasures of Tudor Horror: Popular Histories, Modernity and Sensationalism in the Long Nineteenth Century,” 49. 19  There was, of course, another executed queen of the Tudor period: Katherine Howard. However, comparatively little attention was paid in the nineteenth century to her own story of suffering. Presumably, the Victorians could not quite figure out how to rehabilitate a queen whose sexual indiscretions were accepted as fact. For a summary of those historical novels that do deal with Katherine Howard, see Valerie Schutte, “The Fictional Queen Katherine Howard,” Early Modern Women 12, no. 2 (2018): 146–50. 20  Mary Spongberg, Women Writers and the Nation’s Past 1790–1860 (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 79.

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divorce his wife and his tendency towards despotism more generally.”21 Anne’s life and death were used, as they so often were, as a coded commentary on the political events of the day. What becomes clear about Anne Boleyn in the nineteenth century is the extent to which she could be made to work for a variety of often surprising ideological and literary purposes. Anne was the ideal heroine for Gothic novels, for instance, because of the innately Gothic dimensions of her story: it had sex, imprisonment and a violent death. Writers also began to exploit particularly dramatic “scenes” from her life for short stories, as we will see in Walter Savage Landor’s Imaginary Conversations (1824) and L.E.L.’s (Letitia Elizabeth Landon’s) “Two Scenes in the Life of Anna Boleyn” (1837). The rise of women’s history—popular, novelistic biographies of women, frequently queens, written for an audience of middle-­ class women—also saw her inclusion in the works of writers such as Agnes Strickland and Anna Jameson, to which we will now turn.

Writing Women’s Histories While I am primarily interested in fictional representations of Anne Boleyn in this book, some consideration of women’s historical writing about Anne is pertinent here. These texts not only shared generic conventions with the novel but went on to shape the ways in which Anne was subsequently represented in historical novels well into the twentieth century. Following the work of Mary Hays and Matilda Bentham in the early years of the nineteenth century, the Victorian woman writer of history, such as Elizabeth Benger and the Strickland sisters, opened up space for telling women’s stories, aimed at women readers. As Rohan Maitzen argues, Not only were numerous women claiming discursive spaces for themselves as well as representational space for women in the past, but also writers of both sexes were engaging in projects challenging the rigid and exclusionary standards of conventional historiography—both in form and content—in ways that inevitably challenged its masculinist biases as well.22

 Spongberg, 82.  Rohan Maitzen, Gender, Genre, and Victorian Historical Writing (New York: Garland, 1998), 7. 21 22

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The histories written by these women historians were histories of the domestic, of the family and of women’s experiences hitherto considered unimportant or beyond the scope of historiography. Such writings were, however, routinely trivialised by male writers, both because of the feminised subject matter and because of the generic slipperiness between memoir and novel. Maitzen writes that such works appeared to sit in the space between “politics and romance, between history and fiction.”23 The emphasis in these memoirs on emotion and private actions means that they read as far more novelistic that one might expect from contemporary non-fiction historical writing. Elizabeth Benger’s 1821 Memoirs of the Life of Anne Boleyn was the first full-length biography of Anne and an important influence on those historians and novelists who wrote in her wake. According to Lucy Aikin’s memoir of the author, affixed to subsequent editions of the work, Benger turned her attention to biography after a failed career as a novelist.24 Benger’s credentials as a novelist are legible in the work, which attempts to convey a sense of Anne’s personality and character alongside its recitation of historical fact. The Anne that emerges from Benger’s biography is intelligent and thoughtful. Although Anne has her faults, she is also benevolent and sensible: “Neither in Margaret of Savoy, nor Margaret of Navarre, had the union of sense and softness, of gaiety and reserve, been so attractively blended as in Anne Boleyn.”25 Susan Bordo has written that Benger’s biography “breaks new ground […] in her explicit […] analysis of the role played by gender expectations in the breakdown of Anne and Henry’s relationship.”26 Benger did, indeed, have a sophisticated understanding of the gendered dimensions to Anne’s fall, noting that the precise qualities that made Anne so attractive to Henry also caused her downfall; this interpretation of Anne’s character has become a standard trope in historical fiction.27 However, Benger’s biography does not break new ground so much as it expands upon the eighteenth century’s vision of Anne as sentimental victim. Where Benger does beyond her predecessors

 Maitzen, 35.  Lucy Aikin, “A Memoir of the Author,” in Memoirs of the Life of Anne Boleyn, Queen of Henry VIII by Elizabeth Benger (Philadelphia: A. Hart, 1850), vii (iii–x). 25  Benger, Memoirs of the Life of Anne Boleyn, Queen of Henry VIII, 234. 26  Susan Bordo, The Creation of Anne Boleyn: A New Look at England’s Most Notorious Queen (Boston: Mariner Books, 2014), 151. 27  Benger, Memoirs of the Life of Anne Boleyn, Queen of Henry VIII, 289. 23 24

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is in her portrayal of Anne as a woman whose victimhood is tied to her best qualities, rather than her sexuality.28 As I have already noted, Benger is also very interested in Anne’s role as catalyst for the Reformation. Benger presents Anne as a woman central to the great political upheavals of her time, describing her as “the only woman ever permitted to effect a change in our national and political institutions.”29 Benger’s Anne is an innocent victim of Henry’s tyranny, but she is also a political woman, and one who has been “instrumental in introducing and establishing a better system of things.”30 Maitzen writes that memoirs of queens were often used to demonstrate the indirect agency that women had over history, arguing that women’s histories “created a new model of historical explanation, one that was entirely consistent with women’s accepted form of power: influence.”31 Arguably, however, Benger’s Anne moves beyond influence to become a political agent in her own right. In his discussion of Benger’s representation of the suffering female body in history, Greg Kucich argues that female historians “incur a risk, present throughout this feminist historiography, of confining female subjects to the role of passive historical agent.”32 However, here Anne suffers precisely because of her independent historical agency: it was her active advocacy for the Reformation that led to both her husband’s dissatisfaction and the plots of her Catholic enemies. Agnes Strickland’s multi-volume Lives of the Queens of England, produced in collaboration with her silent sister, Elizabeth, was published from 1840 to 1848, and remains one of the most influential accounts of Anne Boleyn. Many of the anecdotes that routinely appear in later novels about Anne—her fictitious lower-class stepmother and her governess Simonette, for example, as well as her sixth finger/nail—have their origins or revival in Strickland’s biography.33 Like Benger’s memoir, to which it is closely  Benger, 320.  Benger, xii. 30  Benger, xii. 31  Maitzen, Gender, Genre, and Victorian Historical Writing, 40. 32  Greg Kucich, “Women’s Historiography and the (Dis) Embodiment of Law: Ann Yearsley, Mary Hays, Elizabeth Benger,” The Wordsworth Circle 33, no. 1 (2002): 5. 33  Anne’s mother outlived Anne and died in 1538, despite Strickland’s assertion that she died in 1512. Numerous historical novelists of the twentieth century, however, take up Strickland’s error and dramatise the death of Anne’s mother as a key event in her childhood, despite the fact that this error was corrected in twentieth-century biographies. Agnes Strickland, Lives of the Queens of England, from the Norman Conquest, Vol. II, 4th ed. (London: H. Colburn, 1854), 566. 28 29

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related, Strickland is interested in Anne’s domestic life and private emotions, and she explicitly connects her biography of Anne to both poetry and the novel: “There is no name in the annals of female royalty over which the enchantments of poetry and romance have cast such bewildering spells as that of Anne Boleyn.”34 Interestingly, however, Strickland deemphasises Anne’s role in the Reformation, instead suggesting that she remained a Catholic.35 The effect of this assertion is to minimise Anne’s importance to history. In Strickland’s account, Anne reverts to the role of (somewhat cynical) influencer. She has become interested in evangelicalism precisely because of its strategic potential, and her only real contribution to the Reformation is that the “translation of the Scriptures was sanctioned through her influence.”36 When compared to Anna Jameson’s assertion, in her Lives of Celebrated Female Sovereigns and Illustrious Women (1831), that Anne “was the immediate cause of the reformation, or establishment of the Protestant religion in England,” Strickland’s lack of belief in Anne’s historical importance is stark.37 What Strickland does show is that Anne was situated within a group of evangelical reformers and that this influence led to the religious reforms that became embedded during her daughter’s reign. In the preface to her biography, Benger announces that Anne will function as an exemplar in her account: In the records of biography, there is, perhaps, no character that more forcibly exemplifies the vanity of human ambition than that of Anne Boleyn: elevated to a throne, devoted to a scaffold, she appears to have been invested with royalty only to offer an example of humiliating degradation, such as modern Europe had never witnessed.38

This version of Anne—a basically good woman undone by ambition and vanity—would become the prevailing leitmotif of her character in twentieth-­century historical fiction. Agnes Strickland has a similar understanding of Anne’s character, writing of “[h]er wit, her beauty, and the

 Strickland, 562.  Strickland, 631. 36  Strickland, 657. 37  Anna Jameson, Lives of Celebrated Female Sovereigns and Illustrious Women, ed. Mary E. Hewitt (Philadelphia: Porter & Coates, 1870), 12. 38  Benger, Memoirs of the Life of Anne Boleyn, Queen of Henry VIII, 11. 34 35

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striking vicissitudes of her fate,” as well as her “vanity and ambition.”39 Jameson is less overtly interested in setting Anne up as a cautionary tale about the dangers of ambition, but does present her as essentially good, if vain: “Ann [sic] Boleyn had nevertheless many good and amiable qualities, which more than compensate for the silly vanity and thoughtlessness of a young beautiful woman.”40 The Anglo-Irish writer Selina Bunbury, in her account of Anne, The Star of the Court, extends upon these warnings about the dangers of ambition, explicitly framing her biography as a cautionary tale for young female readers: The story of Anne Boleyn is fraught with interest and instruction to the young, the lovely and aspiring, who may not indeed fear to fall into the power of another Henry, but may have to encounter, in their passage through life, circumstances as liable to make shipwreck of their hope here and their happiness hereafter, as any that beset the brilliant child of Blickling Hall.41

This emphasis on the supposed cautionary dimensions to Anne’s rise and fall reflects the way that historians of the period explicitly used the past as a means by which to teach improving lessons, directly largely at women, and often children. Bunbury’s work is addressed to “my dear young friends” and thus anticipates the development of Young Adult fictions about Anne.42 Bunbury’s work also presents itself as a form of anti-history. Her first chapter articulates a philosophy of history as crime and the province exclusively of men.43 Women should not seek to involve themselves in history, and when they do, there is nothing but suffering in store: When in these annals we find the name of woman, whose position and character should give her no place in the page of history, our feelings revolt from

 Strickland, Lives of the Queens of England, from the Norman Conquest, Vol. II, 562.  Jameson, Lives of Celebrated Female Sovereigns and Illustrious Women, 199. 41  Selina Bunbury, The Star of the Court, or, The Maid of Honour and Queen of England, Anne Boleyn (London: Grant and Griffith, 1844), 5. 42  Bunbury, iii. For more on Young Adult fiction about Anne Boleyn, see Chap. 10 of this book, and Stephanie Russo, “Contemporary Girlhood and Anne Boleyn in Young Adult Fiction,” Girlhood Studies 13, no. 1 (2020): 17–32. 43  Bunbury, 1. 39 40

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her connexion with crime, and our interests and sympathies long linger round the tales of her sufferings.44

As Miriam  Elizabeth Burstein notes, “ideally, a woman’s life was too uneventful to warrant narration […] a historical woman was a disruption.”45 However, despite Bunbury’s attempt to show the reader the virtues of passivity, what she actually demonstrates are the positive impacts of Anne’s historical agency: her impact on the Reformation, support of charitable ventures and patronage of young evangelical preachers.46 Heidi Hansson has written of the dilemma faced by women writers like Bunbury, caught between religious beliefs that decreed that women belonged in the home and the essentially public nature of a writing career.47 Bunbury’s writing about Anne is caught up in this same bind, and Bunbury, despite herself, thus inadvertently participates in what Alison Booth defines as Anna Jameson’s central project: “to supplement, indeed profoundly to revise Western biographical history by representing the attainments and attributes of women, and to provide role models to an audience of her peers.”48 Another motif that arises in women’s memoirs of Anne is that of a personal reformation. This trope is one of the few that does not carry forward into twentieth-century history fiction, due to changing standards of morality and, perhaps, shifting understandings of the role of the royal family. In nineteenth-century women’s histories, Anne’s queenship irrevocably changes her character, making her more serious, quiet and religious. Benger describes Anne as becoming “sensible of the onerous duties attached to pre-eminence,” only a few days after her coronation.49 Bunbury agrees, “Anne became greatly changed: it is to be hoped that she felt her own sinfulness.”50 Strickland notes approvingly that Anne “became grave  Bunbury, 2.   Miriam Elizabeth Burstein, Narrating Women’s History in Britain, 1770–1902 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 117. 46  Bunbury, The Star of the Court, or, The Maid of Honour and Queen of England, Anne Boleyn, 125. 47  Heidi Hansson, “Selina Bunbury, Religion, and the Woman Writer,” in The Irish Book in English, 1800–1891, ed. James H. Murphy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 327 (322–330). 48  Alison Booth, “The Lessons of the Medusa: Anna Jameson and Collective Biographies of Women,” Victorian Studies 42, no. 2 (1999): 259. 49  Benger, Memoirs of the Life of Anne Boleyn, Queen of Henry VIII, 280. 50  Bunbury, The Star of the Court, or, The Maid of Honour and Queen of England, Anne Boleyn, 125. 44 45

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and composed in manner […] and spent her hours of domestic retirement with her ladies.”51 The vainglorious, flirtatious Anne of the first half of Strickland’s account may have her charms, but in order to be the sympathetic victim, Strickland must bring her back within the acceptable boundaries of Victorian femininity. Women’s historical writing about Anne shaped the way that she was taken up in historical fiction of the period and beyond. The portrait of Anne as an essentially virtuous woman seduced by ambition was to become a standard way of thinking about her narrative. With their works sitting at the borders of history and fiction, writers like Benger and Strickland carved out a place for women in history. As Billie Melman writes, with “the very inclusion of women in public memory, [Strickland’s] Lives blurs the accepted distinctions between it and the private, or feminine, memory and feminizes notions of power and politics.”52 By writing about the domestic lives of queens and other noteworthy women, the female historians of the nineteenth century both wrote women into history and encouraged a fascination with women like Anne that would manifest itself in the hundreds of historical fictions that would follow.

Anne and the Gothic Novel The publication of Sophia Lee’s novel The Recess in 1783–85, which told the story of Mary Queen of Scots’ fictional twin daughters by a secret marriage, inaugurated a trend for historical fiction about the “secret” (usually entirely fictional) stories of Tudor monarchs. As Richard Maxwell outlines in his study of the historical novel in Europe, Sophia Lee’s novel was “loyal” to the secret history model, which had previously been used by Antoine Prévost in his The English Philosopher, or the History of Mr Cleveland (1731–39), which took the form of an autobiography of a fictional illegitimate son of Cromwell.53 While similar novels about Anne Boleyn rarely present alternative monarchs (at least, not until the twenty-­ first-­century counterfactuals), they do present stories of characters who supposedly have had a shadowy, hitherto unknown role to play in great  Strickland, Lives of the Queens of England, from the Norman Conquest, Vol. II, 659.  Billie Melman, “Gender, History and Memory: The Invention of Women’s Past in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries,” History and Memory 5, no. 1 (1993): 14. 53  Richard Maxwell, The Historical Novel in Europe, 1650–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 47. 51 52

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historical events, and thus present the possibility of an alternative history. With the publication of Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent (1800) and Walter Scott’s Waverly novels (1814–31), too, historical fiction became one of the most important novelistic forms of the nineteenth century.54 Anne’s story, with its dual public and private dimensions, and its Gothic horror tropes, seemed tailor-made to appeal to nineteenth-century audiences raised on Gothic novels, often set in the medieval past, and the emergent form of the realist historical novel. Anne had already featured as a secondary character in one late eighteenth-­century historical novel in the Romantic mode: the anonymous Historical Tales: A Novel (1790). The novel tells the story of the fictional Eudocia, whom Anne meets at the French court. Anne’s story functions as a cautionary tale about the virtues of the private country life, as opposed to the corrupted world of the court: the novel concludes by noting that “should ever your young hearts sigh for a Court, this, like a powerful talisman, shall check the wish.”55 The Anne of Historical Tales is basically virtuous, which is signalled by her friendship with the exemplary Eudocia. Anne, however, is swiftly led astray by her vanity: “though her heart was free as an infant’s from one criminal desire, its wish for admiration was excessive.”56 Anne eventually recognises her folly and writes about her despair and regret to Eudocia from the Tower as she awaits her execution. Historical Tales is indicative of the way that historical fiction of the nineteenth century would construct Anne as Romantic victim, trapped by her ambition and vanity, and persuaded to act against her own better instincts by her power-hungry family. Historical Tales also anticipates the way that later historical novels often narrate Anne’s story through the perspective of an onlooker and, in the process, push Anne into the margins of an otherwise fictional tale. Anne is, in fact, only an intermittent presence in Eudocia’s story. What is so striking about the Gothic novels that take up Anne as a character is that they seem to be, on closer inspection, about anything but Anne. As Jerome de Groot notes of novels of the period, “novels about the Tudor period were more interested in the broader religious and 54  Ian Duncan provides a good summation of Scott’s influence on the development of the historical novel. Ian Duncan, Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 55  Historical Tales: A Novel (London: C. Dilly, 1790), 210. 56  Historical Tales, 210.

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political issues associated with the time” than the characters whose lives they purport to narrate.57 Francis Lathom’s multi-volume Gothic novel Mystic Events, or, The Vision of the Tapestry (1830) is perhaps the novel least interested in Anne herself, despite being notionally “about” Anne. Lathom does not let Anne speak until near the end of the first volume, excises Anne altogether from the third volume and focuses far more tightly on the almost totally invented romantic exploits of her brother George, which involve convoluted narratives about kidnappings and sex with a string of mysterious ladies.58 The novel centres on the exploits of the knight Leolin, who has fallen in love with Anne at first sight: “did I ever perceive any one so eminently lovely, so enchantingly fair, as the damsel mounted on the milk-white palfrey, with the silver trappings, who now bends upon me her soul-subduing eye.”59 Anne returns Leolin’s love after he slips her a mystical love apple given to him by his benefactor, the mysterious Count de Beaumarchais. It later transpires that the Count is Leolin’s father, who has used alchemy to make himself appear as youthful as Leolin. However, Henry soon turns his attention towards Anne, and by the end of Volume 2, Anne has submitted to Henry’s attentions, despite her personal distaste for his suit and lack of interest in power. Anne does, however, have forebodings of harm: “I have, my dear brother, a strange foreboding, an awful presentiment, which whispers to my heart that true felicity will never be my portion upon earth.”60 By the end of the novel, Anne is Queen, but has lost Henry’s love, while Leolin, through a complicated series of events, has married her (fictional) younger sister Amabel, who had been presumed dead for most of the novel. That Mystic Events seems to be about Anne but is, in fact, interested in anything but Anne is apparent in the novel’s treatment of Anne and George’s executions. Lathom simply writes that “[o]f the termination of the unfortunate lives of sir George and Anne Boleyn, history affords the  Jerome de Groot, The Historical Novel (London: Routledge, 2009), 76.  Montague Summers has suggested that Lathom was homosexual and that this accounts for his interest in George’s sex life. However, there is no evidence to support this assertion. What is clear about Mystic Events is that the novel is far more interested in George, and the relationship between George and Leolin, than it is about Anne or her relationships. A queer reading of the novel, then, is certainly possible. Montague Summers, The Gothic Quest (London: Fortune, 1938), 316. 59  Francis Lathom, Mystic Events, or, The Vision of the Tapestry: A Romantic Legend of the Days of Anne Boleyn (London: A.K. Newman & Co, 1830), 1.73. 60  Lathom, 2.148. 57 58

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most satisfactory record.”61 Lathom has given Elizabeth an ahistoric twin brother by this point in the narrative, but, for unknown reasons, Lathom does not use this narrative element to stage a counterfactual history. As Marian Kensler notes about the Anne of Mystic Events, “this Anne was so inactive as to be depressing; it’s like she knew that even the author didn’t even really want her there.”62 What is important to Lathom is not Anne, but the uses to which the Tudor past could be put. Lathom’s novel constructs the Tudor past as a quasi-mystical place; Mystic Events is history put to the services of fantasy. It is the hazily defined past often seen in Gothic novels, from Horace Walpole’s 1764 genre-inaugurating The Castle of Otranto onwards. Little attempt is made at verisimilitude: what is important is the effect of the past.63 William Harrison Ainsworth’s Windsor Castle (1842) cleaves much closer to the story of Anne’s life and death, but again uses her story as the backdrop for a supernatural Gothic tale. The novel dramatises the exploits of the demonic ghost Herne the Hunter and the various attempts to destroy him. The novel also centres on the fate of the beautiful Mabel Lyndwood, who catches the eye of the King even as he woos Anne Boleyn. As Stephen Carver rightly comments, “Herne is the most interesting character in the narrative,” and Ainsworth is evidently rather more interested in this legendary Faustian figure than Anne.64 Despite the similar supernatural trappings, the world of Windsor Castle is far darker than the world of Mystic Events. While the mystical occurrences in Lathom’s novel contrive to bring about a relatively happy ending, Anne’s death notwithstanding, the world of Windsor Castle is an unremittingly chaotic one. As Melman writes of Ainsworth’s The Tower, he “extracts [the Tudors] from an ordered and manageable development-narrative and [tells] instead a story of the past as a place of arbitrariness and disorder.”65 Other critics

 Lathom, 4.277.  Marian Kensler, “Anne Boleyn Novels: Francis Lathom, Mystic Events,” Anne Boleyn Novels, 2014, https://anneboleynnovels.wordpress.com/2014/10/31/1091/ 63  That historical accuracy was not foremost amongst Lathom’s concerns is demonstrated by the repeated references to Shakespeare in the novel, who is apparently the “rising genius” of the period, despite the novel being set 40 years before his birth. Lathom, Mystic Events, or, The Vision of the Tapestry: A Romantic Legend of the Days of Anne Boleyn, 1.86. 64  Stephen James Carver, The Life and Works of the Lancashire Novelist William Harrison Ainsworth, 1805–1882 (Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2003), 289. 65  Melman, “The Pleasures of Tudor Horror,” 48 61 62

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have not been so generous. Andrew Sanders claims that Ainsworth had “no real idea about history.”66 Appropriately enough for this tale of demonic beings, when we first meet Anne we are told that her eyes possess an “irresistible witchery,” although her only crime, at least at this point, is her “strong tendency to coquetry.”67 This Anne loves Thomas Wyatt, but “though it might cost her a struggle […] love would yield to ambition.”68 Unlike the flat paragon of Mystic Events, Ainsworth’s Anne is far more temperamental: she flirts with Wyatt, vows revenge upon Wolsey and bursts into tears in front of a prophetic Queen Catherine. Ainsworth’s portrait of Henry is hardly flattering, either. His attention is quickly captured by Mabel, and he declares to Anne before their marriage that if ever even hears a breath of suspicion about her infidelity, he will immediately put her to death.69 Anne declares her love for Henry Norris at the end of the novel, but is innocent of actual infidelity.70 Even the demonic Herne is disgusted by Henry, telling him that “I know your motives better; I know you have no proof of her guilt, and that in your heart of hearts you believe her innocent. But you destroy her because you would wed Jane Seymour!”71 Henry’s tyranny is such that his place in Hell with Herne is assured.

Anne Boleyn and the Realist Historical Novel Both Mystic Events and Windsor Castle are exemplars of nineteenth-­ century Gothic Tudorism, in which “the days of Anne Boleyn” are presented as a quasi-magical period of equal parts romance and horror. The supernatural events that proliferate both narratives reflect nineteenth-­ century ambivalence about the past. However, as the Gothic craze subsided and the historical novel came to have a more realist cast, following Walter Scott, this ambivalence extends into novels that feature no supernatural elements. The realist historical novels that consider Anne’s narrative demonstrate a preoccupation with narratives of female suffering that 66  Andrew Sanders, The Victorian Historical Novel 1840–1880 (London: Macmillan Press, 1978), 33. 67  W.H. Ainsworth, Windsor Castle (London: Collins Clear-Type Press, n.d.), 34. 68  Ainsworth, 42. 69  Ainsworth, 229. 70  The novel is thus the only novel, to my knowledge, besides Alison Weir’s 2017 A King’s Obsession, to suggest that Anne loved Henry Norris. 71  Ainsworth, Windsor Castle, 404.

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nevertheless align them with earlier Gothic novels. As Rosemary Mitchell writes of novels about Lady Jane Grey in the period, these novels were “clearly influenced by the conventions of the Gothic novels, in which the past featured as a dangerous and dramatic arena where violence and superstition threatened the vulnerable.”72 Katherine Thomson’s novel Anne Boleyn: An Historical Romance (1842) is perhaps the best exemplar of this style of nineteenth-century historical novel. Thomson’s Anne is a Romantic heroine (albeit not a perfect one), vulnerable to the machinations of villains (usually Catholic), ambitious family members (her mother) and the prey of the most dangerous tyrant of all: her husband. Contra Susan Bordo’s claim that Mary Hastings Bradley’s 1912 The Favor of Kings is the “first full-length novel about Anne,” Katherine Thomson’s novel is the first historical novel to tightly focus on Anne’s story if one discounts Madame d’Aulnoy’s Novels of Elizabeth, Queen of England, examined in the previous chapter, on the basis of its generic instability.73 Thomson’s Anne Boleyn places Anne firmly at its centre, even when the focalisation shifts to Thomas or his fictional cousin Mildred. Even the conversations that take place between Thomas and Mildred are usually about Anne. The novel features what would become a pattern of writing about the men in Anne’s life well into the twenty-first century: Wyatt loves Anne, but Anne loves Henry Percy and does not love the King. In the preface of the novel, Thomson outlines her approach to representing Anne: It would be impossible to touch upon the career of Anne without adverting to those great principles which she contributed, during her short period of influence, to support; or to omit a grateful remembrance of those martyrs whom she secretly aided, and by whom her faith was, in return, strengthened and enlightened.74

True to her word, Thomson’s Anne is an ardent evangelical, but has largely been influenced in her religious beliefs by Mildred Wyatt, who is 72  Rosemary A.  Mitchell, “The Nine Lives of the Nine Days Queen: From Religious Heroine in Romantic Victim,” in Clio’s Daughters: British Women Making History, 1790–1899, ed. Lynette Felber (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2007), 97–122. 73  Bordo, The Creation of Anne Boleyn: A New Look at England’s Most Notorious Queen, 161. 74  Katherine Thomson, Anne Boleyn: An Historical Romance (London: Henry Colburn, 1842), vii–viii.

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even more perfect than her mistress. Thomson’s Anne is virtuous and kind, but becomes somewhat corrupted by the Henrician court and turns to ambition after her marriage to Percy is prevented by the King and Wolsey. This narrative would later become a staple of historical fiction about Anne in the twentieth century. Anne’s parents, particularly her mother Elizabeth, are ambitious and unscrupulous in pushing Anne into the path of Henry. As Thomson writes, however, “parental influence, evil counsellors, the habit in which we all indulge of making what is agreeable to our own pride appear the right path; disappointed affections [and] wounded pride,” all contribute to breaking down Anne’s resistance.75 Largely abandoned by her parents, separated from her true love and living in the dangerous world of the court, Thomson sensitively accounts for the impossible circumstances which Anne must navigate. Anne does become blinded by ambition, but she does so because of a system in which women are treated as powerless commodities through which power and influence can be accrued or lost. Thomson’s real contempt is reserved for Henry. She describes him as “repelling; a countenance without a single redeeming expression, gross, heavy, and unvarying, and in later days becoming, from the indulgence of every evil propensity, at once gloomy and almost imbecile.”76 Like Benger, Thomson foregrounds the gendered dimensions of the collapse of Henry and Anne’s relationship. When Anne becomes increasingly serious and devout after her coronation—another manifestation of the personal reformation topos seen in women’s historical writing—the fickle Henry disapproves: “that petty jealousy of the superior influence of a wife, which men of ill-regulated minds often display, had already eaten deeply into the affections of Henry.”77 Henry’s attentions thus turn to Jane Seymour, who is far more submissive and naïve than the intelligent, thoughtful Anne. Thomson does not shy away from representing Anne’s faults or, at least, attributes that would be considered faults to the nineteenth-century mind. She admits that Anne ruled over a flirtatious court. However, Anne’s fall is attributed to her evangelicalism and Henry’s diminishing interest in a wife whose capacities far outstripped his own. However, if Anne is flawed in life, at death she has reached transcendence. By the end of the novel, when Anne is sentenced to death, Anne’s religious devotions  Thomson, 1.207.  Thomson, 1.67–8. 77  Thomson, 2.157–8. 75 76

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have rendered her almost otherworldly, the very picture of wounded innocence: “In this appeal to Him […] she stood, for some moments, absorbed; her hands upraised – her head thrown back – and never was sculptured figure of Piety more beautiful.”78 Anne is both a cautionary tale and a Romantic victim. Unlike novels about Lady Jane Grey, in which “romance and Gothic horror are frequently subordinated to the portrait of Grey as first and foremost a victim of the political machinations of her family,” Thomson’s novel combines romance with a note of caution about Anne’s behaviour.79 A duo of Protestant novels from the second half of the century provides two different visions of Anne’s historical agency. Anne appears in the novel Westminster Abbey, or, The Days of Reformation by Emma Robinson (1854). As Jerome de Groot notes, Westminster Abbey “celebrates the coming of Protestantism” and is rather more interested in “tracing the path of religious and political change” than Anne’s life.80 Anne is no more than a minor figure in the novel, but when she does appear, she is characterised as the perfect and innocent victim of Henry: “the fit heroine of the strangest romance ever devised by that great legendary  – reality.”81 Robinson does not go on to actually give the reader that romance, however. Anne’s historical agency is confined to her influence, and that influence is tied to her body. Anne is a devoted evangelical in this novel, but her real value is her sexual appeal to Henry which, in turn, will bring religious reform to his kingdom. Perhaps surprisingly, Anne would emerge as a much more active historical player in a didactic children’s novel produced for use in Sunday Schools. Emma Leslie’s The Chained Book, written for the Sunday School Union in 1878, presents Anne as one of the women who championed the distribution of the English Bible. Taught about the vernacular Bible by Marguerite de Navarre, Anne is initially not as enthused by evangelicalism as her mistress, but is later inspired by a young girl, Muriel Tewkesbury, and decides to support the faith in England by championing the English Bible. After Anne’s execution, Muriel ponders the fact that “but for Queen Anne Boleyn, we people of England might never have gained permission  Thomson, 3.246.  Mitchell, “The Nine Lives of the Nine Days Queen,” 114. 80  de Groot, The Historical Novel, 76. 81  Emma Robinson, Westminster Abbey, or, The Days of the Reformation (London: Routledge, Warnes & Routledge, 1859), 208. 78 79

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to read the Bible.”82 As Burstein writes of The Chained Book, “this feminized genealogy of English Protestantism rules out women as producers of the Bible as object, let alone theologians” but “nevertheless suggests that women generate the conditions under which biblical knowledge is possible.”83 Anne is a key link in this chain of female religious reformers, a crucial means of ensuring that the ordinary people of England had the access to Scripture that they craved. Moreover, Anne actively encourages Muriel to overcome her hesitancy to display her learning in public forums—an act that, as Burstein writes, turn “literacy into its own form of historical action and […] heroism.”84 When compared to her rather more passive, if just as devout, incarnation in Westminster Abbey and in many of the dramas examined in the next chapter, this Anne is remarkably active and a champion of women’s intellectual achievements. It is a vision of Anne that has surprising resonances with the feisty feminist Annes of the next century.

Late-Century Annes At the end of the nineteenth century, two further novels about Anne were published: 1899’s Defender of the Faith: A Romance by Frank Mathew and Cold Steel by M.P.  Shiel, published in the same year but subsequently revised in 1929. Both novels were written in the wake of P. Friedmann’s biography of Anne Boleyn, published in 1884. Friedmann’s biography was so influential it was to remain the standard biography well into the twentieth century. Friedmann presents a rather different portrait of Anne than the one we have seen in historical fiction to this point. His Anne is an active political agent, a power-player and a scheming, ambitious woman who knows exactly how to manipulate Henry: “She played her game with such tact that week after week her empire became stronger.”85 She is also widely despised by the court for her temper.86 Most notably, Friedmann suggests that Anne may have been guilty of something, even if not the specific crimes for which she was executed:  Emma Leslie, The Chained Book (London: The Sunday School Union, 1878), 61.  Miriam Elizabeth Burstein, Victorian Reformations: Historical Fiction and Religious Controversy, 1820–1900 (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2014), 107. 84  Burstein, 108. 85  Paul Friedmann, Anne Boleyn, ed. Josephine Wilkinson (Stroud: Amberley, 2013), 34. 86  Friedmann, 34. 82 83

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But while I am strongly of the opinion that the indictments were drawn up at random, and that there was no trustworthy evidence to sustain the specific charges, I am by no means convinced that Anne did not commit offences quite as grave as most of those of which she was accused.87

Friedmann gave writers a template for an Anne that could walk the line between innocence and guilt. While Friedmann gives Anne far more political agency than she is usually given, he also presents her as a woman open to using sex to obtain what she wanted. Anne became a late Victorian femme fatale, in other words; a dangerous, glamorous woman whose smarts and sexual appeal both raised her up and brought her down. Frank James Mathew was a Catholic writer, and so his Defender of the Faith is largely concerned with religious schism. Robert Aske, a leader of the Pilgrimage of Grace, is a major character in the novel, and Cromwell, despite being either absent or insignificant in most nineteenth-century writing about Anne, is represented as a wily Machiavellian schemer. Defender of the Faith’s primary focaliser is, unusually, Henry Percy, who is Anne’s true love. While Mathew’s Anne is flirtatious and witty, Henry VIII is presented as a monstrous domestic abuser. In the first scene in which we see Anne and Henry interact as Percy spies on them, Henry chokes Anne, and when she struggles, “he still throttled her.”88 There is something disturbing about Anne and Henry’s relationship: in the same scene, he pinches her aggressively, and wavers from hostile to loving, telling Anne that to keep his love she must be cheerful at all times because “while you laugh you can do anything with me.”89 Henry appears to delight in playing pointlessly malicious games with people, vowing to Percy, for instance, that he will not have Anne put to death even while he plots her execution. Mathew’s Anne, despite the author’s Catholicism, is presented with sympathy. Mathew invents a post-imprisonment meeting of Anne and Henry, which gives Anne the opportunity to talk extensively about their relationship and her history with men. She says that “I have given gold and costly presents to many. Repulsive to men, I had to bribe their devotion. I have always been too lavish with kindness.”90 This Anne is tired of  Friedmann, 262.  Frank Mathew, Defender of the Faith: A Romance (London: John Lane: The Bodley Head, 1899), 87. 89  Mathew, 87. 90  Mathew, 163. 87 88

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being the plaything of more powerful men: “I am weary of hankering after approval like a bird hopping for customary crumbs in the water.”91 It is Cromwell, not Anne, who has brought religious division to England. Anne is simply a victim of men’s desires. Defender of the Faith offers, perhaps unexpectedly, a nuanced representation of an Anne buffeted about by the whims of an arbitrary monarch. By the end of the novel, when Henry’s gaze has settled on Katherine Howard, our sense of Anne as merely one in a long list of female victims of Henry’s tyranny is confirmed. If Mathew’s Anne is treated with compassion and sympathy, the Anne of M.P. Shiel’s Cold Steel is the most straightforwardly vicious Anne of the century, if not in 500 years of writing about Anne. This Anne is, ahistorically and unusually, blonde and voluptuous: “quite an out-push of kerchiefed bust, and frizzy straw hair, and a broad brow, and a freckled nose, and a broad mouth.”92 The novel tells an almost incomprehensively complex story about Anne’s attempts to track down Laura Ford, a woman whose beauty has caught Henry’s eye, so that Henry can have sex with her and tire of her, which will allow Anne to retain his long-term love. Anne is described as having “guile and a big ambition,” and evidently does not hesitate to arrange the rape of another woman.93 One suspects Friedmann has been influential here, but this Anne is beyond anything Friedmann imagined. Shiel’s Anne is so aggressive that even her fictional illegitimate half-brother Sidney is terrified of her. When Anne becomes involved in a physical altercation with Laura’s protective sister Bessie, Anne is represented as tantamount to a monster: “spittle speckled her lip, her dishevelled visage showing like a chaos of sunset flushed.”94 Stalking the Ford sisters across England while pretending to have the sweating sickness, there is little this terrifying Anne will not do. At the end of the novel, after Bessie has convinced the King that she is Laura, slept with him, conceived his illegitimate child and drowned herself, Anne appears to be back on the ascendancy. However, Henry then receives words that Clement will not grant his request for a divorce: “King Henry stamped his foot; and with that stamp Mediæval Europe ceased; and modern England sprang.”95 Shiel was involved in the Decadent  Mathew, 165.  M.P. Shiel, Cold Steel (London: Victor Gollancz, 1929), 49. 93  Shiel, 46. 94  Shiel, 201. 95  Shiel, 304. 91 92

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­ ovement of the 1890s, and as William L. Svitavsky writes, adherents to m this movement believed that “society had worn itself out—its scientific progress, its rejection of older beliefs, and its social failures alike bringing about weaker bodies, weaker morals, and weaker culture.”96 In Shiel’s later writing, this belief in social degradation manifested itself in an obsessive fear of other races, and the so-called threat they presented to English purity. Anne’s role in bringing about this modern world would be, to Shiel, a signal of her corruption, not an indication of her enlightenment. His portrait of a monstrous Anne, prepared to do literally anything she can to hold on to power, positions women at the heart of the degradation of modern England. Brian Stableford writes that Shiel has been accused of “anticlericalism, of overt racism, of anti-Semitism, of incipient Nazism, of social Darwinism, and of commitment to the morality of negative eugenics.”97 Cold Steel suggests that one should add “misogyny” to that list: it is the nastiest portrait of Anne Boleyn in centuries. Anne was evidently still a useful tool for novelists interested in thinking through what it meant to be English.

Scenes from the Life of Anne Boleyn A sub-genre that emerged out of the historical novel in the nineteenth century was the historical short story. Short stories filled the pages of a growing number of newspapers, journals and periodicals—a quick and easy way to fill the public appetite for stories about the Tudors. A number of short stories narrating brief, dramatic scenes in the life of Anne Boleyn appeared throughout the century, including “Imaginary Conversations: Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn” by Walter Savage Landor (1824), “Two Scenes in the Life of Anne Boleyn” by L.E.L (1837), “Norris and Anne Boleyn” by John Overs (1844) and “Annie Boleyn’s New Year” by H.S. Lachman (1880). The latter text appeared in Minnesota’s Princeton Union on 30 December 1880, and tells a seasonally appropriate story about the early days of Henry’s relationship with Anne, in which Henry bestows the gift 96  William L. Svitavsky, “From Decadence to Racial Antagonism: M.P. Shiel at the Turn of the Century,” Science Fiction Studies 31, no. 1 (2004): 2. 97  Brian Stableford, “The Politics of Evolution: Philosophical Themes in the Speculative Fiction of M.P.  Shiel,” in Shiel in Diverse Hands: A Collection of Essays, ed. A.  Reynolds Morse (Cleveland: The Reynolds Morse Foundation, 1983), 372 (369–392).

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of the title of the Marchioness of Pembroke on Anne as a gift.98 John Overs, friend of Charles Dickens, similarly opens his story at Christmas, with an unlikely attack by Henry Percy on Hever Castle. From that point onwards, the story unfolds in a predictable manner, with Anne advocating for religious reform, and undone by a conspiracy of Catholics. What is notable about the story is an unusually evil Mark Smeaton and the invention of his dwarf sister, Mabel, who is described as a “little mis-shaped being” in the service of Princess Mary.99 This alarmingly ableist story ends with the people weeping over the death of Anne, while Mabel is killed by a mob for her role in Anne’s destruction. It is hard to know here whether Overs is trying to reflect perceptions of disability that he believed were held at the Tudor court or whether he was trying to suggest that Mabel’s disability was a reflection of her own character; certainly, her Catholicism makes her suspect in this story.100 The popular nineteenth-century poet L.E.L is responsible for perhaps the most dramatically satisfying of this group of texts. Her story hinges on two scenes taken from the beginning and end of Anne and Henry’s relationship. The first takes place on Valentine’s Day and involves Henry asking Anne to give him one of her rings. Anne lies and tells him that the ring belongs to her mother: it was actually given to her by Henry Percy. In the second scene, Anne is in the Tower after her arrest and has just sent Henry her famous, disputed Tower letter. In response, Henry sends the following: “Henry Tudor returns to Anna Boleyn the ring which Lord Henry gave her.”101 Walter Savage Landor’s imaginary conversation is rather rougher: in it, a drunken Henry confronts Anne in the Tower, berates her about the parentage of the baby boy she has miscarried earlier in the year and then draws her into a theological dispute. Anne is entirely blameless,

98  The text of this story can be read at Marian Kensler, “Annie Boleyn’s New Year by Mrs. H.S.  Lachman,” Anne Boleyn Novels, 2012, https://anneboleynnovels.wordpress. com/2012/12/26/annie-boleyns-new-year-by-mrs-h-s-lachman-1880/ 99  John Overs, “Norris and Anne Boleyn,” in Evenings of a Working Man, Being the Occupation of His Scanty Leisure (London: T.C. Newby, 1844), 126 (115–175). 100  An account of perceptions of dwarfism in the Tudor court can be found in Christopher William Wells, “Court ‘Monsters’: Deformity in the Western European Royal Courts between 1500 and 1700,” Preternature: Critical and Historical Studies on the Preternatural 7, no. 2 (2018): 182–214. 101  L.E. Landon, “Two Scenes in the Life of Anna Boleyn,” in The Cabinet of Modern Art and Literary Souvenir, ed. Alaric A. Watts (London: Whittaker & Co., 1837), 92 (86–92).

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however, and reacts only mildly to her husband’s invective.102 The two scenes are a neat encapsulation of what unites, and what divides, nineteenth-­century representations of Anne. L.E.L.’s Anne is innocent but does have a secret past and another love that she conceals. Landor’s Anne, however, is purely virtuous and good and apparently quite content to let Henry viciously abuse her. Both presume Anne’s innocence, but while L.E.L is prepared to shade nuance into Anne’s character, Landor’s more overtly religious text is not.

Conclusion Nineteenth-century historical fiction presents us with several possible ways of understanding Anne. While Thomson’s Anne helped to define the contours of her narrative that would persist into historical fictions of the twentieth century, Shiel’s Anne is one of the strangest and most idiosyncratic Annes to be seen across five centuries of writing. What the nineteenth century does for writing about Anne is to demonstrate how useful she could be to authors of historical fiction. Her story could be made to signify a range of possible meanings about women, power, history and nation. The novel was such a capacious genre that nineteenth-century writers could place Anne’s story alongside fantastical stories about demonic beings and mystical love apples, amuse young female readers looking for tales of love or adventure or deploy that same story to educate children in Sunday Schools. In the next chapter, I will explore the ways in which Anne was represented on stage in the same period, demonstrating both continuities and divergences in patterns of representation in historical fiction.

References Primary Sources Historical Tales: A Novel. London: C. Dilly, 1790. Aikin, Lucy. “A Memoir of the Author.” In Memoirs of the Life of Anne Boleyn, Queen of Henry VIII by Elizabeth Benger, iii–x. Philadelphia: A. Hart, 1850. Ainsworth, W.H. Windsor Castle. London: Collins Clear-Type Press, n.d.

102  Walter Savage Landor, “Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn,” Imaginary Conversations and Poems, accessed 8 November 2018, https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/l/landor/walter_savage/imaginary-conversations/part1.5.html

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Benger, Elizabeth. Memoirs of the Life of Anne Boleyn, Queen of Henry VIII. Third Edit. Philadelphia: A. Hart, 1850. Bunbury, Selina. The Star of the Court, or, The Maid of Honour and Queen of England, Anne Boleyn. London: Grant and Griffith, 1844. Friedmann, Paul. Anne Boleyn. Edited by Josephine Wilkinson. Stroud: Amberley, 2013. Jameson, Anna. Lives of Celebrated Female Sovereigns and Illustrious Women. Edited by Mary E. Hewitt. Philadelphia: Porter & Coates, 1870. Kensler, Marian. “Annie Boleyn’s New Year by Mrs H.S. Lachman.” Anne Boleyn Novels, 2012. https://anneboleynnovels.wordpress.com/2012/12/26/ annie-boleyns-new-year-by-mrs-h-s-lachman-1880/. Landon, L.E. “Two Scenes in the Life of Anna Boleyn.” In The Cabinet of Modern Art and Literary Souvenir, edited by Alaric A. Watts, 86–92. London: Whittaker & Co., 1837. Landor, Walter Savage. “Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn.” Imaginary Conversations and Poems. Accessed November 8, 2018. https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/l/ landor/walter_savage/imaginary-conversations/part1.5.html. Lathom, Francis. Mystic Events, or, The Vision of the Tapestry: A Romantic Legend of the Days of Anne Boleyn. London: A.K. Newman & Co, 1830. Leslie, Emma. The Chained Book. London: The Sunday School Union, 1878. Mathew, Frank. Defender of the Faith: A Romance. London: John Lane: The Bodley Head, 1899. Overs, John. “Norris and Anne Boleyn.” In Evenings of a Working Man, Being the Occupation of His Scanty Leisure, 115–75. London: T.C. Newby, 1844a. Robinson, Emma. Westminster Abbey, or, The Days of the Reformation. London: Routledge, Warnes & Routledge, 1859. Shiel, M.P. Cold Steel. London: Victor Gollancz, 1929. Strickland, Agnes. Lives of the Queens of England, from the Norman Conquest, Vol. II. 4th ed. London: H. Colburn, 1854. Thomson, Katherine. Anne Boleyn: An Historical Romance. London: Henry Colburn, 1842.

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Sanders, Andrew. The Victorian Historical Novel 1840–1880. London: Macmillan Press, 1978. Schutte, Valerie. “The Fictional Queen Katherine Howard.” Early Modern Women 12, no. 2 (2018): 146–50. Spongberg, Mary. Women Writers and the Nation’s Past 1790–1860. London: Bloomsbury, 2018. Stableford, Brian. “The Politics of Evolution: Philosophical Themes in the Speculative Fiction of M.P. Shiel.” In Shiel in Diverse Hands: A Collection of Essays, edited by A. Reynolds Morse, 369–92. Cleveland: The Reynolds Morse Foundation, 1983. String, Tatiana C., and Marcus Bull. “Introduction.” In Tudorism: Historical Imagination and the Appropriation of the Sixteenth Century, edited by Tatiana C. String and Marcus Bull, 1–12. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Summers, Montague. The Gothic Quest. London: Fortune, 1938. Svitavsky, William L. “From Decadence to Racial Antagonism: M.P. Shiel at the Turn of the Century.” Science Fiction Studies 31, no. 1 (2004): 1–24. Sweet, Rosemary. Antiquaries: The Discovery of the Past in Eighteenth-Century Britain. London: Hambledon and London, 2004. Tomaini, Thea. The Corpse as Text: Disinterment and Antiquarian Enquiry, 1700–1900. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2017. Weir, Alison. The Lady in the Tower: The Fall of Anne Boleyn. New York: Ballantine Books, 2010. Wells, Christopher William. “Court ‘Monsters’: Deformity in the Western European Royal Courts between 1500 and 1700.” Preternature: Critical and Historical Studies on the Preternatural 7, no. 2 (2018): 182–214. Worth, George J. William Harrison Ainsworth. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1972.

CHAPTER 6

Anne Boleyn on the Nineteenth-Century Stage

The Victorian theatre was the mass entertainment of its day, drawing audiences in their thousands to productions of every conceivable form of drama, from Shakespeare to pantomime. Sara Hudston describes the Victorian theatre as “a truly popular entertainment for all classes, urban and rural, an aspect of life which penetrated even the sacred domestic interior to respectable Victorian homes.”1 The melodrama was one of the Victorian theatre’s most popular forms, and was designed to, as Michael Gilmour argues, “elicit emotional or visceral responses from spectators.”2 Melodramas about Anne Boleyn walking bravely to her execution could wring tears of sympathy from spectators, and so her life and death continued to be popular subjects of the theatre over the course of the century. It was in 1830 that Anne became the subject of Donizetti’s opera Anna Bolena; the theatrical, life-and-death contours of her story made it uniquely suited to the operatic form. Kerry Powell has noted, too, that the theatre was “uniquely alluring to women of the Victorian period.”3 Women were acting, seeing and writing plays, and these plays often centred on the lives of women. In 1876, Anna Dickinson would be the first female playwright 1  Sara Hudston, Victorian Theatricals: From Menageries to Melodrama (London: Methuen, 2000), 3. 2  Michael Gilmour, “Victorian Melodrama,” Literature Compass 12, no. 7 (2015): 344–57. 3  Kerry Powell, “Gendering Victorian Theatre,” in The Cambridge History of British Theatre, ed. Joseph Donohue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 352 (352–68).

© The Author(s) 2020 S. Russo, The Afterlife of Anne Boleyn, Queenship and Power, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58613-3_6

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to write a full-length drama about Anne Boleyn. Women on the Victorian stage could be innocent maidens or femme fatales, or something in between, and plays about Anne were no different. A survey of Anne Boleyn’s appearances on stage in the nineteenth century demonstrates, yet again, the dizzying array of uses to which she could be put. There is no one overriding influential drama about Anne Boleyn from the period. Many of the plays considered in this chapter were never produced, or, if they were, details about these productions have been lost. We also have references to plays that were produced for which no script survives. It is highly likely that more plays of the period will be unearthed. Many of these Anne Boleyn dramas were probably written to be private theatricals, read aloud in domestic settings for the amusement of middle-­ class families. However, their status as private entertainments does not mean that these Anne Boleyn dramas are not significant. What they demonstrate is how Victorian audiences understand Anne, and the ways in which her story could be put to the service of entertainment. Moreover, private theatricals were often conceived of as a space where women could take part in theatre: as Susan Schuyler writes, private theatricals were “considered appropriate for the production and consumption of ‘respectable’ Victorians—particularly bourgeois women.”4 Whether or not these women were reading historical writing about the court of Henry VIII, they were almost certainly encountering stories about Anne in either popular novels or dramas. The plays in which Anne Boleyn appeared, if they were produced at all, would have been produced for smaller, perhaps regional, theatres, for largely middle-class audiences. Schuyler has written about the ambivalence with which the theatre was considered in the period; the theatre’s very popularity meant that it was viewed with suspicion, as it sat at the intersection of commerce and art.5 Many of the plays considered in this chapter were reviewed poorly, where they were reviewed at all, and there is very little information to be found about either the production history of the texts or many of the playwrights who were writing these plays. However, the very fact of Anne’s repeated appearances in dramas over the course of the nineteenth century suggests her ongoing capacity to mean something to audiences.

4  Susan Amanda Schuyler, “Crowd Control: Reading Victorian Popular Drama” (Stanford University, 2007), 241. 5  Schuyler, 10.

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Over the course of the century, the following plays about Anne Boleyn were written: Henry Montague Grover’s Anne Boleyn: A Tragedy (1826); Henry Hart Milman’s Anne Boleyn: A Dramatic Poem (1826); J.R. Planche’s The Court Masque, or Richmond in the Olden Time: An Opera in Two Acts (1833); George Lewis Smyth’s Queen Anne Boleyn: A Tragedy in Five Acts (1834); T. Fielding’s Anne Boleyn (1838);6 George Boker’s Anne Boleyn: A Tragedy (1850); Francis Terrell’s Anne Boleyn: A Historical Drama in Five Acts (1861); Tom Taylor’s Anne Boleyn: An Original Historical Play in Five Acts (1875); Anna Dickinson’s A Crown of Thorns, or Anne Boleyn (1876); R. Dobson’s Anne Boleyn, or, The Jester’s Oath (1877);7 D. Nutt’s Anne Boleyn: A Tragedy in Five Acts (1881) and M.L. Tyler’s Anne Boleyn: A Tragedy in Six Acts (1884). Anne Boleyn, then, was appearing on the Victorian stage (or in the Victorian parlour) with some regularity. The Anne of many of these dramas is virtuous, virtually faultless and guilty of nary a hasty word, let alone adultery or incest. Anne is, in other words, the perfect heroine of Victorian melodrama. Henry and others (variously Suffolk, Norfolk, Lady Rochford or fictional Catholic conspirators) thus fill the archetypal villain role. As David Mayer writes, Victorian melodrama is a theatrical or literary response to a world where things are seen to go wrong, where ideas of secular and divine justice and recompense are not always met, where suffering is not always acknowledged, and where the explanations for wrong, injustice, and suffering are not altogether understandable.8

6  T. Fielding’s Anne Boleyn, which premiered in the St. Charles Theatre in New Orleans in 1838 and which starred Josephine Clifton as Anne, appears to have been lost to history. Only a few notices about the play appear, including one review in The Corsair, which describes the play as a “meagre attempt at historical tragedy.” However meagre it may have been, it is also the first-known American representation of Anne Boleyn. “The Theatre,” The Corsair: A Gazette of Literature, Art, Dramatic Criticism, Fashion, and Novelty 1, no. 10 (1839): 157. 7  R. Dobson’s play premiered in July 1877 at the Theatre Royal in Belfast, but no extant script has been found. A notice in the Dundee Courier suggests that the play portrays Anne sympathetically, but is brought down by a jester of Cardinal Wolsey who seeks revenge for Wolsey’s downfall. “Review of Anne Boleyn; The Jester’s Oath,” Dundee Courier, 10 July 1877, 2. My thanks are extended to Marian Kensler for making me aware of these lost plays. 8  David Mayer, “Encountering Melodrama,” in The Cambridge Companion to Victorian and Edwardian Theatre, ed. Kerry Powell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 148 (145–163).

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Accordingly, the virtuous Anne suffers, while the villain Henry is free to continue his reign of terror beyond the end of the narrative. The audience-­ member would presumably be moved to emotional catharsis precisely because Anne’s death is so undeserved. The demands of melodrama meant that maximum drama must be wrung from Anne’s story: in order to make her death an epic tragedy, she was represented as an innocent victim. Sally Ledger has argued that melodrama focuses on suffering and, in so doing, is a form of protest.9 While a queen could hardly be described as downtrodden, these plays do demonstrate her powerlessness—and therefore the powerlessness of women more broadly. Even the most passive Annes have a political point to make.

Saintly Annes Anne is frequently, but not exclusively, represented in nineteenth-century dramas as a devout evangelical free of any kind of ambition, except where that ambition is related to her ability to assist in religious reform. These visions of Anne tend to cleave closely to the image of Anne given in Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (see Chap. 2) and are often deployed for specifically Protestant political purposes. The clergyman and poetry professor Henry Hart Milman declares in the preface to his Anne Boleyn: A Dramatic Poem (1826) that “the wise and good among the Roman Catholics reprobated, as strongly as ourselves, the sanguinary and unprincipled means by which the Power of the Papacy was maintained.”10 The dedication of intent is clear: this play will concern itself with Anne’s role in dismantling the power of the Pope. This play was written just three years before the Roman Catholic Relief Act in 1829 and was written in the context of agitation around the Catholic Emancipation movement.11 The play, written by a Protestant churchman, thus both assumes that the “wise and good” Catholics will agree about the corruption of the Papacy, while portraying most Catholics as unscrupulous villains. Anne is represented as a martyr who dies as a result of Catholic machinations. Her death, however, will shore up the Protestant Golden Age of her daughter. Milman’s villain is a 9  Sally Ledger, Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 10  H.H. Milman, Anne Boleyn: A Dramatic Poem (London: John Murray, 1826), vi. 11  For more on the fight for Catholic Emancipation, see Ambrose Macaulay, The Catholic Church and the Campaign for Emancipation in Ireland and England (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2018).

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fictional evil Jesuit named Angelo Carrafa, who explains his absence from history by folding a plot to disappear from the historical record into his schemes.12 Milman’s Anne, already Queen when we first meet her, is a paragon of womanly perfection. Her only problem is that she is too generous to the poor, a charge that she meets by asserting the divine responsibilities of kingship. Lest his point by missed, Milman interrupts the drama to have George Boleyn present an eight-page “Protestant’s Hymn to the Virgin,” a text that outlines how Protestants might honour the Virgin Mary without lapsing into idolatry. The play’s anxieties about Catholicism are manifested on nearly every page. Anne is not so much a character in this play as a manifestation of an idea. She is the Protestant good to the Catholic bad represented by Carrafa. When Anne is led to her death, she protests that “I’ve lived as pure and chaste as snow / New fallen from Heaven”; her tragedy is amplified by her pure innocence.13 As Miriam Elizabeth  Burstein writes of nineteenth-­ century representation of Protestant martyrs, their violent deaths “testify to the horrors of Catholic persecution and to the universal truths of Protestant faith.”14 Their deaths also “affirm the martyr’s physical and spiritual chastity, self-control and containment.”15 Anne is, then, entirely devout, serious and devoted to selfless acts of charity. She is not exactly passive as she defies instructions to spend less money on charitable endeavours, but she chooses only to exert herself in the interests of her religious convictions. The Catholic characters in the play are motivated by self-interest, while Anne is prepared to damage her reputation in her drive to do good. Milman neatly avoids dealing with the circumstances of Anne’s rise by opening the drama with Anne already on the throne. Far from the sexy other woman who has tempted Henry away from his virtuous wife, this Anne appears to be almost sexless. Milman’s Anne might be the paragon of religious devotion, but she is at least more active than the Anne who appears in Henry Montague Grover’s Anne Boleyn: A Tragedy, written in the same year as Milman’s play. Grover’s play is less overtly religious than Milman’s and far less implicated in Protestant anxieties over Catholic Emancipation. The lack of  Milman, 14.  Milman, 167. 14   Miriam Elizabeth Burstein, Narrating Women’s History in Britain, 1770–1902 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 113. 15  Burstein, 113. 12 13

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attention to religious matters is rather surprising, given that Grover was a cleric known for his theological works.16 While Norfolk and Lady Rochford plot against Anne because of their disapproval of the execution of Thomas More, they do not discuss either Anne’s or their own religious beliefs to any great extent. Grover’s Anne appears to lack any kind of ambition or agency or, indeed, the capacity to think about the situation that she has found herself in at all. She decides to simply not worry about Thomas More’s opposition to her marriage, for instance, as “I, being Queen, pluck from my mind / All thoughts of enmities to Anne Boleyn.”17 She defers to the King when she is questioned about the morality of a King breaking his vows and even apologises to Henry for interrupting his romantic walk with Jane.18 The only time that Anne ever acts for herself is when she upbraids Francis Weston for declaring his love for her.19 Henry, meanwhile, is just as passive as his wife: he is aware of Anne’s innocence, but wants to marry Jane Seymour, so he simply plays along with the plot against Anne because it seems like the easiest option. In attempting to render Anne into the perfect victim of melodrama, Grover renders her almost pathologically inactive. History seems to unfold despite the players involved in it, for no real logical reason, beyond the fact that history tells us it was so. It is hard to disagree with the reviewer who wrote in The Edinburgh Review that “in the management of his plot, Mr. Grover is not more successful than in his dialogue.”20 Anne was still being represented as the saintly victim of Henry’s tyranny by mid-century. However, her characterisation by this point is tied less to anxieties about Catholic Emancipation than to more specific attempts to recuperate her reputation. Francis Terrell’s 1861 Anne Boleyn: A Historical Drama in Five Acts is explicitly written as a riposte to James Anthony Froude’s History of England (1850–70), which attempted to resuscitate the reputation of Henry VIII. In a long introduction, Terrell writes that 16  Gordon Goodwin and Mari G. Ellis, “Henry Montague Grover,” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), https://www.oxforddnb. com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-1 1686;jsessionid=B4463184C0919395603DD8DF958BE67F 17  Henry Montague Grover, Anne Boleyn: A Tragedy, London (Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green, 1826), 34. 18  Grover, 79. 19  Grover, 99. 20  The Edinburgh Review, or Critical Journal for December 1826–March 1827, XLV (Edinburgh: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green, 1827), 327.

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Froude “[f]ound it to be convenient to depress the wife that the husband might be exalted; she must be made black lest a spot should attach itself to him.”21 Terrell’s play is recovery work, designed to rescue Anne, “who seems to have been dragged from her untombed grave to be again unjustly tried and condemned.”22 However, in attempting to defend Anne from Froude’s calumnies, he flattens Anne into a flat and lifeless figure of pure virtue. One of the easiest ways of recuperating Anne’s character at this time was to represent her as genuinely devoted to the cause of religious reform. In Anne’s first scene in Terrell’s play, she ponders what kind of queen she might make and decides on a model of evangelical queenship: “Suppose I were a queen, I’d queenly reign, / Relieve the poor, shield all the persecuted, / Protect the Protestants against the pope, / And put the Book into the hands of all.”23 When Anne goes to her execution, Margaret Lee, one of her most devoted companions, comments, “Have you not persecution checked, and made / Of threatened martyrs grateful living saints?”24 Anne’s role is that of Protestant martyr, torn down due to her devotion to her faith. That point is again underlined in the final scene, when a priest notes approvingly that “we’ve scotched the Heresy that wore a crown.”25 Anne’s defeat, however, is also of course a victory: Protestantism would triumph in England under Anne’s daughter. Terrell is writing during the reign of another great English queen, and thus there is an implied connection between the Golden Age of Elizabeth and that of Victoria. D. Nutt’s 1881 Anne Boleyn: A Tragedy in Five Acts is one of the last Victorian plays to represent Anne as the completely blameless victim of Henry’s tyranny. In the author’s note, Nutt writes that Anne was the “minion of the brutal tyrant, she stepped into the place of her injured queen and Mistress – this was the Nemesis that laid her head upon the block.”26 However, that act of stepping into Catherine’s place was unwilling and will seal her doom. While this Anne might be the innocent victim of Henry’s lust, what the play does demonstrate is an acute understanding 21  Francis A. Hull Terrell, Anne Boleyn: A Historical Drama in Five Acts (London: W. Kent and Co., 1861), viii. 22  Terrell, xviii. 23  Terrell, 3. 24  Terrell, 145. 25  Terrell, 164. 26  D. Nutt, Anne Boleyn: A Tragedy in Five Acts (London: C. Kegan Paul & Co., 1881), author’s note.

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of the position that women faced in the patriarchal world of the Tudor court. Sos Eltis has written of the rise of the “fallen woman” plays in the final decades of the century: she argues that one of the “clearest causative factors” for the popularity of plays about such women was the “multifaceted campaign for increased rights and opportunities for women in legal, political, social, industrial and commercial spheres.”27 While Anne is not quite a fallen woman, she is a woman associated with illicit sex, and the play demonstrates considerable interest in thinking about the relationship between sexuality, ambition and power. Nutt has many of the characters in the play muse quite explicitly on ways of understanding female sexuality. The Earl of Surrey, for instance, has much to say about women’s fickleness and sexual lasciviousness, commenting that “[s]ince Eve plucked the fruit of knowledge, the sex longs for things forbidden.”28 Lady Boleyn, however, advises Anne that clever women know how to manipulate men’s lust against them, and so accrue their own power: Thou hast to learn that woman’s love, to man, is but a stepping-stone to fortune’s favour, or the light toy of his fantastic hours. And she is wise who uses well the knowledge; a man’s low selfish nature makes a tool for her ambition.29

In the historical novels of the twentieth century, Anne enthusiastically takes this advice. In this play, however, Anne rejects her mother’s exhortations. She openly weeps when she is proclaimed Queen, signalling her lack of ambition and incurring Henry’s disgust in the process. Soon enough, he is deposing her to marry Jane Seymour. Religion is underplayed in the drama; while Anne is interested in religious reform, it is clearly Henry’s sexual desires that motivate all the action. Anne might be the other woman—a role inevitably associated with sex—but it is Henry’s lusts that are at issue, not Anne’s. Henry is the villain who will compromise Anne’s virtue. Far from wanting “things that are forbidden,” as Surrey imagines, Anne has no interest in either sex or the crown. It is possible that like Terrell, Nutt was attempting to write against Froude’s depiction of Henry and Anne. The brief author’s note does 27  Sos Eltis, Acts of Desire: Women and Sex on Stage, 1800–1930 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 115. 28  Nutt, 26. 29  Nutt, 23.

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suggest that the primary focus of the piece would be to expose Henry’s bad behaviour and, indeed, our last image of Henry waiting for the news that Anne has been executed does leave the reader and/or viewer with no illusions as to his character: “So ho! The deed is done, the deed is done! Tomorrow we will wed with Mistress Seymour!”30 As Susan Bordo highlights, too, Froude was not the only historian to present Anne negatively in the period: Henry William Herbert’s Memoirs of Henry the Eighth of England: With the Fortunes, Fates, and Characters of His Six Wives (1856) had represented Anne as vain and ambitious. A growing body of (male) historiography was, then, as Bordo writes, “substitut[ing] a refurbished image of Chapuys’s scheming adventuress.”31 The prevailing interpretation of Anne’s character, then, differs markedly in men and women’s historical writing of the period. As was examined in the last chapter, female historians such as Elizabeth Benger and Agnes Strickland presented Anne as basically good, if flawed. For male historians, however, Anne was increasingly an object of suspicion. Marian Kensler has suggested that D. Nutt, about whom almost nothing is known, was a woman—an intriguing possibility to consider about the writer of this play so interested in thinking about gender expectations in the Tudor court.32 In any event, Nutt’s play exposes the impossible path that women must navigate, in the early modern Tudor court and in the late nineteenth-century context in which Nutt was writing. Lady Boleyn’s advice to Anne encapsulates the options available to women: either wield their sexuality as a weapon or risk becoming victim to the fickle lusts of men. Anne chooses the latter option and pays the inevitable price.

Not-So-Saintly Annes Despite the plethora of saintly Annes in nineteenth-century drama, more nuanced representations in dramas of the period do exist. These plays more closely resemble the historical fiction of the period in attempting to present a complex, nuanced Anne. This cluster of dramas is also less likely  Nutt, 105.  Susan Bordo, The Creation of Anne Boleyn: A New Look at England’s Most Notorious Queen (Boston: Mariner Books, 2014), 159. 32  Marian Kensler, “Anne Boleyn: A Tragedy in Five Acts, by D.  Nutt (1881),” Anne Boleyn Novels, 2013, https://anneboleynnovels.wordpress.com/2013/10/05/anneboleyn-a-tragedy-in-five-acts-by-d-nutt-1881/. D. Nutt is now listed in the WorldCat database as “Miss,” but it is unclear what information has led to Nutt’s identification as a woman. 30 31

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to follow established narrative patterns. As we saw in the last chapter, Henry was routinely depicted as a monstrous tyrant by women such as Benger and the novelist Katherine Thomson, and it was often presumed that Anne was motivated by ambition, even by those writers who presented her sympathetically. However, in Tom Taylor’s 1875 play Anne Boleyn: An Historical Play in Five Acts, Anne is depicted as being genuinely in love with Henry. Her own assessment of her fall is that it “was too much love, and some ambition, drew me on to the doom that, gathering long, has fallen at last.”33 Towards the latter half of the century, too, an Anne who had a more complex relationship to her own sexuality emerged in drama—a femme fatale, rather than an Angel in the House. George Boker’s play Anne Boleyn: A Tragedy (1850) appears to never have been produced, but it has become one of the best-known Anne Boleyn dramas by virtue of Boker’s fame as a poet and playwright.34 The play has some similarities to earlier Anne Boleyn dramas. As in Milman’s play, Anne is already Queen at the beginning of the action, and the play opens with Suffolk and Norfolk plotting against her. Their objection to her seems to be based in fears around the power she wields: “Why she was queen before her crown was on.”35 The Henrician court is represented as a debased space in which machinations against contending parties perpetually play themselves out. Only Anne seems to stand apart, and her intelligence allows her to accurately judge those around her. She tells Norfolk, for instance, “You are one of those / Big bloated toads that cumber up sweet earth, / A mere deformity in common sight.”36 Anne even appears to intuit the tenor of her own afterlife, noting that “if history should hand my name to time, / God grant its fame may rest on firmer base / Than the disjointed sainthood of a mob!”37 Boker does not present Anne as a paragon of perfection, however. Instead, Boker’s Anne is prone to bouts of anger, as seen when she berates Jane Seymour for her entanglement with Henry: “base minion, treble

33  Tom Taylor, “Anne Boleyn: An Original Historical Play in Five Acts,” in Historical Dramas (London: Chatto & Windus, 1877), 402–3. 34  Arthur Hobson Quinn argues that a production of Anne Boleyn was considered, but never performed. Arthur Hobson Quinn, “The Dramas of George Henry Boker,” PMLA 32, no. 2 (1917): 238. 35  George H. Boker, Anne Boleyn: A Tragedy (Philadelphia: A. Hart, 1850), 14. 36  Boker, 35. 37  Boker, 40.

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traitoress, / False to yourself, false to your state and me!”38 What is distinctive about Boker’s Anne is that she manages to be both powerful and victimised; she does not have to be purely good in order to be a sympathetic victim. When George Boleyn notes that she is an “equal with the king,” one is inclined to agree.39 The play continually affirms her intellectual and moral superiority to all the men who surround her. As Ronan Ludot-Vlasak notes, the tendency of Boker’s play is to delegitimise Henry as king—perhaps a reflection of the fact that Boker was American and thus had a different, potentially less reverential or nostalgic, relationship to the monarchy.40 While others had previously depicted Henry as a tyrant, Boker’s Henry is also unintelligent and lacks the judgement and foresight of his much cleverer wife. Boker’s account of Anne’s execution also leans heavily on Tudor horror tropes. As examined in the last chapter, nineteenth-century understandings of the Tudor past centred on the thrilling appeal of images of imprisonment and violent death. In Boker’s play, Anne imagines her head rolling in the dust after her execution. As Thea Tomaini writes, “anxieties about female sexuality, independence, and a lingering uncanny attraction to a woman beautiful in death are projected onto Anne’s head specifically.”41 Unlike some of the paradigmatic victims of the Tower, such as Jane Grey, Anne is never the perfect innocent.42 Boker’s Anne is consistently associated with both intelligence and sex, has a complex understanding of the caprices of fortune as they manifest themselves in the Henrician court, and diagnoses the essential problem of Henry’s court as lying within the greed and ambition of those with whom he surrounds himself.43 She is a woman both acted upon and acting, a woman capable of both intense anger and an ability to step back and rationally assess the circumstances of her life. As Ludot-Vlasak argues, she even has the forethought to attempt to preserve Henry’s reputation at her death, making her the only character who  Boker, 47.  Boker, 67. 40  Ronan Ludot-Vlasak, “Looking into the Attribute of Transcendent Genius: George Henry Boker and Robert Conrad’s Use of Shakespeare,” Transatlantica 1 (2010): 25. 41  Thea Tomaini, The Corpse as Text: Disinterment and Antiquarian Enquiry, 1700–1900 (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2017), 116. 42  Rosemary A.  Mitchell, “The Nine Lives of the Nine Days Queen: From Religious Heroine in Romantic Victim,” in Clio’s Daughters: British Women Making History, 1790–1899, ed. Lynette Felber (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2007), 97–122. 43  Boker, Anne Boleyn: A Tragedy, 50. 38 39

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“assumes her political role.”44 Anne is aware of the role that she must play in history and that her impact on Tudor England will not conclude with her death. That Anne is not a saint only makes her tragedy more acute, not less. Boker’s play cleaves closer to historical fiction of the period in its incorporation of narrative elements that would recur throughout the next century of writing about Anne. Thomas Wyatt, for instance, is presented as the man that Anne should have married. Wyatt’s true love for Anne contrasts positively with the shallow lusts of the King, which inevitably burn themselves out after consummation. If the King is the man who kills her, Wyatt is the man who will immortalise her. As Julie Crane writes of Wyatt’s appearances in narratives of Anne’s life, his “authoritative literary energy is borrowed both to highlight and place Anne’s tragedy, both to illumine and obscure his own fame.”45 At the end of the play, Wyatt vows that all his poetry will henceforth be devoted to commemorating her, as if his entire poetic oeuvre should be seen as a game of Spot-the-Anne-BoleynReference. He declares that “I’ll hide thy name / Under the coverture of even lines, / I’ll hint it darkly in familiar songs, / I’ll mix each melancholy thought of thee / Through all my numbers.”46 Other elements of Boker’s play are also repeatedly seen in historical fiction of the next two centuries: Henry is a villain who knows full well that his wife is innocent, and Lady Rochford is the arch-villainess of the piece. In terms of both plot and characterisation, then, Boker’s Anne has survived into the modern historical novel, while the saintly Annes of his contemporaries have largely disappeared. Another more complex Anne appears in M.L. Tyler’s 1884 Anne Boleyn: A Tragedy in Six Acts. The first scene of the play involves Anne and Jane Seymour fighting over Anne’s laziness, and when Henry appears, Anne manages to both flirt with him while resisting his advances: “I swear, tho’ thou art King, thou art but churl, that canst refuse a lady on her knees so light a boon!”47 Given the seriousness with which needlework is treated 44  Ludot-Vlasak, “Looking into the Attribute of Transcendent Genius: George Henry Boker and Robert Conrad’s Use of Shakespeare,” 27. 45  Julie Crane, “Whoso List to Hunt: The Literary Fortunes of Anne Boleyn,” in The Female Figure in Contemporary Historical Fiction, ed. K. Cooper and E. Short (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 78. 46  Boker, Anne Boleyn: A Tragedy, 221–2. 47  M.L. Tyler, Anne Boleyn: A Tragedy in Six Acts (London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Co., 1884), 10.

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in Strickland’s memoirs, that Anne is not sewing in the first scene, even while Catherine’s other ladies do, is laden with significance: she is no Victorian Angel in the House. Anne describes herself as “[a] woman grown, with faultless nerve, and matchless intrepidity.”48 Eltis defines the characteristics of the fallen woman on the Victorian stage as “idleness, vanity, frivolity, weak will, and [an] inability to take deliberate and calculated actions.”49 While many of these characteristics are descriptive of Tyler’s Anne—she is idle and vain—she also differs markedly from this paradigm. She is just as devoted to the cause of religious reform as she is in other plays, and she is certainly not weak-willed. However, she is also not ambitious, describing ambition to Henry as “will-o-the-wisp.”50 Anne is also constantly associated with death throughout the play. Anne’s execution is repeatedly foreshadowed, and the specific mode of her execution is returned to with an almost obsessive regularity. As I outlined in the previous chapter, nineteenth-century writing about the Tudors was centred around a touristic fascination with the Tower and the scaffold.51 Anne’s attendant, Anne Saville, has a vision of Anne’s execution, describing it as a sight “awful-terrible-beyond what words may paint,” but then goes on to give a detailed explanation of the event anyway.52 Anne, however, takes her warning lightly: Poor little head! – a football in the mire: – How wilt thou brook it? And, poor, headless trunk; Methinks, when this veracious prophecy shall come to pass, thou wilt not long stand thus, like an old scarecrow in a new-sown field, headless, to fright the birds away: but then thy head is taken from thee, thou will fall.53

Anne’s boldness and sexuality, as well as her association with (violent) death, align her with the figure of the femme fatale. In Rebecca Stott’s study of the late Victorian femme fatale, she argues that “she is always  Tyler, 13.  Eltis, Acts of Desire: Women and Sex on Stage, 1800–1930, 23. 50  Tyler, 24. 51  See Billie Melman, “The Pleasures of Tudor Horror: Popular Histories, Modernity and Sensationalism in the Long Nineteenth Century,” in Tudorism: Historical Imagination and the Appropriation of the Sixteenth Century, ed. Tatiana C. String and Marcus Bull (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 37–56. 52  Tyler, Anne Boleyn: A Tragedy in Six Acts, 31. 53  Tyler, 20. 48 49

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outside, either literally … or metaphorically, for as the sexually fatal woman she represents chaos, darkness, death, all that lies beyond the safe, the known, and the normal.”54 The sexual woman is death incarnate, and so images of death haunt Anne from the beginning. Anne is also always associated with the disruption of the stable order associated with the virtuous Catherine, who never neglects her sewing. However, even if Anne fills the femme fatale role, she is also not a monster. When Anne’s fall comes, it is framed as a de casibus tragedy—the inevitable and tragic fall of the great historical figure. Anne ponders the fact that “I had leapt the giddy precipice … but that it was so high the fall was longer, and the shock delayed.”55 The Wheel of Fortune has turned, and Anne’s ambition has led inexorably to her downfall. Interestingly, it is Thomas Wyatt who takes up the position of innocent victim in the play: when he hears of Anne’s arrest and execution, he goes mad and starts muttering about the symbolic meaning of flowers, as if he has become a gender-­ inverted Ophelia. It is as if Tyler needs a perfect victim, and because that cannot be the ambitious femme fatale Anne, it is left to Wyatt to heighten our perception of Anne’s death as a tragedy. In the last scene, however, he recovers and crowns her coffin with flowers while affirming his “deathless and devoted love.”56 Wyatt’s devotion to Anne might also be an attempt to tie Anne back to her Petrarchan beginnings. In death, she joins Petrarch’s Laura or Dante’s Beatrice as one of those dead (and silent) women who inspire male poetic genius.57 Anne’s power is finally contained, and it is the male writer who will take custody over her story.

Anna Dickinson’s Lost Anne The Anne Boleyn drama that has most thoroughly disappeared from the public consciousness, despite its author’s fame in her own day, is Anna Dickinson’s Anne Boleyn, or a Crown of Thorns. Anna Dickinson was an actress, a playwright, the first woman to give a speech to the United States 54  Rebecca Stott, The Fabrication of the Late-Victorian Femme Fatale (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1992), 37. 55  Tyler, Anne Boleyn: A Tragedy in Six Acts, 97. 56  Tyler, 101. 57  For a good examination of Victorian representations of dead women as muses, see Elisabeth Bronfen, “Dialogue with the Dead: The Deceased Beloved as Muse,” in Sex and Death in Victorian Literature, ed. Regina Barreca (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 241–59.

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Congress and an advocate for causes such as abolition and women’s rights. Her play now only exists in two manuscript copies in the Library of Congress. However, in terms of visibility in its own time, it far outstrips most of the plays examined in this chapter; it was seen quite widely by theatre-goers in the United States in the late 1870s. It was first staged in 1876 at the Globe Theatre in Boston, to moderate success, and was performed several times across the North and Midwest United States until its final theatrical run in New York in 1882.58 Oddly, the play’s current obscurity was a result of a decision made by Dickinson herself. She seems to have become possessive, even obsessive, over the role of Anne, which she played herself, to generally negative reviews. She then withdrew the play in an effort to prevent any other actress taking on the role.59 However, Marian Kensler, writing for the BoleynBooks.com website, has recently produced a full, as-yet-unpublished transcription of the play, and it is this transcription that I am relying on here. Dickinson seems to have been inspired to write about Anne upon reading Froude’s history which was, as we have seen, a common motivation for nineteenth-century playwrights wishing to construct a more positive vision of Anne. Stacey A. Stewart provides an account of Dickinson’s reading of Froude, and her letters to her sister about her distaste for what she saw as the “male historian’s apparently sexist assumptions that resulted in a warped interpretation of historical events.”60 Accordingly, Dickinson’s Anne is virtuous and intelligent, albeit lonely and frequently misunderstood. Dickinson’s belief in the rights of women was key to her self-­ professed devotion to Anne. As Stewart writes, Dickinson saw Anne as a historical touchstone for her political views:

58  J. Matthew Gallman provides a synopsis of the production history of the play. J. Matthew Gallman, America’s Joan of Arc: The Life of Anna Elizabeth Dickinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 59  James Harvey Young provides a survey of reviews of Dickinson’s play, which were generally critical of her performance as Anne. James Harvey Young, “Anna Dickinson as Anne Boleyn,” The Emory University Quarterly 5 (1949): 163–69. 60  Stacey A. Stewart, “Nothing Ladylike About It: The Theatrical Career of Anna Elizabeth Dickinson” (University of Maryland, College Park, 2004), 82.

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Dickinson believed that she had found a female character who could illustrate what she firmed believed—that a woman could be strong, intelligent, and virtuous at the same time—a woman like herself.61

In Dickinson’s play, then, we have the forerunner of the proto-feminist Annes of later centuries. The complexity of Dickinson’s Anne is perhaps summarised by her declaration that “I am not so vain as to believe that the stars in their courses watch over me, nor sufficiently humble to be willing for them to control me.”62 Dickinson’s Anne is undoubtedly a victim, but she is also admirable, intelligent and thoughtful. She has historical agency, but is also a victim of her circumstances. Dickinson was one of the first women to openly self-identify with Anne, but she would not be the last. Where Dickinson’s play is truly unusual, even ground-breaking, however, is in its depiction of Thomas Cromwell. Dickinson’s Cromwell schemes against Anne from the first. Nineteenth-century writing did not seem to have much time for Cromwell, who usually plays only an ancillary role in Anne Boleyn narratives. As explored in the previous chapter, the late-century novel Defender of the Faith gives us a villainous Cromwell, but that text is coloured by its pro-Catholic stance. Where Cromwell is represented in historical fiction both before and after Dickinson, he is usually represented as, at least initially, a supporter of Anne, based on a shared religious sensibility. However, Dickinson suggests that Cromwell was always hostile to Anne, based on both his personal desire for power and his loyalty to Wolsey. When Wolsey falls, his final words to Cromwell are a reminder that Anne “has dug my grave. I leave you to dig hers in time to come.”63 Dickinson thus anticipates Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall (2009), in which Cromwell plots against Anne because of her role in Wolsey’s downfall.64 Diarmaid MacCulloch’s recent magisterial biography of Cromwell endorses this new reading of Cromwell’s attitude towards Anne.65 While Dickinson’s insistence on Anne’s value as an example of a strong woman from history foreshadows much of the tenor of Anne’s later literary afterlife, it is within her depiction of Cromwell’s relationship to Anne that 61  As Stewart also notes, Dickinson often referred to Anne as “Anna,” suggesting a selfconscious identification with Boleyn. Stewart, 91. 62  Anna E.  Dickinson, Anne Boleyn or A Crown of Thorns: A Tragedy in Four Acts, ed. Marian Kensler, 1876, 18. 63  Dickinson, 56. 64  Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall (London: Fourth Estate, 2009). 65  Diarmaid MacCulloch, Thomas Cromwell (London: Penguin, 2018).

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Dickinson’s play is at its most revolutionary, as Kensler argues.66 It remains unclear upon what grounds Dickinson bases this depiction of Anne and Cromwell’s relationship, but it is remarkable that the play so neatly anticipates the tenor of contemporary writing about the pair.

Comic Anne The nineteenth-century stage also gave Anne one of her most surprising and unexpected roles: that of comic heroine. From 1868 onwards, Anne was a character in the popular pantomime Bluff King Hal: Or, Harlequin Anne Boleyn and the Jolly Miller of the River Dee; The Sergeant’s Wife. Unfortunately, given the comic potential of the title, I have been unable to find any indication of the plot of this pantomime. Anne also appeared in Conway Edwardes’s 1872 Anne Boleyn: An Original Historical Burlesque Extravaganza. In this burlesque, Anne’s story moved from grand tragedy to farce. This Anne references dancing the can-can for Henry and sings a song called “It makes me so awfully wild.” At the conclusion of the play, Henry sits in a washtub, holding an umbrella, watching Anne travel to the Tower by boat. Anne’s boat “rushes through the arch of the bridge … and knocks over the KING and his tub  – intense excitement.”67 Henry is subsequently fished out of the Thames by his Fool, Will Somers, and is persuaded not to kill Anne because “[h]ow ’bout the piece, you know, tomorrow night?”68 The play is a lively subversion of history, poking fun at its own theatricality while gleefully declaring that “’[t]is true with history we’ve played strange pranks, but if you’ll pardon, we will give much thanks.”69 Percy sums up the play’s approach to history: “We’ve finished our wild perversion of Anne Boleyn’s historee.”70 Edwardes’s burlesque gives us an Anne that we are entirely unused to, and on first glance, Anne’s story seems an odd choice for a burlesque. However, it is also one of the most surprising and delightful representations of Anne Boleyn over the course of the century, as the play gives us an 66  Marian Kensler, “Anne Boleyn, or a Crown of Thorns by Anna Dickinson (1876),” Anne Boleyn Novels, 2019, https://anneboleynnovels.wordpress.com/2019/06/29/ anne-boleyn-or-a-crown-of-thorns-by-anna-dickinson-1876/ 67  Conway Edwardes, Anne Boleyn: An Original Historical Burlesque Extravaganza (London: Samuel French, 1872), 33. 68  Edwardes, 34. 69  Edwardes, 34. 70  Edwardes, 35.

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Anne who gets her own kind of wild revenge on the King, who is reduced to the figure of ineffectual buffoon. After so many visions of Anne going piously and tragically to her death, it is satisfying to see an Anne who exerts some kind of triumph over Henry. As Richard W.  Schoch notes, “the burlesque exempted no area of polite culture from its parodic assault.”71 In parodying the story of Henry VIII and his many dead wives, Edwardes gives us a parodic counterfactual history and, potentially, a feminist counterfactual in which Anne gets to live. Schoch also writes that “the essential activity of burlesque [was] a sustained, self-conscious comic interpretation of a source text.”72 It is difficult to parse the exact target of Edwardes’s satire in terms of text, although its inclusion of Henry Percy as a major character would seem to suggest Banks’s Vertue Betray’d, which was still a popular text in the nineteenth century. However, the burlesque’s gleeful skewering of English history suggests that its target was somewhat wider: it seems to be a farcical take on Tudor England, writ large. At one point, Henry proclaims, “Tub be, or not tub be, that is the question.”73 The burlesque’s knowing self-reflexivity undermines and makes ridiculous our vision of the so-called Tudor “Golden Age” and exposes the extent to which it is built on theatrical artifice. As Schoch writes, “burlesques abjure the entire notion of canonicity by removing the ground for the meaning of all texts and performances, including themselves.”74 What Conway Edwardes’s burlesque does is expose the inauthenticity of all constructions of Tudor history, including his own. History is all performance, the final tableau suggests. The only difference between Anne Boleyn: An Original Historical Burlesque Extravaganza and the dramas that came before it is that Edwardes has his characters openly acknowledge the artifice.

Conclusion When Edwardes openly admits to the “wild perversion” of Anne’s history, he is alone amongst nineteenth-century dramatists. The nineteenth century saw Anne appear in a staggering diverse range of texts, for a wide 71  Richard W.  Schoch, “Introduction,” in Victorian Theatrical Burlesques, ed. Richard W. Schoch (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), xi. 72  Schoch, xiv. 73  Edwardes, Anne Boleyn: An Original Historical Burlesque Extravaganza, 33. 74  Schoch, “Introduction,” xviii.

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range of ideological and literary purposes, with each writer presenting their vision of Anne as uniquely authoritative. Some distinct patterns did emerge amongst this thicket of representations—Anne as Protestant martyr, Anne as cautionary tale, Anne as romantic heroine, Anne as blinded by ambition and Anne as femme fatale—and most of these patterns would carry through to the twentieth century. If the nineteenth century marked an ever-increasing interest in Anne’s story, thanks to the era’s fascination with antiquarianism, medievalism, Tudorism and melodrama, in the twentieth  century writing about Anne would expand wildly again, with new books about Anne seemingly appearing every year. It was the rise of the historical romance in the twentieth century—a form that had its origins in novels such as Katherine Thomson’s Anne Boleyn—that allowed both the proliferation of novels about Anne and her emergence as an avatar of changing ways of understanding femininity. Edwardes’s image of Henry deciding Anne should not be killed because she had to appear onstage again the following night might be read as an apt metaphor for the endless Anne Boleyn texts of the next two centuries: as soon as one Anne is killed off, a new one appears.

References Primary Sources “Review of Anne Boleyn; The Jester’s Oath.” Dundee Courier, July 10, 1877. The Edinburgh Review, or Critical Journal for December 1826  – March 1827. XLV. Edinburgh: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green, 1827. “The Theatre.” The Corsair: A Gazette of Literature, Art, Dramatic Criticism, Fashion, and Novelty 1, no. 10 (1839): 157. Boker, George H. Anne Boleyn: A Tragedy. Philadelphia: A. Hart, 1850. Dickinson, Anna E. Anne Boleyn or A Crown of Thorns: A Tragedy in Four Acts. Edited by Marian Kensler, 1876. Edwardes, Conway. Anne Boleyn: An Original Historical Burlesque Extravaganza. London: Samuel French, 1872. Grover, Henry Montague. Anne Boleyn: A Tragedy. London. Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green, 1826. Mantel, Hilary. Wolf Hall. London: Fourth Estate, 2009. Milman, H.H. Anne Boleyn: A Dramatic Poem. London: John Murray, 1826. Nutt, D. Anne Boleyn: A Tragedy in Five Acts. London: C. Kegan Paul & Co., 1881. Taylor, Tom. “Anne Boleyn: An Original Historical Play In Five Acts.” In Historical Dramas, 341–412. London: Chatto & Windus, 1877.

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Terrell, Francis A. Hull. Anne Boleyn: A Historical Drama in Five Acts. London: W. Kent and Co., 1861. Tyler, M.L. Anne Boleyn: A Tragedy in Six Acts. London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Co., 1884.

Secondary Sources Bordo, Susan. The Creation of Anne Boleyn: A New Look at England’s Most Notorious Queen. Boston: Mariner Books, 2014. Bronfen, Elisabeth. “Dialogue with the Dead: The Deceased Beloved as Muse.” In Sex and Death in Victorian Literature, edited by Regina Barreca, 241–59. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. Burstein, Miriam Elizabeth. Narrating Women’s History in Britain, 1770–1902. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004. Crane, Julie. “Whoso List to Hunt: The Literary Fortunes of Anne Boleyn.” In The Female Figure in Contemporary Historical Fiction, edited by K. Cooper and E. Short, 76–91. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Eltis, Sos. Acts of Desire: Women and Sex on Stage, 1800–1930. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Gallman, J. Matthew. America’s Joan of Arc: The Life of Anna Elizabeth Dickinson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Gilmour, Michael. “Victorian Melodrama.” Literature Compass 12, no. 7 (2015): 344–57. Goodwin, Gordon, and Mari G.  Ellis. “Henry Montague Grover.” In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128. 001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-11686;jsessionid=B4463184C0919395 603DD8DF958BE67F. Hudston, Sara. Victorian Theatricals: From Menageries to Melodrama. London: Methuen, 2000. Kensler, Marian. “Anne Boleyn, or a Crown of Thorns by Anna Dickinson (1876).” Anne Boleyn Novels, 2019. https://anneboleynnovels.wordpress. c o m / 2 0 1 9 / 0 6 / 2 9 / a n n e - b o l e y n - o r- a - c r o w n - o f - t h o r n s - b y - a n n a dickinson-1876/. ———. “Anne Boleyn: A Tragedy in Five Acts, by D. Nutt (1881).” Anne Boleyn Novels, 2013. https://anneboleynnovels.wordpress.com/2013/10/05/ anne-boleyn-a-tragedy-in-five-acts-by-d-nutt-1881/. Ledger, Sally. Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Ludot-Vlasak, Ronan. “Looking into the Attribute of Transcendent Genius: George Henry Boker and Robert Conrad’s Use of Shakespeare.” Transatlantica 1 (2010): 1–42.

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Macaulay, Ambrose. The Catholic Church and the Campaign for Emancipation in Ireland and England. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2018. MacCulloch, Diarmaid. Thomas Cromwell. London: Penguin, 2018. Mayer, David. “Encountering Melodrama.” In The Cambridge Companion to Victorian and Edwardian Theatre, edited by Kerry Powell, 145–63. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Melman, Billie. “The Pleasures of Tudor Horror: Popular Histories, Modernity and Sensationalism in the Long Nineteenth Century.” In Tudorism: Historical Imagination and the Appropriation of the Sixteenth Century, edited by Tatiana C. String and Marcus Bull, 37–56. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Mitchell, Rosemary A. “The Nine Lives of the Nine Days Queen: From Religious Heroine in Romantic Victim.” In Clio’s Daughters: British Women Making History, 1790–1899, edited by Lynette Felber, 97–122. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2007. Powell, Kerry. “Gendering Victorian Theatre.” In The Cambridge History of British Theatre, edited by Joseph Donohue, 352–68. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Quinn, Arthur Hobson. “The Dramas of George Henry Boker.” PMLA 32, no. 2 (1917): 233–66. Schoch, Richard W. “Introduction.” In Victorian Theatrical Burlesques, edited by Richard W. Schoch, xi–xlvi. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003. Schuyler, Susan Amanda. “Crowd Control: Reading Victorian Popular Drama.” Stanford University, 2007. Stewart, Stacey A. “Nothing Ladylike About It: The Theatrical Career of Anna Elizabeth Dickinson.” University of Maryland, College Park, 2004. Stott, Rebecca. The Fabrication of the Late-Victorian Femme Fatale. Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1992. Tomaini, Thea. The Corpse as Text: Disinterment and Antiquarian Enquiry, 1700–1900. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2017. Young, James Harvey. “Anna Dickinson as Anne Boleyn.” The Emory University Quarterly 5 (1949): 163–69.

CHAPTER 7

Anne Boleyn from 1900 to 1950

The quantity of fictional representations of Anne Boleyn increased markedly in the twentieth century. This chapter and the next will consider the plethora of representations that span the twentieth century, but each can only be an incomplete account. The sheer volume of historical novels alone that address Anne’s story that emerge over the century could fill its own full-length volume.1 For the twentieth-century writer, Anne’s story was attractive because it was the ultimate synthesis of the political and the personal at a time when thinking through the impact of the political on the personal, and vice versa, was an increasingly important strategy for the first generations of feminist activists. Her story also combined domestic tragedy with political change in a period when two world wars were making these themes all too real. Anne’s life was historically distant enough to provide nostalgic glamour and colour to wartime readers, while remaining recognisable to contemporary women grappling with dramatic social, cultural and political shifts. Anne’s story also resembled popular melodrama; Anne was the other woman who intervened in a long-standing marriage, and so historical novels about her life resembled other popular novels and films of the period. In attempting to account for the broad range of representations of Anne over the course of the early twentieth century, this chapter will consider the rise of the women’s historical novel and continuities of representational patterns found in novels about Anne Boleyn, 1  Please see the Appendix for a full list of all Anne Boleyn fictions across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

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before turning to a broader consideration of some of the thematic differences that occur between accounts in relation to agency and sexuality. The history of Anne Boleyn fictions during the twentieth century is itself a potted history of women’s popular fiction of the twentieth century, both reflecting upon and resisting changing understandings of femininity, gender relations and sexuality.

The Rise of the Woman’s Historical Novel The early twentieth century has long been identified as the period which marked the rise of the woman’s historical novel and, indeed, most of the novels considered in this chapter and the next were written by women and marketed to female readers. The Tudor historical novel became so dominated by women writers in the twentieth century that after 1950, there are vanishingly few male writers producing historical novels about Anne. Diana Wallace has dated the rise of the woman’s historical novel to the period after the First World War: “It was after the First World War that British women, entering into history as enfranchised citizens for the first time, turned to the historical novel in substantial numbers and reshaped it in forms which expressed and answered their needs and desires.”2 Of course, as we have seen, women had been writing historical novels long before this. What is distinctive about the twentieth-century historical novel is the ever-expanding market for novels in which the histories of women’s domestic and private lives are foregrounded. As Alison Light writes of the appeal of women’s historical novels, “what the novels manage is to give the concerns of the so-called private sphere the status and interest of history, like one never-ending family saga, which indeed has become a modern view of royalty.”3 The lives of royal and aristocratic women were taken up as subjects for historical drama in the early twentieth century by novelists such as Anya Seton, Jean Plaidy, Margaret Irwin and Margaret Campbell Barnes. A subject such as Anne, whose private and romantic life had so many tantalising gaps for fiction to fill in, naturally became one of the favoured subjects of historical fiction written for a primarily female audience eager to read about women’s lives and interests. 2  Diana Wallace, The Woman’s Historical Novel: British Women Writers, 1900–2000 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 25. 3  Alison Light, “‘Young Bess’: Historical Novels and Growing Up,” Feminist Review 33 (1989): 59.

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The emergent popularity of the historical romance and its close association with women, however, led to its critical devaluation. As Helen Hughes has shown, the genre is often associated with a fantastical representation of the past that exists merely to insert the generic concerns and motifs of the romance, and therefore the “history” of the historical past in these works has often been called into question.4 The historical romance has often been trivialised as an escapist fantasy for bored housewives. Wallace links the popularity of the woman’s historical novel during the 1940s to the Second World War: costume dramas were a desirable form of escapism to a generation of women living through the drudgery and terror of warfare. However, while the escapist label has been used to belittle such novels, Wallace argues that “the very excess and melodrama of these texts code resistance not merely against the frequent drabness of wartime life but also the repressive nature of the roles enforced on women.”5 This resistance often manifested in “an almost obsessive concern with transgressive and subversive femininities in the form of wicked ladies and wilful or wayward women.”6 Anne Boleyn was a wicked or wilful lady, insofar as her story included aspects of melodrama such as premarital sex and scandal, and resembled the plots of other historical novels popular during the period, such as Gone with the Wind or Forever Amber. Throughout the twentieth century, Anne was frequently characterised as transgressive due to her supposedly unfeminine desire for status and power. There is little wonder that Anne’s story was so popular with the middle-class female readers of historical fiction: her story had sex and power, glamour and tragedy, transgression and submission. Such a mix proved ideally suited to a period in which perceptions of femininity began to shift. However, as Jerome de Groot has highlighted, Anne could be a potential problem for the romance novelist. He writes that “the romance novelist is attracted to Anne Boleyn, for instance, for her story and her significance, but cannot pin her down into a conventional narrative as her story eschews generic boundaries.”7 The ideological complexity, even contradiction, that plays itself out in many Anne Boleyn fictions of the twentieth century suggests that Anne is a much more complicated figure for the heroine of a historical romance than she might first appear. Anne’s  Helen Hughes, The Historical Romance (Abingdon & New York: Routledge, 1993), 1.  Wallace, The Woman’s Historical Novel, 79. 6  Wallace, 80. 7  Jerome de Groot, The Historical Novel (London: Routledge, 2009), 68. 4 5

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story is not a romance, at least not in terms of the formal requirements of the genre: her story has no happy ending, and it is not until the early twenty-first century that counterfactual Anne Boleyn novels began to be written. The insistence on presenting Anne’s story as a romance means that other men (usually Henry Percy) are routinely identified as Anne’s first, and only genuine, love. As de Groot writes, the story of Anne is about dissenting from and challenging the dominant cultural norms; her example is that of the woman who created herself and, for a brief time, through her brilliance and her beauty and her will, maintained herself in a society in which quasi-independent female empowerment and agency were relatively unknown.8

Historical novelists had to decide, therefore, how they were to account for Anne, especially as perceptions of gender began to change: would she be a feisty modern woman, a flapper or a nymph, or a cautionary tale about what happens to women when they transgress acceptable models of femininity?

Continuities If the twentieth century was a period of immense growth for the cottage industry of Anne Boleyn novels, then it was also the period that, perhaps counter-intuitively, saw her story settle into established patterns. There is a familiarity to many twentieth-century texts, despite the different social and cultural contexts in which they were produced. It was in the early twentieth century that a master narrative emerged that saw various mythical facets of Anne’s life and character transformed into truisms. The more-­ or-­less standard narrative runs as follows: the quick-witted Anne falls in love with Henry Percy, is divided from him by the wily Cardinal Wolsey (sometimes as a result of Henry’s sexual interest in Anne), vows revenge, capitalises on Henry’s interest in her as a means of obtaining that revenge, becomes twisted by ambition and power, and falls as a result of her inability to contain that lust for power. The similarities can perhaps be accounted for by the fact that historical novelists read each other’s work, and as historical novels about Anne started to proliferate, the accepted lore of

8

 Groot, 73.

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Anne’s story concretised.9 These perceptions about Anne and her biography have achieved the status of established wisdom, only to be then reinscribed back into other historical romances. The movement away from religion and politics into the realm of the private and affective meant that a different Anne emerged than had been seen in previous centuries. This Anne was more immediately accessible to the interests of twentieth-century women. The Victorian Protestant martyr Anne retreated and her story became increasingly secularised and depoliticised. The lip service often paid to the role of religion in Anne’s rise and fall can largely be accounted for by the secularisation of Western society in the twentieth century. Readers were simply more interested in sex than in religion, at least in their historical romances. Even when historical novels attempt to account for the political world of the Tudor court, these political entanglements are often reduced to sexual politics; private sexual passions and disappointments are usually represented as far more immediately important than the larger religious and cultural conflicts of the early modern world. In 1909, Reginald Farrer declared, in the preface to his novel The Anne-Queen’s Chronicle, that he was tired of highly polarised representations of Anne Boleyn: If anyone declares that they would rather have back the inane and sentimental Anne Boleyn of romantic convention, or the pious Protestant, or the bland victim, instead of this haggard and rather awful woman, black with misery and despair in the achievement of her quest, then I reply that the truth, whatever be in its shape, no matter how fearful, is always more beautiful and wholesome than any lying convention, no matter how smooth and lovely.10

Anne is thus frequently represented in the early twentieth century as a woman whose struggles mirrored those of a largely female readership 9  Many of the novels examined in this chapter feature, for example, Anne’s fictional stepmother and her equally fictional governess Simonette. Both of these characters are derived not from the historical record, but from the works of Agnes Strickland (see Chap. 5). Historical novelists are therefore either reading Strickland in the original or reading other historical novels that use Strickland as a source. They then replicate her errors, despite the fact that Anne’s early twentieth-century biographers, such as Philip Sergeant, had already pointed out that Anne’s mother actually outlived her (see Philip W.  Sergeant, The Life of Anne Boleyn (London: Hutchinson & Co, 1923)). 10  Reginald Farrer, The Anne-Queen’s Chronicle (London: Alston Rivers, 1909), xxiv.

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attempting to grapple with major social, cultural and political shifts. The movement away from the martyr/whore dichotomy meant that novelists increasingly sought to make Anne Boleyn a rounded character, with real human strengths and flaws. The Anne Boleyn that emerged from the early twentieth-century historical novel was a woman who looked and acted just like the (imagined) female reader of the period. As a woman whose life was also lived in the wake of great cultural change, Anne Boleyn was uniquely positioned to speak to the interests of twentieth-century women. Stripping Anne’s story of any of its specific religious or political dimensions allowed novelists to essentially construct Anne as a fictional character; a woman upon whom various fictional topoi related to genre could be overlaid. One of the ways in which writers signalled their determination to reflect the “truth,” rather than “lying convention,” was to stress that Anne was a woman like any other. Jessie Armstrong’s 1900 novel My Friend Anne attempts to create a portrait of Anne to which women, and especially young women, could relate. Armstrong stresses her desire to create a “life-­like and natural portrait of a young girl,” in the preface of her novel.11 This refrain— that Anne was a normal girl—would reappear frequently in the paratextual material appended to Anne Boleyn novels over the next century. Armstrong’s Anne is both innocent and yet not quite entirely blameless. The novel’s young narrator, Patience Linacre, the friend to Anne of the title, suggests that Anne’s less-that-innocent behaviour, such as her flirtatiousness, is a result of the fact that she has no moral guide: “she might have been saved from the fate she struggled lone against, and have resisted the temptation to climb those heights.”12 As Miriam  Elizabeth Burstein writes of the novel, “Patience’s inability to grasp Anne’s internal struggle between godly rectitude and worldly power tells us what’s right with Patience  – and what’s wrong with Anne.”13 Anne’s story is essentially a cautionary tale for the well-intentioned, but easily influenced, teenage girl. Mary Hastings Bradley also declares in the foreword of her 1912 novel The Favor of Kings that she sought to create a relatable Anne. She writes that she wanted to, “offer the Anne Boleyn of this story, a very human girl, gay and fearless and rashly proud, as the likeness of that Anne who dared 11  Jessie Armstrong, My Friend Anne: A Story of the Sixteenth Century (London: Frederick Warne and Co., 1901), v. 12  Armstrong, 45. 13  Miriam Elizabeth Burstein, “The Fictional Afterlife of Anne Boleyn: How to Do Things with the Queen, 1901–2006,” Clio 37, no. 1 (2007): 8.

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and lost so long ago and whose blood was the first of any woman’s to stain an English scaffold.”14 Anne is accordingly represented as a kind of spirited Edwardian wit who engages in long discursive drawing-room conversations with her ladies-in-waiting. The emphasis on relatability also reveals much about the interests of historical fiction. Novelists inevitably represent Anne as precisely the kind of “human girl” that is relatable within their own context: whatever kind of woman is legible to the context of production is the woman that historical fiction creates. The Anne of The Favor of Kings becomes the prototype Anne of the twentieth century because she is uniquely suited to that century: an intelligent woman increasingly aware of, and struggling with, her own powerlessness who uses the tools she has at her disposal (her sex appeal) to obtain what she wants (revenge, power, status). Almost all historical novels of the period assume that Anne was not in love with the King and that her actions were largely driven by the desire to become Queen, whether motivated by sheer will to power or the desire for revenge (usually on Wolsey). By the early twentieth century, Henry’s reputation as an overweight womanising sociopath meant that even the most romantic historical novelist could not, it seems, imagine an Anne Boleyn that genuinely loved him. Charles Laughton’s representation of Henry in the film  The Private Life of Henry VIII in 1933 was perhaps influential here: it is hard to imagine an obese Henry tossing chicken legs over his shoulders being considered for the role as sexy romance hero. In order to make Anne’s story romantic, an alternative love interest had to be found. Henry Percy was an attractive option because history tells us his liaison with Anne was thwarted. Thomas Wyatt also becomes another attractive alternative lover for Anne, although it is usually assumed his love was unrequited. The Favor of Kings is again an instructive exemplar, as it established the dominant theme of so many of the novels that followed. Bradley suggests that all of Anne’s problems stemmed from Wolsey’s intervention into her marriage with Henry Percy. It is this crisis that turns Anne into a woman desperate for revenge, and furiously aware of her own powerlessness: Oh, for the power of ruling her own life, of riding out with her lover forth to his country home, far from her all interference and tyranny! Oh for the 14  Mary Hastings Bradley, The Favor of Kings (New York and London: D. Appleton and Company, 1912), 11.

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power to dash aside these arrogant men and women, or to wreak on them one-hundredth of the bitterness that she was suffering now!15

It is a system in which women could be bartered and sold as a “wooden pawn to be moved hither and yon” that is to be blamed for her growing conviction that she needs to acquire power in whatever way she can.16 As Susan Bordo writes of this novel, “the paradigm of Anne as a vivacious, high-spirited young girl whose life was profoundly—and tragically— altered by becoming Henry’s queen has remained the narrative spine of the twentieth-century novels that are sympathetic to her.”17 What is interesting is that this narrative spine actually remains largely the same even in novels that are less than sympathetic to her, so entrenched does this assumption about Anne’s character become. Reginald Drew’s novel Anne Boleyn was written in the same year as The Favor of Kings, but while Drew’s Anne, represented as “all sweetness and moral light,” fell out of favour, Bradley’s Anne became the dominant paradigm precisely because audiences were increasingly demanding representations of historical women with whom they could relate.18 The perfect Anne that was so popular the century before now looked increasingly old-fashioned and dull. E. Barrington’s 1932 novel Anne Boleyn also inaugurates another tradition in writing about Anne that was to linger: her apparent asexuality. Barrington describes Anne’s attitude towards men as essentially affectless: To Anne, [men were] animals a little contemptible but eminently manageable, their appetites when matched against her intellect and graces setting a delightful game which, since Providence apparently took a hand in it now and then, must certainly be played with the skill of which all her coquetries were part and lot.19

Anne might take pride in her skilful deployment of the language of romance and courtship, but she remains pristinely above such matters. For Anne, sex is nothing but a slightly distasteful performance. Burstein argues that the Anne of historical romance frequently “manipulates the language  Bradley, 11.  Bradley, 22. 17  Susan Bordo, The Creation of Anne Boleyn: A New Look at England’s Most Notorious Queen (Boston: Mariner Books, 2014), 165. 18  Burstein, “The Fictional Afterlife of Anne Boleyn,” 7. 19  E. Barrington, Anne Boleyn (London: Amazon, 1932), 31. 15 16

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of romance to turn sex with Henry into [an] utopian encounter,” despite her lack of genuine romantic feelings for Henry.20 That Anne was able to convince Henry that their relationship was a genuine love match becomes a commonplace in Anne Boleyn historical fiction, alongside the conviction that Anne was adept at performing emotional intimacy that she did not feel.

Agency Versus Passivity One of the most interesting questions to be asked about Anne Boleyn was the extent to which she was either acting or acted upon: was she an agent of history or its victim? Wallace suggests that in the 1930s, as the world careened from the Depression towards another world war, women’s historical novels became histories of the “defeated” and emphasised women’s lack of agency and legacy of suffering, usually at the hands of men.21 Writing about literature of the inter-war period, Alison Light also writes that despite the apparent conservatism of the period, the 1920s and 1930s “nevertheless put woman and the home, and a whole panoply of connected issues, at the centre of national life.”22 The emphasis of the interconnectedness between women and the state again rendered Anne an ideal subject for historical fiction, because Anne’s private life was clearly so central to national stability. In My Friend Anne, Jessie Armstrong attributes the seeds of Empire to Anne’s influence: “We who are now […] living in the glorious reign of our wise and beloved queen – good queen Bess, as her subjects liked to call her – may thank God for the freedom and prosperity which hath accrued to our nation […] through that Reformation.”23 Armstrong may as well be describing life in England in the latter years of Victoria’s reign here. After the First World War, that self-­assured portrait of a safe and stable England might have been fractured, but historical novelists continued to think about Anne’s influence on the history of England at a particularly tumultuous point in its early modern history.

 Burstein, “The Fictional Afterlife of Anne Boleyn,” 12.  Wallace, The Woman’s Historical Novel, 54–57. 22  Alison Light, Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism between the Wars (London: Routledge, 1991), 10. 23  Armstrong, My Friend Anne: A Story of the Sixteenth Century, 45. 20 21

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Historical novelists were divided in their representations of the agency Anne was able to wield. The Anne found in E. Barrington’s Anne Boleyn is certainly suffering and defeated by the end of the novel but does not lack for agency throughout. Barrington follows the model already established in historical fiction at this point in representing Anne as ambitious. However, the precise nature of her ambition is somewhat unusual. Instead of suggesting that Anne was personally ambitious for riches or power, Barrington locates Anne’s ambition in a kind of mystical, pre-Christian devotion to beauty. Anne and her brother George are described as “Apollo and Diana shooting golden arrows of superiority at lesser folk.”24 There is a small chance that Barrington was influenced by Margaret Murray in her incorporation of pagan mysticism into Anne Boleyn. In 1931, Murray argued in The God of the Witches that Anne was an adherent of Paganism. However, it was not until her follow-up, 1954’s The Divine King in England, that Murray was to expand upon her theories about Anne and the “Old Religion,” and it is more likely that Barrington’s incorporation of references to witchcraft, mythology and sorcery are due to her interest in fantasy fiction.25 Central to Barrington’s conceptualisation of Anne is the presence of a kind of amateur Freudian psychoanalysis. Many novelists of the period, such as May Sinclair and Rosamond Lehmann, as Nicole Beauman has shown, were increasingly looking to Freud in order to explore the “inner workings of their character’s minds.”26 Barrington accordingly suggests that Anne’s alleged extra finger was not an incidental embarrassment, but the key to unlocking her character: “It made her a finished actress in all she said and did, a flowing, changing creature of graces carried to absolute perfection […] but warped, abnormal under it all.”27 Anne, the servant of beauty, cannot reconcile her body’s own imperfections, and so devotes herself to a performance of aesthetic perfection motivated by a frantic 24  E. Barrington, Anne Boleyn, 20. Mark Smeaton is also repeatedly described in the novel as a quasi-mythic figure, a “goatish” man (63) or a “rustic English pan” (69). 25  For more on Margaret Murray’s argument that Anne was a practising pagan, see Roland Hui, “Anne of the Wicked Ways: Perceptions of Anne Boleyn as a Witch in History and in Popular Culture,” Parergon: Journal of the Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies 35, no. 1 (2018): 97–118. Anne and Henry are married in a Pagan ceremony in Maureen Peter’s 1969 novel Anne, the Rose of Hever. 26  Nicole Beauman, A Very Great Profession: The Woman’s Novel 1914–39 (London: Virago Press, 1983), 149. 27  Barrington, 10.

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sense that she must hide those imperfections. As the novel proceeds, Barrington continually returns to the idea that Anne is motivated by an unconscious inferiority complex stemming from her deformities. Far from having no historical agency, the problem for Barrington’s Anne is her lack of passivity: she is, in fact, too much. She is too powerful and too agentic for the Tudor court. Anne’s queenship is described as one of “all that was gay, young, merry and beauteous, full of zest and spirit.”28 In this devotion to fun and high spirits, Anne resembles the flapper figure of the 1920s, but due to her asexuality, lacks the flapper’s casual sexuality. However, writing at a point after the stock market collapse of 1929, at which point the flapper fell out of favour, Barrington writes that Anne’s spiritedness veered into dangerous volatility: “the life she inflicted on Henry was one that no man could endure with patience, even though her jealous furies alternated with wild fits of caresses and entreaties and subjection that no other man could have borne to see.”29 Such excessive energy was to lead directly to Anne’s execution: the Henrician court cannot account for a woman of such unruly energies. The novel thus reflects both changing understandings of femininity between the wars and social anxiety around the consequences of that shift. What would happen to the social world if women started speaking their mind? It is a proposition as apparently troubling for the world of the 1930s as it is for Tudor England. If, for some historical novelists of the period, Anne was a historic prototype for the agentic woman, then for others, Anne was an avatar of female powerlessness. For those who continued to represent Anne as essentially acted upon, Anne’s story has more immediate relevance to contemporary women as a historical touchstone for their own powerlessness. Jean Plaidy is the most prominent example of a historical novelist whose novels emphasised Anne’s status as a victim. The most prolific historical novelist of the twentieth century, Jean Plaidy was also one of its most enthusiastic writers of the lives of Tudor queens.30 Plaidy wrote two versions of Anne’s life: 1949’s Murder Most Royal and 1986’s The Lady in the Tower. Murder Most  Barrington, 122.  Barrington, 273. 30  Jean Plaidy was the pseudonym of Eleanor Hibbert, who wrote under a plethora of names. Under the name Jean Plaidy, Hibbert wrote novels about virtually every famous royal woman, including novels focusing on each of Henry’s queens, as well as novels about other Tudor women. Anne is necessarily a character in other Plaidy novels, such as her three-volume series on Catherine of Aragon. However, here I have focused solely on the novels in which Anne is the principal focalising character. 28 29

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Royal intersperses Anne’s story with the youth of Katherine Howard. The inclusion of Katherine Howard underlines the fact that Henry would commit two acts of “murder most royal” and, of course, Plaidy must also represent the unhappy conclusion of Catherine of Aragon’s marriage to Henry. The novel emphasises women’s dependence on men; no romantic encounter has a happy ending in the world of the novel, and even the most powerful women are victims of their husband’s transitory desires. Plaidy’s Anne is not a paragon of perfection, however. In common with most early twentieth-century Annes, she is motivated by ambition, but here that ambition is short-lived. Soon after their marriage, Anne becomes disillusioned with Henry’s character, which she finds easier to judge from her position as Queen, rather than as subordinate subject. She notes, too, that “the fight had tired her far more than it had Henry.”31 Plaidy’s Anne might be the passive victim, but she is also not a saintly figure. Plaidy, in fact, makes Anne a proto-feminist, which is attributed to the influence of her time in the French court and the intellectual example provided by Marguerite de Navarre, sister of the French king: “Marguerite had imbued her with a new, advanced way of thinking, the kernel of which was equality of the sexes.”32 That Marguerite was responsible for Anne’s alleged progressive views about gender increasingly becomes commonplace in historical fiction after Plaidy. Even as Plaidy gestures towards the changes that were to come with the rise of second-wave feminism with her emphasis on Anne’s interest in equality of the sexes, she does not represent women as active agents of history. Instead, Plaidy consistently reiterates the fact that even queens are captive wives. Her interest in women’s mistreatment by men could, of course, be read as an act of feminist resistance. As Wallace writes, Plaidy’s historical novels “demonstrate that it is a matter of historical fact that women have been locked up, mistreated, violently abused, raped, and even killed, often by their husbands.”33 In the 1960s, speaking out about experiences of rape was a key activity for feminist consciousness-raising. Plaidy’s emphasis on the fact that Anne’s story is one in which a husband sentences his wife to a violent death anticipates Karen Lindsey’s feminist

 Jean Plaidy, Murder Most Royal (London: Arrow Books, 2006), 319.  Plaidy, 18. 33  Wallace, The Woman’s Historical Novel, 137. 31 32

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reinterpretation of the wives of Henry VIII, as well as later more explicitly feminist historical novels.34 While Barrington’s Anne is too unruly for the Henrician court, Plaidy’s well-read Anne is too clever. For many historical novelists, the problem for Henry is that once he has experienced sex with Anne, the erotic promise of that encounter is spent. Megan Hickerson reads Plaidy’s novel as, like Barrington’s, engaged in a Freudian reading of Henry’s sexuality: “Henry rationalises his desires to his conscience; his conscience then parrots his own reasoning back to him, framing pursuit of his libidinous impulses as his moral duty.”35 However, if Henry rationalises his own unconscious urges to justify his pursuit of Anne, his rejection of Anne is far more prosaic and far easier to parse. Anne has ventured into areas that Henry regards as the exclusive domain of men: “Too clever, dying to dictate England through him […] he would be better without Anne; she disturbed him, distracted him from state matters […] Women were for bedtime, not to sidle between a king and his country.”36 Anne has not behaved in an appropriately passive manner in insisting upon having her own opinions about masculinised matters of state, and so Henry insists upon reiterating her subservient status. His attraction to the colourless and meek Jane Seymour is a conscious reaction against Anne’s temperament. Jenna Elizabeth Barlow has suggested that Plaidy hedges, “between portraying [Anne] as the victim and the architect of her own fate.”37 Plaidy does certainly suggest that “modern” women such as Anne might initially excite men, but that they inevitably prefer more traditionally submissive women. However, I would contend that Plaidy does not represent Anne as the architect of her own misfortune because Murder Most Royal demonstrates that no matter how women behave, they are always inevitably the victims of men. No matter how much agency women exercise, the result is always the same: they are inevitably made to remember that they are still subservient to, and dependent on, the men in their lives. 34  Karen Lindsey, Divorced, Beheaded, Survived: A Feminist Reinterpretation of the Wives of Henry VIII (Reading: Addison-Wesley, 1995). 35  Megan L. Hickerson, “‘Anne Taught Him How to Be Cruel’: Henry VIII in Modern Historical Fiction,” in Henry VIII and History, ed. Thomas Betteridge and Thomas S. Freeman (London: Routledge, 2012), 230 (223–40). 36  Plaidy, Murder Most Royal, 384. 37  Jenna Elizabeth Barlow, “Women’s Historical Fiction ‘After’ Feminism: Discursive Reconstructions of the Tudors in Contemporary Literature” (Stellenbosch University, 2014), 84.

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Male writers of the period also tend to emphasise Anne’s passivity, although often in historical dramas rather than novels. Writing about George Bernard Shaw’s play Saint Joan (1923), Stephen Watt notes that “the history play has been a hybrid genre of culturally validated serious or canonically ‘high’ artistic matter and its opposite—namely, the sensationalistic, mundane, or canonically ‘low’ conventions of popular drama.”38 Anne Boleyn dramas of the early twentieth century accordingly tend to stress the impact of Anne’s domestic life on the stability of the nation. However, the emphasis on the impact of Anne’s relationship with Henry on the state does not mean that Anne is represented as agentic; instead, Anne is frequently constructed as the victim of historical forces beyond her control. Edgar Lee Masters’s play Henry VIII and Ann Boleyn (1934) capitalises on the confluence of melodrama and history in Anne’s story. The play consists of a long confrontation between Anne (Ann) and Henry after he has accused her of adultery. The consequences of Ann’s alleged infidelity will be public and private, political and personal. Masters’s Ann is also quite straightforwardly a victim of Henry’s cruelty. Ann uses the word “assault” to characterise Henry’s pursuit of her: “Then does the man despite himself who assaulted / The fort so often with such ill success.”39 Identifying Henry’s pursuit of Anne as assault might seem to suggest a feminist reading of Anne as a victim of sexual harassment and abuse. However, after this declaration, Masters’s Ann is largely silent. Henry is by far the predominant speaker in the play, while Ann is left to intermittently protest, “I cry for mercy!”40 In giving Henry the vast majority of lines, Masters allows Henry to define the parameters of his relationship with Ann and shift the blame for the collapse of their relationship on to her. Despite Masters’s identification of Henry as an abuser, denying Ann the power of speech means that any broader social or historic significance of representing Anne Boleyn as a victim of her husband’s violence is muted. By way of contrast, some representations of a passive Anne more closely resemble the Protestant martyr Annes of the nineteenth century. What is at issue for these writers is not the relevance of Anne’s experiences to the 38  Stephen Watt, “Shaw’s ‘Saint Joan’ and the Modern History Play,” Comparative Drama 19, no. 1 (1985): 66. 39  Edgar Lee Masters, “Henry VIII & Ann Boleyn,” in Dramatic Duologues: Four Short Plays in Verse (New York & Los Angeles: Samuel French, 1934), 4 (3–18). 40  Masters, 16.

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lives of twentieth-century women, but Anne’s exceptionalism. W.S. Pakenham-Walsh’s play, Anne Boleyn, or The Queen of May: A Play in Four Acts (1921) features an Anne that is so perfect that even Nature acknowledges her superiority. As the Boleyn family awaits her return from France, the garden of Hever Castle rejoices: “The garden’s glad itself. I swear I’ve seen a rose lift up its head when I / But spoke her name.”41 Pakenham-Walsh is an unusual contributor to writing about Anne: he was so enamoured with her that his posthumously published A Tudor Story (1969), written over the 1920s and 1930s, reveals his sincerely held belief that he had a number of personal encounters with the ghost of Anne Boleyn, with whom he was spiritually connected.42 At the end of his play, Pakenham-Walsh has Lady Kingston remark that “Anne Boleyn is a saint,” while Mary Wyatt declares that Anne’s name will “be breathed with every growing reverence into the future.”43 There are no assertions of Anne’s “relatability” here or the relevance of her experiences to twentieth-century women; instead, what we seem to have is a male writer in love with his subject. The most important Anne Boleyn drama of the early twentieth century does, however, restore Anne’s agency to her. Maxwell Anderson’s Anne of the Thousand Days, written in 1948, was an immensely popular stage play even before its adaptation into film in 1969 (see Chap. 11). Amongst other accolades, Rex Harrison won a Tony Award for his portrayal of Henry VIII, and so, in terms of sheer popularity, Anne of the Thousand Days is an important text for the twentieth century. The play is structured around a series of scenes from the life of Anne, opening with her in the Tower reflecting on her relationship with Henry.44 This Anne is even more “feisty” than was common in historical novels of the period, rebuffing Henry’s advances by telling him, “You’re spoiled and vengeful, and malicious and bloody. The poetry they praise so much is sour, and the music

41  W.S. Pakenham-Walsh, Anne Boleyn, or, The Queen of May: A Play in Four Acts (London: Erskine Macdonald, 1921), 13. 42  For more information about Pakenham-Walsh’s ghost memoir, see Stephanie Russo, “At the Border of Life and Death: The Ghost of Anne Boleyn,” Parergon: Journal of the Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 37.2 (2020), forthcoming. 43  Pakenham-Walsh, Anne Boleyn, or, The Queen of May: A Play in Four Acts, 115, 118. 44  Maxwell Anderson, Anne of the Thousand Days, Acting Edi (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1950), 4.

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you write’s worse.”45 Anderson’s Anne in fact confesses to hating Henry prior to sleeping with him, when that hatred switches to a powerful love. She finds to her despair that “when I no longer hated him, he hated me.”46 The central theme of Anne of the Thousand Days is the impact that Anne will have both on Henry personally, and on English history through Elizabeth. Anne is given the chance to remove herself to Antwerp and clear the way for Henry’s remarriage, but refuses to do so because she would rather, “send ten thousand to die rather than disinherit my blood.”47 Anne then boldly foretells Elizabeth’s destiny as Queen shortly before her death. There would have been no reason for the historic Anne to think that Elizabeth would take the crown and, in fact, Anne’s death left Elizabeth in a precarious position. However, by giving Anne this moment of ahistoric triumph, Anderson suggests that Anne will take an active role in the shape of English history beyond her death: her sacrifice will allow for the glories of the upcoming Elizabethan era. Moreover, Henry admits that he cannot be free from the influence of Anne, even after her death. He notes, “It would have been easier to forget you living than to forget you dead,” accepting that he will spend the rest of his life musing on her loss.48 Anne functions as both truth-teller and active agent on both political and personal levels. Anne’s impact on history is comparatively underplayed in most historical novels of this period, compared to Anderson’s vision of a woman whose agency is so powerful it lingers posthumously both politically and personally, which suggests that there is something about the dramatic form that allowed a more epic dimension to her story to be highlighted. The relatively compressed scope of the drama also allowed playwrights to dispense with many of the tropes associated with the historical romance to focus on other elements of Anne’s biography.

Sexuality It was in the twentieth century that the sex life of Anne and Henry became a subject of speculation. While earlier texts had hinted at the sexual dynamics of their relationship, it was not until the early twentieth century that an Anne/Henry sex scene could be put to paper. Women’s fiction of the time  Anderson, 23.  Anderson, 49. 47  Anderson, 57. 48  Anderson, 74. 45 46

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was increasingly likely to directly address female sexuality, although such novels were likely to be met with controversy. Elinor Glynn’s novel Three Weeks was published in 1907, and its frank depiction of sexual relationships proved immensely popular with readers, if critically derided. Similarly, E.M. Hull’s 1919 The Sheik (and its 1921 film adaptation starring Hollywood heartthrob Rudolph Valentino) was an immediate bestseller that also attracted considerable moral panic. As Hsu-Ming Teo writes, The Sheik “gave credence to women’s sexual desires and sexual autonomy, contributing to a modern understanding and conversation about sex in the 1920s.”49 Women writing historical romances in the early half of the twentieth century thus had greater leeway to write about sex. In fact, the historical setting of Anne’s story may have allowed women writers to more openly write about sexuality. Beauman writes that novelists such as Elinor Glyn and E.M. Hull usually set their romances “somewhere far away and exotic,” in order to avoid censorship or controversy.50 The historical distance of the Tudor period, and the fact that Anne Boleyn’s biography had an obvious sexual element, meant that historical novelists could increasingly grapple with female sexuality quite openly in their novels. One of the first novels to foreground the sexual dynamics of Anne and Henry’s relationship was The Favor of Kings. Before her marriage to Henry, Anne realises Henry can and will try to take her sexually by force and worries about how to manage and regulate his sexual desires: He wanted her – he was resolved to have her. He did not clothe what he was pleased to call his sentiments in imaginative garb at all. He did not reckon with denial. Love he wanted, love he would have. He was master. He would have his way.51

Such scenes, however, were as much about reflecting on Anne’s precarious position as allowing readers vicarious pleasure and titillation. The novel therefore both contemplates Anne’s helplessness and capitalises on the growing marketplace for explicitly erotic fiction for women. Imagining how Anne managed to hold off Henry’s sexual advances becomes frequent material for historical novelists, who sometimes feature scenes in which Anne and Henry almost have sex, only for Anne to think better of 49  Hsu-Ming Teo, Desert Passions: Orientalism and Romance Novels (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012), 89. 50  Beauman, A Very Great Profession, 187. 51  Bradley, The Favor of Kings, 72.

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it at the last minute. Bradley also ties Anne’s downfall to her sexuality. Sir Nicholas Carewe has been sexually rejected by Anne, and so he plots her fall as an act of revenge. Anne is thus consistently represented as sexual prey for the men around her. Her execution is less a punishment for feminine overreach than a reflection of her powerful sexuality; the desire that she evokes in men is both exciting and deadly. That women were now increasingly free to write frankly about sex does not mean that sex was always treated positively in their novels. A plot element that repeatedly occurs in historical fictions across the century is that Mark Smeaton’s (alleged) desire for Anne is a real problem for  her. In Barrington’s novel, Mark Smeaton is a Satanic figure whose ability to “fascinate the something elfish” in Anne presages disaster.52 The motif continues into the later twentieth century. In Peter Albery’s The Uncommon Marriage (1960), Smeaton’s desire for Anne becomes obsessive and leads directly to her downfall. Cromwell gives Smeaton a drug that makes Smeaton lose control and attempt to rape Anne; Henry, of course, walks in at precisely that moment.53 There is an interesting class dimension here. Rarely are the other men executed for adultery with Anne represented as sexually interested in her. Instead, the sexuality of a lower-class man is perceived as a real threat to Anne, whether or not she reciprocates that desire. As we have seen, one of the continuities of Anne Boleyn historical fiction at this time was its insistence that Anne was either asexual or personally unmoved by her relationship with Henry. If Anne is allowed to be sexual at all, her sexuality is only moved by others, usually by Henry Percy and sometimes by Thomas Wyatt. Jean Plaidy’s Murder Most Royal, however, is characterised by anxiety about sex. As Barlow writes, Plaidy’s interest in gender equality is “tempered by th[e] rather conservative, even prudish attitude she adopts regarding feminine sexuality, which is somewhat perplexing even in the context of the 1940s.”54 Mary’s sexual relationship with Henry, for example, is described by Anne as “degrading.”55 When it is Anne’s turn to submit to Henry sexually, she becomes intermittently “frantic” with regret.56 Whether the sexual encounter is driven by  Barrington, Anne Boleyn, 164.  Peter Albery, The Uncommon Marriage (London: Elek Books, 1960). 54  Jenna Elizabeth Barlow, “Women’s Historical Fiction ‘After’ Feminism,” 78. 55  Plaidy, Murder Most Royal, 51. 56  Plaidy, 210. 52 53

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lust (Mary) or ambition (Anne), the consequence for women in Plaidy’s novel who have sex must always be degradation, rejection and/or death. Plaidy’s depiction of Katherine Howard’s (very) youthful sexual encounters are presented as sexually fulfilling, but read not as pornographic; instead, they are ominous reminders that these sexual acts will lead directly to the still teenage Katherine’s own execution. Male writers grappling with Anne’s sexuality actually reveal less anxiety about female sexuality than their female counterparts. However, in doing so, they simply reiterate the perception that romance is entirely the domain of women. That women are “made” for sex, and ill-suited for virtually anything else, is suggested in two novels written by men in the early twentieth century in which Thomas Wyatt’s supposed relationship with Anne is foregrounded: Francis Hackett’s Queen Anne Boleyn and Philip Lindsay’s The Queen’s Confession. The twentieth-century interest in Thomas Wyatt is unsurprising: as Julie Crane writes, Wyatt “is the poet and the failed lover, highly sensitive, but himself safe from the end which is awaiting her.”57 Wyatt is the perfect sensitive hero for historical romance, and a far more attractive lover than Henry because while Henry will kill Anne, Thomas will immortalise her in his poetry. In Francis Hackett’s 1939 Queen Anne Boleyn, Thomas is first Anne’s admirer and then her lover. Wyatt considers himself engaged to Anne and muses that “his pre-contract with Anne, in the eyes of the Church, was as binding as marriage.”58 Anne is again presented as initially asexual, but finds herself changed after sex with Thomas: “the proud woman in her, as well as the calculating, gave way to a creating of blinding tenderness.”59 There is no guilt or anxiety associated with the sexual encounter; instead, heterosexual sex effectively “cures” Anne of ambition. The solution to women seeking fulfilment beyond the home, then, is to provide them sexual satisfaction, which will distract them from any other concern. Philip Lindsay’s The Queen’s Confession (1947) again insists that Thomas Wyatt’s love for Anne is requited, but does not feature a consummation scene. Instead, it is only when Anne is at the brink of death that she comes to the realisation that she has loved Wyatt all along. Instead of 57  Julie Crane, “Whoso List to Hunt: The Literary Fortunes of Anne Boleyn,” in The Female Figure in Contemporary Historical Fiction, ed. K. Cooper and E. Short (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 78 (76–91). 58  Francis Hackett, Queen Anne Boleyn (New York: Doubleday, Doran & Company, Inc., 1939), 17. 59  Hackett, 126.

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regretting the extramarital sexual encounter, Anne regrets that she has not committed adultery with Thomas: But alas, alas, I never sinned with Wyatt! Would now that I had. That is my one regret; never have I known love, and only a man whose touch I hated possessed me, for I possessed no man, no man.60

That Anne has been in love with Wyatt from the beginning has been readily apparent to the attentive reader, as she seems to spend most of her time obsessing over his relationship with Elizabeth Darrell. Lindsay’s Anne is highly unreliable, and a significant portion of the novel takes the form of a conversation in which Anne questions the accuracy of her memories or berates herself for her actions: “It was ambition, Anne, the mad dream, a young girl’s dream of a king for a lover. You were unlucky because your dream came true.”61 Ambition has not allowed Anne to realise or explore her true sexuality, and her tragedy is amplified by the fact that she has never had an authentic sexual experience or true emotional intimacy. The importance of genuine female sexuality is underscored in the novel by the fact that Anne’s parting wish is that her daughter will be open to the experience of sexual desire. Of course, the reader well knows that Elizabeth will be the virgin queen, so Anne’s speech is laden with irony: Do not reject love, little child, for to us women it is life. We are not like men who can fight and drink and plot, turning from kissing to battle in a wink. We women are all love, our bodies tender, our breasts for children. God has made us that way and it is a wicked sin when we forget what we are for and turn ambitious, longing for outward splendour, for body’s gear and not the soul’s comfort.62

Philip Lindsay was the son of the Australian painter Norman Lindsay, whose paintings of lushly sensual naked women scandalised early twentieth-­ century Australian society. Philip Lindsay had a far less overtly scandalous resume, as the author of many historical romances, but like his father’s art, his fiction emphasises fleshy female sexuality. The tragedy of Anne’s story, for Lindsay, is that she did not allow heterosexual sex to save her.

 Philip Lindsay, The Queen’s Confession (London: Hutchinson & Co, 1947), 479.  Lindsay, 189, original emphasis. 62  Lindsay, 344. 60 61

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The Tudor Scarlett O’Hara Representations of Anne were as much influenced by women’s films as they were by women’s historical fiction and two films, in particular, had a demonstrable impact on Anne Boleyn historical fiction of the 1940s: Gone with the Wind and The Women. Both films were released in 1939, and both are either cited specifically in Anne Boleyn fictions or obliquely referenced. Anne’s story has a surprising resonance with women’s films of both the pre-Code period (1930–34) and beyond, as these films often featured glamourous, agentic and openly sexual women who enjoy a great deal of freedom, only to be punished at the end of the film. Anne’s story—or, at least, how her story was so often imagined—follows the exact same trajectory. As Jeanine Basinger writes in her exploration of such films, “it’s obvious that seeds of unrest, even rebellion, were planted in some female minds by the evidence they saw on-screen, despite the conventional endings that turn a story into a cautionary tale.”63 Merle Oberon’s depiction of Anne in The Private Life of Henry VIII will also be considered later in this volume. For female readers on both sides of the Atlantic in the late 1930s, no heroine of a historical fiction was as beguiling as Scarlett O’Hara from Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 bestseller Gone with the Wind and its blockbuster 1939 film adaptation starring Vivien Leigh as the beautiful, wilful, flirtatious and deluded Scarlett. As Pamela Regis points out, however, Gone with the Wind is not a romance. Not only does the novel end unhappily, the novel “never manages to deliver a barrierless relationship between heroine and hero.”64 In its failure to meet all the generic requirements of the romance novel, and its unhappy conclusion, Gone with the Wind is therefore more closely aligned to Anne Boleyn historical fictions than the romance novel, with its happily-ever-after conclusion. Writing about the reception of the novel and film in the post-war era, Helen Taylor notes that Scarlett O’Hara, and the novel’s representation of a post-Civil War America, resonated with the experiences of women: “the dawn of a new peacetime era…offered hopes of new styles of class, generational and

63  Jeanine Basinger, A Woman’s View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women 1930–1960 (Hanover & London: Wesleyan University Press, 1993), 11. 64  Pamela Regis, A Natural History of the Romance Novel (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003). 50.

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sexual behaviour and relations; GWTW [sic] placed all the energy and life force in characters who were … distinctly unorthodox.”65 If the unorthodox and ambitious Scarlett, who openly flirts with (and marries) men to get what she desires was an avatar of her time, then Anne Boleyn, by then popularly assumed to be another ambitious and flirtatious woman, could quite easily be read as a Tudor Scarlett O’Hara. Margaret Campbell Barnes’s novel Brief Gaudy Hour, published in 1949, is perhaps the most overt manifestation of this tendency.66 Brief Gaudy Hour opens with an echo of Mammy calling Scarlett from the window of Tara, a scene from the 1939 film, with Simonette, Anne’s governess, calling Anne to come inside to try on her new dresses. Anne, like Scarlett, is on the precipice of adventures: “for her […] the gaudy hour of life was being born […] full of golden promise, and transient as the summer day.”67 Even the title Brief Gaudy Hour, with its suggestion of evanescence, recalls the title Gone with the Wind, with its suggestions of endings and pastness. Like Scarlett, Anne is overtly and self-consciously flirtatious. Her stepmother notes that Anne’s habit of laughing through her eyelashes was a “fascinating, hussy’s trick.”68 Anne’s relationship with Henry is motivated by the desire for power and revenge, not sex. When she reads Henry’s first love letter, she “felt a warm sense of power rising in her.”69 Anne can perceive that Henry will be the way to obtain that power, yet feels either indifferent or repulsed by Henry personally, just as Scarlett’s first two husbands, Charles Hamilton and Frank Kennedy, are purely convenient to her. Anne’s sexuality is itself only stirred by her first love, Percy, which parallels Scarlett’s devotion to her own first love, Ashley Wilkes. If Scarlett becomes hard and calculating as a result of the failure of that relationship, so too does Anne turn to ruthless ambition when divided from Percy. 65  Helen Taylor, Scarlett’s Women: Gone with the Wind and Its Female Fans (London: Virago Press, 1989), 9. 66  I am not the first person to observe that Barnes’s Anne resembles Scarlett O’Hara. Marian Kensler, writing as Sonetka at the BoleynBooks website, also makes this point: Marian Kensler, “Brief Gaudy Hour: A Novel of Anne Boleyn (1949) by Margaret Campbell Barnes,” Anne Boleyn Novels, 2012, https://anneboleynnovels.wordpress. com/2012/07/14/brief-gaudy-hour-a-novel-of-anne-boleyn-by-margaret-campbellbarnes-1949/ 67  Margaret Campbell Barnes, Brief Gaudy Hour (Naperville: Sourcebooks Landmark, 2008), 1. 68  Barnes, 7. 69  Barnes, 125.

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Susan Bordo has read Barnes’s novel as reflecting the development of the American teenager in the 1940s and 1950s. She writes that “there are many times that the novel sounds exactly like a story from one of the upbeat teen magazines that began to be published in the midforties.”70 However, while Barnes’s Anne might initially be a precocious teenager eager to engage in adventures within the glamourous world of the court, she soon becomes a hard and often cruel woman. Anne acknowledges as such: “even while this heady draught of power drove her, she hated herself for growing hard.”71 So too does Scarlett mature over the course of the novel and film from flirtatious teenager to a woman increasingly prepared to do or say anything to avoid the poverty and hardship she experiences during the war. Moreover, both Scarlett and Anne—and their readers— are living through periods of great social and political change. The contexts of Early Modern England, Civil War America and Second World War England are thus aligned; new models of behaviour for women are possible in moments of social upheaval. If Scarlett O’Hara’s journey from pampered Southern belle to tough independent businesswoman was an avatar for the twentieth-century woman whose options were expanding beyond the domestic, then so too could the power-hungry and intelligent Anne be a historical touchstone for the modern woman. Both Scarlett and Anne are undone by the end of the novel: Scarlett’s stubborn allegiance to Ashley Wilkes renders her unable to realise her love for Rhett Butler, while Anne’s ambitions are her undoing. Scarlett is memorably given a moment of triumph at the end of the novel and film in her famous declaration, “Tomorrow is another day.”72 The reader is encouraged to believe that Scarlett, who has always managed to acquire what she wants, will find a way to return to Rhett. Anne is not precisely given such a moment of affirmation, largely because of the constraints of historical fact. It is hard to transform a bloody execution into a victory; the only novelists who attempt to do so usually can only visualise victory for Anne in prophesising the rise of Elizabeth. However, Barnes does give Anne a moment to gloat, even as she ascends the steps of the scaffold. She is so hyper-aware of her own beauty and power over men that she notes that

 Susan Bordo, The Creation of Anne Boleyn, 173.  Barnes, Brief Gaudy Hour, 234. 72  Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind (London & Sydney: Pan Books, 1974), 1011. 70 71

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men cannot stop ogling her body, even as she walks to the violent destruction of that body: she can still “stir the hearts of men.”73 Other novels later in the century, including Lozania Prole’s The Dark-­ Eyed Queen (1967) and Margaret Heys’s Anne Boleyn of the same year, replicate the Anne-as-Scarlett mould.74 Both novels feature Annes who respond to the loss of the first love—Percy—by turning their attention to the accumulation of power and privilege through sex. Another potential fictional touchstone for such a representation is Kathleen Winsor’s historical novel Forever Amber, published in 1944 and adapted into film in 1947. The heroine of Forever Amber, Amber St. Clare, cannot be with the man she loves, and so sleeps her way to wealth in late seventeenth-century England.75 Both Gone with the Wind and Forever Amber provided women with historical precedents, albeit fictional ones, for new ways of thinking about femininity, while at the same time allowing readers to revel in the glamour and nostalgia of the past. Anne is thus consistently imagined as a Scarlett O’Hara/Amber St. Clare type from the 1940s onwards. Moreover, the Scarlett O’Hara paradigm continues into the twenty-first century. The first line of Gone with the Wind is “Scarlett O’Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm as the Tarleton twins were.”76 The first line of Emily Purdy’s 2010 novel The Tudor Wife is virtually identical: “Anne Boleyn was not beautiful, but, while women were quick to take gleeful note of this, men seldom noticed.”77 The intertextual link is clearly no accident. Another text that gives us an Anne in the Scarlett O’Hara mode is Kenneth Haynes’s Mistress Minx (1940). The very title of the play suggests how Anne would be represented within. The play is much tighter in its scope than the historical novel and focuses solely on Anne’s life prior to her involvement with Henry. The only characters who appear are Anne, Mary Boleyn and Anne’s ever-present fictional governess, Simonette. The only characters who appear on stage, then, are women, aside from a page who opens the play with a neo-Shakespearean prologue.78 The play hinges  Barnes, Brief Gaudy Hour, 375.  Lozania Prole, The Dark-Eyed Queen (London: Robert Hale, 1967); Margaret Heys, Anne Boleyn (London: Sphere Books, 1967). 75  Kathleen Winsor, Forever Amber (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2000). 76  Mitchell, Gone with the Wind, 5. 77  Emily Purdy, The Tudor Wife (London: Avon, 2010), 9. 78  The play was written for a 1940 production by the New Jersey Woman’s Club, and so Haynes inevitably had a limited group of actresses with which to work. 73 74

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on a dramatic confrontation between the sisters, in which Anne mocks Mary for her failure to achieve any material advantage from her affair with Henry. When Mary accuses Anne of being “marked with the devil,” in reference to her infamous sixth finger, Anne “suddenly raises her arms cat-­ like and springs” at the terrified Mary.79 As noted explicitly in the printed edition of the play, this production is designed to be a “medieval version of THE WOMEN,” the popular 1939 film starring Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford and Rosalind Russell.80 The Women featured an exclusively female cast and has a number of set-piece scenes in which women fight either verbally (Norma Shearer vs. Joan Crawford) or physically (Rosalind Russell vs. Paulette Goddard). The Women is primarily about a love triangle, in which a married woman (Norma Shearer as Mary Haines) discovers that her never-seen husband is having an affair with the fascinatingly glamorous Crystal Allen (Joan Crawford). Haynes thus exploits the resemblance of Anne’s story to soap opera and melodrama, but entirely excludes Catherine of Aragon from the action. In The Women, Joan Crawford’s Crystal Allen is adept as masquerade. In one scene, she uses a telephone call to both convince Stephen that she is a homely, domestic type, as well as convince him to visit her that evening. As she speaks, she intermittently exchanges barbs with another shop girl, thus revealing that her sickly-sweet sentimentality is simply an affectation. Similarly, Haynes’s Anne is a self-conscious performer, depicted practising a masquerade and plotting a way to turn herself into a sensation at court. By the end of the play, Anne notes that her performance will be so dazzling that “perhaps even the king shall see me and ask for me.”81 The influence of Scarlett O’Hara is also not absent from Mistress Minx. In the final scene, Anne poses on a bench and arranges her dress artfully in order to impress a visiting Thomas Wyatt. This Anne might as well be Scarlett flirting meaninglessly with the Tarleton twins in the opening scenes of the film. Both The Women and Gone with the Wind suggest that women were essentially forced to become schemers due to their dependence on men. They plot, manoeuvre and use the tools available to them in order to shore up their survival. Either Barnes’s or Haynes’s Anne could fit seamlessly

79  Kenneth Haynes, Mistress Minx: An Episode in the Early Life of Anne Boleyn (Boston & Los Angeles: Baker’s Plays, 1940), 22. 80  Haynes. 81  Haynes, 46.

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into the world of either film, reflecting the extent to which the twentieth century had transformed her into a modern woman.

Conclusion In the second half of the twentieth century, historical novels whose basic plot structure mirrored that found in the novels of Bradley, Barrington, Plaidy and Barnes continued to be written. The same assumptions continued to be associated with Anne: that she was motivated by ambition, that her true love was Henry Percy and that she did not love the King, for example, continue to be tropes taken as received wisdom and replicated endlessly in ever-increasing numbers. However, with the rise of second-­ wave feminism, and the sexualisation of the romance novel, the passively victimised Anne of Murder Most Royal virtually disappears and a sharper, more villainous Anne came increasingly into favour. Anne again becomes a cautionary tale: the woman who takes feminism too far.

References Primary Sources Albery, Peter. The Uncommon Marriage. London: Elek Books, 1960. Anderson, Maxwell. Anne of the Thousand Days. Acting Edi. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1950. Armstrong, Jessie. My Friend Anne: A Story of the Sixteenth Century. London: Frederick Warne and Co., 1901. Barnes, Margaret Campbell. Brief Gaudy Hour. Naperville: Sourcebooks Landmark, 2008. Barrington, E. Anne Boleyn. London: Amazon, 1932. Bradley, Mary Hastings. The Favor of Kings. New York and London: D. Appleton and Company, 1912. Farrer, Reginald. The Anne-Queen’s Chronicle. London: Alston Rivers, 1909. Hackett, Francis. Queen Anne Boleyn. New York: Doubleday, Doran & Company, Inc., 1939. Haynes, Kenneth. Mistress Minx: An Episode in the Early Life of Anne Boleyn. Boston & Los Angeles: Baker’s Plays, 1940. Heys, Margaret. Anne Boleyn. London: Sphere Books, 1967. Lindsay, Philip. The Queen’s Confession. London: Hutchinson & Co, 1947. Masters, Edgar Lee. “Henry VIII & Ann Boleyn.” In Dramatic Duologues: Four Short Plays in Verse, 3–18. New York & Los Angeles: Samuel French, 1934. Mitchell, Margaret. Gone with the Wind. London & Sydney: Pan Books, 1974.

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Pakenham-Walsh, W.S. A Tudor Story: The Return of Anne Boleyn. Cambridge: The Lutterworth Press, 2006. ———. Anne Boleyn, or, The Queen of May: A Play in Four Acts. London: Erskine Macdonald, 1921. Plaidy, Jean. Murder Most Royal. London: Arrow Books, 2006. Prole, Lozania. The Dark-Eyed Queen. London: Robert Hale, 1967. Purdy, Emily. The Tudor Wife. London: Avon, 2010. Sergeant, Philip W. The Life of Anne Boleyn. London: Hutchinson & Co, 1923. Winsor, Kathleen. Forever Amber. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2000.

Secondary Sources Barlow, Jenna Elizabeth. “Women’s Historical Fiction ‘After’ Feminism: Discursive Reconstructions of the Tudors in Contemporary Literature.” Stellenbosch University, 2014. Basinger, Jeanine. A Woman’s View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women 1930–1960. Hanover & London: Wesleyan University Press, 1993. Beauman, Nicole. A Very Great Profession: The Woman’s Novel 1914–39. London: Virago Press, 1983. Bordo, Susan. The Creation of Anne Boleyn: A New Look at England’s Most Notorious Queen. Boston: Mariner Books, 2014. Burstein, Miriam Elizabeth. “The Fictional Afterlife of Anne Boleyn: How to Do Things with the Queen, 1901–2006.” Clio 37, no. 1 (2007): 1–26. Crane, Julie. “Whoso List to Hunt: The Literary Fortunes of Anne Boleyn.” In The Female Figure in Contemporary Historical Fiction, edited by K. Cooper and E. Short, 76–91. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Groot, Jerome de. The Historical Novel. London: Routledge, 2009. Hickerson, Megan L. “‘Anne Taught Him How to Be Cruel’: Henry VIII in Modern Historical Fiction.” In Henry VIII and History, edited by Thomas Betteridge and Thomas S. Freeman, 223–40. London: Routledge, 2012. Hughes, Helen. The Historical Romance. Abingdon & New York: Routledge, 1993. Hui, Roland. “Anne of the Wicked Ways: Perceptions of Anne Boleyn as a Witch in History and in Popular Culture.” Parergon: Journal of the Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies 35, no. 1 (2018): 97–118. Kensler, Marian. “Brief Gaudy Hour: A Novel of Anne Boleyn (1949) by Margaret Campbell Barnes.” Anne Boleyn Novels, 2012. https://anneboleynnovels. wordpress.com/2012/07/14/brief-gaudy-hour-a-novel-of-anne-boleyn-bymargaret-campbell-barnes-1949/. Light, Alison. Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism between the Wars. London: Routledge, 1991.

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———. “‘Young Bess’: Historical Novels and Growing Up.” Feminist Review 33 (1989): 57–71. Lindsey, Karen. Divorced, Beheaded, Survived: A Feminist Reinterpretation of the Wives of Henry VIII. Reading: Addison-Wesley, 1995. Regis, Pamela. A Natural History of the Romance Novel. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. Russo, Stephanie. “At the Border of Life and Death: The Ghost of Anne Boleyn.” Parergon: Journal of the Australian and New Zealand Association for Medievel and Early Modern Studies, 2020. Taylor, Helen. Scarlett’s Women: Gone with the Wind and Its Female Fans. London: Virago Press, 1989. Teo, Hsu-Ming. Desert Passions: Orientalism and Romance Novels. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012. Wallace, Diana. The Woman’s Historical Novel: British Women Writers, 1900-2000. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Watt, Stephen. “Shaw’s ‘Saint Joan’ and the Modern History Play.” Comparative Drama 19, no. 1 (1985): 58–86.

CHAPTER 8

Anne Boleyn from 1950 to 2000

The historical novels of the first half of the twentieth century standardised many elements of how we have come to understand Anne’s story. The historical romance novel continued to grow in popularity throughout the latter half of the century, and novelistic representations of Anne became ever more plentiful. That the personal was political was one of the central maxims for the second-wave feminist movement and so an exploration of the impact of Anne’s personal life upon the state was again ideally suited to the interests of the period. Most of the topoi that had, by this point, become entrenched in historical fictions about Anne continued to hold the status of received wisdom. Anne was routinely represented as motivated by either ambition or revenge, for example, and the assumption that she did not genuinely love Henry was consistently reiterated. A rare exception is Linda-Dawn Reeve’s 1980s trilogy. In the last novel, Condemned, Anne manifests little interest in either religion or power, but instead comments breathlessly on Henry’s “extremely well built” body.1 However, in most novels, if Anne did love at all, another man was assumed to be the object of her desire, and more erotically charged historical fiction was written about those imagined relationships. While continuities in Anne Boleyn fictions across the century persist, there are also significant shifts visible in representations of Anne from the mid-century onwards. The early century saw many changes in the ways in which gender and sexuality were understood, but the rise of the 1

 Linda-Dawn Reeve, Condemned (London: Robert Hale, 1981), 11.

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second-wave feminist movement brought even more significant social, cultural and political changes. These changes inevitably effected the ways in which women, power and gender relations were represented in writing by and about women. Deborah Philips argues of romance fiction of the period that “the model heroine is inevitably in dialogue with the challenges of the women’s movement.”2 Representations of Anne Boleyn are no exception. As Diana Wallace writes: Women’s fiction at this point splits between the ‘serious’ novel, typically confessional realism concerned with women’s predicament in the contemporary moment and consciously eschewing the romance plot, and the ‘popular’ novel, epitomised by the popular romance with its happy ending.3

Historical fictions about Anne Boleyn sit uncomfortably within this paradigm because most fit firmly within the popular romance mode, but as history dictates, these novels also cannot have a happy ending. The attempt to conform to genre expectations while at the same time not being able to provide a satisfactory resolution is a problem with which many late-­century novels about Anne grapple. As Wallace has shown, at a time when discussion around women’s power, or lack thereof, was central to the public consciousness, stories about the domestic sphere were popular because that was the place where women did demonstrably have power.4 Historical novels about Anne Boleyn thus both reflect upon these social changes at the same time as demonstrating considerable anxiety about the consequences of these changes. How to think about Anne’s supposed ambition becomes one of the central questions of late twentieth-century Anne Boleyn fiction. Does Anne’s (assumed) ambition make her a proto-feminist icon or a manifestation of societal fears about feminism going “too far”? Certainly, the spirit of the time meant that strong, agentic Anne Boleyns were even more in favour than they had been previously. However, even novelists who represent Anne as powerful inevitably still tie her downfall to precisely that deployment of power. In fact, the stronger the Anne, the more that strength is directly implicated in the circumstances of her fall. No 2  Deborah Philips, Women’s Fiction 1945–2005: Writing Romance (London and New York: Continuum, 2006), 14. 3  Diana Wallace, The Woman’s Historical Novel: British Women Writers, 1900–2000 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 152. 4  Wallace, 154.

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twentieth-century novelist is quite able to turn Anne’s downfall into a victory for the empowered woman. By the 1990s, Anne had become either a cautionary tale for the emergent power feminist or a salutary lesson about what would happen to the woman who ventured too far beyond the domestic sphere. The question of sex also becomes an increasingly important issue in Anne Boleyn fictions from the 1950s onwards. Again, the assumption in most novels is that Anne was not guilty of the charges laid against her at her trial. The rise of the erotic historical novel meant, however, that novelists were increasingly likely to represent Anne as having extramarital sex of some type but, crucially, this sexual activity does not signal something negative about Anne’s character. In fact, Anne’s lack of a sex drive becomes a problem in the late century as standards of sexual morality loosened. While Anne’s reputation for sexual laxity had been a problem for her posthumous reputation for centuries, from the 1960s onwards Anne is increasingly constructed as unfeminine due to her alienation from her sexuality.

The Erotic Historical The 1970s is associated in romance scholarship with the sexualisation of the romance novel. As Hsu-Ming Teo writes, the rise of second-wave feminism and the counter-cultural movement of the 1960s led to the sexualisation of romantic love and the romance novel, the representation of heroines and heroes, the increasing conflation of romance with capitalism and extravagant consumption, the gradual Americanization of the genre […], and the fragmentation and overt politization of the genre.5

Accordingly, Anne Boleyn historical fictions written in the period are far more sexualised. Carol Thurston has described the heroines of this new wave of sexualised historical romances as “obstreperous and rebellious women, all fighting for equal respect, fair treatment, and some measure of independence, no matter how ‘upstream’ all that might be for the time in which they lived.”6 By the second half of the twentieth century, this descriptor might equally be written about the way that Anne Boleyn was 5  Hsu-Ming Teo, “The Contemporary Anglophone Romance Genre,” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 9 (1–27). 6  Carol Thurston, The Romance Revolution: Erotic Novels for Women and the Quest for a New Sexual Identity (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 68.

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routinely represented in fiction. Once again, Anne Boleyn, or at least the cluster of topoi that had now accrued around her, could be easily adapted to the interests of the historical novel. One of the most influential and popular historical romances of the period was Kathleen Woodiwiss’s 1972 novel The Flame and the Flower. The novel became infamous as the hero of the novel rapes the heroine, who subsequently falls in love with him. Likewise, Rosemary Rogers’s 1974 Sweet Savage Love featured many explicit sex scenes in which consent is ambiguous. Sarah Frantz Lyons and Eric Murphy Selinger identify the publication of The Flame and the Flower and Sweet Savage Love as “signalling the emergence of a new subset of the romance novel, the ‘women’s historical romance’ or ‘erotic historical romance’ or ‘bodice ripper,’ as the American media eventually dubbed it.”7 While it is difficult, from our contemporary vantage-point, to equate rape with romance, Lyons and Selinger have persuasively shown that the representation of female sexuality found in The Flame and the Flower is considerably more complex than it might first appear. While the Scarlett O’Hara-esque romance heroines of earlier in the century used sex as a tool to get what they wanted, the heroine of the new form of sexualised historical romance wanted good, mutually fulfilling sex, even in the “contexts of gender oppression and sexualised violence.”8 This emphasis on sex and violence is replicated within Anne Boleyn historical romances of the period, in which Anne and Henry’s presumed lack of a mutually satisfying romance increasingly becomes a problem. Sexual fulfilment in the new erotic historical was also tied to women’s autonomy. Romance heroines were not supposed to be dependent on men; rather, the “heroine’s world and her values […] colonize and transform the hero’s values before the couple can achieve their happy ending.”9 The erotic historical thus required that the hero become submissive to the heroine, and it is here that the demands of genre sit uncomfortably with the contours of Anne’s biography. Anne and Henry’s relationship cannot adequately fit within these parameters, because while Henry initially seems to be submissive to Anne, his power will always overwhelm hers, as her 7  Sarah Frantz Lyons and Eric Murphy Selinger, “Strange Stirrings, Strange Yearnings: The Flame and the Flower, Sweet Savage Love, and the Lost Diversities of Blockbuster Historical Romance,” in Romance Fiction and American Culture: Love as the Practice of Freedom?, ed. William A. Gleason and Eric Murphy Selinger (Surrey: Ashgate, 2016), 90 (89–110). 8  Lyons and Selinger, 80. 9  Teo, “The Contemporary Anglophone Romance Genre,” 10.

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trial and execution so clearly illustrates. Carol Thurston writes that the erotic historical is one of the most significant developments in the history of the romance novel, as the “customary happy ending now is possible only through the heroine’s emergence as an autonomous individual, no longer defined solely in terms of her relationship to a man.”10 The problem for Anne is that she cannot have any happy ending at all. Her relationship with Henry, far from giving her an opportunity to discover her authentic sexuality and power, has essentially disrupted her potential to become the desiring, self-actualised heroine of the 1970s erotic historical. The possibility that another man can “save” her is also not a possibility. Historical novels about Anne from the late twentieth century become either failed erotic historicals or erotic historicals about another couple entirely. While the novels of the first part of the twentieth century routinely either stripped Anne of her sexuality or claimed that she used it as a tool, the novels of the latter half allowed Anne to seek out and have a lot more sex. In Norah Lofts’s 1963 novel The Concubine, Anne is guilty of adultery, although not in the way in which she is accused. Desperate to conceive the child that she knows will secure her safety, she concocts a plan which will allow her to maximise her chances of conceiving. She stages a masquerade ball in which she, disguised, has sex with a series of masked gentlemen. The plot is successful, and she conceives the baby she will subsequently miscarry in early 1536.11 The stratagem is not treated as abhorrent or as an indicator of Anne’s depraved nature. Instead, Lofts represents the escapade as simply a clever plan, and one that has the added advantage of also allowing the other women of the court to enjoy illicit encounters. Anne is, admittedly, using sex as a means to shore up power, but in the process she is allowed to experience some measure of sexual freedom. Another novel that allows Anne to plot episodes of illicit sex is Karen Harper’s 1983 The Last Boleyn (also known as Passion’s Reign). In that novel, Anne decides to avenge herself upon the French women in Calais who refuse to acknowledge her as the future Queen of England by setting up a mass seduction of French men by English women. The novel is suffused with rape imagery; Anne’s suggestion that Mary Boleyn should resume her sexual relationship with King Francois at this imagined orgy is treated as tantamount to the suggestion that Mary organise her own rape.  Carol Thurston, The Romance Revolution, 86.  Norah Lofts, The Concubine (Stroud: Tree of Life Publishing, 1963), 259–261.

10 11

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Later, William Stafford suggests that Anne should be raped in order to teach her a lesson. Stafford, Mary’s second husband, tells Mary that Henry “ought to just rape her and have done with it, but he has never had his pride stuck full of lances by a lady he desired before.”12 Stafford also makes frequent references to forcing Mary to have sex with him over the course of the novel, which is a proposition that rather excites Mary, despite her earlier trauma at having been passed, without her consent, as a sexual object from Francois to his friends at court. The Last Boleyn is representative of a late 1970s/early 1980s erotic historical which, as we have seen in The Flame and the Flower, has a complex relationship to the idea of rape. That it is Stafford who is consistently associated with rape reflects the fact that it is he, not Henry, who is the romantic hero of the novel. As Dawn Heinecken writes of romance fiction of the period, Stafford is the alpha male “inextricably linked to images of male violence,” which is, in turn, “linked to sexuality.”13 Teo notes, too, that the rape of the heroine “results from a lack of control over [the hero’s] inflexible will because he cannot resist the heroine’s sexual attractiveness […] he cedes power to her at the very moment of overpowering her.”14 Stafford is a better romance hero precisely because he finds his sexual attraction to Mary almost impossible to control and thus cedes power to her. Anne, however, fails to achieve that kind of sexual control over Henry precisely because he spends many years resisting her sexual power over him. Henry never submits himself to Anne in the way that the genre demands, and so power does not flow from Henry to Anne, but stays with Henry. However, the sex represented in The Concubine or The Last Boleyn (at least in relation to Anne) is not the kind of emotionally intimate sex favoured by the erotic historical. An attractive means by which to transform Anne’s story into a genuine (if unhappy) erotic historical was to give her another lover through which to fulfil her sexual desires. Henry remained too unappealing to be the hero of a bodice ripper. As was common in the early twentieth century, too, Thomas Wyatt was an ideal alternative candidate for the lover role; he could be a Tudor Sensitive New Age  Karen Harper, The Last Boleyn: A Novel (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1983), 267.  Dawn Heinecken, “Changing Ideologies in Romance Fiction,” in Romantic Conventions (Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1999), 159 (149–172). 14  Hsu-Ming Teo, Desert Passions: Orientalism and Romance Novels (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012), 158. 12 13

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hero in ways that Henry could not. The most extended treatment of Thomas Wyatt’s relationship with Anne in the period was Philippa Wiat’s 1973 novel The Heir of Allington, which is narrated by Wyatt. In this novel, Wyatt’s love for Anne is physically requited, and rather surprisingly, he is identified as the real father of Elizabeth.15 The novel is not overly explicit, featuring only a few relatively tame sex scenes, but it is reflective of the general trend towards a more overt representation of sexuality in historical romances in the 1970s and beyond. The Heir of Allington is littered with excerpts from Wyatt’s poetry, which serves to establish his romantic credentials. Thomas writes the poem commencing “Now Fortune showeth herself so fair,” for example, “to calm his mind” over his affair with Anne.16 When Thomas sends Anne a copy of “Whoso List to Hunt,” she has a moment of reflection in which she recognises his true worth as a lover, comparing his pure devotion favourably to Henry’s compromised and shallow attentions.17 Wyatt’s poetry is treated as a pure manifestation of his feelings for Anne; no mention is made of the Petrarchan source for “Whoso List to Hunt,” and instead the poem is represented as a direct expression of Wyatt’s jealousy over Anne’s relationship with Henry. The only mention of Petrarch is found after a sex scene between Anne and Thomas and is entirely detached from a consideration of his poetry. Wiat instead notes that “Petrarch had won his Laura after all.”18 Thomas and Anne’s love, however, is fulfilled and sexualised, rather than pure and unconsummated. Anne is also reduced to the status of passive muse—the Laura who exists only to inspire the creativity of a man. Wyatt’s very lack of power means that he represents the potential for true romance, free from the stain of courtly power struggles. As Miriam Elizabeth Burstein writes, “sexual expression enables Anne and Wyatt to achieve fleeting moments of personhood.”19 The emancipatory potential 15  To my knowledge, The Heir of Allington is the only novel to suggest that Elizabeth’s father was Thomas Wyatt, although other novels of the period do occasionally suggest that Elizabeth’s father could have been Mark Smeaton. See Robert York, My Lord the Fox: The Secret Documents of Anthony Woodcott Concerning Elizabeth I and Anne Boleyn (New York: Vanguard Press, 1984). 16  Philippa Wiat, The Heir of Allington (London: Robert Hale, 1973), 162. 17  Wiat, 96. 18  Wiat, 135. 19  Miriam Elizabeth Burstein, “The Fictional Afterlife of Anne Boleyn: How to Do Things with the Queen, 1901–2006,” Clio 37, no. 1 (2007): 10.

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of the sexual union with Wyatt is not muted by the fact that it must be an extramarital liaison, due to Wyatt’s unhappy marriage. Anne’s tragedy, in terms of the generic demands of the 1970s erotic historical, is that she did not choose sexual fulfilment with Wyatt, even if that sexual fulfilment had to happen outside the boundaries of marriage. Instead, her choice of ambition over love means that she has lost the chance to escape dependency from men and become an autonomous woman. It is telling that Anne conceives a child with Wyatt and not Henry. There is something fundamentally diseased about Anne and Henry’s relationship, and thus it is not generative of new life. At the end of The Heir of Allington, Anne, waiting for her death in the Tower, muses on the fact that had she married Wyatt, she “would have been the mistress of Allington, a woman greatly loved and mother of his children.”20 Writing about the difficulties involved in representing Nell Gwyn, one of the many mistresses of Charles II, as the heroine of a historical romance, Julia Novak argues that there is often a tension between fact and genre.21 Unlike historical novels such as The Flame and the Flower and Sweet Savage Love, Anne Boleyn and Nell Gwyn existed, and the historical romance novelist must somehow make their actual biographies fit within the demands of the genre. The requirement for the Happily Ever After ending of romance (often referred to in the scholarship as the HEA) is only the most obvious example of where history might be at odds with the genre. The story of Anne and Henry might be suffused with sex, but for the historical novelist of the second half of the twentieth century, it is the wrong kind of sex, tainted with politics, and inherently transactional rather than pleasurable. Anne must be allowed to have other kinds of sex, with other men, not because she is the “whore” of earlier writings, but because novelists wanted her to have the kind of intimate, mutually fulfilling sex that the historical romance demands.

20  Wiat, The Heir of Allington, 277. Anne does not note at this point, however, that marriage to Wyatt would have been impossible as he was already married. 21  Julia Novak, “Nell Gwyn in Contemporary Romance Novels: Biography and the Dictates of ‘Genre Literature,’” Contemporary Women’s Writing 8, no. 3 (2014): 373–90.

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Anne’s Associates: Mary Versus Anne One of the most popular ways of writing about Anne in the late twentieth century, and into the next, was to write her story through the lens of one of her “associates.” In many cases, this associate was her sister Mary. While the most well-known example of this kind of novel is Philippa Gregory’s The Other Boleyn Girl (see Chap. 9), filtering Anne’s story through the consciousness of another character has been a hallmark of writing about Anne since the eighteenth-century anonymous novel Historic Tales. Such a strategy enabled novelists to avoid the problem of representing Anne’s consciousness. Focalising through an eyewitness allows the novelist to present a perspective on Anne that is framed as authoritative, without having to imagine Anne’s interiority. That the novels in question are actually about Anne, however, is registered by the fact that they usually commence with Anne as a child, focus tightly on Anne’s rise and fall, and conclude with an account of her execution, despite the fact that many of these focalising characters, such as Mary, lived many years beyond Anne’s execution. What is more important about the use of one of Anne’s associates as a focaliser for her story is that they can provide an interpretative lens through which to view and understand Anne’s character. When that character is Mary, what is at issue is precisely the sex that Mary is having and that Anne is not. A suite of novels that takes Mary Boleyn as their ostensible focus commenced with Aileen Armitage’s 1971 The Tudor Sisters. Focalising through Mary Boleyn allowed these writers the opportunity to construct Anne through negative example. Mary Boleyn is frequently represented as conforming to standards of hegemonic femininity: she lacks ambition, seeks love and companionship, prefers the domestic space to that of the court and is intellectually incurious. She is Anne’s opposite in every way. In Peggy Boyton’s The Reluctant Mistress (1977), Mary describes her “undoing” as her inclination to please people, while “ambition has been the undoing of others in my family,” namely, Anne and her social-climbing father.22 She is also fair in appearance: the angelic blonde to Anne’s exotic brunette. The young Anne in Judith Saxton’s 1974 Feather Light, Diamond Bright dreams that she will become more like her beautiful sister one day: “she was sure, her hair, so black and straight, would gradually

 Peggy Boyton, The Reluctant Mistress (London: Robert Hale, 1977), 11.

22

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turn fair, and curl.”23 Laura Saxton’s analysis of The Other Boleyn Girl holds equally true of earlier Mary Boleyn novels: “Anne, driven by ambition, utilises her sexuality for political gain and is ultimately punished for this, while Mary seeks love and contentment,” and so is rewarded.24 Good, blonde Mary is infinitely to be preferred to bad, dark Anne; seemingly a surprisingly regressive attitude for the time. The ideological thrust of most of the Mary Boleyn novels, including The Other Boleyn Girl, is neatly summarised at the end of Armitage’s The Tudor Sisters: “undoubtedly obscurity and peace were infinitely to be preferred to glittering prominence.”25 In Karen Harper’s The Last Boleyn, Mary’s retreat into domesticity and sexual fulfilment with Stafford is seen as the “right” choice, in comparison to Anne’s incorrect valuation of power and ambition above companionship and sexual fulfilment. There is little wonder that Mary is the “last” Boleyn, as she is the only Boleyn to realise what is truly important and to remove herself from her family’s relentless pursuit of power. The Mary Boleyn novels reflect a profound anxiety about the consequences for women of moving beyond the domestic sphere into the masculinised public arena. It is not surprising that such novels appear after the social and political reforms of the 1960s, as this was a period in which women were entering the public space in ever greater numbers. Anne becomes the Tudor-equivalent of the feminist who has chosen to eschew love and family for a career and come to regret it. Mary, by contrast, has chosen the traditional route of love and family and thrives. If Anne’s story does not work as the subject of historical romance, Mary’s story is ideal because of her supposed embrace of romance above all. Mary had married William Stafford without seeking permission, presumably because of her genuine affection for him, and was ejected from court because of it. In the Mary Boleyn novels, accordingly, it is Mary, not Anne, who is associated with unrestrained sexual desire. In The Tudor Sisters, for example, Mary is very willing to be seduced by King Frances and finds that sex is “what she had been destined for all her life, to give and receive love, to savour the delights of the senses to the full.”26 As I have shown, the erotic historical constructs such a whole-hearted embrace 23  Judith Saxton, Feather Light, Diamond Bright (North Yorkshire: Dales Large Print Books, 1974), 14. 24  Laura Saxton, “The Infamous Whore Forgotten: Mary Boleyn in History and Fiction,” Lilith: A Feminist History Journal 19 (2013): 98. 25  Aileen Armitage, The Tudor Sisters (Sutton: Severn House, 2005), 191. 26  Armitage, 61.

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of female sexuality as admirable. After losing her virginity, Armitage’s Mary is apparently willing to sleep with most of the men in the French and English courts, without demonstrating any kind of shame or guilt, becoming a Tudor free love icon for the 1970s. By contrast, Anne is entirely unmoved by Henry, or indeed any man, and thus is something of an aberrant woman. Armitage’s Anne declares that “I did not choose Henry with my heart but with the Boleyn acumen that was born in me.”27 The Mary Boleyn novels conform to the pattern, examined in the previous chapter, of presenting Anne as asexual, “vengeful, near hysterical […] and power mad.”28 Burstein argues that those novels which use the story of another couple to tell Anne’s story posit that “true love and an authentically organic relationship to court culture can exist only outside of court culture.”29 The problem for Anne is that she has chosen the glittering world of courtly ambition, and becomes a victim of history, while Mary emerges the victor precisely because of her retreat into the world of the erotic. In electing to remove herself from history and devote herself to the fleshy world of sensuality, Mary becomes a survivor. It is Anne’s lack of any kind of genuine sexual interest, at least in Henry, that is at the root of her downfall. Anne has become something less than a woman and is easily corrupted by the world of men and politics. However, women do not “naturally” belong in this world, and so she finds herself vulnerable. The doctrine of free love that Mary Boleyn is represented as embodying only serves to confirm that the natural place for women is back within the confines of the private and the domestic.

Villainous Annes If one of the defining characteristics that Anne was assumed to have had by this point was ambition, then it was also often presumed that that ambition led Anne to behave in ways that proved destructive or cruel. As Tudor society was imagined to be a place that could not accommodate a woman who was powerful in her own right, her reign is necessarily cut short, with the meek and mild Jane Seymour replacing the shrewish Anne, much to the general relief of all. Burstein writes that those novels in which Anne is presented as a ruthless and unscrupulous social climber suggest  Armitage, 189.  Burstein, “The Fictional Afterlife of Anne Boleyn,” 3. 29  Burstein, 18. 27 28

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that “Tudor court culture produces bitch-figures (because no true innocent can survive) while draping them with a temporary, protective gauze of Christian virtue.”30 The Annes of the latter half of the twentieth century, accordingly, increasingly become villainous figures. In other words, the cruel, merciless Anne imagined by the sixteenth-century Catholic polemists returns. On one level, a villainous Anne can be tremendously enjoyable for the reader; there is something satisfying in reading about an unscrupulous Anne who tears through the Tudor court on a mission of destruction. However, villainous Annes also reveal persistent anxieties about female power. One of the most unscrupulous Annes is found in Jane Lane’s 1962 novel Sow the Tempest. This novel predates the rise of second-wave feminism, but signals an anxiety with the incipient social changes that would coalesce into that movement. Lane’s Anne has no sexual feelings at all, not even for Henry Percy, who she simply treats as a tool for her ambitions. Her wounded pride drives the novel’s revenge plot against Wolsey: “So he called me a foolish girl about the Court, and a chit, did he? I shall remember that.”31 Anne’s ruthlessness is a Boleyn family characteristic: Anne was her father’s daughter, but she had more than his smooth tongue, his selfishness, and his sycophancy. She possessed, as she had found in France, a complete command over her physical inclinations, and an astonishing tenacity until she had attained her objective.32

To venture out of the world of romance meant to trespass into the world of the masculine, and Lane thus associates Anne with qualities usually gendered masculine: “selfishness,” “command” and “tenacity.” Interestingly, Jane Boleyn, Anne’s sister-in-law, is usually presented as even more villainous than Anne, usually because of frustration over her unhappy marriage to George Boleyn. When love goes bad, these novels suggest that women court disaster by becoming involved in the cut-and-­ thrust world of masculine courtly politics.33 Novels such as Sow the Tempest explicitly connect Anne’s unfeminine ambition to her undoing. Anne lets power go to her head: “the iron  Burstein, 14.  Jane Lane, Sow the Tempest (London: House of Stratus, 2001), 68. 32  Lane, 72. 33  See, for example, Peter Albery, The Uncommon Marriage (London: Elek Books, 1960); Reeve, Condemned; Sylvia Lover, Reap the Storm (London: Citron Press, 1998). 30 31

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resolution and self-command … were overwhelmed now by her vanity and exultation.”34 Lane’s novel suggests that the complex political machinations of the court system, in which courtiers are pitted against each other in a constant and dangerous power struggle, are generative of nothing but evil. At the end of the novel, as Henry lays dying, he ponders the fact that Cromwell is buried in the same place as “Anne the witch and her incestuous brother,” the only reference to his dead wife in a long monologue in which he spares more time thinking about his relationship with Cromwell.35 Anne’s supposed sexual sin is not as important, however, as her unfeminine intervention into politics, which Henry inadvertently reveals when he remembers the also-unfaithful Katherine Howard with fondness and regret. As Jerome de Groot has written, Lane’s novel is also explicitly pro-­ Catholic.36 Lane presents Catherine of Aragon as the perfect woman who knew how to behave as a devout woman and queen: she provided a simple model of piety for her subjects and was appropriately submissive. Anne’s sexual power over Henry has a profoundly negative impact upon the state. Henry consistently returns to thoughts of Catherine on his deathbed because she represents a time before Anne, quite literally, ruined everything. Lane’s novel reflects a persistent mid-century anxiety about the consequences of women moving beyond the public sphere. If contemporary women were to act like Anne and take power into their own hands, social unrest and/or disintegration would be the inevitable result, Lane suggests. Later fictions provide the reader with similarly villainous Annes, although most of these novels are ultimately sympathetic to her. Her execution, even when she is initially represented as a villain, is conceived of as a tragedy, not a just punishment. If Anne had been content to remain at home, tragedy would have been averted, these texts insist. Peter Albery’s 1956 play Anne Boleyn: A Tragedy in Four Acts at first presents the reader with an unscrupulous Anne who describes the acquisition of a new dress as an “insurance policy,” bites Henry when he attempts to kiss her and declares that “witches are so exciting–alive.”37 However, by the end of the play, she has renounced her ambitions and declares that she would rather  Lane, Sow the Tempest, 193.  Lane, 292. 36  Jerome de Groot, The Historical Novel (London: Routledge, 2009), 74. 37  Peter Albery, “Anne Boleyn: A Tragedy in Four Acts,” in Plays of the Year (London: Elek Books, 1956), 349, 354–5 (333–445). 34 35

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“live and love humbly / Honeysuckled in a hedgerow / Queen of ragged robins and sweet cecilies.”38 Lest the moral needed to be made clearer, the play concludes with the assertion that “the path is steep and most of us grow giddy with striving.”39 As in Lane’s novel, Albery’s play suggests that Anne would have enjoyed greater happiness had she remained within the domestic arena and lived “humbly.” Historical fictions written in the 1980s and 1990s are more likely to present Anne as misguided than actively evil. Such novels were written in a social landscape that had been impacted by the reforms of second-wave feminism and so often represent the consequences of these changes on the lives of individual women. If you could no longer argue that the world would be destroyed by ambitious women, then you could say that these women would inevitably regret their choices as they aged. In Mollie Hardwick’s 1988 Blood Royal, a novel that is broadly sympathetic to Anne, Mary Boleyn frames Anne’s behaviour as not conducive to a successful marriage: “For I knew, nobody better—even Queen Catherine—that to please the King his woman must never argue with him, nor blame him for anything, nor cry […] His pride must never be pricked, as Anne was doing now, at the top of her voice, within our hearing.”40 Anne is not appropriately submissive; in order to maintain a happy marriage, women should disguise their own opinions and maintain a veneer of domestic peace. Anne neglects to do so at her peril, Mary warns. In Joanna Dessau’s 1997 novel All or Nothing, Anne’s ambition makes her unattractive and bad-tempered: “Anne was not taking the business very well; her temper, touchy enough in any circumstance, was wellnigh unbearable these days and her looks were suffering greatly.”41 Even the title of that novel, All or Nothing, can be read as a reference to ongoing social anxieties, endlessly rehearsed since at least the 1990s, over whether women could “have it all”: family and a career.42 The answer to Joanna Dessau’s novel would seem to be no, as Anne ends up, of course, with nothing. Anne’s refusal to act in ways coded acceptably feminine, even in  Albery, 430.  Albery, 443. 40  Mollie Hardwick, Blood Royal (London: Methuen, 1988), 230. 41  Joanna Dessau, All or Nothing: The Life-Story of Anne Boleyn (Leicester: Ulverscroft, 1997), 256. 42  “Can women have it all” is still frequently the subject of popular discussion. See AnneMarie Slaughter, Unfinished Business: Women, Men, Work, Family (New York: Random House, 2016). 38 39

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the context of the final years of the twentieth century, is conceived of as the cause of her demise. Villainous Anne is akin to a late-century career-­ woman—the woman who went too far, wanted too much and neglected marriage and family in the process.

Anne’s Associates: Class Politics and Feminist History The second-wave feminist movement in the 1960s also gave rise to academic feminist history. As John Pettegrew writes, “women’s historians have been hugely successful since the early 1970s in establishing themselves in the US history profession and reorganizing (if not transforming) its institutional practices as well as its historiographical assumptions, content and boundaries.”43 The socialist perspective from which many of these feminist historians were working placed class at the centre of the first generation of women’s histories. This new emphasis on “history from below” saw a shift that flowed from academia through to the historical novel. Historical novels were more likely to take as their subject matter the experience of ordinary, lower-class women, although narratives of queens remained popular. The 1980s also saw the rise of the postmodern historical novel, which was defined by Linda Hutcheon as novels “which are both intensely self-reflexive and yet paradoxically lay claim to historical events and personages.”44 However, most Anne Boleyn novels remained in the realist mode, with only limited formal experimentation. The expanding academic interest in the histories of ordinary men and women that came out of feminist history did, however, result in a spate of novels published in the late century that told the stories of kings and queens through the perspective of a servant. One of the most influential Tudor historical novels of the twentieth century was Margaret George’s 1986 novel The Autobiography of Henry VIII, With Notes by His Fool, Will Somers. As the title suggests, the novel features interjections by Henry VIII’s fool (who was a real historical figure), allowing George to narrate events at which Henry was not present. Will, for example, is able to describe Anne’s execution from the vantage-point of a witness: “Anne had 43  John Pettegrew, “From Radicalism to Perspectivalism: US Feminist History, 1970–2010, and the Example of Linda Gordon,” Journal of Women’s History 30, no. 1 (2018): 129. 44  Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (New York and London: Routledge, 1988), 1.

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arranged her exquisite death as she had arranged her fetes and masques: out of the bare materials she had fashioned something of memorable, fragile beauty.”45 Margaret Campbell Barnes also followed up her 1949 Brief Gaudy Hour with King’s Fool (1959), which is solely narrated by Will Somers.46 Servants and other lower-class functionaries of the court were ideally placed to provide accounts of the lives of royalty, while also revealing the circumstances of their own lives. Servant narratives could be an effective means by which to explore the impact of royal lives upon their subjects. What many servant narratives reveal is that royal lives are either irrelevant to their subjects, or are merely seen by them as the source of exciting scandal. While servants who wait upon Anne Boleyn might interact closely with her for a short period of time, working-class life goes on as normal, regardless of who might be on the throne. It is unsurprising, then, that many of the Anne Boleyn servant narratives were written after the rise of feminist academic histories. Servant narratives were a means by which to combine the new interest in history from below with the ongoing appetite for stories about queens. In Laura Cassidy’s 1991 novel, The Black Pearl, Lady Elizabeth De Cheyne (called Bess) is summoned to court in early 1536 and thus witnesses Anne’s demise. While Bess is an aristocratic woman, she is a comparatively lowly one, more accustomed to a simpler life in the country.47 In Dilys Gater’s The Witch-Girl (1979), Anne Boleyn strikes up a friendship with a lower-­ class girl based on an acknowledgement of their mutual difference. Anne happens to come across the novel’s narrator, the country girl Kate Granville, just as she is about to be drowned as a witch on a ducking-stool. Anne feels an immediate affinity with Kate because Kate has a mole and Anne has a sixth finger: “there, but for the grace of God, was Anne Boleyn,” Anne wryly notes.48 In other novels, such as Barbara Kyle’s 1994 The Queen’s Lady (also known as A Dangerous Temptation), Anne is useful to the heroine, Honor Larke, who is an agent of the evangelical cause.49 Indeed, in many of the servant narratives, Anne is at least as useful to her attendants as she might be to them. 45  Margaret George, The Autobiography of Henry VIII, With Notes By His Fool, Will Somers (London: Pan Books, 1986). 46  Margaret Campbell Barnes, King’s Fool: A Notorious King, His Six Wives, and the One Man Who Knew All Their Secrets (Naperville: Sourcebooks Landmark, 2009). 47  Laura Cassidy, The Black Pearl (Surrey: Mills & Boon, 1991). 48  Dilys Gater, The Witch-Girl (London: Robert Hale, 1979), 13. 49  Barbara Kyle, The Queen’s Lady (London: Constable & Robinson, 2012).

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One of the most significant servant narratives, however, predates academic feminist history, and the 1980s–90s servant narratives, but significantly anticipates the concerns of these novels. Norah Lofts’s novel The Concubine was published contemporaneously with Betty Freidan’s The Feminine Mystique in 1963. However, the novel establishes the basic shape of later servant narratives, while also demonstrating the greater self-­ consciousness about the form of historical fiction that would come to characterise the postmodern historical novel. While the novel does use several focalisers, the central narrative consciousness is that of Emma Arnett, one of Anne’s servants. It is Emma who is responsible for inspiring Anne’s evangelicalism, which is then passed on, in turn, to Henry. Lofts’s novel conceives of the English Reformation as essentially a ground-up movement, reflective of the will of the people and, particularly, the beliefs of the working class. Cardinal Campeggio admits to the Pope that he believes the “English have never, I feel, been fully integrated; they’re Christian, some are even pious, but their Englishness gets in the way; they have this ancient law against receiving instructions from any outside power.”50 Emma accordingly plants an English translation of the Old Testament in Anne’s rooms, commenting, “I wish someone with more learning could tell me why it is forbidden reading.”51 The novel thus frames religious reform as a common-sense movement towards the democratisation of information, eagerly sought and facilitated by the working classes. Emma is not merely manipulating Anne: she has a genuine cross-class friendship with the Queen. At the end of the novel, she arranges Anne’s private (and ahistoric) burial at Salle in Norfolk and eulogises her as the brave defiant girl, the gay woman, the anxious woman, the crafty, the honest, the king, the cruel, the altogether puzzling and contradictory human being whom Emma Arnett, without knowing it, had loved for thirteen years.52

The novel demonstrates the closeness within which master and servant lived, and suggests that women across classes could have mutually beneficial, reciprocal relationships based on a genuine intellectual connection.  Lofts, The Concubine, 81.  Lofts, 141. 52  Lofts, 355. 50 51

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Of course, Emma’s attempt to fashion Anne as the unwitting leader of a working-class revolutionary reform movement fails. Anne’s death not only halts the progress of the Reformation, but it strips Emma of her own faith. “God,” Emma thinks, “didn’t know His own business!”53 Anne’s death is not only a personal tragedy for Anne and her immediate family and friends, but a social tragedy for the lower-classes who had hoped she could be a conduit for their concerns. Sixteen years after the publication of The Concubine, Lofts returned to the life of Anne Boleyn, this time in non-fiction. In her 1979 biography, Lofts, following Margaret Murray, quite seriously suggests that Anne was a witch devoted to Satan worship and that, in taking Communion before her death and swearing her innocence, she was offering “one more tribute to her dark master.”54 Roland Hui argues that Lofts’s representation of Anne indelibly shaped her increasingly negative portrayal in the 1980s and 1990s, as well as the now widespread (and false) belief that Anne was accused of witchcraft at her trial.55 Certainly, in recent years, references to Anne-the-witch have emerged in novels such as the Harry Potter series (in which a portrait of Anne is found hanging in the halls of Hogwarts) and the television series The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, in which Anne is referred to as a witch in both the first (2018) and second series (2019). These references are benign and tongue-in-cheek, but they do reinforce the erroneous perception that Anne was suspected of witchcraft in her own time. However, even if Lofts’s assertion that Anne was a Satanist reads as bizarre from our contemporary vantage-point, the Anne that emerges from The Concubine, even if guilty of adultery, is manifestly one to be admired. Anne’s true goodness is signalled by her ability to build a relationship with a lower-class woman. Lofts is also careful throughout the novel to signal her mastery over her material. Every chapter features an epigraph from a historical text, such as Cavendish’s The Life of Cardinal Wolsey or the Letters and Papers of Henry’s reign. One epigraph even addresses the reader directly and indicates where Lofts has led imagination shape her narrative: “Your author” tells the reader that “I do not say that  Lofts, 272.  Norah Lofts, Anne Boleyn (London: Book Club Associates, 1979), 174. 55  Roland Hui, “Anne of the Wicked Ways: Perceptions of Anne Boleyn as a Witch in History and in Popular Culture,” Parergon: Journal of the Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies 35, no. 1 (2018): 97–118. 53 54

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this is how it happened; I only say that this is how it could have happened.”56 De Groot writes that such explicit reliance on historical sources “gives the work a certain authenticity but also a self-consciousness about its artificiality.”57 That self-consciousness is a defining characteristic of the postmodern historical novel. The Concubine and Lofts’s non-fiction signal anxieties around the form of the historical novel, and the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction: is history fiction or is fiction history? Our contemporary understanding of Anne’s character is almost entirely a result of the fictions that have accrued around her for centuries, but these myths have not solely been derived from either fictional or non-fictional texts. As Hayden White has argued, history is not the antithesis of fiction; both writers of history and of novels use the process of what he calls “emplotment” in order to make sense of and shape their narratives.58 Moreover, as Katherine West Scheil has persuasively shown in her exploration of both biographies and novels about the life of Anne Hathaway, Shakespeare’s life, “in the second half of the twentieth century the separation between biography and history narrowed, with fiction often including brief biographies, and biographies engaging with greater degrees of fiction.”59 If Lofts’s historical novel betrays an anxiety around fictionalising history which points forward to the postmodern historical novel, then equally her biography of Anne, with its earnest representation of Anne-the-witch, suggests the fictionalising tendencies of history.

I, Anne Boleyn: Victim Versus Power Feminism in the Age of Girl Power One of the formal shifts that occurred in the latter half of the century in women’s historical fictions was the shift in narrative voice to the first-­ person narrator. As Deborah Philips has shown, the use of the first person in women’s popular fictions of the time became increasingly widespread from the 1940s onwards. She argues:

 Lofts, The Concubine, 259.  de Groot, The Historical Novel, 72. 58  Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). 59  Katherine West Scheil, Imagining Shakespeare’s Wife: The Afterlife of Anne Hathaway (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 138. 56 57

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The narrative voice in these novels is, almost without exception, intensely personal. The narrator, whether first or third person, frequently assumes a tone of intimacy with the reader, often addressing the reader directly […] This assumed intimacy constructs an experience that is close to a conservation with a close woman friend (and such conversations frequently figure in the narrative).60

Accordingly, there is a shift within Anne Boleyn fictions to allowing Anne to narrate her own story. As we saw in Chap. 7, novelists often signalled their intention to produce relatable Annes whose experiences mirrored those of contemporary women, but these earlier novels were largely narrated in the third person. First-person narratives both allow for a closer identification between reader and subject and allow these readers to enter into the (potentially alien) consciousness of a woman from the distant past. Jean Plaidy, one of the twentieth century’s most prolific historical novelists, had already written one version of Anne’s story (Murder Most Royal) when she returned to her story in 1986’s The Lady of the Tower. Plaidy rewrites Anne’s story to fit in with the parameters of her Queens of England series. This series commenced with the 1983 publication of Myself My Enemy, about Queen Henrietta Maria. Each novel in the series was written in the first person, a major departure from Plaidy’s characteristic use of third-person narration earlier in her career. Forty years separate Murder Most Royal and The Lady in the Tower, but the latter novel largely rewrites the same narrative events and situations as the former. In writing about the early part of Plaidy’s career as a historical novelist, Diana Wallace argues that Plaidy rarely asks the reader to identify with her heroines with any kind of intensity, primarily because of her use of the third-person narrator.61 As Jenna Elizabeth Barlow writes of her shift to first person, however, Plaidy “demonstrates an impulse to allow her subjects to write themselves back into history, to rescue their stories from an andocentric historical narrative and to provide an (imaginative) account of their lives ‘in their own words.’”62 Use of the first person thus allows Plaidy to write a more explicitly feminist Anne, in line with the temperament of the 1980s and the rise of feminist history.  Philips, Women’s Fiction 1945–2005, 5–6.  Wallace, 136. 62  Jenna Elizabeth Barlow, “Women’s Historical Fiction ‘After’ Feminism: Discursive Reconstructions of the Tudors in Contemporary Literature” (Stellenbosch University, 2014), 94. 60 61

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Allowing Anne to tell her own story theoretically allows for a more agentic Anne than the relatively passive Anne of Murder Most Royal. The Anne of The Lady in the Tower chafes against the restrictions of her sex. Anne contemplates, for example, “the injustice done to my sex,” while gazing at the baby Elizabeth, and ponders, “why should not the child sleeping in the cradle be as great a monarch as any man?”63 She eventually comes to the conclusion that “perhaps if there were more women rulers, then there would be less of that foolishness [war].”64 The reader, of course, well knows that Elizabeth will prove to be a great monarch, and Plaidy invites her to step outside the novel to contemplate the historical record and agree with Anne’s judgement about women’s capacity to rule. While Plaidy had signalled that Anne was interested in equality of the sexes in Murder Most Royal, here Anne goes one step further to explicitly articulate a vision of female power. Jean Plaidy was writing The Lady in the Tower in Margaret Thatcher’s England—perhaps not the most benign exemplar of feminine power, but a powerful woman nonetheless. However, aside from isolated incidents in which Anne gives voice to more recognisably feminist sentiments, the Anne of The Lady in the Tower is not materially different from the one found in Murder Most Royal. Plaidy essentially repeats the captive woman motif from Murder Most Royal in The Lady in the Tower. At the end of The Lady in the Tower, Anne muses, “I was in the hands of ruthless men who would stop at nothing to get what they wanted … and the most ruthless of them all was my husband, the King.”65 She is still always powerless at the hands of men, regardless of what beliefs she might hold about gender equality. Again, part of the problem for Plaidy is the historical record. It is very hard not to represent Anne as a victim of patriarchal power when she manifestly was a victim of patriarchal power. A girl power narrative for Anne cannot quite work or, at least, Plaidy cannot make it work. That Anne is a victim, however, is precisely Plaidy’s point. Plaidy’s late-career rewriting of Anne’s story suggests that second-wave feminism made women more conscious of their own victimisation, but could not yet prevent gender-based violence and oppression. Recognising that women could and should be able to be powerful figures cannot save Anne from the inexorability of her own fate. 63  Jean Plaidy, The Lady in the Tower: The Story of Anne Boleyn (New York: Fawcett Crest, 1986), 326. 64  Plaidy, 386. 65  Plaidy, 386.

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Other late-century novels explore the feminist potential of allowing Anne to narrate her own story.66 The most prominent of these is Robin Maxwell’s 1997 novel The Secret Diary of Anne Boleyn. The novel’s structure, in which the young Elizabeth reads her mother’s diaries, metatextually comments upon the appeal of the woman’s historical novel. Elizabeth has the same desire to read and understand her mother’s story, in her own words, that presumably motivates the reader of Anne Boleyn historical fictions. As Julie Crane has written of the strange appeal for young women of reading themselves into Anne’s story, “Anne is … felt to be an embryonic writer herself, a commentator on the events of her own life, and an endless source of narrative possibility.”67 We read Anne’s story in order to find out all the missing pieces and identify connections with the circumstances of one’s own life, just as Elizabeth excitedly mines the diaries of her mother in order to make sense of herself and her place in the world. Anne herself comments on the power of self-inscription quite explicitly at the beginning of her diary. She recalls Wyatt’s advice that “if you find a way to write with open heart to Diary, a friend with Truth, no detail spared, your tome like Petrarch’s works will contain the scattered fragments of your soul.”68 Maxwell’s Anne clearly has a modern understanding of writing as inherently confessional and cathartic. Moreover, her account will have deep consequences for her daughter’s understanding of gender relations, and her decision not to marry. At the end of the novel, after reading the entire diary, Elizabeth understands that Anne’s demise was a result of her powerlessness: When a King desires a woman there is no answer but Yes, Sire. Unless like Anne, she mounts a great challenge … with nothing to do but flee or surrender to his love which, as she had always known in her soul, was death.69

66  The title for this section is lifted from another first-person Anne narrative from the late twentieth century: Victoria Allen’s I, Anne Boleyn. In that novel, Anne becomes enamoured with the symbol of female power—the Queen’s crown—when she witnesses Catherine of Aragon’s coronation as a child. Victoria Allen, I, Anne Boleyn (Bognor Regis: New Horizon, 1978). 67  Julie Crane, “Whoso List to Hunt: The Literary Fortunes of Anne Boleyn,” in The Female Figure in Contemporary Historical Fiction, ed. K. Cooper and E. Short (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 83 (76–91). 68  Robin Maxwell, The Secret Diary of Anne Boleyn (London: Orion, 2010), 24. 69  Maxwell, 257.

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Musing on the apparent impossibility of maintaining her power over her kingdom and submitting to the will of her husband, Elizabeth decides to take on her mother’s lesson: “never relinquish control to any man.”70 Anne’s story thus becomes a cautionary tale for the girl-power 1990s: Elizabeth’s success, as compared to her mother’s failure, is attributed to her embrace of absolute power. Elizabeth’s refusal to cede that power to any man insulates her from the threat posed by the patriarchy. Maxwell uses the same technique of first-person narration as Plaidy, but treats Anne’s victimhood differently. Written four years after Naomi Wolf’s 1993 feminist manifesto Fire with Fire, the emphasis on the effect of Anne’s story on Elizabeth (and, potentially, on the female reader) can be read as a manifestation of Wolf’s conceptualisation of “power feminism.” Wolf defined power feminism against what she called victim feminism, arguing that “we are moved far more effectively by appeals to our strength, resourcefulness, and sense of responsibility.”71 For Wolf, it was more important to tell stories about women’s triumph than women’s victimisation. Accordingly, it is Elizabeth, not Anne, who is the real heroine of The Secret Diary of Anne Boleyn. Power feminism looked to “strong” women of the past, like Elizabeth I, for inspiration. The Secret Diary of Anne Boleyn was written just one year before Cate Blanchett’s star turn in Shekhar Kapur’s Elizabeth (1998) and is very much in line with that film’s representation of Elizabeth as a proto-feminist icon. In her last diary entry, Anne warns her daughter to “let no man be your master.”72 Within the individualist, neoliberal-inflected ethos of power feminism, the success or failure of any woman was not a result of social forces or institutions, but instead a result of the way individual women deployed power or failed to. The power feminist, like Elizabeth, had to rise above their circumstances through a combination of grit, determination and strength. The victim, in Wolf’s view, had failed to overcome her circumstances, so could only ever be a negative exemplar. However, where Maxwell differs from Wolf is that she can see value in telling the stories of victims. If Anne was not a successful girl-power icon because of her 70  Maxwell, 258, original emphasis. Maxwell’s decision not to marry is also influenced by the death of Dudley’s wife; she knows that the suspicious circumstances of Amy Robsart’s death mean that her marriage to Dudley would be mired in too much controversy. Elizabeth thus realises that any marriage is a problem for women. 71  Naomi Wolf, Fire with Fire: The New Female Power and How to Use It (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1994), 37. 72  Maxwell, The Secret Diary of Anne Boleyn, 248.

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dependence on men, then Elizabeth can learn from her mother’s mistakes and become a 1990s-style power feminist. Elizabeth looks to her mother’s history for lessons on how not to become a victim. The novel is sympathetic to Anne but is primarily interested in the effect that Anne’s story has on Elizabeth’s understanding of her own power.

The Nihilistic 1990s The 1990s was not just the era of girl power; it was also the era of social detachment, grunge music, pessimism about the future and anxieties about the next millennium, which were manifested in the fears over the Y2K bug. These currents were reflected in popular culture of the time, which increasingly featured characters, often women, in depressed and/or suicidal mental states. The 1993 memoir Girl Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen, for example, explored a woman’s experience of mental illness and institutionalisation, while Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides of the same year dramatised the suicide of five teenage girls. Ken Urban has also written of the rise of a nihilist consciousness in British theatre of the 1990s; what he terms the “in-yer-face” excavation of the cruelty of contemporary British society.73 While Anne Boleyn dramas are not exactly what one might term “in-yer-face,” we do see in the 1990s a singular, but noteworthy, example of a move towards nihilism and despair in telling her story. Claire Luckham was one of the founding members of the feminist theatre troupe Monstrous Regiment, which was launched in 1976. Monstrous Regiment took its name from John Knox’s sixteenth-century pamphlet The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women; clearly, the sixteenth century was a touchstone for this group. One of the aims of the group was to “reclai[m] the history play from women’s point of view.”74 Luckham’s 1998 The Seduction of Anne Boleyn therefore focuses quite intensely on Anne’s interiority and, particularly, her sense of helplessness as a woman living in a violent patriarchal world. Luckham’s portrait of Anne Boleyn diverges markedly from that routinely found in historical novels. Instead of the feisty, ambitious Anne we are now used to seeing, Luckham gives us an Anne who finds the burden of her reputation 73  Ken Urban, “Towards a Theory of Cruel Britannia: Coolness, Cruelty, and the ’Nineties,” New Theatre Quarterly 20, no. 4 (2004): 354–72. 74  Michelene Wandor, Understudies: Theatre and Sexual Politics (London: Methuen, 1981), 37.

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too much to live up to: “I feel under an obligation to amuse all the time, and that’s impossible. Particularly if you tend, as I do, to be a little melancholic.”75 Anne is more likely to “go and live on my own in a wood somewhere” than plot death on her enemies.76 She would rather be a nun than Henry’s mistress. Anne thus becomes a portrait of 1990s disaffection and depression. Luckham’s Anne would rather seek shelter in the quiet of an institution than play the game of sexual and power politics in which she is so often entangled in historical romances of the period. The play also quite explicitly comments upon the meanings that had been ascribed to Anne’s story by this point. Elizabeth Boleyn, given an unusually large role in the play, is left to summarise the action by refusing to ascribe meaning to her daughter’s life and death: If this was a folk tale, or a fairy story, a tale from the Bible – a Greek myth – Any sort of story – you wouldn’t understand it because it doesn’t fit together. It’s not like a puzzle. There are no consequences. No rhyme or reason. You’d think it was far-fetched. Some crazy thing a child had made up.77

Luckham seems to be writing against the past 500 years of writing about Anne Boleyn here. There is no coherent narrative to be found about Anne, despite the attempts of novelists, playwrights and poets to wrest some meaning from her life. It is a nihilism reflective of what Urban terms the “crisis of meaning” productive of a “profound state of psychological turmoil” in dramas of the period.78 However, the very fact of the play’s existence reveals the persistent interest in trying to make the parts “fit together,” to borrow Elizabeth Boleyn’s phrase. In its simultaneous interest in, and rejection of, historical truth, The Seduction of Anne Boleyn exemplifies what Amy J.  Elias argues of postmodern historical fiction: “History is untouchable, ultimately unknowable, and excruciatingly tantalising as well as terrifying.”79 The play is thus one of the century’s few postmodern Anne Boleyn fictions—a text that both rejects the possibility

75  Claire Luckham, “The Seduction of Anne Boleyn,” in Luckham: Plays (London: Oberon Books, 1999), 145–6 (127–210). 76  Luckham, 181. 77  Luckham, 209. 78  Urban, “Towards a Theory of Cruel Britannia,” 368. 79  Amy J. Elias, Sublime Desire: History and Post-1960s Fiction (Baltimore & London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 53.

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that any meaning can be gleaned from Anne’s story and affirms the desire to know something about her.

Conclusion That drive to know something about Anne Boleyn persists into the twenty-­ first century, in which the appetite for stories about Henry VIII and his six wives has only expanded. By the end of the twentieth century, an established way of writing about Anne Boleyn in historical fiction was largely set. In the twenty-first century, Anne continues to be the subject of historical romances, as well as popular films and television series, plays and musicals. Many of these representations of Anne replicate the assumptions of twentieth-century literature, although some changes do occur; novels which try to recuperate Anne and Henry’s relationship as a romance, for example, begin to emerge. Anne would also find herself the somewhat unexpected subject of an online fanbase of young women, who construct in her a historical prototype of the third-wave feminist icon. The next two chapters will explore the many manifestations of Anne Boleyn that have emerged in the last 20 years, from historical romances to transgeneric representations of her biography.

References Primary Sources Albery, Peter. “Anne Boleyn: A Tragedy in Four Acts.” In Plays of the Year, 333–445. London: Elek Books, 1956. ———. The Uncommon Marriage. London: Elek Books, 1960. Allen, Victoria. I, Anne Boleyn. Bognor Regis: New Horizon, 1978. Armitage, Aileen. The Tudor Sisters. Sutton: Severn House, 2005. Barnes, Margaret Campbell. King’s Fool: A Notorious King, His Six Wives, and the One Man Who Knew All Their Secrets. Naperville: Sourcebooks Landmark, 2009. Boyton, Peggy. The Reluctant Mistress. London: Robert Hale, 1977. Cassidy, Laura. The Black Pearl. Surrey: Mills & Boon, 1991. Dessau, Joanna. All or Nothing: The Life-Story of Anne Boleyn. Leicester: Ulverscroft, 1997. Gater, Dilys. The Witch-Girl. London: Robert Hale, 1979. George, Margaret. The Autobiography of Henry VIII, With Notes By His Fool, Will Somers. London: Pan Books, 1986. Hardwick, Mollie. Blood Royal. London: Methuen, 1988.

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Harper, Karen. The Last Boleyn: A Novel. New York: Three Rivers Press, 1983. Kyle, Barbara. The Queen’s Lady. London: Constable & Robinson, 2012. Lane, Jane. Sow the Tempest. London: House of Stratus, 2001. Lofts, Norah. Anne Boleyn. London: Book Club Associates, 1979. ———. The Concubine. Stroud: Tree of Life Publishing, 1963. Lover, Sylvia. Reap the Storm. London: Citron Press, 1998. Luckham, Claire. “The Seduction of Anne Boleyn.” In Luckham: Plays, 127–210. London: Oberon Books, 1999. Maxwell, Robin. The Secret Diary of Anne Boleyn. London: Orion, 2010. Plaidy, Jean. The Lady in the Tower: The Story of Anne Boleyn. New York: Fawcett Crest, 1986. Reeve, Linda-Dawn. Condemned. London: Robert Hale, 1981. Saxton, Judith. Feather Light, Diamond Bright. North Yorkshire: Dales Large Print Books, 1974. Wiat, Philippa. The Heir of Allington. London: Robert Hale, 1973. York, Robert. My Lord the Fox: The Secret Documents of Anthony Woodcott Concerning Elizabeth I and Anne Boleyn. New York: Vanguard Press, 1984.

Secondary Sources Barlow, Jenna Elizabeth. “Women’s Historical Fiction ‘After’ Feminism: Discursive Reconstructions of the Tudors in Contemporary Literature.” Stellenbosch University, 2014. Burstein, Miriam Elizabeth. “The Fictional Afterlife of Anne Boleyn: How to Do Things with the Queen, 1901–2006.” Clio 37, no. 1 (2007): 1–26. Crane, Julie. “Whoso List to Hunt: The Literary Fortunes of Anne Boleyn.” In The Female Figure in Contemporary Historical Fiction, edited by K. Cooper and E. Short, 76–91. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Elias, Amy J. Sublime Desire: History and Post-1960s Fiction. Baltimore & London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. Groot, Jerome de. The Historical Novel. London: Routledge, 2009. Heinecken, Dawn. “Changing Ideologies in Romance Fiction.” In Romantic Conventions, 149–72. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1999. Hui, Roland. “Anne of the Wicked Ways: Perceptions of Anne Boleyn as a Witch in History and in Popular Culture.” Parergon: Journal of the Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies 35, no. 1 (2018): 97–118. Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York and London: Routledge, 1988.

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Lyons, Sarah Frantz, and Eric Murphy Selinger. “Strange Stirrings, Strange Yearnings: The Flame and the Flower, Sweet Savage Love, and the Lost Diversities of Blockbuster Historical Romance.” In Romance Fiction and American Culture: Love as the Practice of Freedom?, edited by William A. Gleason and Eric Murphy Selinger, 89–110. Surrey: Ashgate, 2016. Novak, Julia. “Nell Gwyn in Contemporary Romantce Novels: Biography and the Dictates of ‘Genre Literature’.” Contemporary Women’s Writing 8, no. 3 (2014): 373–90. Pettegrew, John. “From Radicalism to Perspectivalism: US Feminist History, 1970–2010, and the Example of Linda Gordon.” Journal of Women’s History 30, no. 1 (2018): 129–53. Philips, Deborah. Women’s Fiction 1945–2005: Writing Romance. London and New York: Continuum, 2006. Saxton, Laura. “The Infamous Whore Forgotten: Mary Boleyn in History and Fiction.” Lilith: A Feminist History Journal 19 (2013): 92–105. Scheil, Katherine West. Imagining Shakespeare’s Wife: The Afterlife of Anne Hathaway. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Slaughter, Anne-Marie. Unfinished Business: Women, Men, Work, Family. New York: Random House, 2016. Teo, Hsu-Ming. Desert Passions: Orientalism and Romance Novels. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012. ———. “The Contemporary Anglophone Romance Genre.” In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, 1–27. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Thurston, Carol. The Romance Revolution: Erotic Novels for Women and the Quest for a New Sexual Identity. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1987. Urban, Ken. “Towards a Theory of Cruel Britannia: Coolness, Cruelty, and the ’Nineties.” New Theatre Quarterly 20, no. 4 (2004): 354–72. Wallace, Diana. The Woman’s Historical Novel: British Women Writers, 1900–2000. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Wandor, Michelene. Understudies: Theatre and Sexual Politics. London: Methuen, 1981. White, Hayden. Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978. Wolf, Naomi. Fire with Fire: The New Female Power and How to Use It. New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1994.

CHAPTER 9

Anne Boleyn in Twenty-First-Century Historical Fiction

The twenty-first century has seen the demand for Anne Boleyn fictions increase dramatically. The list of twenty-first-century fictions about Anne Boleyn exceeds that of the entire twentieth century, even though this century is only currently two decades long.1 The extraordinary proliferation of contemporary Anne Boleyn fictions can be partly attributed to the rise of self-publishing and e-books. Many of the books considered in this chapter are either only available on the Amazon Kindle platform, were self-­published, or originated on the internet as activities related to fan practices. As I will outline, a distinct Anne Boleyn internet fandom has arisen in recent years, and this fandom has driven the demand for ever-more fictions with Anne at their centre. Two popular media properties have also influenced the proliferation of Anne Boleyn fictions: Philippa Gregory’s The Other Boleyn Girl and the television series The Tudors, which I will turn to in the final chapter. The extraordinary volume of Anne Boleyn fictions has resulted in an expansion of the range of Annes available to readers. While the twentieth century saw a master narrative about Anne emerge, in which Anne is widely assumed to have become ambitious and cruel as a result of her thwarted love for Henry Percy, twenty-first century writing about Anne is far more diverse in its interests, although some themes and patterns do emerge. What is perhaps distinctive about twenty-first-century historical fiction is the expectation that “good” historical fiction, especially in relation to women, is historical fiction that avoids replicating, or overtly challenges, 1

 See Appendix.

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ideologies that we would now consider racist or sexist. While twentieth-­ century writing was interested in making Anne relatable to contemporary readers, twenty-first-century historical fiction is usually far more transparent about its commitment to representing historical figures as recognisably modern people. That sometimes means historical figures are used as the mouthpiece for modern ideas; a large proportion of the Anne Boleyn fictions examined here use Anne to voice feminist political beliefs. As Katherine West Scheil has noted in her study of historical fiction about Shakespeare’s wife, Anne Hathaway, reader reviews at sites like Goodreads reveal how contemporary audiences understand “these various Annes in relation to contemporary mores and expectations for women.”2 Scheil writes that readers “participate in a conversation about Shakespeare’s life as if he was a personal friend, and to play a part in critiquing, reviewing, and circulating the stories that should be told about him.”3 These same tendencies are manifested in Anne Boleyn fictions, which are often written by self-confessed fans and reflect the popular understanding of her character that has developed on social media. The emphasis on representing a self-consciously modern Anne does not mean, however, that all twenty-­ first-­century Annes are admirable. Indeed, many contemporary novelists present Anne as even more openly ambitious and power-hungry than their predecessors. However, while ambitious Annes were generally used as a means of critiquing second-wave feminism in the twentieth century, it is now more likely that such portraits of Anne are presented as feminist in their orientation. As I will argue, however, these texts are more accurately described as postfeminist in their insistence on Anne’s personal errors as the underlying cause of her downfall. The twenty-first century has also seen the rise of critical studies of biofiction, which was a term first coined in the late twentieth century. Biofictions are biographical fictions; historical fictions that concentrate tightly on the life of an individual. While biofictions have always existed, scholarship in the field is increasingly interested in unpacking the relationship between biography and fiction. This relationship is a complex one, made even more complex when a contemporary author attempts to engage with the imagined interiority of a historical figure from the distant past. As Michael Lackey, one of the foremost scholars of biofiction, argues, 2  Katherine West Scheil, Imagining Shakespeare’s Wife: The Afterlife of Anne Hathaway (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 192. 3  Scheil. 192.

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“foregrounding the biographical is problematic because most authors of biofiction explicitly claim that they are not doing biography.”4 Lackey argues that what readers get in biofictions is “the novelist’s vision of life and the world, and not an accurate representation of an actual person’s life.”5 Lackey writes that Georg Lukács, still one of the most influential theorists of historical fiction, rejected biofiction as a form, because “the focus on ‘the biography of the hero’ leads authors to overlook or misrepresent significant historical events and truths.”6 However, biofictions, despite early critical scepticism, have become an increasingly important subset of the historical novel; another reason, perhaps, that the rate of Anne Boleyn fictions continues to increase. As scholars of biofictions have shown, historical fiction that focuses on the experiences of one specific person tends to present history as the collation of many individual stories, or mimic the “Great Man” model of history by suggesting that the actions of one individual have had an outsize effect on the historical record. Colm Tóibín has recently suggested that historical fiction and biofiction are distinct forms, because biofiction is almost exclusively interested in the experiences of the individual subject, while the historical novel is interested in getting at some kind of truth about history.7 Read through this lens, almost all Anne Boleyn fictions are properly considered biofictions, in that the larger social and political forces shaping this moment in history are largely elided to focus on the individual. Even when a broader social consciousness is introduced into the narrative, such as those novels which represent Anne as either a feminist or a devoted religious reformer, emphasis is usually placed on Anne as either a woman outside of time (in that her feminism renders her too progressive for the Tudor court) or single-handedly responsible for the English Reformation. That focus on the individual is manifested most sharply, however, in postfeminist fictions about Anne, in which larger historical forces, such as politics and religion, are largely subsumed to focus 4  Michael Lackey, “Locating and Defining the Bio in Biofiction,” A/b: Auto/Biography Studies 31, no. 1 (2016): 5. 5  Lackey, 7. 6  Michael Lackey, “Introduction: The Rise of the American Biographical Novel,” in Truthful Fictions: Conversations with American Biographical Novelists, ed. Michael Lackey (New York & London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 5 (1–25). 7  Colm Toibin and Bethany Layne, “The Anchored Imagination of the Biographical Novel,” in Conversations with Biographical Novelists: Truthful Fictions Across the Globe, ed. Michael Lackey (New York: Bloomsbury, 2019), 228–9 (224–234).

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exclusively on Anne’s behaviour within the domestic sphere and attribute her downfall squarely to her own errors of judgement.

Philippa Gregory and the Postfeminist Anne No other Anne Boleyn novel in the twenty-first century has been as popular, or controversial, as Philippa Gregory’s 2001 The Other Boleyn Girl. The novel was so popular that it was adapted twice, with a BBC television adaptation in 2003, and a feature film in 2008. Focalised through Mary Boleyn, the novel notoriously implies that Anne seduced her brother in order to conceive a child to secure her crown: “I went on a journey to the very gates of hell to get him,” she tells Mary.8 Later, that child is stillborn a deformed “monster.”9 In her brief author’s note, Gregory attributes her portrait of a homosexual George Boleyn and the birth of a deformed foetus to Retha Warnicke’s 1991 biography The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn.10 However, Warnicke does not claim that Anne slept with her brother, which Gregory does not address. In her biography of Mary Boleyn, Alison Weir writes that The Other Boleyn Girl “elevated” a mania for all things Tudor to a “virtual obsession.”11 She also claims that Mary Boleyn was an obscure figure until the publication of Gregory’s novel.12 However, while the first claim is beyond doubt, the second claim is more problematic, as Gregory’s novel is almost identical in its presentation of Mary Boleyn to its twentieth-­ century forebears (see the previous chapter). While novels such as The Tudor Sisters, Feather Light Diamond Bright, The Reluctant Mistress or The Last Boleyn did not achieve anywhere near the success of The Other Boleyn Girl, all of these novels present Mary as the blonde good girl to Anne’s brunette schemer and femme fatale.13 In the opening pages of Gregory’s novel, Anne calls herself “dark and French and fashionable and difficult”  Philippa Gregory, The Other Boleyn Girl (London: HarperCollins, 2011), 450.  Gregory, 472. 10  Gregory, 531. Retha Warnicke, The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn: Family Politics at the Court of Henry VIII (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 11  Alison Weir, Mary Boleyn: The Mistress of Kings (New York: Ballantine Books, 2011), xx. 12  Alison Weir, xxi. 13  Aileen Armitage, The Tudor Sisters (Sutton: Severn House, 2005); Judith Saxton, Feather Light, Diamond Bright (North Yorkshire: Dales Large Print Books, 1974); Peggy Boyton, The Reluctant Mistress (London: Robert Hale, 1977); Karen Harper, The Last Boleyn: A Novel (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1983). 8 9

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to Mary’s “sweet and open and English and fair.”14 The Other Boleyn Girl is not a departure from existing ways of representing Anne and Mary. Instead, it reaffirms the late twentieth century’s insistence that Anne’s failure is a direct result of her overreach, while Mary’s success is attributable to her embrace of the domestic. As Julie Crane writes, Mary, “content to be a bearer of genealogy […] is granted both peace of mind, and fertility.”15 Anne, whose primary characteristic is her drive to acquire more, is granted neither. The novel’s presentation of Anne has drawn quite virulent criticism from readers and critics alike. Susan Bordo describes Gregory’s Anne as more selfish, spiteful, and vindictive than she had appeared in any previous novel, a nasty, screechy shrew who poaches Henry from her generous, tender-­hearted (and very blonde) sister, and proceeds to tyrannize her (and everyone around her).16

Jerome de Groot writes that the message of the novel is that “men will always be men and that instead of taking up the fight in the centre, one should retire to the margins and start a family.”17 The website The Anne Boleyn Files has devoted extensive coverage to critiquing both Gregory’s interpretation of Anne’s character and her treatment of history.18 Even the Wikipedia page for the novel lists in detail the historical errors found within the novel.19 Jenna Elizabeth Barlow, however, interprets Gregory’s characterisation of Anne and Mary differently. In Barlow’s reading, what is at issue is Mary’s active choice of the domestic life with her second husband, William Stafford, and her embrace of a matrilineal genealogy.20  Gregory, The Other Boleyn Girl, 7.  Julie Crane, “Whoso List to Hunt: The Literary Fortunes of Anne Boleyn,” in The Female Figure in Contemporary Historical Fiction, ed. K. Cooper and E. Short (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 82 (76–91). 16  Susan Bordo, The Creation of Anne Boleyn: A New Look at England’s Most Notorious Queen (Boston: Mariner Books, 2014), 220. 17  Jerome de Groot, Consuming History: Historians and Heritage in Contemporary Popular Culture (London & New York: Routledge, 2009), 220. 18  Claire Ridgway, “Anne Boleyn and The Other Boleyn Girl,” The Anne Boleyn Files, 2010, https://www.theanneboleynfiles.com/anne-boleyn-and-the-other-boleyn-girl/ 19  “The Other Boleyn Girl,” Wikipedia, accessed October 5, 2019, https://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/The_Other_Boleyn_Girl 20  Jenna Elizabeth Barlow, “Women’s Historical Fiction ‘After’ Feminism: Discursive Reconstructions of the Tudors in Contemporary Literature” (Stellenbosch University, 2014), 131. 14 15

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Barlow argues that Gregory is not critiquing the fact of Anne’s ambition, but the means by which she goes about achieving it: her body. Barlow writes that “Mary recognises the cost of Anne’s action as further eroding the value of women in a patriarchal society, exacerbating their disempowerment in making them dispensable at the whim of their men.”21 By using her body in order to obtain power, Anne has reaffirmed her status as a commodity and essentially implicated herself in patriarchal misogyny. It is not surprising, then, that Henry discards her when that body fails him. Barlow’s reading of Gregory’s novel is a generous one, but cannot quite account for Gregory’s presentation of Anne, which is imbued with an explicit distaste for female ambition. One of Mary’s final comments about Anne is telling; she describes Anne’s life as “ill-lived.”22 Anne has made the wrong choices and lived to regret them, while Mary is last seen galloping away from court, happy to live a quiet life in the country away from the corridors of power. In an interview in 2008, Gregory explicitly says that Mary’s victory is “a triumph of common sense over the ambition of her sister Anne.”23 Far from participating in the feminist revisionism that Barlow imagines, the novel actually sustains sixteenth-century perceptions as Anne as the “calculating harridan,” as de Groot writes.24 Gregory’s novel reflects the discourse of postfeminism, which was an ideology that emerged in the late twentieth century as a manifestation of the belief that the need for feminism had diminished because women had achieved equality. Rosalind Gill defines postfeminist discourse as encompassing [t]he notion that femininity is a bodily property; the shift from objectification to subjectification; an emphasis upon self-surveillance, monitoring and self-discipline; a focus on individualism, choice and empowerment; the dominance of a makeover paradigm; and a resurgence of ideas about natural sexual difference.25

 Barlow, 137–8.  Gregory, The Other Boleyn Girl, 527. 23  Katey Rich, “Exclusive Interview: Philippa Gregory, Author of The Other Boleyn Girl,” CinemaBlend.Com, 2008, https://www.cinemablend.com/new/Exclusive-InterviewPhillippa-Gregory-Author-Other-Boleyn-Girl-7994.html 24  De Groot, Consuming History: Historians and Heritage in Contemporary Popular Culture, 219–220. 25  Rosalind Gill, “Postfeminist Media Culture: Elements of a Sensibility,” European Journal of Women’s Studies 10, no. 2 (2007): 147–66. 21 22

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Postfeminism holds that because the feminist movement has achieved many or all its aims, women are free to choose the kind of life they want. Women are no longer victims but empowered. To choose a life that looks like the life that second-wave feminists chafed against—marriage and domesticity—is no longer conceived of as oppressive. Mary’s choice of domesticity over ambition is thus not a capitulation to conservatism, but politically neutral. Moreover, postfeminism’s insistence on the individual renders women’s success or failure entirely dependent on their own choices. Anne’s failures, then, are not attributable to the form of brutal patriarchy enacted in the Tudor court, but personal failings. Postfeminist literature and media often celebrate what Angela McRobbie calls a “hyper-culture of commercial sexuality.”26 Much of the critique of postfeminist literature has been interested in texts such as Helen Fielding’s novel Bridget Jones’s Diary (1996), Candace Bushnell’s Sex and the City (1997) and the emerging genre of “chick lit.”27 However, as Laura Saxton has shown, “Boleyn’s sexual agency, and manipulation of her sexuality for power, ostensibly position her as a post-feminist icon”; The Other Boleyn is essentially chick lit set in the Tudor period.28 Anne actively chooses to use her sexuality to obtain what she desires, so is not a victim, but, Saxton writes, “is complicit in her own objectification by using sexual behaviours as a tool to achieve power and status.”29 In Gregory’s novel and many of the postfeminist novels that followed her, Anne has “come to be viewed as manipulative and as having used marriage and sex purely as a means to gain personal power.”30 In other words, the postfeminist chick-lit heroine must find an authentic way to express and act upon her desires, and this is what Anne has failed to do. Gregory suggests that Anne has simply bought all her troubles upon herself. However, as we have seen, villainous Annes were being written from the mid-twentieth century onwards; they are not a uniquely postfeminist phenomenon. The Anne that appears in Gregory’s novel is very similar to that found in Jane Lane’s 1962 Sow the Tempest or Karen Harper’s The Last Boleyn (see Chap. 8). What is different is that twenty-first-century  Angela McRobbie, The Aftermath of Feminism (London: Sage, 2009), 18.  See Heike Missler, The Cultural Politics of Chick Lit: Popular Fiction, Postfeminism and Representation (New York: Routledge, 2016). 28  Laura Saxton, “The Unblemished Concubine: Representations of Anne Boleyn in the English Written Word, 2000–2012” (Australian Catholic University, 2015), 110. 29  Saxton, 110. 30  Saxton, 179. 26 27

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historical novels usually position their treatment of Anne’s character as feminist even when they represent her as an ambitious, villainous shrew who cares only for herself. Gregory conceives of herself as writing feminist history, even though her novel punishes Anne for her ambition.31 As McRobbie notes, postfeminism “appears to be engag[ed] in a well-­ informed and even well-intended response to feminism” while at the same time postfeminist texts signal the “undoing of feminism.”32 To write a villainous Anne was no longer tied to a critique of the advances made by second-wave feminism, but implicated in a discourse that purports to be feminist, while in fact reinscribing anti-feminist messages. A number of novels take up Gregory’s postfeminist characterisation of Anne. Katherine McCarran’s Queenbreaker (2016), for example, represents the Tudor court as an extreme example of a vicious high school clique, perhaps inspired by the 2005 film Mean Girls, which was based on Rosalind Wiseman’s 2002 book about high school girls, Queen Bees and Wannabes. Anne is even explicitly described as the “Queen bee at the center of our hive.”33 McCarran’s Anne resembles the ambitious Anne of Gregory’s novel, who will do whatever it takes to secure power; she tells Mary that “love does not raise you above your mothers and sisters. Love does not secure your future.”34 The novel goes to some effort to ascribe women agency, suggesting that Mary Howard and Mary Shelton, two of Anne’s ladies-in-waiting, will work together to bring about Anne’s downfall. The women of Queenbreaker have power, but only use that power as a weapon to be wielded against other women. While the novel does briefly suggest that women behave in these ways because of the actions of men, Queenbreaker pits woman against woman to suggest that there are winners and losers and the woman who loses—which history tells us is Anne—is the woman who has made mistakes.35 As Deidre Kelly and Shauna Pomerantz have argued, while Mean Girls “offers its heroin[e] various modes for expressing control, anger, and agency,” these “forms of power are surprisingly disconnected from any overt politics or critique of larger power structures, depositing girls directly into a postfeminist landscape 31  Kate Kellaway, “Philippa Gregory: Unearthing History’s Forgotten Women,” The Guardian, July 28, 2013, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jul/28/ philippa-gregory-unearthing-history-s-forgotten-women 32  Angela McRobbie, The Aftermath of Feminism (London: Sage, 2009), 11. 33  Catherine McCarran, Queenbreaker: Perseverance, 2016, 120. 34  McCarran, 248. 35  McCarran, 256.

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without recourse or remedy—except their own sheer willpower.”36 Queenbreaker interprets the court of Anne Boleyn as a postfeminist landscape, in which women must struggle against each other to survive. Emily Purdy’s novels The Tudor Wife (2010) and The Boleyn Bride (2014) are also quite overt manifestations of postfeminist Tudor biofictions. They are narrated by Jane and Elizabeth Boleyn, respectively, but both novels foreground the story of Anne’s rise and fall. In The Tudor Wife, Jane Boleyn obsesses over her jealousy of Anne. Characteristic of her narration is the reflection that “sex had robbed [Anne] of her mystique; now she was just another woman, like all the rest. Anne Boleyn was no longer special. I watched it all, and gloated like a Roman matron watching Christians being thrown to the lions.”37 The novel reiterates the postfeminist view that women are responsible for their own victimisation. As Barlow states of a scene in which Jane emotionlessly watches Henry rape Anne: Anne is depicted as being responsible for this dramatic shift in Henry’s character, as her sexual manipulations and unfulfilled promises have changed him from a gallant, courtly knight to a debased, disappointed man who needs to reclaim his power.38

The novel, quite disturbingly, suggests that Anne is to blame for her own rape. While narrating the novel through Jane’s perspective inevitably means that we cannot view Anne through anything but an unsympathetic lens, the novel does not undermine or challenge Jane’s view of Anne as an unscrupulous schemer in any way. Elizabeth Boleyn is the postfeminist heroine of The Boleyn Bride. She sleeps with countless men over the course of the novel, which is represented quite overtly as a form of empowerment. In Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture, Ariel Levy argues that raunch culture, in which women are expected to flaunt their bodies and claim their sexuality as a form of power, is not empowering to women, but another means by which women are reduced to the sexual playthings of

36  Deidre M.  Kelly and Shauna Pomerantz, “Mean, Wild, and Alienated: Girls and the State of Feminism in Popular Culture,” Girlhood Studies 2, no. 1 (2009): 4. 37  Emily Purdy, The Tudor Wife (London: Avon, 2010), 147. 38  Barlow, “Women’s Historical Fiction ‘After’ Feminism: Discursive Reconstructions of the Tudors in Contemporary Literature,” 257.

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men.39 Elizabeth constructs her affairs as a form of rebellion against her husband, who she constantly refers to as “Bull-In” as a play on his social and sexual striving.40 However, by the end of the novel, she is alone and bitter about the death of her children, and declares that the only thing that she has taught her daughter is how to “spend her life in proud defiance trying to prove to the world that she was indeed worthy of love, admiration, and respect.”41 In other words, the form of empowerment that Elizabeth has taught Anne has led directly to her death and Elizabeth’s bitter decline. In the epilogue to the novel, Purdy declares that “Mary was the Boleyn girl who got it right in the end; she knew how to follow her heart and go after what was really important.”42 Elizabeth and Anne are thus configured as having made wrong choices in their pursuit of either meaningless sex (Elizabeth) or ambition (Anne). The novel thus confirms the view of Anne propagated by Gregory; she brought about her own tragedy by making the wrong choice. Hilary Mantel, undoubtedly the most critically celebrated historical novelist of the early twenty-first century, has written about Anne’s deployment for a range of ideological purposes, including feminism, saying: She takes on the colour of our fantasies and is shaped by our preoccupations: witch, bitch, feminist, sexual temptress, cold opportunist. She is a real woman who has acquired an archetypal status and force, and one who patrols the nightmares of good wives.43

However, while Mantel might be more reflexive about Anne’s capacity to signify a variety of different meanings, her representation of Anne is, in fact, quite similar to that of Gregory and reflects postfeminism’s tendency to presuppose that women have an unlimited potential to shape the circumstances of their own lives. Where Mantel and Gregory differ is that the former does not make any claims about writing feminist history; instead, Mantel’s novels attempt to recuperate the posthumous reputation of 39  Ariel Levy, Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture (Melbourne: Schwartz Publishing, 2005). 40  Emily Purdy, The Boleyn Bride (New York: Kensington Books, 2014), 4. 41  Purdy, 233. 42  Purdy, 254. 43  Hilary Mantel, “Anne Boleyn: Witch, Bitch, Temptress, Feminist,” The Guardian, May 12, 2012, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/may/11/hilary-mantel-on-anne-boleyn

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Thomas Cromwell. Mantel’s Wolf Hall (2009), Bring Up the Bodies (2012) and The Mirror and the Light (2020) are focalised by Cromwell, and Anne is largely a secondary character in the first two novels and dead by the third. Where Anne appears, she is represented as a power-hungry schemer who earns Cromwell’s secret enmity because of her desire for revenge upon Wolsey.44 Mantel compares Anne to Melusine, a serpent woman from European mythology, by drawing an analogy between Henry’s passion for Anne and Edward IV’s love for Elizabeth Woodville, who “claimed descent from the serpent woman, Melusine.”45 Melusine claims that her children will “reign for ever: power with no limit, guaranteed by the devil,” and indeed, Anne is constructed throughout all three novels as a figure of boundless ambition.46 Anne’s downfall is brought about because she is locked into a power struggle with Cromwell. Anne must fall for Cromwell to retain power, but where Cromwell’s strategising is represented as clever and pragmatic, Anne’s pursuit of power renders her monstrous. One might argue that the disparate way in which their ambition is conceived is a result of narrative perspective: we are seeing Anne through Cromwell’s eyes. However, Mantel does not allow for any space for an alternative view of Anne to be advanced. Mantel, in fact, replicates many of the conventional tropes associated with Anne. Mantel’s Anne is asexual, as she so often is in historical fiction: “Anne is not a carnal being, she is a calculated being.”47 She has contempt for Henry, as Cromwell notices, and is simply using him for her own self-interest: “He sees, in a flash, how Henry irritates her.”48 Another common trope of historical fiction that Mantel also relies upon is the perception that Anne’s volatile temper was a significant factor in the demise of her relationship to Henry: “How will Anne counter meekness, and silence? Raging will hardly help her. She will have to ask herself what Jane can give the king, that at present he lacks.”49 At the end of Bring Up the Bodies, Cromwell cannot even feel sorry for Anne on the eve of her execution; instead, he ponders that “he knows her for a woman without remorse.

44  Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall (London: 4th Estate, 2009), 79. In Chap. 6, I argue that Anna Dickinson’s play anticipates this reading of Cromwell and Anne’s relationship. 45  Mantel, 96. 46  Mantel, 96. 47  Mantel, 350. 48  Hilary Mantel, Bring Up The Bodies (London: 4th Estate, 2012), 157. 49  Mantel, 41.

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He believes she would commit any sin or crime.”50 That so many of her ladies-in-waiting assist Cromwell in his scheme to bring her down suggests that Cromwell’s reaction to Anne is also held by everybody who comes into contact with her. Cromwell is haunted by her death in The Mirror and the Light, especially as he comes closer to his own, but lingers on a memory of George Boleyn in the Tower more often than he considers Anne’s execution, reflecting the novel’s preoccupation with homosocial ties.51 Mantel’s Anne ultimately falls as a result of her own actions. The same ideological contradiction is thus visible in Mantel’s novels as was often visible in late twentieth-century historical fictions. How does one give Anne agency and yet avoid blaming her for her own execution? Susan Bordo has argued that Mantel deliberately constructs her Anne as a “rejoinder to the more sympathetic portraits” of other writers.52 However, Dana Roders argues that Mantel’s representation of Anne’s political agency is ultimately positive, because her responsibility is “respected, impressive.”53 One could certainly read Mantel’s ambitious Anne, the only potential “rival” to Cromwell, as a feminist representation. However, the fact remains that Mantel does not really move beyond the binary that Jerome de Groot identifies in writing about Anne: “either political and problematic” or “romantic, passionate and mistreated.”54 There is, in fact, nothing particularly new about representing an Anne who has agency. Postfeminist discourse routinely ascribes women control over their own lives because of its individualist ethos; women suffer because they have made the wrong choices, not because of wider systems of oppression. As Laura Saxton argues, too, Anne is frequently represented as culpable in her own downfall in ways that reinscribe existing stereotypes: “she is often the Lady Macbeth who encourages him.”55 Mantel replicates the dilemma of earlier historical fictions because her novel replicates their representation of Anne. Moreover, nearly all the women surrounding Anne who are represented in Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies conform to established stereotypes.  Mantel, 345.  Hilary Mantel, The Mirror and the Light (London: 4th Estate, 2020). 52  Bordo, The Creation of Anne Boleyn: A New Look at England’s Most Notorious Queen, 235. 53  Dana Roders, “Hilary Mantel’s Anne Boleyn: Locating a Body of Evidence,” Forum for World Literature Studies 6, no. 4 (2014): 575+. 54  Jerome de Groot, The Historical Novel (London: Routledge, 2009), 74. 55  Laura Saxton, “‘She Was Dead Meat’: Imagining the Execution of Anne Boleyn in History and Fiction,” Parergon: Journal of the Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 37.2 (2020), forthcoming. 50 51

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Mary is the lascivious simpleton who survives because she has chosen love over ambition, while Jane Boleyn is a troublemaker who plots against her husband and sister-in-law, and Jane Seymour is plain and docile. In the Author’s Note to Bring Up the Bodies, Mantel admits to “throw[ing] more blame on Jane, Lady Rochford, than perhaps she deserves,” but notes that her primary interest was examining how “a few crucial weeks might have looked from Thomas Cromwell’s point of view.”56 In presenting us with a new vision of Cromwell, however, Mantel largely fails to say anything new about Anne. When Cromwell witnesses Anne telling Kingston that her old rooms in the Tower are too good for her, he reiterates the individualist ethos of the postfeminist era: “She did not mean to admit her guilt, but to say this truth: I am not worthy, and I am not worthy because I have failed.”57 For a perhaps surprising number of twenty-first-century writers, Anne’s demise represents a personal failure. For others, however, Anne is reimagined as a third-wave feminist icon for the internet age.

Third-Wave Anne While postfeminism is the dominant ideology lying behind many contemporary representations of Anne, other novelists portray more transparently feminist Annes. Again, that shift reflects shifts in popular culture of the time. Imelda Whelehan argues that women’s popular fiction inevitably is in “dialogue with feminism” as the heroines “often seem to be wrestling with a nascent feminist consciousness set against their quest for The One.”58 In twenty-first-century historical romance, too, heroines became increasingly empowered; as Hsu-Ming Teo writes about the contemporary heroine of romance, they “enjoy orgasms as well as close friendships with other women.”59 Many of the Anne novels that present her as a feminist emphasise Anne’s relationships with her ladies-in-waiting, as well as her desire for a sexually fulfilling relationship.60 Robin Maxwell’s  Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies, 410, 409.  Mantel, 303. 58  Imelda Whelehan, The Feminist Bestseller: From Sex and the Single Girl to Sex and the City (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 5. 59  Hsu-Ming Teo, “The Contemporary Anglophone Romance Genre,” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 1–27. 60  In To Die For, to cite one example, Anne has a close friendship with Meg Wyatt, the focaliser of the novel. Sandra Byrd, To Die For: A Novel of Anne Boleyn (Brentwood: Howard Books, 2011). 56 57

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Mademoiselle Boleyn, for example, features a subplot that combines both female friendship with sexual awakening, as Anne learns to masturbate to orgasm and then instructs the other ladies-in-waiting how to do the same.61 It is not hard to imagine this scene taking place in a contemporary piece of chick lit. The construction of a feminist Anne also reflects an interesting, somewhat surprising dimension of Anne’s twenty-first-century afterlife: her status as something of a cult internet feminist hero. Anne Boleyn fandom is clustered around websites such as The Anne Boleyn Files, On the Tudor Trail and The Anne Boleyn Society, as well as a variety of Facebook sites.62 In Mickey Mayhew’s recent study of this phenomenon, he argues that Anne Boleyn fandom constitutes a cyber-subculture of predominantly young women: “feeling disenfranchised themselves, they covet an icon that also projects that persona.”63 Susan Bordo also argues that the women involved in this fandom actively construct an image of Anne as a third-­ wave feminist: It became clear to me that Anne’s young fans have not followed any of the historical prototypes, but have created their own Anne, patched together out of those pieces of the media images that they find attractive […] what they see as the many-sidedness of Anne’s personality, which resists definition as either flirt or “brain”, “feminine” or feisty, mother or career woman, sexpot or “one of the guys”, saint or sinner.64

Arguably, this idea of Anne is modelled on Natalie Dormer’s portrayal of her in The Tudors. In any event, Anne Boleyn is an ideal focus for young third-wave feminists, Bordo argues, because she resists any easy classification.65 The appeal for many of these young women is that her particular  Robin Maxwell, Mademoiselle Boleyn (New York: New American Library, 2007).  Claire Ridgway, “The Anne Boleyn Files,” accessed December 4, 2018, https://www. theanneboleynfiles.com/; Natalie Grueninger, “On the Tudor Trail,” accessed December 4, 2018, onthetudortrail.com; “The Anne Boleyn Society,” Facebook, accessed December 4, 2018, https://www.facebook.com/SocietyAnne/ 63  Mickey Mayhew, “Skewed Intimacies and Subcultural Identities: Anne Boleyn and the Expression of Fealty in a Social Media Forum” (London South Bank University, 2018), 2. 64  Bordo, The Creation of Anne Boleyn: A New Look at England’s Most Notorious Queen, 255. 65  A good summary of how Anne Boleyn is perceived by internet fans is found in a tweet summarising Anne’s personality by @anne_theriault, which reads “unrepentant Francophile; snark-master; fAsHiOn; bad case of resting bitchy face; workaholic; everything she says sounds WAY meaner out loud than it did in her head; ‘don’t @ me!!!’; tough exterior, but 61 62

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situation is oddly relatable: she was a woman whose legendary sex appeal quite literally changed the world, yet was brought down because of those very same qualities. For young women living in a world that tells them that they must look and act in highly proscribed ways, and then subsequently trivialises and humiliates them for exactly these types of behaviours, while simultaneously insisting that they are equal—the discourse of postfeminism, in other words—Boleyn’s plight seems very familiar. To consciously create a feminist Anne, then, is an act of resistance to the postfeminist ideologies found in Gregory’s novel. Third-wave feminist Annes usually embody characteristics that might once have been conceived of negatively but are now recontextualised as either admirable or understandable. Suzannah Dunn’s 2004 novel The Queen of Subtleties has Anne declare on the opening pages of the novel that “the only way to be a strong woman is to be a harridan.”66 On the surface, Dunn appears to be presenting Anne as exactly the kind of villainous woman favoured in postfeminist fiction. Henry, for instance, prefers a “good, old-fashioned kind” of woman, and chastises Anne for being overtly argumentative and opinionated.67 At the end of the novel, Anne warns her daughter that “if you want to keep your head, keep it down. But my guess is that you – Tudor, Boleyn – will run the risk of losing it anyway, one day, so I say this: be your mother’s daughter and hold it high.”68 However, where Dunn’s novel differs from the postfeminist novels is in her insistence that it is the world that surrounds Anne that prompts that behaviour: the problem is the Tudor world, not Anne. In other words, Anne can now be a “bitch-figure,” to use Miriam  Elizabeth Burstein’s parlance, but is no longer punished for being so.69 As Sarah Wendall writes of the use of the word “bitch” in the romance community, “reclaiming and using the word ‘bitch’ for affirmative use demands recognition for the idea that that the stereotype itself is wrong and that there is nothing at all wrong or unnatural with a woman being any of the meanings of the word.”70

loves u more than u can imagine.” @anne_theriault, Twitter, 2018, https://twitter.com/ anne_theriault/status/1000187533156929536. This tweet was liked over 1100 times. 66  Suzannah Dunn, The Queen of Subtleties (London: Harper Perennial, 2004), 3. 67  Dunn, 283. 68  Dunn, 311. 69  Miriam Elizabeth Burstein, “The Fictional Afterlife of Anne Boleyn: How to Do Things with the Queen, 1901–2006,” Clio 37, no. 1 (2007): 14. 70  Sarah Wendall, “‘You Call Me a Bitch like That’s a Bad Thing’: Romance Criticism and Redefining the Word ‘Bitch,’” in New Approaches to Popular Romance Fiction, ed. Sarah

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The novel foregrounds Anne’s knowledge that, as a woman, she is powerless. The sections focalised by Anne take the form of a letter from Anne to her daughter in which she foretells her own historic invisibility: “You won’t remember how I look, and I don’t suppose you’ll ever come across my likeness. Portraits of me will be burned.”71 Anne knows that she is a problem that can be solved by “the thinnest of blades”; as a woman, she is expendable and voiceless.72 As Barlow writes, “Dunn provides Anne with the platform from which to add her own ‘truth’ to the many versions of her life story, highlighting the highly subjective and interpretative nature of historical narrative.”73 Dunn’s novel suggests the importance of women talking to women—Anne talks to Elizabeth through her letter— and in doing so constructs an alternative history. Her novel thus transcends blaming Anne for her own predicament and turns the focus back onto the way history has silenced women. Robin Maxwell, as examined in the previous chapter, had already written a novel that used power feminism to explore Anne’s story in her The Secret Diary of Anne Boleyn (1997). The power feminist, however, was Anne’s daughter. In Mademoiselle Boleyn, published ten years later in 2007, Maxwell transforms Anne herself into the power feminist. The novel, unusually, takes as its focus Anne’s time in France and ends with Anne travelling back to England. The novel is about Anne’s developing feminist consciousness, which is triggered by two experiences: watching her sister be forced into becoming François’s mistress, and the influence of Marguerite, his sister. Mary’s real desire is to be a respectable wife and mother, and Anne, anxious about her own betrothal to James Butler, is horrified by women’s powerlessness. She becomes close friends with Marguerite, who teaches Anne that “women are far stronger than men would let them think they are. All but a few of us believe the lie of powerlessness.”74 However, women’s power does not prevent them from becoming “the victims of men’s whims, their violence and aggression.”75 When François’s attentions fall on Anne and she fears she will become just G.S.  Frantz and Eric Murphy Selinger (Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 2012), 183–4 (178–194). 71  Dunn, 1. 72  Dunn, 2. 73  Barlow, “Women’s Historical Fiction ‘After’ Feminism: Discursive Reconstructions of the Tudors in Contemporary Literature,” 188. 74  Robin Maxwell, Mademoiselle Boleyn, 185. 75  Maxwell, 185.

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such a victim, she bets her honour on a game of strip poker, which she wins. François graciously concedes: “You are destined for greatness, Anna. But not as my mistress.”76 Here Anne proactively takes matters in her own hand to avoid becoming the victim she had been in The Secret Diary of Anne Boleyn. If anybody is a victim in this later novel, it is Mary Boleyn, who accedes to her father’s requests that she uses her body to obtain power. Mary is thus placed in the role that Anne took up in The Secret Diary of Anne Boleyn: the victim who inspires the power feminist. All of Anne’s nascent feminism is channelled into women’s right to have agency over their own lives. When she meets Henry Percy at the Field of the Cloth of Gold, she finds a cause to champion: her desire to marry for love. In the Readers Guide material appended to the novel, Robin Maxwell ties Anne’s intelligence and ambition to her relationship to Percy: “I always kept in mind that she began as an innocent, if highly intelligent, a romantic idealist who had the backbone to defy her father, her king, and Cardinal Wolsey, in order to pursue a marriage with Henry Percy.”77 Anne, having witnessed how men trade women’s bodies amongst themselves in order to accrue power and status, conceives of the right to insist upon genuine romantic love as the only means by which women can gain power and control over their own lives. When Anne insists upon the right to marry Henry Percy, the reader knows she will lose, but is prompted to recognise and admire Anne’s progressive views. Alison Weir repeats many of the motifs found in Maxwell’s novel to present her own feminist Anne in her 2017 novel Anne Boleyn: A King’s Obsession. Weir’s Anne is friends with Leonardo da Vinci, as she was in Mademoiselle Boleyn, and has also learnt about the tenets of what we would now call feminism at the feet of Marguerite. In a discussion at the French court, Marguerite declares that “our flesh might be weak – although those who have borne children might deny that – but our hearts and our intellects are strong. I say we can be a match for any man.”78 Anne approves of such ideas and Marguerite’s assertion that “change will come, have no doubt of it, and we women who have power and rank are the ones who will bring it about.”79 In her long author’s note, Weir admits to a resistance to the rise of representations of Anne as a feminist: “until recently, I  Maxwell, 232.  Maxwell, Readers Guide. 78  Alison Weir, Anne Boleyn: A King’s Obsession (London: Headline Review, 2017), 91. 79  Weir, 91. 76 77

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would have dismissed [feminist Anne] as anachronistic, arguing that feminism was unknown in Tudor England.”80 She then argues that she now considers it “legitimate” to represent Anne as a feminist because of the cultural influence of the French court and her “Renaissance cultural background.”81 It is a rare example of a novelist admitting to how trends in representational patterns shaped her own novel; Weir had to represent Anne as a feminist because, by this point, to do otherwise would have been perceived as failing to respect Anne’s modernity. Representations of a feminist Anne reflect the modern trend in historical fiction of presenting women’s stories as part of a broader lineage of feminist resistance; Anne and Marguerite of Navarre become the reader’s feminist ancestors.

Romantic Annes Gregory has been so influential in the historical romance space that it is not surprising that as many historical novelists react against Gregory as they replicate her characterisation of Anne. One of the manifestations of this reaction against Gregory is, arguably, the desire to write ambition out of Anne’s story. As I have shown in the last two chapters, the prevailing assumption of much Anne Boleyn fiction throughout the twentieth century was that Anne did not love Henry. Instead, their relationship is usually represented as one-sided, and either characterised by sexual harassment or a result of Anne’s self-conscious manipulation of Henry. That basic narrative does continue to be seen in some twenty-first-century texts. Angela Warwick’s Moth to the Flame (2013), for example, gives us a Scarlett O’Hara-esque Anne (see Chap. 7) who does not love Henry, but is motivated by ambition and a desire for revenge on Wolsey. “As God is my witness,” Anne declares, echoing Scarlett’s “I’ll never be hungry again” speech, “I hope one day that it will lie within my power to destroy [Wolsey’s] life as he has surely destroyed mine!”82 However, the twenty-first century sees a marked shift back to a romantic depiction of Anne and Henry’s relationship. Not since the eighteenth-­ century poetry of Tollet and Whitehead had such romanticism been associated with the marriage of Anne and Henry. By writing genuine love and commitment back into Anne’s narrative, historical novelists could  Weir, 508.  Weir, 509. 82  Angela Warwick, Moth to the Flame: The Story of Anne Boleyn, 2013, 110. 80 81

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disassociate Anne with the taint of potentially “unfeminine” ambition and ascribe her purer motives. She was doing it all for love, these novels suggest. On one level, the turn back towards romance is unsurprising. Henry spent many years working to clear the way towards marrying Anne, and so their story can be quite easily constructed as one marked by passionate, overwhelming love that brooked no opposition. Read in this light, it is perhaps surprising that so few novels make their relationship a genuine love story. What makes that story difficult to sustain, of course, is its ending. How can we account for a love story that ends in violent death only three years after its consummation? The turn back to romance also reflects the desire to make Henry and Anne’s relationship fit the parameters of the historical romance genre. As I have shown, in the twentieth century, the conflict between generic convention and historical fact manifested itself in the drive to identify Anne’s “real” love as somebody other than Henry. While such narratives continue to be written in the twenty-first century, there has been an increasing willingness in recent years to make Henry the romantic hero, despite the complications involved. One might argue that it is possible to read the trace of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight novels (2005–08) into many of the most romantic contemporary Anne/Henry novels. As Danielle N. Borgia notes, these novels “promot[e] inegalitarian gender roles, obsessive, codependent romantic relationships, racial hierarchies, and elitism.”83 Meyer’s novels, coupled with E.L. James’s 2011 erotic romance Fifty Shades of Grey (which was originally published as Twilight fanfiction), derive their erotic power through the juxtaposition of love and violence.84 However, historical fictions about Anne and Henry’s love rarely characterise their relationship as a Tudor version of a love-hate BDSM-based (bondage, discipline, sadism, and masochism) relationship; instead, they tend to idealise their relationship up until the point at which Henry suddenly (and sometimes inexplicably) turns on Anne. Sandra Vasoli’s two-part Je Anne Boleyn series is perhaps the most overt manifestation of this turn towards romance. Vasoli represents Anne and Henry’s relationship as a true love match, and there is much discussion throughout both of the novels about the fact that Anne is Henry’s 83  Danielle N. Borgia, “Twilight: The Glamorization of Abuse, Codependency, and White Privilege,” The Journal of Popular Culture 47, no. 1 (2014): 153. 84  Elizabeth Moss’s Wolf Bride, which features Anne Boleyn as a secondary character, is marketed as “Fifty Shades of Tudor Sex” on the front cover. Elizabeth Moss, Wolf Bride: Lust in the Tudor Court (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2013).

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“second self,” which he has realised upon reading Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics.85 However, that Anne and Henry are genuinely in love does not mean that Anne is free of ambition. Instead, she has a great deal of ambition invested in her perception of the strength of their union and its capacity to bring about religious reform. Later in the novel, Henry tells Anne that he had not come into himself as a monarch until he met her: “With you, I am the man I was meant to be – the ruler I was born to be.”86 Vasoli represents Anne as a self-consciously modern, proto-feminist woman; at one stage, she even has Anne advocate for the development of women’s tennis.87 For Anne and Henry, at least in the first novel in the series, Struck by the Dark of Love (2016), love and ambition can peacefully coexist and are, in fact, bolstered by each other. Vasoli’s Anne thus conforms to the paradigm of third-wave feminist Anne; she can be the adoring lover and the striving career woman. However, historical fact is once again at issue here. Vasoli must balance her portrayal of Anne and Henry’s intense “second self” love with the reality of how it ended. Vasoli attempts to resolve this problem by blaming Thomas Cromwell for Anne’s downfall. She also suggests that if Anne had a chance to see Henry between her arrest and her execution, she would have been able to convince him of Cromwell’s deception. Anne reflects that Henry “was a man whose need for absolute loyalty was childlike,” and so when informed of her infidelity, his “frenzy would have been uncontrollable.”88 The dissolution of Anne and Henry’s relationship becomes simply a tragic misunderstanding that could easily have been set right. Moreover, Anne’s ambition is not a problem for Henry, who actively encourages it, but is a problem for Cromwell, who resents it. Cromwell favours Jane Seymour as Queen because she is “more malleable” and will not interfere with his plans for the money garnered from the dissolution of the monasteries.89 Cromwell is the bad patriarchal man, while Henry is far more modern in his support of an ambitious woman. Such a manoeuvre allows Vasoli to preserve the notion that Anne and Henry were, as she writes in the epilogue, a “well-matched pair  – ‘soul mates’ in today’s 85  Sandra Vasoli, Struck With the Dart of Love: Je Anne Boleyn  – Book 1 (London: MadeGlobal, 2016), 177. 86  Vasoli, 203. 87  Vasoli, 124. 88  Sandra Vasoli, Truth Endures: Je Anne Boleyn – Book 2 (London: MadeGlobal, 2016), 191. 89  Vasoli, 190.

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parlance.”90 The novel also concludes with Anne writing her contested final letter from the Tower, and so neatly avoids having to represent the spectacle of Henry sending Anne to her execution.91 While the reader presumably is well aware of Anne’s fate, the novel ends with her in a state of hope and expectation, as if a different ending is possible. Other novels also represent an Anne genuinely in love with Henry. The Anne of Suzannah Dunn’s The Queen of Subtleties, for example, initially characterises her flirtation with Henry as a dalliance before an encounter with the king at leisure prompts her to realise that “we would have to spend our lives together.”92 Likewise, the Anne of Charlie Fenton’s Perseverance is initially reluctant to engage in a relationship with Henry, due to loyalty to her sister, but soon finds herself deeply in love with Henry.93 Fenton’s Anne is a return to the victim Anne mode of previous centuries, but while Anne was usually represented as a victim because she did not love Henry, here she is a victim because of her excessive love for Henry. Sara Ahmed has written about what she terms the “happiness turn” in the twenty-first century, which she sees as the movement towards thinking about happiness as a key social good, even a duty.94 Those novels in which Anne is represented as pursuing happiness with Henry, despite the significant complications, reflect the contemporary belief that Ahmed identifies, in which pursuing what makes one happy, despite the potential consequences, is framed as desirable and morally right. The romantic novels about Anne and Henry also reflect contemporary understandings of love as an uncontrollable, undeniable emotional force, unable to be tempered by more prosaic considerations or interests. Adrienne Dillard’s The Raven’s Widow (2017) has a slightly different focus, in that Dillard quite explicitly aims to resuscitate the reputations of George and Jane Boleyn.95 The novel also gives us an Anne who is genuinely kind, but not passive or perfect; she has agency but is also a victim. Anne is initially hostile to Henry’s advances, responding with genuine anger when Henry wears the motto “Declare, I Dare Not” at a joust at  Vasoli, 198.  Vasoli claims that Anne’s letter from the Tower, which most historians dismiss as a hoax, should be considered a genuine historical document authored by Anne. See Sandra Vasoli, Anne Boleyn’s Letter from the Tower (London: MadeGlobal, 2015). 92  Dunn, The Queen of Subtleties, 20. 93  Charlie Fenton, Perseverance, Kindle edi (London, 2014). 94  Sara Ahmed, The Pursuit of Happiness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 3–7. 95  Adrienne Dillard, The Raven’s Widow: A Novel of Jane Boleyn (London: MadeGlobal, 2017), 1. 90 91

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Greenwich: “I won’t be anyone’s spoilt goods, not even the king’s.”96 However, Anne comes to genuinely love Henry: “The king changed my heart,” she tells Jane, and has “made me happier than I ever thought I could be.”97 Dillard, like Vasoli, attributes to Cromwell blame for the dissolution of Anne and Henry’s relationship.98 However, Dillard avoids painting Henry as the innocent victim of Cromwell’s machinations. Later in the novel, as Jane faces her own death, she describes herself having to “force myself to face the evidence of the king’s cruelty” and what she perceives as her own betrayal of George by serving the man who murdered him.99 Dillard thus reconciles a portrait of Anne and Henry’s relationship as a love match and Henry’s betrayal of Anne. The novel does not use clever plotting to suggest that Henry did not really mean to execute Anne, as Vasoli does, but instead presents us with a Henry who genuinely loved Anne but who is both cruel and weak, especially in his treatment of his loved ones. In attempting to provide a more balanced view of Anne’s brother and sister-in-law, then, Dillard delivers one of the relatively few examples of a novel in which the way Anne and Henry’s relationship ends is entirely consistent with it being a genuine emotional connection. While Dillard is less declarative in her feminism than those texts which explicitly represent Anne as a proto-feminist icon, The Raven’s Widow also presents just the kind of third-wave feminist Anne, neither a victim nor a schemer, that the fans in Bordo’s study desire.

The Return of Religion The twentieth century largely imagined Anne’s story as a secular tale. Where religion was dealt with, it was usually either incidental to the plot or presumed that Anne’s religious beliefs were either not sincerely held or only marginally influential in her rise and fall. However, the twenty-first century has seen a major recentring of religion in Anne Boleyn narratives. One way to account for the renewed role of religion may be the influence of popular biography: Joanne Denny’s biography of Anne, published in 2004, emphasises the importance of Anne’s religious faith.100 Eric Ives had  Dillard, 95.  Dillard, 108. 98  Dillard, 304. 99  Dillard, 335. 100  Joanne Denny, Anne Boleyn: A New Life of England’s Tragic Queen (London: Da Capo Press, 2006). 96 97

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also previously written extensively about Anne’s role in religious reform, as well as what can be known of her private faith.101 Moreover, many of the writers who wish to reclaim Anne as a feminist have tied her interest in religious reform to her intellectual life. Robin Maxwell’s Mademoiselle Boleyn, for instance, suggests that a critique of the excesses of the Catholic Church was one of the lessons that Anne imbibed from Marguerite of Navarre.102 In general, twenty-first-century novels are far more likely to take religion seriously than their twentieth-century forerunners. Contra Hayley Nolan’s recent, unsupported assertion that Anne’s religious beliefs are routinely represented as not genuine, then, there has been a robust return in the twenty-first century to an insistence upon the centrality of religion to Anne’s narrative.103 The rise of the Christian fiction market in the twenty-first century has also resulted in a spate of novels that emphasise Anne’s evangelical religious beliefs for a specifically Protestant, usually female, audience. Melanie C. Duncan writes that the rise of Christian fiction commenced in the late twentieth century, but specifically identifies the first two decades of the twenty-first century as marking a pronounced flourishing of the genre.104 Anne is of obvious appeal to the Christian publishing market. Her story is central to the story of the English Reformation, and she provides a historical model for a devout woman persecuted for her religious beliefs; an ideal touchstone for an evangelical community that sees itself as under threat in an increasingly secular age. Twenty-first-century religious representations of Anne’s life have a different ideological function from earlier texts, however. Instead of being used to prosecute a sectarian conflict, they instead insist upon both Anne’s genuine commitment to religious reform and the influence that her private faith had upon the state. In doing so, Anne is posited as a model of pious, active Christian womanhood. Sandra Byrd’s To Die For (2011) was published by Howard Books, a US-based Christian publisher, and Byrd has made her name writing both Christian fiction and non-fiction. The novel departs from the pattern of earlier representations of Anne, in which Anne is influenced by another woman’s religious beliefs, as was the case in Lofts’s The Concubine. Byrd’s 101  Eric Ives, The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn (Malden: Blackwell, 2004), on religious reform 260–276, and on Anne’s private faith 276–287. 102  Maxwell, Mademoiselle Boleyn, 237. 103  Hayley Nolan, Anne Boleyn: 500 Years of Lies, Kindle edi (New York: Little A, 2019), 44. 104  Melanie C. Duncan, “A Born-Again Genre,” Library Journal 137, no. 3 (2012): 26–28.

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Anne always has a strong belief in reform; in the first few pages, the narrator, Meg Wyatt, tells us that she and the young Anne “had many rigorous debates about holy things.”105 As Anne’s relationship with Henry develops, Anne comes to believe that her influence over Henry is fated to bring about the English Reformation: “I believe God has chosen Henry for this purpose.”106 This Anne lacks the fiery temperament or unruliness of most twenty-first-century Annes, but instead devotes herself selflessly and piously to her religious interests. Her destruction is brought about by two factors: the machinations of Cromwell and Henry’s enthusiastic adoption of his newly granted absolute power, which Meg notes is the unintentional side-effect of Anne’s religious reforms.107 At the end of the novel, Byrd affirms Anne’s credentials as the ideal model for virtuous Christian womanhood. As Anne prepares for her impending execution, Meg provides the following summation of Anne’s life: You have borne the weight of England’s Reformation on your shoulders. You have used your influence to place men who stand solely on scripture … throughout the Church of England and they will stand, and lead others, long after you are gone.108

The model of femininity that Anne embodies for Byrd, and for her readers, is centred on the idea of righteous feminine influence. Anne has promoted men who have the capacity to become the leaders of the movement for religious reform, and they will take up the cause in Anne’s absence. However, Byrd also imagines Anne as moving beyond the mode of passive moral influence. She has actively promoted reformist preachers and used her role for fundamentally political purposes. Byrd thus looks forward to female-led Christian activism, providing Anne as a model, while still insisting upon her compliance with hegemonic standards of femininity—Anne is a good wife, and her moral influence on her daughter will result in the triumph of Protestantism.109  Byrd, To Die For: A Novel of Anne Boleyn, 12.  Byrd, 114. 107  Byrd, 142. 108  Byrd, 311. 109  For more on conservative Christian female-led activism in the late twentieth century, see Michelle M.  Nickerson, Mothers of Conservatism: Women and the Postwar Right (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012). 105 106

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Ginger Garrett’s In the Shadow of the Lions (2008) was also published by an explicitly Christian publisher. Garrett presents the reader with a devout Anne, who insists upon reading the vernacular Bible, despite knowing the risks associated with doing so. The novel also includes a frame narrative in which an angelic Scribe appears to a modern woman on the brink of death to instruct her to transcribe Anne’s story and thus learn—and teach others—about the struggle for the right of ordinary people to access the Bible. The novel concludes with an Epilogue in which the author states that “the average American family owns four Bibles and has read none of them.”110 Anne’s sacrifice is not being repaid, Garrett implies, by an appropriate level of respect for the Bible, although the source of her statistic is unknown. In any event, Anne is a useful proselytising tool. An exploration of the impact that religion had upon Anne’s narrative is not limited to Christian fiction, however. Jay Margrave’s Luther’s Ambassadors does not overtly proselytise but presents religious reform as Anne’s “life sworn aim.”111 Howard Brenton’s play Anne Boleyn also insists upon the centrality of religion to Anne’s narrative, but does so without an explicitly Christian worldview underpinning the text. In Brenton’s play, which premiered at Shakespeare’s Globe in 2010, Anne Boleyn appears as a ghost, sometimes holding her head, but more often chatting to a cross-dressing James VI and I about her evangelicalism and the future of England. Anne presents herself as a woman with immense historical agency, but her real impact lies within the upheaval caused by the English Reformation in the future, of which she has an uncanny awareness. In the first scene of the play, Brenton plays with audience expectations, suggesting that the ghostly Anne is carrying her own head in a bag, only to reveal that she is holding a Bible: “This killed me! This book!”112 After revealing that she is also carrying her own head, Anne tells the modern audience of theatre-goers that she will “bring you all to Jesus,” and the play makes much of the space between Anne’s posthumous reputation as a sexually licentious woman and her religious beliefs.113 While Brenton does not seek to proselytise or reach an exclusively Christian audience, he does affirm the centrality of religion to Anne’s life and death. 110  Ginger Garrett, In the Shadow of Lions: A Novel (Colorado Springs: David C. Cook, 2008), 329. 111  Jay Margrave, Luther’s Ambassadors (Guildford: Goldenford Publishers, 2008). 6. 112  Howard Brenton, Anne Boleyn (London: Nick Hern Books Limited, 2012), 11. 113  Brenton, 11.

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Conclusion The contemporary popularity of stories about the Tudors shows little sign of abating, and so it seems likely that historical fiction about Anne Boleyn will continue to proliferate over the course of the twenty-first century. What is truly novel about writing about Anne Boleyn in this century is that the democratisation of access to publishing has meant that a wide variety of fictional Annes can now coexist. While the story of Anne Boleyn fiction in the century earlier was the emergence of a master narrative from which few deviations could be found, the twenty-first century has so far been characterised by the opposite tendency. Twenty-first-century historical fiction can now accommodate Annes who are variously religious, ambitious, romantic, intelligent, angry, feminist and victimised. In the next chapter, I turn to the rise of transgeneric fictions about Anne Boleyn in which she becomes everything from a vampire to a contemporary high-school student.

References Primary Sources Armitage, Aileen. The Tudor Sisters. Sutton: Severn House, 2005. Boyton, Peggy. The Reluctant Mistress. London: Robert Hale, 1977. Brenton, Howard. Anne Boleyn. London: Nick Hern Books Limited, 2012. Byrd, Sandra. To Die For: A Novel of Anne Boleyn. Brentwood: Howard Books, 2011. Dillard, Adrienne. The Raven’s Widow: A Novel of Jane Boleyn. London: MadeGlobal, 2017. Dunn, Suzannah. The Queen of Subtleties. London: Harper Perennial, 2004. Fenton, Charlie. Perseverance. Kindle edi. London, 2014. Garrett, Ginger. In the Shadow of Lions: A Novel. Colorado Springs: David C. Cook, 2008. Gregory, Philippa. The Other Boleyn Girl. London: HarperCollins, 2011. Harper, Karen. The Last Boleyn: A Novel. New York: Three Rivers Press, 1983. Mantel, Hilary. Bring Up The Bodies. London: 4th Estate, 2012. ———. The Mirror and the Light. London: 4th Estate, 2020. ———. Wolf Hall. London: 4th Estate, 2009. Margrave, Jay. Luther’s Ambassadors. Guildford: Goldenford Publishers, 2008. Maxwell, Robin. Mademoiselle Boleyn. New York: New American Library, 2007. McCarran, Catherine. Queenbreaker: Perseverance, 2016.

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Morris, Sarah. Le Temps Viendra: A Novel of Anne Boleyn, Volume 1. Spartan Publishing, 2012. ———. Le Temps Viendra: A Novel of Anne Boleyn, Volume 2. Spartan Publishing, 2013. Moss, Elizabeth. Wolf Bride: Lust in the Tudor Court. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2013. Purdy, Emily. The Boleyn Bride. New York: Kensington Books, 2014. ———. The Tudor Wife. London: Avon, 2010. Saxton, Judith. Feather Light, Diamond Bright. North Yorkshire: Dales Large Print Books, 1974. Vasoli, Sandra. Struck With the Dart of Love: Je Anne Boleyn – Book 1. London: MadeGlobal, 2016a. ———. Truth Endures: Je Anne Boleyn – Book 2. London: MadeGlobal, 2016b. Warwick, Angela. Moth to the Flame: The Story of Anne Boleyn, 2013. Weir, Alison. Anne Boleyn: A King’s Obsession. London: Headline Review, 2017.

Secondary Sources @anne_theriault. “Tweet.” Twitter, 2018. https://twitter.com/anne_theriault/ status/1000187533156929536. Ahmed, Sara. The Pursuit of Happiness. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. Barlow, Jenna Elizabeth. “Women’s Historical Fiction ‘After’ Feminism: Discursive Reconstructions of the Tudors in Contemporary Literature.” Stellenbosch University, 2014. Bordo, Susan. The Creation of Anne Boleyn: A New Look at England’s Most Notorious Queen. Boston: Mariner Books, 2014. Borgia, Danielle N. “Twilight: The Glamorization of Abuse, Codependency, and White Privilege.” The Journal of Popular Culture 47, no. 1 (2014): 153–73. Burstein, Miriam Elizabeth. “The Fictional Afterlife of Anne Boleyn: How to Do Things with the Queen, 1901–2006.” Clio 37, no. 1 (2007): 1–26. Crane, Julie. “Whoso List to Hunt: The Literary Fortunes of Anne Boleyn.” In The Female Figure in Contemporary Historical Fiction, edited by K. Cooper and E. Short, 76–91. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Denny, Joanne. Anne Boleyn: A New Life of England’s Tragic Queen. London: Da Capo Press, 2006. Duncan, Melanie C. “A Born-Again Genre.” Library Journal 137, no. 3 (2012): 26–28. Gill, Rosalind. “Postfeminist Media Culture: Elements of a Sensibility.” European Journal of Women’s Studies 10, no. 2 (2007): 147–66. Groot, Jerome de. Consuming History: Historians and Heritage in Contemporary Popular Culture. London & New York: Routledge, 2009a. ———. The Historical Novel. London: Routledge, 2009b.

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Grueninger, Natalie. “On the Tudor Trail.” Accessed December 4, 2018. onthetudortrail.com. Ives, Eric. The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn. Malden: Blackwell, 2004. Kellaway, Kate. “Philippa Gregory: Unearthing History’s Forgotten Women.” The Guardian, July 28, 2013. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/ jul/28/philippa-gregory-unearthing-history-s-forgotten-women. Kelly, Deidre M., and Shauna Pomerantz. “Mean, Wild, and Alienated: Girls and the State of Feminism in Popular Culture.” Girlhood Studies 2, no. 1 (2009): 1–19. Lackey, Michael. “Introduction: The Rise of the American Biographical Novel.” In Truthful Fictions: Conversations with American Biographical Novelists, edited by Michael Lackey, 1–25. New York & London: Bloomsbury, 2014. ———. “Locating and Defining the Bio in Biofiction.” A/b: Auto/Biography Studies 31, no. 1 (2016): 3–10. Levy, Ariel. Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture. Melbourne: Schwartz Publishing, 2005. Mantel, Hilary. “Anne Boleyn: Witch, Bitch, Temptress, Feminist.” The Guardian, May 12, 2012. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/may/11/ hilary-mantel-on-anne-boleyn. Mayhew, Mickey. “Skewed Intimacies and Subcultural Identities: Anne Boleyn and the Expression of Fealty in a Social Media Forum.” London South Bank University, 2018. McRobbie, Angela. The Aftermath of Feminism. London: Sage, 2009. Missler, Heike. The Cultural Politics of Chick Lit: Popular Fiction, Postfeminism and Representation. New York: Routledge, 2016. Nickerson, Michelle M. Mothers of Conservatism: Women and the Postwar Right. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012. Nolan, Hayley. Anne Boleyn: 500 Years of Lies. Kindle edi. New  York: Little A, 2019. Rich, Katey. “Exclusive Interview: Philippa Gregory, Author of The Other Boleyn Girl.” CinemaBlend.Com, 2008. https://www.cinemablend.com/new/ Exclusive-Interview-Phillippa-Gregory-Author-Other-Boleyn-Girl-7994.html. Ridgway, Claire. “Anne Boleyn and The Other Boleyn Girl.” The Anne Boleyn Files, 2010. https://www.theanneboleynfiles.com/anne-boleyn-and-theother-boleyn-girl/. ———. “The Anne Boleyn Files.” Accessed December 4, 2018. https://www. theanneboleynfiles.com/. Roders, Dana. “Hilary Mantel’s Anne Boleyn: Locating a Body of Evidence.” Forum for World Literature Studies 6, no. 4 (2014): 575+. Saxton, Laura. “‘She Was Dead Meat’: Imagining the Execution of Anne Boleyn in History and Fiction.” Parergon: Journal of the Australian and New Zealand

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Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies volume 37, number 2, 2020, forthcoming. ———. “The Unblemished Concubine: Representations of Anne Boleyn in the English Written Word, 2000–2012.” Australian Catholic University, 2015. Scheil, Katherine West. Imagining Shakespeare’s Wife: The Afterlife of Anne Hathaway. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Teo, Hsu-Ming. “The Contemporary Anglophone Romance Genre.” In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, 1–27. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. “The Anne Boleyn Society.” Facebook. Accessed December 4, 2018. https:// www.facebook.com/SocietyAnne/. “The Other Boleyn Girl.” Wikipedia. Accessed October 5, 2019. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Other_Boleyn_Girl. Toibin, Colm, and Bethany Layne. “The Anchored Imagination of the Biographical Novel.” In Conversations with Biographical Novelists: Truthful Fictions Across the Globe, edited by Michael Lackey, 224–34. New York: Bloomsbury, 2019. Vasoli, Sandra. Anne Boleyn’s Letter from the Tower. London: MadeGlobal, 2015. Warnicke, Retha. The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn: Family Politics at the Court of Henry VIII. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Weir, Alison. Mary Boleyn: The Mistress of Kings. New York: Ballantine Books, 2011. Wendall, Sarah. “‘You Call Me a Bitch like That’s a Bad Thing’: Romance Criticism and Redefining the Word ‘Bitch.’” In New Approaches to Popular Romance Fiction, edited by Sarah G.S.  Frantz and Eric Murphy Selinger, 178–94. Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 2012. Whelehan, Imelda. The Feminist Bestseller: From Sex and the Single Girl to Sex and the City. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

CHAPTER 10

Anne Boleyn in Twenty-First-Century Transgeneric Fiction

As I argued in the previous chapter, the twenty-first century has seen an extraordinary proliferation of Anne Boleyn fictions, on the back of significant technological changes in book publishing and platforms. The democratisation of access to publishing has meant that what Anne Boleyn “means” has become fragmented and ever more idiosyncratic. It is no longer possible to provide a simple account of how Anne is depicted in fiction because the master narrative of the twentieth century has ruptured into a dizzying array of potential Annes. Alongside this tendency towards fragmentation has arisen a trend towards transgeneric accounts of Anne’s narrative. While Anne’s narrative had usually been confined to the pages of historical romance in the twentieth century, in the twenty-first century it is possible to find her story inscribed in a wide range of generic forms, such as novels about time travel, vampires, and even contemporary American high schools. Transgeneric novels incorporate features from across a variety of genres, and in this chapter, I examine what happens to the historic drama of Anne and Henry’s relationship when it is translated into other genres beyond that of the historical romance. While transgeneric Anne Boleyn fictions might seem strange or unlikely, Anne’s story has always had the capacity to prompt both readers and writers to think about new ways of understanding that narrative in relation to changing social expectations and conventions. As Katherine West Scheil has argued of contemporary fictionalisations of the life of Shakespeare’s wife, Anne Hathaway, speculative biographical fiction has the power to © The Author(s) 2020 S. Russo, The Afterlife of Anne Boleyn, Queenship and Power, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58613-3_10

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“destabiliz[e] prevailing narratives” and “encourag[e] communities of readers to rethink the certainty of various biographical premises.”1 Similarly, transgeneric Anne Boleyn fictions seek to destabilise our understanding of who Anne was and what she means, often in quite explicitly reactionary ways. Many of the novels examined here express dissatisfaction with the historic record, or prevailing ways of thinking about Anne in fiction, and actively seek to present a new Anne for the twenty-first century. Many of the transgeneric novels about Anne are essentially thought experiments. What would happen if Anne Boleyn could time travel? What would Anne be like if she lived now? If you could talk to Anne Boleyn’s ghost, what would she say? What if Anne Boleyn didn’t die in 1536? Combining historical fiction with science fiction, or Young Adult fiction, or the counterfactual, allows potential answers to these tantalising questions to be posited. What unites all these disparate accounts of Anne is the conviction that Anne Boleyn continues to mean something in the twenty-first century, even if that meaning itself is disputed and often contradictory.

Anne Boleyn Young Adult Fiction While children’s literature is a form that dates back to the eighteenth century, literature for teenagers and young adults (commonly known as Young Adult or YA literature) became increasingly popular in the late 1990s and early 2000s.2 As we have seen throughout this book, Anne Boleyn has always appeared as a character in whatever form or genre of literature was popular at the time, and so too does the twenty-first century see a spate of Anne Boleyn YA fictions. There are historical antecedents for Anne Boleyn’s emergence as a YA heroine. Selina Bunbury framed her novel The Star of the Court as a cautionary tale for young female readers as early as 1844 (see: Chap. 5). The use of the maid’s narrative in twentieth-­ century historical fiction also allowed historical novelists to centre the experience of young women growing up in the shadow of the life and death of Anne Boleyn, and provided authors a means by which to filter

1  Katherine West Scheil, Imagining Shakespeare’s Wife: The Afterlife of Anne Hathaway (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 193. 2  For a good history of the rise in popularity of Young Adult literature, see: Rachel Falconer, The Crossover Novel: Contemporary Children’s Literature and Its Adult Readership (New York: Routledge, 2009).

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events through the experience of an “ordinary” girl.3 In the twenty-first century, Tudor historical fiction for young adults has become a flourishing sub-genre. In the last chapter, we saw that the contemporary phenomenon of the Anne Boleyn online fandom meant that Anne was frequently read as a third-wave feminist icon whose experiences spoke to disenfranchised young women struggling with competing ways of being a woman. The perception that Anne has something specific to say to twenty-first-­ century girls is carried through into contemporary YA Tudor fiction. Carolyn Meyer’s Young Royal series (1999–2013) and Katherine Longshore’s Royal Circles series (2012–14) both centre on the stories of either royal or aristocratic girls in the Tudor court. The novels are clearly packaged for teenage readers, with the cover art showing portraits of young women dressed in extravagant Tudor dresses. In these novels, Anne’s youthful experiences and maturation are foregrounded. Typically, YA fiction about Anne tends to de-emphasise the specificity of the Tudor setting, instead focusing on general or universal elements of her narrative, such as her nascent interest in boys. The plot of Longshore’s Tarnish (2003), which is focalised by Anne, turns on her difficult early experiences in the Henrician court.4 Anne makes various clumsy attempts to capture the attention of men, and spends most of the novel flirting with Thomas Wyatt, who is here imagined as the Tudor equivalent of a teen Byronic hero. The novel concludes with Anne on the precipice of capturing the heart of the King, and her story is represented as a narrative of triumph about a teenager overcoming social awkwardness. Carolyn Meyer’s Doomed Queen Anne (2002) is initially far less sympathetic to Anne and presents her interest in Henry as a form of immature sibling rivalry between Anne and her sister Mary. Doomed Queen Anne takes as its focus Anne’s realisation that competing with Mary only leaves her lonely and vulnerable: she comes to understand that her “greatest sin” is Pride.5 Writing about the rise of YA historical fiction, Joanne Brown and Nancy St. Clair write that the heroines of these novels “usually begin in a position of extreme vulnerability,” due to the social structures in which they live.6 3  See, for example: Laura Cassidy, The Black Pearl (Surrey: Mills & Boon, 1991); Dilys Gater, The Witch-Girl (London: Robert Hale, 1979); Norah Lofts, The Concubine (Stroud: Tree of Life Publishing, 1963). 4  Katherine Longshore, Tarnish (London: Simon and Schuster, 2013). 5  Carolyn Meyer, Doomed Queen Anne (Orlando: Harcourt, 2002), 227. 6  Joanne Brown and Nancy St. Clair, The Distant Mirror: Reflections on Young Adult Historical Fiction (London: The Scarecrow Press, 2006), 4.

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The task of the historical YA heroine is to overcome or challenge these social structures and thus gain “unprecedented strength.”7 Anne Boleyn is the perfect choice for such fictions as her story has an obvious gendered dimension, and has routinely been interpreted as the story of a woman who chafed against the social world of which she was a part. There is also a class dimension to her story. The Boleyn family is frequently represented as an ambitious middle-class family, and so YA historical fiction can imagine Anne as an outsider to the Henrician court, despite her courtly European education. YA historical fiction foregrounds Anne’s struggles, not her triumphs. As Brown and St. Clair argues of Meyer’s Young Royal series, the lesson that must be learned by all the young heroines is that “being a princess involved more than wicked stepmothers and attending balls.”8 Likewise, the reason that Anne makes such frequent errors in Tarnish is precisely because of her lack of familiarity with the rules of courtly etiquette, despite the historical fact of her education within the most sophisticated of European courts. Longshore’s Anne is essentially the new girl at high school; she must deal with a mean girl (Henry’s sister Mary), and finds that she requires a makeover to fit in. Her worries and interests are imagined to be analogous to the twenty-first-century teen girl, and it is therefore not surprising that her latest incarnation in YA fiction makes that ability to speak to the interests of the present literal.

Anne Enters the Twenty-First Century The last decade has seen the publication of a spate of YA novels in which Anne Boleyn’s story is taken out of time and rewritten as a contemporary high school drama. Libby Schmais’s YA novel Tudor Rules: How Anne Boleyn Helped Me Survive High School (2012) tracks what happens when the protagonist, Amanda, attempts to use lessons gleaned from popular biographies (those by Alison Weir) and novels (The Other Boleyn Girl) about Anne to become popular at high school.9 Tudor Rules speaks directly to the notion that the experiences of women in the past can be used to understand or even shape the lives of girls in the present. Two recent YA novels, Dawn Ius’s 2015 Anne & Henry and Hannah Capin’s 2019 The  Brown and Clair, 4.  Brown and Clair, 29. 9  Libby Schmais, Tudor Rules: How Anne Boleyn Helped Me Survive High School (Kindle, 2012). 7 8

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Dead Queens Club, make literal what Anne’s online fandom posits: the story of Anne Boleyn is seen as so relevant to today’s teenage girls that her story is literally transferred in time and place to that most teenage of settings: high school.10 Dawn Ius’s Anne & Henry begins with a party at the Tudor ballroom, as a teenage Henry Tudor ogles the new girl in town, Anne Boleyn, from across the dance floor: “She is a raven among doves. Bloodred lipstick forms the shape of a heart, striking against her stark black hair.”11 Ius’s Anne is an outsider to the privileged world of the Tudors, as her working-­ class mother has only recently married a rich man, and so Henry’s upper-­ class family and friends respond with horror to their relationship. The conflict culminates in a scene in which Anne is invited to a party, plied with alcohol, and filmed dancing provocatively until she passes out. The footage from the party is then used to convince Henry, who is an aspiring politician, that Anne is promiscuous and potentially damaging to his future career. The final scene recreates Anne’s trial as a student-led investigation into Anne’s behaviour, at which Anne is expelled from the school. The final line of the novel sees her pondering that “all that remains is the stark image of my severed head.”12 Anne & Henry thus takes on many of the issues facing teenagers today—such as slut-shaming and online bullying—while at the same time imagining a contemporary analogue for Anne’s story. However, the novel insists upon punishing Anne for her “transgressions,” even though she has essentially been set up to fail by all those around her. There is no alternative ending imagined for Anne Boleyn, even when transposed into a world in which one might expect more progressive understandings of gender. At the end of the novel, Henry Tudor and his enclave of rich friends will still enjoy their privilege, while his relationship with Anne is written off as a misguided teen dalliance. One might argue that this ending merely reflects historical fact. However, there is something disturbing about the extent to which this teenage Anne takes on the blame for actions over which she had no agency. At one stage, she reveals to Henry that the boyfriend of her older sister Mary has staged a scene in which it appears to all—including 10   For an extended consideration of these novels, please see: Stephanie Russo, “Contemporary Girlhood and Anne Boleyn in Young Adult Fiction,” Girlhood Studies 13, no. 1 (2020): 17–32. 11  Dawn Ius, Anne & Henry (New York: Simon Pulse, 2015), 4. 12  Ius, 289.

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Mary—that Anne has slept with him, as an act of revenge after Anne refuses his sexual advances. Anne takes on all the blame for his actions, telling Henry that, “it’s just easier not to fight, you know?”13 Anne, in other words, is a postfeminist Anne (see: Chap. 9). She weaponises her sexuality in order to gain power but also regards herself as responsible for her own suffering. Her behaviour at the party is represented as a failure of self-surveillance, despite the fact that the other guests have manipulated her and taped her without her consent: “it’s useless to point fingers or shift blame to anyone in this room.”14 Aiyana Altrows has recently written about the “victim-pathologizing” tendencies of YA fiction, which is “informed by neoliberal ideology that celebrates a compulsively positive self-determination, often redefining victimhood as personal failure.”15 Anne & Henry replicates this victim-pathologising in suggesting that Anne has some kind of innate deficiency that manifests itself in a failure to regulate herself in order to fit in with the world that Henry inhabits. Hannah Capin’s The Dead Queen’s Club, by way of contrast, presents the reader with a novel that imagines the (still living) queens of Henry VIII as a girl gang determined to take him down. The novel is one of the first post-#MeToo Anne Boleyn fictions, and engages directly with masculinity and male violence, as well as the failure to take women’s experiences seriously. The novel is narrated by Annie Marck, known as Cleves, who is Henry’s fourth girlfriend and now best friend. When the action of the novel opens, Anne Boleyn (here named Anna) is already dead and Henry is dating Katie Howard. Anna is believed to have accidentally died in an explosion which was intended to murder Henry. However, after the supposedly accidental death of Katie Howard, Parker Rochford (Jane Boleyn) begins to suspect Henry of multiple murders, and so Cleves, Lina (Catherine Aragon), Jane Seymour, Cat Parr and Parker work together in order to expose Henry’s crimes. The novel concludes with a feminist revisionist ending, as portraits of Anna and Katie are prominently displayed in the town under a banner that reads “LONG LIVE THE QUEENS.”16 The Dead Queens Club is an imaginative rewriting of history in which women hold Henry to account for his crimes. The novel hinges on the  Ius, 180.  Ius, 11. 15  Aiyana Altrows, “Silence and the Regulation of Feminist Anger in Young Adult Rape Fiction,” Girlhood Studies 12, no. 2 (2019): 3. 16  Hannah Capin, The Dead Queens Club (Sydney: HQ Young Adult, 2019), 440. 13 14

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discourses of girl power but avoids replicating postfeminism’s insistence that women are to blame for their own suffering. The novel also insists upon taking on the posthumous reputations of the queens of Henry VIII and challenging them explicitly. Cleves, for example, is prompted to reassess her summation of Jane Seymour as a “human pumpkin spice latte” when Jane shows up to their confrontation with Henry with a gun.17 Likewise, although Anna is dead through the action of the novel, Cleves begins to understand that her initial assessment of Anna as the “wannabe femme fatale who jets in from France and bribes you with theoretical sex” was unfair.18 Cleves comes to realise that it is very easy to ascribe meaning to dead women, and thus confine them to highly limiting and misogynistic scripts. In perhaps the most self-reflexive—and accurate—comment on the story of Anne Boleyn to be found in any historical fiction in 500 years, Cleves reflects that “the entire Anna Boleyn story can be whatever the storyteller wants it to be, for better or worse.”19 Transitioning Anne’s story into the modern day has also moved beyond the pages of YA fiction. Other novels translate Anne and Henry’s story into other modern, usually glamourous and wealthy settings. Amber Duran and Talia Johnson’s 2017 Misconstrued features billionaire CEO Henry Tudor and his wife Anne, who have become distanced from each other shortly after their marriage. It transpires that Anne has been unfaithful with his best friend, Thomas Cromwell, and with a “sick and twisted kiss” reveals to him that their daughter is Thomas’s child.20 The novel thus replicates centuries-old assumptions about Anne’s dangerous and unrestrained sexuality. Carol Wolper’s Anne of Hollywood (2012), however, actively writes against these perceptions of Anne and allows her the happy ending that history denied. Anne attracts the attention of the wealthy Henry Tudor but discovers that marriage in Hollywood is as cut-throat as any early modern court. The novel ends, however, with Anne accepting her divorce from Henry and noting happily that, “Anne Tudor was killed but Anne Boleyn is still hanging around.”21 While their orientation towards Anne differs dramatically, both novels pick up on the essential soap-opera quality to the tale of Henry and his wives with Anne of  Capin, 99.  Capin, 91. 19  Capin, 267. 20  Amber Duran and Talia Johnson, Misconstrued, 2017, 329. 21  Carol Wolper, Anne of Hollywood (New York: Gallery Books, 2012), 334. 17 18

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Hollywood, in particular, marketed as a fairly conventional chick-lit narrative in its story of a woman balancing love and work. The most recent novel to rewrite Anne’s story as a contemporary tale is Olivia Hayfield’s Wife After Wife (2020). The novel is quite explicitly written in response to the #MeToo movement; an early scene shows an ageing Henry attempting to grapple with the fact that, “these young women were happy to Instagram phots of their bottoms in micro-bikinis to a thousand followers they’d never met ‘IRL,’ but should a colleague comment on said bottom in real life, it was harassment.”22 Henry (here called Harry) is imagined as a Harvey Weinstein-esque media mogul, and Ana, here called Ana Lyebon, is the stylist and sophisticated art director at a magazine which Henry owns. Ana is initially reluctant to take up with the already-married Harry, but eventually finds herself drawn to him and they marry. Ana is the kind of ambitious career woman who believes that, “women should be judged on their ability to do a good job,” rather than the men they sleep with, but the novel largely avoids stereotyping Ana as a coldly ambitious career woman.23 She begins divorce proceedings against Harry when she discovers his affair with Janetta (Jane Seymour), only to be murdered by one of Henry’s Russian business associates, who sees Ana as a threat to Henry’s media empire. Years later, Ana’s sister Merry shoots him, but Harry recovers, and the novel concludes with Harry forced to step down from his position and reckon with his treatment of women. He vows that the “redemption of Harry Rose starts here.”24 In Hayfield’s hands, Anne’s story is turned into a #MeToo narrative in which the abusive man must account for his actions, but still retains the possibility for forgiveness and redemption. Even in this most contemporary of novels, however, Anne is afforded no second chances, and even her sister’s attempt to avenge her murder is thwarted.

 Olivia Hayfield, Wife After Wife (London: Berkley, 2020), 3.  Hayfield, 130. 24  Hayfield, 434. Original emphasis 22 23

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Time-Travelling Annes If one way of making Anne speak to the interests of the modern world is to reimagine her story into the present, another popular twenty-first-­ century sub-genre of Anne Boleyn fiction finds another: time travel.25 As Paul Nahin argues, “longing for the past,” is the reason why any form of historical fiction is consumed; time-travel narratives are merely the ultimate kind of nostalgic escapism.26 However, Anne Boleyn time-travel narratives are just as likely to propel Anne into the future as they are about the desire to revisit the past. David Wittenberg has argued that time-travel narratives are a part of two genres: science fiction and romance. In the former, time travel is the central principle of the plot, while in the latter, time travel is incidental to the larger romance narrative.27 That pattern is largely replicated in Anne Boleyn time-travel narratives, with science-fiction time-­travel novels constructing her as a proto-feminist heroine who speaks to the concerns of the present, while romance time-travel novels function as explicit rejections of the present in favour of a romanticised past. Some time-travel narratives, however, use Anne for other purposes entirely: Q. Kelly’s Third (2011), for example, brings Anne Boleyn into the present so she can enter a lesbian threesome with the heroine, Helen Franklin (who is a Tudor historian) and her wife.28 Time-travel narratives can also be quite self-reflexive. Lillian Stuart Carl’s short story, “A Rose With All Its Thorns” (1999) satirises the tendency to think about Anne as a modern woman. The heroine, Virginia, goes to an academic conference at Hever Castle, determined to prove her thesis, seemingly borrowed from Karen Lindsey, that “Anne Boleyn was a prototypical victim of sexual harassment.”29 Virginia is a parody of a second-­wave feminist: she dresses severely, has no interest in sex and suggests the word “seminal” should be replaced by “ovular.”30 However, when Virginia takes on Anne’s memories using a kind of DNA-facilitated 25  For more on Anne Boleyn time-travel narratives, see: Stephanie Russo, “Time Travelling with Anne Boleyn: History, Science Fiction and Fandom,” Clio 47, no. 2 (2020), 193–213. 26  Paul J. Nahin, Time Machines: Time Travel in Physics, Metaphysics, and Science Fiction, Second Edi (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1993), 30–1. 27  David Wittenberg, Time Travel: The Popular Philosophy of Narrative (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 26. 28  Q. Kelly, Third (Ride the Rainbow Books, 2011). 29  Lillian Stewart Carl, “A Rose With All Its Thorns,” in Past Lives, Present Tense, ed. Elizabeth Ann Scarborough (New York: Ace Books, 1999), 36 (35–38). 30  Carl, 37.

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time travel, she soon finds that, as Miriam Elizabeth Burstein writes, “this new Anne chooses to manipulate men with her sexual appeal, just as those men choose to fall prey to her machinations.”31 Virginia is horrified to discover that she now enjoys all the accoutrements of femininity, and even more so to discover that Anne is indeed guilty of all the charges levelled against her, with the sole exception of incest: “She’d spent good money to have her prejudices confirmed, damn it!”32 The story is a sly commentary on attempts to claim Anne as a second-wave feminist, but Carl also presents us with a new kind of feminist Anne: savvy and intelligent, unapologetically sexual, and no straightforward victim, “neither saint nor sinner but, like most of us, a mixture of both.”33 The story becomes an allegory of the defeat of the victim Anne associated with second-wave feminism, and her replacement with a far more agentic third-wave feminist icon. The narrative possibilities afforded by time travel allow novelists a mechanism through which they can save Anne from her fate and deposit her into our own. In Nancy Kress’s “And Wild for to Hold” (1991), a group of research scientists remove Anne from her timeline in order to avoid the religious divisions that plagued England for centuries after the English Reformation. In deciding to select Anne for their project, they also make a claim for her historical importance: “She, not he, is the branching place, where the decision tree splits and the war begins.”34 Anne, however, is not so amenable. She is unimpressed by being taken out of her own timeline and insists upon returning to it, even though she knows that she will be walking back to her death. In his discussion of time-travel historical fiction, Jerome de Groot argues that, “in some, the different linearities it represents are to be feared; in others, they are to be desired.”35 “And Wild for to Hold” constructs the possibility of a different linearity, with Anne Boleyn at its hinge, but then destroys that possibility as an affront to historical forces. That same impulse to correct historical injustice through time travel is manifested in Donna Hosie’s recent YA novel The 48 (2018), one of the 31  Miriam Elizabeth Burstein, “The Fictional Afterlife of Anne Boleyn: How to Do Things with the Queen, 1901–2006,” Clio 37, no. 1 (2007): 1. 32  Carl, “A Rose With All Its Thorns,” 47. 33  Carl. 34  Nancy Kress, “And Wild For To Hold,” accessed January 2, 2020, https://www.bookscool.com/en/The-Best-of-Nancy-Kress-855910/1 35  Jerome de Groot, Remaking History: The Past in Contemporary Historical Fictions (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016), 120.

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Anne Boleyn time-travel narratives that involves travelling back to the Tudor world. In this novel, the 48, a mysterious institution of time travellers actively interferes with history in order to eradicate all religions, and in doing so, prevent or minimise conflicts. In his study of the history of the concept of time travel, James Gleick argues that while “travel to the past begins as tourism in the extreme,” soon the “sightseers start tinkering,” because “we barely learn to read history before we want to rewrite it.”36 The 48 explores what happens when this drive to tinker with history becomes institutionalised. Alexander and Charles, the twin protagonists, are not tasked specifically with saving Anne Boleyn, however; she is considered less central to future religious conflict than she was in “And Wild For To Hold.” Instead, their goal is to prevent Henry marrying Jane Seymour and instead redirect his energies into another Protestant bride to prevent a resurgence of Catholicism. The 48 represents the Tudor past as a disordered, regressive and violent place, and the atmosphere of stress and paranoia in the Henrician past is so overwhelming that the palace “vibrated.”37 Moreover, the novel is rather dismissive of Anne herself, at least initially. She is represented as intimidating, sharp and cruel. Charles does come to have some sympathy for Anne, largely because she lacks any allies at court, but Alice, another time traveller, remarks that “Anne is vile,” and her death is just another manifestation of the inherent violence of the past.38 The most extensive Anne Boleyn time-travel narrative is Sarah Morris’s two-part historical romance, Le Temps Viendra (2012–13). These novels are radically different in focus and orientation from the more science-­ fiction-­oriented Anne Boleyn time-travel novels. Morris’s Anne is very much in line with third-wave representations of Anne, in which she is wilful, petulant, opinionated and overtly sexual. Morris was inspired directly by Natalie Dormer’s portrayal of Anne in The Tudors, and the novels are dedicated to Dormer and the real Anne Boleyn: Morris writes that, “The Tudors was as complex, compelling and beguiling as the lady herself.”39 Further, instead of utilising time travel as a means of saving Anne, the novel instead involves a modern woman (also named Anne) time travelling  James Gleick, Time Travel: A History (London: 4th Estate, 2017), 203.  Donna Hosie, The 48 (New York: Holiday House, 2018), 93. 38  Hosie, 307. 39  Sarah Morris, Le Temps Viendra: A Novel of Anne Boleyn, Volume 1 (Spartan Publishing, 2012), dedication. 36 37

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into Anne’s body and finding that the world of Tudor England is superior to the modern world in every way. The novel is more properly described as a time-slip novel than a time-travel novel, since the precise mechanism by which time travel is achieved is never explained. Writing about the time-slip in children’s literature, where it is a relatively common plot device, Tess Cosslett suggests that time-slip narratives evade nostalgia.40 However, Le Temps Viendra instead explicitly revels in nostalgia for a lost Tudor England. As Diana M. Calhoun-French writes, “valorization of the past, or of prefeminist male/female relationships, is at the heart of” the time-travel romance narrative.41 Indeed, Le Temps Viendra is the only Anne Boleyn time-travel novel to present the loss of the historical past as an unmitigated disaster; instead of seeing history as something to be improved upon, an authentic experience of the past is manifestly to be desired because of the inherently fallen nature of the present. The novel begins when twenty-first-century Anne attends an Anne Boleyn conference at Hever Castle, just as Carl’s Virginia does in “A Rose With All Its Thorns.” However, while Virginia is surrounded by academic Tudor historians, the conference that Anne attends is for the Anne Boleyn fan. Morris’s novel thus reflects Anne’s emergence as a twenty-first-­ century cult feminist icon. Sarah Morris herself is a particularly active figure in Anne Boleyn fandom. She runs the website The Tudor Travel Guide, which provides guides to several historic sites connected with Anne Boleyn and other Tudor figures. Morris has also co-written two full-length nonfiction books: In the Footsteps of Anne Boleyn and In the Footsteps of the Six Wives of Henry VIII.42 These two guidebooks are designed to allow the self-­confessed Anne Boleyn fan to follow in her footsteps across England. Morris also appears in YouTube videos in Anne Boleyn cosplay and in character as Anne.43 Morris presents herself as uniquely authoritative to 40  Tess Cosslett, “‘History from Below’: Time-Slip Narratives and National Identity,” The Lion and the Unicorn 26, no. 2 (2002): 244. 41  Diane M.  Calhoun-French, “Time-Travel and Related Phenomena in Contemporary Popular Romance Fiction,” in Romantic Conventions, ed. Anne K.  Kaler and Rosemary E. Johnson-Kurek (Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1999), 92 (86–99). 42  Sarah Morris and Natalie Grueninger, In the Footsteps of Anne Boleyn (London: Amberley, 2015); Sarah Morris and Natalie Grueninger, In the Footsteps of the Six Wives of Henry VIII (London: Amberley, 2016). 43  Sarah Morris, “Sarah Morris Talks about Anne Boleyn and Her Debut Novel, ‘La Temps Viendra: A Novel of Anne Boleyn,’” YouTube, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=-uoKu4foOnk

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comment on the inner life of Anne Boleyn, both because of her extensive research, and her conscious representation of herself as somehow emotionally and/or spiritually connected to Anne. Le Temps Viendra is the manifestation par excellence of the phenomenon of the Anne Boleyn fan. When modern-day Anne falls ill, she wakes up in the body of Anne Boleyn, which is the realisation of a long-held daydream. She notes that: “I, perhaps like any other lover of history, had dreamed of what it would be like if just for a short while, I could be transported back in time.”44 Contemporary Anne is well-equipped to take up Anne Boleyn’s existence, both because of her obsessive interest in Anne and because she finds the spirit of the “real” Anne speaking through her, as if Anne had chosen her. It eventually becomes clear that contemporary Anne and Anne Boleyn are so connected that the former is a kind of reincarnated avatar of the historical Anne, while her married boyfriend Daniel is an avatar for Henry VIII. Later, when transported back into her own time, Anne shows off her historical bona fides, informing one of the tour guides at Hever where to find a portrait of Anne in a tapestry.45 The time-­ slip narrative allows contemporary Anne’s experience of the past to be constructed as authentic, as “opposed to the superficial heritage activities” enjoyed by other visitors to Hever Castle.46 Contemporary Anne finds the Tudor world of Anne Boleyn remarkably comfortable, despite the lack of modern conveniences and standards of hygiene. She continually notes how much richer and more satisfying her life is in the past: “in Anne’s body I had never felt more alive, or more vibrant.”47 Morris’s enthusiasm for the Tudor past is clearly legible here: she sees the sixteenth century as preferable, at least aesthetically, to the modern world. When Anne returns to the twenty-first century, she becomes increasingly alienated from her surroundings. She finds modern clothing dowdy and unflattering, and all she can bring herself to do is wander the streets and note what is no longer there. The lost world of the Tudor court, despite its violence, becomes a time of beauty, class and ­dignity, as opposed to the corruption and noise of contemporary life. Given Morris’s professed interest in accessing figures from the past through visits to historic sites, her novel also functions as a kind of  Morris, Le Temps Viendra: A Novel of Anne Boleyn, Volume 1, 20.  Morris, 334. 46  Cosslett, “‘History from Below’: Time-Slip Narratives and National Identity,” 249. 47  Morris, Le Temps Viendra: A Novel of Anne Boleyn, Volume 1, 87. 44 45

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cross-media promotion for her tourist guide output. The true historical fan, the woman dedicated to the worship of Anne Boleyn, can look past the stone and paving slabs and see the lost wonder of the Tudor city. A parallel impulse that runs alongside Morris’s romanticised view of the Tudor court is her presentation of Anne and Henry’s relationship as an unproblematic love story. As I argued in the previous chapter, the twenty-­ first century has seen a return to romantic depictions of Anne and Henry’s relationship; it is no longer assumed that Anne was emotionally unmoved by Henry, as it was throughout the twentieth century. In Le Temps Viendra, Anne is deeply in love with Henry, and that love persists despite his repudiation of her. Their love is so intense that it spills into her relationship with her modern-day relationship with Daniel.48 In reading Anne and Henry’s relationship as a genuine love story, history is again presented as a mystery that can only be solved by the true historical fan: people have presumed that Anne did not love Henry, but by accessing Anne’s actual life, the Anne Boleyn fan knows that she did love him intensely. Despite her knowledge, too, of Anne Boleyn’s fate, Anne does not do anything to evade that fate. Instead of saving Anne Boleyn from history, then, as in other time-travel narratives, Morris is more interested in saving contemporary Anne from the present. The ultimate affective encounter with history is to be transported into it and become part of it. Time-travel romance allows the historical fan—in this case, the devoted Anne Boleyn fan—to transcend reading and thinking about the past through immersion into the actual past. By juxtaposing past and present, and giving us an Anne Boleyn who inhabits both, the material reality of the past becomes an even more acute issue in time-travel fictions than it does in more conventional historical fictions. The past, present and future are inherently interconnected in these narratives: they all affirm the ongoing legacy of Anne Boleyn on the present in some way. That emphasis on Anne’s ongoing ability to speak to the present also plays itself out in another transgeneric form of writing about Anne: the ghost story.

 Morris, 69.

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Supernatural Annes Stories about Anne’s restless ghost have proliferated since her execution, and so it is hardly surprising that she has been repeatedly represented as a ghost or another supernatural creature in fiction.49 Seeking out contact with the ghost of Anne Boleyn, in fiction or in folklore, is a manifestation of what Louise d’Arcens and Andrew Lynch have termed “feeling” for the premodern. They write that: contact with the premodern or early modern past evokes in modern Western subjects a suite of transhistorical feelings—that is, a range of feelings associated with the affective-imaginative experience of both their own time and another time from their own.50

The Anne Boleyn ghost encounter is frequently framed as terrifying and awe-inspiring—a sublime moment in which the liminal can be transcended—but the primary emotion associated with Anne’s ghost is desire: the desire for the past and to gaze upon the body of Anne Boleyn. Those texts in which Anne Boleyn’s ghost appears suggest that historical figures can be made to explain themselves and provide an interpretative lens through which to view their story. If confusion about the way to properly understand Anne’s narrative and character exists, then what better way to settle these differences than to consult her ghost? Moreover, as Peter Guse and Andrew Stott point out, ghosts are “neither dead nor alive, neither corporeal objects nor stern absences,” and so stories of the ghost of Anne Boleyn give modern readers a vision of an early modern woman who seems to be both of the past and of the present simultaneously.51 The frequency with which Anne Boleyn’s ghost appears in both fiction and non-fiction also suggests a fair degree of unresolved historical guilt associated with her story. Writing about ghosts in postmodern historical fiction, Jerome de Groot writes that ghosts “are not warnings or 49  For more on Anne Boleyn ghost narratives, see: Stephanie Russo, “At the Border of Life and Death: The Ghost of Anne Boleyn,” Parergon: Journal of the Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies 37, no. 2 (2020), forthcoming. 50  Louise D’Arcens and Andrew Lynch, “Feeling for the Premodern,” Exemplaria: A Journal of Theory in Medieval and Renaissance Studies 30, no. 3 (2018): 185. 51  Peter Buse and Andrew Stott, “Introduction: A Future for Haunting,” in Ghosts: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, History, ed. Peter Buse and Andrew Stott (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1999), 10 (1–20).

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manifestations but somehow physical renderings of the past.”52 Anne Boleyn’s ghost provides a physical manifestation of the sins of the past; she variously warns, terrifies, fills in the gaps in the historical record, chastises and, in some cases, even kills. Anne’s ghost frequently appears in historical fiction to taunt her dying husband with the prospect of eternal punishment or attempt to make him feel guilty. Her ghost appears in Judith Arnopp’s The Kiss of the Concubine, for example, in which Anne appears as a ghost to Henry on his deathbed to tell him that she has “lingered” to see “the Devil catching up with you.”53 Anne’s ghost (played by Natalie Dormer) even appears in the Showtime series The Tudors (2007–2010), just before the death of Henry (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers).54 In this brief scene, Anne’s ghost reminds Henry of her innocence, commends Elizabeth’s genius and compares her fate to that of Katherine Howard, knowledge of which the historic Anne Boleyn would not have access to, signalling the ghost’s capacity to be both a signifier of the past while somehow aware of the present. Anne’s reappearance as a ghost also often reveals the guilt of the person who sees her. Variation on the usual pattern of Anne’s ghost appearing to Henry occurs in Alison Weir’s Jane Seymour: The Haunted Queen (2013). In this novel, Anne’s ghost haunts Jane Seymour, confronting her for her complicity in Anne’s execution. Jane sees the shadow of Anne’s ghost on her own deathbed, and Jane is asked to account for herself to the spectre of Anne Boleyn.55 Jane Seymour also appears as the target of Anne’s ire in Zoe Bramley’s The Boleyn Necklace: A Tudor Ghost Story (2016). In this story, it is Jane’s refusal to relinquish possession of Anne’s famous “B” pendant to Mary Boleyn that precipitates Anne’s ghostly visits. It is suggested that Jane’s death soon after childbirth is a direct consequence of the anger of Anne’s ghost. Soon after Jane’s death, her maid Meg hears “the faintest tinkle of laughter” from the ghost and recognises that Jane has brought about her own demise.56 Anne takes on the mantle of vengeful spirit, but she is less interested in blaming Jane Seymour for her death than  in reinstating the legacy of the Boleyns, here encapsulated by her necklace.  Jerome de Groot, The Historical Novel (London: Routledge, 2009), 129.  Judith Arnopp, The Kiss of the Concubine (2013), 334. 54  Ciaran Donnelly, “The Tudors 4:10: Death of a Monarchy,” 2010. 55  Alison Weir, Jane Seymour: The Haunted Queen (London: Headline Review, 2018), 501. 56  Zoe Bramley, The Boleyn Necklace: A Tudor Ghost Story, Kindle edi, 2016, location 256. 52 53

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The spirit of Anne Boleyn is also often depicted as striving for posthumous redemption. In 1912, the anonymous short story “The Ghost of Anne Boleyn: What a Traveller Beheld at the Scaffold at Tower Hill” appeared in the Newport [WA] Miner. In this story, the Earl of Emberton has an encounter with the ghost of Anne Boleyn at Tower Hill shortly after her execution. The Earl falls in love with the ghostly Anne, without realising that he is talking to a dead woman. However, the ghost of Anne insists upon gazing back at the scaffold and, after appearing to restage her execution, she disappears. Years later, when the Earl dies, “a portrait was discovered above his mantel—his sovereign’s beheaded queen, Anne Boleyn,” who he has loved for his whole life.57 Anne’s sexuality is still so compelling that it has the power to attract even after her death. The story implies that the ghost of Anne Boleyn will constantly restage her own death, trapped between the desire for another ending and the immutability of history. This ghost narrative also speaks to the longing for a personal, affective encounter with history that was also visible in the Anne Boleyn time-travel fictions. There have also been accounts by those who claim to have contacted Anne Boleyn’s “real” ghost, which is usually represented as the result of a deep affective and spiritual union with the dead queen. In Edward Maitland’s biography of the Victorian spiritualist Anna Kingsford, published in 1896, he describes Kingsford communicating with the ghost of Anne as a séance.58 Unpublished until 1969, but written in the 1920s–30s, the clergyman W.S. Pakenham-Walsh’s memoir A Tudor Story: The Return of Anne Boleyn describes, at length, the author’s attempts to communicate over a number of years with the ghost of Anne Boleyn. Anne’s official role in Heaven is said to be a protector of the unjustly accused, and she reassures Pakenham-Walsh that “her life now is very real and happy.”59 Another purportedly real-life ghost encounter is given by Liam Archer in Anne Boleyn’s Ghost (2014), in which he claims to have photographic proof of Anne Boleyn’s ghost from his visit to Hever Castle.60 A further psychic 57  Marian Kensler, “The Ghost of Anne Boleyn,” Anne Boleyn Novels, 2015, https:// anneboleynnovels.wordpress.com/2015/12/09/the-ghost-of-anne-boleyn-what-travelerbeheld-at-the-scaffold-on-tower-hill-c-1912/ 58  Edward Maitland, Anna Kingsford: Her Life, Letters, Diary and Work (London: John M. Watkins, 1896), 13. 59  W.S.  Pakenham-Walsh, A Tudor Story: The Return of Anne Boleyn (Cambridge: The Lutterworth Press, 2006), 15. 60  Liam Archer, Anne Boleyn’s Ghost, Kindle edi, 2014.

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encounter with Anne’s spirit is relayed in Kathleen Ann Milner’s Between Two Worlds: The Story of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn – And Her Celtic Heritage, in which Milner posits that Anne was taught Celtic healing practices by her Irish grandmother; information which she has gleaned through psychic encounters with Anne herself.61 The encounter with Anne Boleyn’s ghost at a historic home or palace has also become a popular plot in fiction. In Alison Weir’s “The Tower is Full of Ghosts Today” (2017), a woman who seems to be a costumed guide arrives to shepherd a group of tourists around the areas of the Tower associated with Anne’s imprisonment and execution. As the lead historian Jo notes, however, the guide is extremely convincing.62 Soon, a “haunted” young woman joins the group and Jo becomes suspicious that she is the ghost of Anne Boleyn. The girl seems to be particularly disturbed by the physical remains of the Tower and disappears in apparent distress after hearing about Anne’s execution. However, in a twist that seems to open up the possibility of two Anne Boleyn ghosts existing in the same space, Jo discovers that the convincing costumed guide appears to have come from nowhere, as the woman actually commissioned for the job has run late and missed the tour. Weir’s story reveals the extent to which desire shapes the ghost narrative and capitalises on the long-standing association between Anne and the Tower. In another Anne ghost narrative, the Tower is imagined as a kind of posthumous meeting place for English royal ghosts. In “The Lost Princes: The Tower, 1536,” Anne Boleyn wakes after her execution to find herself still at Tower Green in ghost form. She is soon taken into the care of the Princes of the Tower, victims of Richard III, who tell her that “haunting people soothes the murdered soul.”63 After hearing about the execution of Mary Queen of Scots—another example of her ghost having access to events that happened after her death—Anne vows to be a vengeful ghost who will wreak havoc upon the present. That Anne Boleyn keeps reappearing not as a safely dead historical figure, but as somebody who can move through the spaces of the present suggests that she has a stake in the contemporary. While popular medievalism is, according to Stephanie Trigg, invested in the “temporal and 61  Kathleen Ann Milner, Between Two Worlds: The Story of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn – and Her Celtic Heritage, 2003. 62  Alison Weir, The Tower Is Full of Ghosts Today, Kindle edi (Bidford-on-Avon: Headline Review, 2017), location 103. 63  R.B. Swan, The Tower of London, Kindle edi, 2014, location 295.

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cultural disjunction” between the medieval and the modern, Anne Boleyn ghost narratives dismantle this imagined historical space.64 In Howard Brenton’s play Anne Boleyn (2010), Anne Boleyn appears as a ghost, sometimes holding her head, but more often chatting to a cross-dressing James VI and I about her religious beliefs and the future of England. Anne presents herself as a woman with immense historical agency, but her real impact lies within the upheaval caused by the English Reformation which post-dated her death. For all of its multi-layered fascination with the past—James’s increasing obsession with the Tudors, the play’s nostalgia for Britain’s royal history, and the staging of the play within the contemporary reconstruction of the Globe Theatre—the play is surprisingly tethered to the present moment of spectatorship. The ghost of Anne Boleyn stands on stage and directly addresses the audience about the circumstances that led to her death. At the end of the play, James’s desire to know something concrete about Anne is realised when she and James meet. Anne enters James’s bedroom through the floor and notes that, “I’m over here…people always look for me in the wrong place”; a wry comment on her fascinating and often bizarre literary afterlife.65 Anne knows she is ever desired and sought but seems to revel in her capacity to elude understanding. She then suggests that she has an ability to look beyond James’s temporality to see into the audience’s present: “You all are in the future…godless demons.”66 As Anne disappears into the ether, she reconciles herself to the audience and suggests the coming of a better world. This Anne Boleyn is both a ghost and a relic left by her death, but her ghostly intervention into the future suggests an Anne Boleyn that could have been. The novel that must starkly use the figure of Anne Boleyn’s ghost to attempt to assuage historical guilt by rewriting her story is Robert Parry’s 2011 novel The Arrow Chest. The first chapter of the novel takes place at the 1876 excavation of Anne’s burial place at St Peter ad Vincula in the Tower of London. Thea Tomaini argues that Anne’s disinterment was used a means of either refuting or confirming the “corpse myths” associated with Anne’s body: “they could, if they chose, imagine a half-mad

64  Stephanie Trigg, “Medievalism and Theories of Temporality,” in The Cambridge Companion to Medievalism, ed. Louise D’Arcens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 198 (196–209). 65  Howard Brenton, Anne Boleyn (London: Nick Hern Books Limited, 2012), 113. 66  Brenton, 115.

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femme fatale clutching ominously at her little neck.”67 The fictional artist at the centre of the novel, however, is much less interested in testing Anne’s bodily reality against the myth. Instead, the novel is preoccupied with Anne’s ghost legend and its situatedness within the Tower. The artist Amos Roselli is commissioned to paint Anne’s bones in situ, but while he paints, he is visited by a mysterious man who tells him about Anne’s ghost; only later does Amos discover that this man is himself a ghost who has been killed bayoneting Anne’s ghost. This ghostly experience sets the scene for a novel in which Anne appears in two guises: one living and one dead. The novel is a rewriting of Anne’s biography, as the characters appear to be reincarnated avatars of their Tudor forebears. Amos is the stand-in for Thomas Wyatt, and much of the action is precipitated because the historic Thomas Wyatt has promised Anne Boleyn to save her but failed in that mission. Anne’s execution is thus not safely historical but instead continues to reverberate down the centuries. The tragic denouement of the historical Anne’s story initially seems to be repeating itself in The Arrow Chest. When Oliver (Henry) plots to accuse Daphne (Anne) of adultery, Amos and Daphne are moved to act to prevent Anne Boleyn’s fate replicating itself. Fearing that Oliver will not be satisfied with a divorce, they fake Daphne’s death while she flees to safety in America. As Amos tells his story to Beth—the novel’s avatar for Elizabeth I—a “lovely dark-haired woman” watches them, and “in a moment the woman is gone, vanished silently, like a ghost of someone who once lived but has become no more than a passing memory.”68 The novel, then, according to its own logic, “saves” Anne Boleyn twice; by allowing this new Anne a chance at eluding the cruel grasp of her husband, the need for her to ghost the future is removed. The story retold with a happier conclusion, the ghost of Anne Boleyn can finally rest. Anne also appears in other supernatural guises in recent fiction, for dramatically different purposes. Robert Olen Butler’s 2009 novel Hell finds a space for an encounter with the spirit of Anne Boleyn in Hell. This Anne is engaged in a sexual relationship with a former newsreader, Hatcher McCord. Anne’s sexuality has again transcended her death in this text. Much is made in the novel of Anne’s body, as well as some odd sexual play involving Anne removing and reattaching her head, and she is described as 67  Thea Tomaini, The Corpse as Text: Disinterment and Antiquarian Enquiry, 1700–1900 (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2017), 122. 68  Robert Stephen Parry, The Arrow Chest, 2011, 332.

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a fairly clichéd femme fatale figure: “she turned those black eyes on me and her eyes with some unidentified deep-space phenomenon[…]a dark light that would not lose itself in the crimson light of Hell.”69 Hell gives us the dead queen as sexpot: there is no other reason, seemingly, to meet Anne in the afterlife other than to have the opportunity to have sex with her, or at least gaze upon her body. Her life and death are of no further interest. Vampire fiction has been particularly popular in the twenty-first century in the wake of the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003) and Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series (2005–2008). Further, the Gothic mash-up, in which literary texts or incidents are combined with stories about vampires, zombies or werewolves have also become a flourishing sub-genre, with the most famous exemplar of this type of text being Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009). Miriam Borham-Puyal writes that Gothic mash-ups of canonical texts “blend two different narratives and even historical contexts, appropriating the idealised past and its paradigmatic texts, stripping them of their aura and bringing them closer to a wider reading public.”70 Gothic mash-ups of historical stories either function to parody these narratives (Henry VIII: Wolfman) or add an element of supernatural glamour to the text (Blood of the Rose). Anne Boleyn Gothic mash-ups also replicate or make literal ideological undercurrents that are always present in these tales. Anne Boleyn mash-ups capitalise on the already Gothic dimensions of Anne’s story—violence, imprisonment, and death—and add supernatural beings into the narrative. Cinsearae S.’s Boleyn: Tudor Vampire (2010) depicts an Anne who has become a vampire when she curses God at her execution. Vampire Anne then spends most of the novel haunting Henry and intermittently regretting her rise to power: “I wanted my revenge, and, damn it all to hell, I would have it!”71 Jonathon East’s 2015 novel The Conjured Vengeance of Anne Boleyn sees Anne rise from her grave 500 years after her death to swear that “I shall remain in the shadows of this world, unseen by its people, for as long as I have on Earth. Until I choose to reap my conjured vengeance upon them.”72 While vampiric Anne is frightening  Robert Olen Butler, Hell (New York: Grove Press, 2009), 10.  Miriam Borham-Puyal, “New Adventures in Old Texts: Gender Roles and Cultural Canons in Twenty-First-Century Mash-Ups,” Journal of Popular Culture 51, no. 6 (2019): 1315. 71  Cinsearae S., Boleyn: Tudor Vampire, 2010, 16. 72  Jonathon East, The Conjured Vengeance of Anne Boleyn (Kindle, 2015), 310. 69 70

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and menacing, both texts represent Anne’s quest for revenge as justified by historical events. Boleyn: Tudor Vampire revels in the details of Anne’s quest to torment Henry, and gives her a happy ending at the end of the novel when she “wakes” in the present, no longer a vampire, and retreats into the spirit world with Mary Boleyn and her mother. As in the ghost narratives, and, indeed, many other more conventional historical fictions, the assumption here is that Anne’s execution is a historical injustice that must be resolved. However, some Gothic mash-ups replicate sexist stereotypes about Anne as power-hungry and unscrupulous. In Kate Pearce’s Blood of the Rose, Anne is a vampire who is using Henry to obtain power and the plot hinges on the attempts of the vampire slayer Rosalind Llewellyn—a clear nod to Buffy the Vampire Slayer—to prevent evil vampire Anne taking over control of England.73 Both Anne and Henry become werewolves in A.E. Moorat’s Henry VIII: Wolfman (2010). However, Moorat goes some way towards “redeeming” werewolf-Henry by making him an unusually thoughtful werewolf—even though he does kill Jane Seymour in a moment of wolfish weakness—while Anne almost immediately joins an attempt by the werewolves to take over the kingdom. Despite the supernatural patina, the novel presents us with a very recognisable Anne. Wolsey summarises Anne as “not as pretty as Mary, very ambitious, and – oh – a Lutheran.”74 Anne’s embrace of her new supernatural powers is tied to her boundless ambition, and everybody breathes a sigh of relief when she is executed at the end of the novel. A werewolf Anne is more dangerous than a werewolf Henry, the novel implies. The effect of the Gothic mash-up, then, is simply to make the ideologies underpinning any retelling of Anne’s story far more literal. Anne is wronged and so comes back to avenge her death. Anne is evil and thus is an evil monster. It is striking that the Gothic mash-ups seldom imagine a different fate for Anne, despite the potential of the form. However, a new sub-genre of Anne Boleyn historical fiction does take up the possibility of another ending to her story.

 Kate Pearce, Blood of the Rose (New York: Signet Eclipse, 2011).  A.E. Moorat, Henry VIII: Wolfman (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2010).

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Counterfactual Annes If Anne’s death is still considered a problem in many of the texts examined in this chapter, some novelists reimagine history to prevent it from ever happening in the first place. These alternative histories, or counterfactuals, imagine what it would be like if Anne Boleyn survived past May 1536. Catherine Gallagher argues that counterfactuals developed out of 1950s science fiction but became increasingly common in the 2000s.75 Imagining what would have happened if Anne’s relationship with Henry did not follow its historical trajectory is an interesting thought experiment that allows a whole range of alternative futures to be imagined. Gallagher writes that alternative histories “encourage people not only to think about the causes of present conditions but also to imagine what the probable alternatives might have been.”76 Somewhat oddly, most Anne Boleyn counterfactuals do not actually take up the question of what historical changes had been wrought had Anne Boleyn not married Henry; instead, they usually commence in 1536. Perhaps there is little appetite for a story about Anne and Henry in which Anne marries a far-less illustrious man and does not have access to power and influence. Laura Anderson’s 2013 The Boleyn King, the first of a trilogy, takes up the question, as she writes in her author’s note, of “what if Anne Boleyn had not miscarried?” in early 1536.77 The answer to that question, according to Anderson, is that she had a healthy boy who would grow up to become King Henry IX. The novel is largely concerned with the threat of war with France and a Catholic rebellion, and Anne dies before the end of the novel. The novel does give the reader glimpses of an older Anne as a sharp-tongued and powerful woman: “Elizabeth had heard her mother cut a lady to shreds with her tongue for an uneven hem or a slight stain, and she did not doubt that Anne would subject her own daughter to the same.”78 Likewise, Olivia Longueville’s Between Two Kings (2015) imagines Henry staying Anne’s execution when he realises that she is pregnant. In this case, however, he fully intends to execute her after she has given birth, but Henry Percy smuggles her out of the country where she becomes “a cold and dispassionate woman” who seeks “justice and 75  Catherine Gallagher, Telling It Like It Wasn’t: The Counterfactual Imagination in History and Fiction (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 1. 76  Gallagher, 5. 77  Laura Andersen, The Boleyn King (New York: Ebury Press, 2013), author’s note. 78  Andersen, 13.

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revenge.”79 By the end of the novel, she has married the French king, Francois, who has fallen in love with her. While The Boleyn King is more interested in establishing a romance for Anne’s son, then, Longueville’s novel almost immediately entangles Anne in a relationship with another king, and largely neglects the fate of Anne’s son Arthur. Longueville capitalises on Anne’s reputation as the beguiling woman that men cannot resist, while Anderson’s interest in Anne herself is limited. Raven A. Nuckols’s Had the Queen Lived (2011) is somewhat unusual, as it is set out as an alternative history textbook, rather than a novel. The work again takes as its entry point Anne’s miscarriage in early 1536; that event, the counterfactuals agree, is the pivot upon which Anne’s fate hinged.80 Anne gives birth to Prince Henry, becomes involved in educational and religious reform with a newly returned-to-England Tyndale, uncovers evidence of Mary Tudor’s complicity in the Pilgrimage of Grace, prods Henry to condemn her to death, secures the downfall of Cromwell, reforms medical practices and wishes to be “acknowledged the King’s chief counsel publicly as well.”81 Had the Queen Lived presents us with a portrait of an ambitious, politically engaged Anne who is both tenacious in the pursuit of her own interests, and yet genuinely solicitous of the people over whom she is queen. However, as she grows older and Henry begins to seek younger mistresses, Anne suffers from a series of emotional breakdowns and becomes ever more volatile. While Nuckols is not uniformly positive in her vision of a mature Anne, she does ultimately affirm that Anne’s legacy “reminds us of how a strong will of mind can truly change the world.”82 Had the Queen Lived posits an alternative history for Anne in which she is able to extend her influence in ways that are consistent with her actual historical interests: charitable bequests, education and religious reform. It is also a vision of Anne that allows her significant historical agency, beyond her status as Henry’s most famous victim. The only Anne Boleyn counterfactual that does not take Anne’s miscarriage in 1536 as its pivot point is Helen R. Davis’s The Most Happy: An Alternative History of Anne Boleyn (2017). Instead, it imagines what would have happened had Anne Boleyn given birth to twins, instead of  Olivia Longueville, Between Two Kings (MadeGlobal, 2015), 128.  Raven A.  Nuckols, Had the Queen Lived: An Alternative History of Anne Boleyn (Bloomington: AuthorHouse, 2011), xv. 81  Nuckols, 248. 82  Nuckols, 296. 79 80

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just Elizabeth, in September 1533. Happily for Anne, one of the twins is a boy, Edward. Anne also gives birth to the Duke of York, Henry, in early 1536, only for Henry to die in his (historic) jousting accident at the same time. Anne becomes Regent and is an adept, if insecure, leader. Jane Seymour, borrowing words attributed to the historic Elizabeth I, tells Anne that she has “the body of a week and feeble woman, but the heart and stomach of a king”; Anne herself later repeats these words when she defeats the Spanish Armada.83 Elizabeth, however, still manages to ascend to the throne upon the death of Edward VI, who has died out of grief for his late wife, Lady Jane Grey, and their infant daughter. The counterfactual Anne Boleyn fictions are fantasies of power for Anne, stories in which she is not punished for her failure to bear a son but appreciated for her own brand of feminine power and agency. However, they all persistently tie the exercising of that power to her ability to bear male heirs. Nobody, it seems, can imagine an Anne Boleyn who fails to produce a son, and live.

Conclusion The transgeneric Anne Boleyn fictions of the twenty-first century might strike the reader as unlikely, even preposterous. However, these novels are merely doing what all fictions about Anne Boleyn have done since her death. They each suggest a variety of multifaceted ways of understanding this sixteenth-century woman’s life through the lens of the present. Once again, the extraordinary malleability of Anne’s story is evident. Her narrative is just as easily rendered as a vampire revenge narrative as it is a story about twenty-first-century Hollywood, or the experience of being a teenage girl. What unites all the varied transgeneric Anne Boleyn fictions is the conviction that Anne Boleyn is still important. The presentism of twenty-­ first-­century Anne Boleyn narratives might be read as a reflection of the self-reflexive, inward nature of twenty-first-century literature: contemporary readers and writers are only interested in the past when it is set in, or brought into, the present. However, that tendency to reinvent Anne Boleyn’s story as one that has particular relevance now has always existed.

83  Helen R.  Davis, The Most Happy: An Alternative History of Anne Boleyn (Madrid: Editorial Caliope, 2017), 102.

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References Primary Sources Andersen, Laura. The Boleyn King. New York: Ebury Press, 2013. Archer, Liam. Anne Boleyn’s Ghost. Kindle edi., 2014. Arnopp, Judith. The Kiss of the Concubine, 2013. Bradley, Mary Hastings. The Favor of Kings. New York and London: D. Appleton and Company, 1912. Bramley, Zoe. The Boleyn Necklace: A Tudor Ghost Story. Kindle edi., 2016. Brenton, Howard. Anne Boleyn. London: Nick Hern Books Limited, 2012. Butler, Robert Olen. Hell. New York: Grove Press, 2009. Capin, Hannah. The Dead Queens Club. Sydney: HQ Young Adult, 2019. Carl, Lillian Stewart. “A Rose With All Its Thorns.” In Past Lives, Present Tense, edited by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough, 35–58. New York: Ace Books, 1999. Cassidy, Laura. The Black Pearl. Surrey: Mills & Boon, 1991. Davis, Helen R. The Most Happy: An Alternative History of Anne Boleyn. Madrid: Editorial Caliope, 2017. Donnelly, Ciaran. “The Tudors 4:10 Death of a Monarchy,” 2010. Duran, Amber, and Talia Johnson. Misconstrued, 2017. East, Jonathon. The Conjured Vengeance of Anne Boleyn. Kindle, 2015. Gater, Dilys. The Witch-Girl. London: Robert Hale, 1979. Hayfield, Olivia. Wife After Wife. London: Berkley, 2020. Hosie, Donna. The 48. New York: Holiday House, 2018. Ius, Dawn. Anne & Henry. New York: Simon Pulse, 2015. Kelly, Q. Third. Ride the Rainbow Books, 2011. Kensler, Marian. “The Ghost of Anne Boleyn.” Anne Boleyn Novels, 2015. https:// anneboleynnovels.wordpress.com/2015/12/09/the-ghost-of-anneboleyn-what-traveler-beheld-at-the-scaffold-on-tower-hill-c-1912/. Kress, Nancy. “And Wild For To Hold.” Accessed January 2, 2020. https://www. bookscool.com/en/The-Best-of-Nancy-Kress-855910/1. Lofts, Norah. The Concubine. Stroud: Tree of Life Publishing, 1963. Longshore, Katherine. Tarnish. London: Simon and Schuster, 2013. Longueville, Olivia. Between Two Kings. MadeGlobal, 2015. Maitland, Edward. Anna Kingsford: Her Life, Letters, Diary and Work. London: John M. Watkins, 1896. Meyer, Carolyn. Doomed Queen Anne. Orlando: Harcourt, 2002. Milner, Kathleen Ann. Between Two Worlds: The Story of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn – and Her Celtic Heritage, 2003. Moorat, A.E. Henry VIII: Wolfman. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2010. Morris, Sarah. Le Temps Viendra: A Novel of Anne Boleyn, Volume 1. Spartan Publishing, 2012.

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———. Le Temps Viendra: A Novel of Anne Boleyn, Volume 2. Spartan Publishing, 2013. Nuckols, Raven A. Had the Queen Lived: An Alternative History of Anne Boleyn. Bloomington: AuthorHouse, 2011. Pakenham-Walsh, W.S. A Tudor Story: The Return of Anne Boleyn. Cambridge: The Lutterworth Press, 2006. Parry, Robert Stephen. The Arrow Chest, 2011. Pearce, Kate. Blood of the Rose. New York: Signet Eclipse, 2011. S., Cinsearae. Boleyn: Tudor Vampire, 2010. Schmais, Libby. Tudor Rules: How Anne Boleyn Helped Me Survive High School. Kindle, 2012. Swan, R.B. The Tower of London. Kindle edi., 2014. Weir, Alison. Jane Seymour: The Haunted Queen. London: Headline Review, 2018. ———. The Tower Is Full of Ghosts Today. Kindle edi. Bidford-on-Avon: Headline Review, 2017. Wolper, Carol. Anne of Hollywood. New York: Gallery Books, 2012.

Secondary Sources Altrows, Aiyana. “Silence and the Regulation of Feminist Anger in Young Adult Rape Fiction.” Girlhood Studies 12, no. 2 (2019): 1–16. Borham-Puyal, Miriam. “New Adventures in Old Texts: Gender Roles and Cultural Canons in Twenty-First-Century Mash-Ups.” Journal of Popular Culture 51, no. 6 (2019): 1312–31. Brown, Joanne, and Nancy St. Clair. The Distant Mirror: Reflections on Young Adult Historical Fiction. London: The Scarecrow Press, 2006. Burstein, Miriam Elizabeth. “The Fictional Afterlife of Anne Boleyn: How to Do Things with the Queen, 1901–2006.” Clio 37, no. 1 (2007): 1–26. Calhoun-French, Diane M. “Time-Travel and Related Phenomena in Contemporary Popular Romance Fiction.” In Romantic Conventions, edited by Anne K.  Kaler and Rosemary E.  Johnson-Kurek, 86–99. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1999. Cosslett, Tess. “‘History from Below’: Time-Slip Narratives and National Identity.” The Lion and the Unicorn 26, no. 2 (2002): 243–53. D’Arcens, Louise, and Andrew Lynch. “Feeling for the Premodern.” Exemplaria: A Journal of Theory in Medieval and Renaissance Studies 30, no. 3 (2018): 183–90. Falconer, Rachel. The Crossover Novel: Contemporary Children’s Literature and Its Adult Readership. New York: Routledge, 2009. Gallagher, Catherine. Telling It Like It Wasn’t: The Counterfactual Imagination in History and Fiction. Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 2018.

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“Ghost Tours: Hampton Court Palace.” Historic Royal Palaces. Accessed February 21, 2019. https://www.hrp.org.uk/hampton-court-palace/explore/ghosttours/#gs.aoonbw0P. “Ghosts in the Castle!” Hever Castle & Gardens, 2018. https://www.hevercastle. co.uk/news/ghosts-in-the-castle-2/. Gleick, James. Time Travel: A History. London: 4th Estate, 2017. Groot, Jerome de. Remaking History: The Past in Contemporary Historical Fictions. Abingdon: Routledge, 2016. ———. The Historical Novel. London: Routledge, 2009. Morris, Sarah. “Sarah Morris Talks about Anne Boleyn and Her Debut Novel, ‘La Temps Viendra: A Novel of Anne Boleyn.’” YouTube, 2013. https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=-uoKu4foOnk. Morris, Sarah, and Natalie Grueninger. In the Footsteps of Anne Boleyn. London: Amberley, 2015. ———. In the Footsteps of the Six Wives of Henry VIII. London: Amberley, 2016. Nahin, Paul J. Time Machines: Time Travel in Physics, Metaphysics, and Science Fiction. Second Edi. New York: Springer-Verlag, 1993. Russo, Stephanie. “At the Border of Life and Death: The Ghost of Anne Boleyn.” Parergon: Journal of the Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies 37, no. 2 (2020a). ———. “Contemporary Girlhood and Anne Boleyn in Young Adult Fiction.” Girlhood Studies 13, no. 1 (2020b): 17–32. ———. “Time Travelling with Anne Boleyn: History, Science Fiction and Fandom.” Clio 47, no. 2 (2020c): 193–213. Scheil, Katherine West. Imagining Shakespeare’s Wife: The Afterlife of Anne Hathaway. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Stott, Peter Buse and Andrew. “Introduction: A Future for Haunting.” In Ghosts: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, History, edited by Peter Buse and Andrew Stott, 1–20. Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1999. Tomaini, Thea. The Corpse as Text: Disinterment and Antiquarian Enquiry, 1700–1900. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2017. Trigg, Stephanie. “Medievalism and Theories of Temporality.” In The Cambridge Companion to Medievalism, edited by Louise D’Arcens, 196–209. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Wittenberg, David. Time Travel: The Popular Philosophy of Narrative. New York: Fordham University Press, 2013.

CHAPTER 11

Anne Boleyn in Film and Television

The lives and deaths of the Tudors have been a popular subject for film since the 1895 silent short film The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, in which camera tricks are used to convince the audience that the actress had been executed.1 While the popularity of films about Anne Boleyn has ebbed and flowed, her story has been adapted into film and television numerous times over the past 100 years of cinematic history. There have been three distinct waves of interest in screen adaptations of Anne’s life: early adaptations, culminating in The Private Life of Henry VIII; the 1970s revival after the release of Anne of the Thousand Days; and the twenty-first-­ century wave of film and television, which reached its height with The Tudors. Cinematic Annes are generally far more uniform than those found in novels. With the exception of the earliest silent short films, screen Annes are usually agentic, ambitious and intelligent women, even when plot elements of her story are treated very differently. As with historical novels, films about Anne reveal much about the circumstances in which they were produced and the ways in which women, power and sexuality were thought about at the time.

1  The film can be seen at: “The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots (1895),” YouTube, 2009, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIOLsH93U1Q

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Anne’s Cinematic Debuts The first time that Anne herself appeared in film was in a 1911 short film called Henry VIII, in which Anne Boleyn was portrayed by the Scottish actress Laura Cowie.2 The film collated five scenes from Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Henry VIII, but all copies of the film were burnt by William G.B. Barker, the director, so nothing is known about Cowie’s performance.3 Anne was then portrayed by Clara Kimball Young, a popular silent film star, in two Vitagraph Silent Films in 1912: Anne Boleyn and Cardinal Wolsey.4 The former film does not seem to have survived, but Cardinal Wolsey, which is again loosely based on Shakespeare and Fletcher’s play, portrays Anne as an innocent victim of Henry’s lust. In the first scene in which Anne appears, she is changing her clothes while Henry surreptitiously watches. The film largely aligns with Victorian representations of Anne as passive and virtuous, and clearly predates the twentieth century’s shift towards imagining a more agentic and ambitious Anne, making the film our only brief glimpse on the screen of the kind of saintly Anne that had been so popular for centuries. While this book’s scope is limited to Anglophone representations of Anne Boleyn, it would be remiss to exclude Ernst Lubitsch’s 1920 film Anna Boleyn (retitled Deception at its American premiere) from any discussion of her representation in film, as it was the first full-length feature film to centre on Anne’s story.5 Anne, played by Henny Porten, is depicted as the victim of Henry’s lecherous attentions, which she nobly resists; an early scene features her running from him at speed. Bordo has described Porten’s Anne as “a victim, a virtuous—and blonde—sacrificial lamb very much in the tradition of the wide-eyed, demure heroines that Mary Pickford made famous.”6 Incidentally, the film was said to be one of Mary Pickford’s own favourites.7 Certainly, it is unusual to see a blonde Anne, and the film consistently stresses Anne’s goodness, such as in the scene  William G.B. Barker, Henry VIII (United Kingdom: Barker Motion Photography, 1911).  Sue Parrill and William B.  Robison, The Tudors on Film and Television (Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 2013), 98. 4  Anne Boleyn (USA: Vitagraph, 1912); J. Stuart Blackton and Lawrence Trimble, Cardinal Wolsey (USA: Vitagraph, 1912). 5  Ernst Lubitsch, Anna Boleyn (Germany: Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung, 1920). 6  Susan Bordo, The Creation of Anne Boleyn: A New Look at England’s Most Notorious Queen (Boston: Mariner Books, 2014), 177. 7  Herbert Howe, “Mary Pickford’s Favourite Stars and Films,” Photoplay, January 1924. 2 3

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where she throws herself at the feet of Catherine of Aragon in order to express her regret at Henry’s actions. However, she is not wholly as one-­ dimensional or passive as Bordo suggests. She chastises both the King and Henry Norris, for instance, and she plays a trick on Jane Seymour to separate her from the king. As Parrill and Robison write, “Anna shows her mettle on several occasions.”8 The most significant film about Anne Boleyn in the first 50 years of cinema was Alexander Korda’s 1933 The Private Life of Henry VIII. The film has become infamous for Charles Laughton’s Academy Award–winning portrayal of Henry and was one of the most successful British films of the 1930s.9 Anne was played by Merle Oberon, who had previously only appeared in bit parts in relatively minor films. Oberon is now largely known for the mystery surrounding her ethnicity: she claimed to be Tasmanian in order to mask her Anglo-Indian ancestry.10 While Oberon did not wish to be known as a biracial actress, her “exotic” looks may have appealed to Korda, Oberon’s future husband, for invoking a sense of Anne’s glamourous French appeal. Philip Lindsay, who would go on to write the novel The Queen’s Confession in 1947, was the film’s historical advisor. In an essay on the rise of historical films, Lindsay writes that “we will see before us the great achievements of man, the gigantic history of a little creature that has risen from we know not what”: despite Lindsay’s elevated diction, the film is not concerned with nation-building as much it is interested in Henry’s failure to manage his personal life.11 Indeed, Mike Wayne has described the film as “uncomfortably stradd[ling] the border between burlesque and authentic historical drama.”12 In its own time, as Sue Harper outlines, the film provoked much discussion about its portrayal of history as “cheap and tawdry,” and the film’s “foregrounding of the pleasures of historical texts and of the irrelevance of accuracy is of

 Parrill and Robison, The Tudors on Film and Television, 15.  Greg Walker calls the film “the most important film produced in Britain before the Second World War.” Greg Walker, The Private Life of Henry VIII (London: I.B.  Tauris, 2003), foreword. 10  For more on Oberon’s ethnicity, see Angela Woollacott, Race and the Modern Exotic: Three “Australian” Women on Modern Display (Clayton: Monash University Publishing, 2011). 11  Philip Lindsay, “The Camera Turns on History,” Cinema Quarterly Autumn (1933): 11. 12  Mike Wayne, “Constellating Walter Benjamin and British Cinema: A Study of The Private Life of Henry VIII,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 19, no. 3 (2002): 249–60. 8 9

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note.”13 Greg Walker has situated the film firmly within the political landscape of the 1930s, and the perceived need for Britain to promote a sense of British identity and values on the international stage.14 The Private Life of Henry VIII is perhaps surprising to the modern viewer in its choice of subject matter, as it does not concern itself with Henry’s first divorce. Catherine of Aragon is completely absent from the film and is written off in the film’s opening intertitles as of no interest. The film opens on the day of Anne’s execution—here erroneously represented also as Henry and Jane’s wedding day—and so we are not given any insight into Anne and Henry’s relationship at all. Charles Laughton and Merle Oberon never appear in the same scene together, and Anne is dead by the 17-minute mark. If any wife can be said to dominate the film, it is Katherine Howard (Binnie Barnes), who takes up the role we now associate with Anne Boleyn: the ambitious woman who belatedly regrets marrying a man she does not love. Henry comments that his “second wife” was ambitious, but the audience is given no indication that his assessment of Anne is correct. As The Tudors would replicate 75 years later, the opening scenes of the film contrast Anne dressing for her execution and Jane Seymour (Wendy Barrie) dressing for her wedding. Anne’s quiet dignity is sharply juxtaposed with Jane’s boisterousness and excitement. Both Anne and Jane repeat the words “what a lovely day,” and are seen to hold their hands clasped before them in the same manner, with radically different implications. Susan Bordo has described Merle Oberon as “the first of many elegant, hypnotic beauties who helped create the more glamourous version of femininity that reigned in the thirties—and that seems to have been her main function in the film.”15 The film is one of the first amongst a series of historical films made in the 1930s which feature the “queens” of Hollywood as historic queens: Greta Garbo in Queen Christina (1933), Marlene Dietrich in The Scarlet Empress (1934) and Norma Shearer in Marie Antoinette (1938), for example. Certainly, it is hard to glean much about Anne from her brief appearance in the film except for the fact that, as Anne notes, “it is a pity to lose a head like this.”16 However, the film 13  Sue Harper, Picturing the Past: The Rise and Fall of the British Costume Film (London: British Film Institute, 1994), 23. 14  Walker, The Private Life of Henry VIII, 27–41. 15  Susan Bordo, The Creation of Anne Boleyn, 177. 16  As Walker points out, the emphasis on Anne’s appearance reflects Korda’s (successful) attempt to use the film as a star-making vehicle for Merle Oberon. Walker, The Private Life of Henry VIII, 66–7.

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does go to some effort to present Anne’s death as tragic. While we do not see Anne’s actual execution, we do see her ladies-in-waiting and the crowd express regret over her death, and when it is Katherine Howard’s turn to be executed, the scene is staged almost identically, to underline the fact that Anne is but one in a series of unfortunate wives. After Korda’s film, screen versions of Anne were few and far between, even while films about her daughter proliferated. Anne was portrayed in the 1953 MGM film Young Bess by Elaine Stewart, but in this film, it is Elizabeth who is the Scarlett O’Hara-esque “feisty” heroine (see Chap. 7). We only have two brief glimpses of Anne: Anne laughing as Henry shows off the baby Elizabeth, and then Anne at the block while Kat Ashley, Elizabeth’s governess, notes that she laughed too often with other men.17 Young Bess offers a triumphal vision of Elizabeth’s rise to the throne; she succeeds where her mother failed. The Elizabethan period was more amenable to such triumphalist narratives of British identity than the Henrician, and the fact that Queen Elizabeth II was crowned in 1953 adds a contemporary resonance to Young Bess’s portrait of a young woman taking on power.18 It was not until a spate of Tudor historical films in the late 1960s—the period associated with the rise of second-wave feminism— that Anne returned to the screen as a central figure of historical interest in her own right.

Anne of the Thousand Days and the 1970s Revival A Man for All Seasons, the 1966 film adaptation of Robert Bolt’s play of the same name, dramatises the life and death of Thomas More.19 The film won the Academy Award for Best Picture and Paul Schofield, who played More, won Best Actor. Anne, portrayed by Vanessa Redgrave, makes a very short appearance in the film, pictured laughing, singing and kissing Henry. The film was a critical and popular success, which Peter Marshall attributes to its portrait of “heroic nonconformity” at a time marked by protests over the Vietnam War and the struggle for Civil Rights.20 While  George Sidney, Young Bess (United States of America: MGM, 1953).  Billie Melman, The Culture of History: English Uses of the Past 1800–1953 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 187–88. 19  Fred Zinnemann, A Man for All Seasons (United States: Columbia Pictures, 1966). 20  Peter Marshall, “Saints and Cinemas: A Man for All Seasons,” in Tudors and Stuarts on Film: Historical Perspectives, ed. Susan Doran and Thomas S. Freeman (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 49 (46–59). 17 18

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Anne is mostly absent from the film, A Man for All Seasons certainly drove interest in seeing Tudor stories on film in the late 1960s and into the next decade. In the wake of the popularity of both A Man for all Seasons and Maxwell Anderson’s 1948 Tony Award–winning play Anne of the Thousand Days, the film adaptation of Anderson’s play was released in 1969 by Hal Wallis Productions, starring Richard Burton as Henry and Genevieve Bujold as Anne.21 Anne of the Thousand Days was not the first time that a Maxwell Anderson play about Anne had been adapted for the screen. In 1952, The Trial of Anne Boleyn, written by Anderson, was aired on CBS as part of a variety show.22 Despite the title, the TV play opens after Anne’s trial, with Anne waiting for her execution at the Tower. A few themes emerge from that short piece which will be replicated in Anne of the Thousand Days: Anne’s intelligence and her concern for Elizabeth are emphasised in both. As Glenn Richardson writes, Anne of the Thousand Days “is an example of the 1960s vogue for ‘popular’ psychology in cinema” and resembles The Lion in Winter (1968), another historical film that centred on uncovering the psychology of a relationship.23 Anne of the Thousand Days also dealt with themes that were considered shocking in the 1960s, such as illegitimacy and premarital sex. In one early scene, Anne confesses to Henry Percy that she is not a virgin, and lightly alludes to having possibly been sexually abused by a boy when she was “little,” but this thread of the narrative is never expanded upon.24 The film had mixed critical success, but was nominated for ten Academy Awards, including nominations for Burton, Bujold and Anthony Quayle’s performance as Cardinal Wolsey.

21  Charles Jarrott, Anne of the Thousand Days (United Kingdom: Hal Wallis Productions, 1969). Rex Harrison won a Tony in 1949 for his performance as Henry in the Broadway production, which also won a Tony for Best Scenic Design. For more on Anderson’s play, see Chap. 8 of this book. 22  Michael Ritchie, “The Trial of Anne Boleyn” (United States of America: CBS TV, 1952). 23  Glenn Richardson, “Anne of the Thousand Days,” in Tudors and Stuarts on Film: Historical Perspectives, ed. Susan Doran and Thomas S.  Freeman (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 63. 24  Retha Warnicke argues that the film’s contention that Anne was not a virgin upon marriage came from Sanders, but I would suggest that the filmmakers are far more likely to be reflecting the reality of late 1960s womanhood than reading Sanders. Retha M. Warnicke, “Anne Boleyn in History, Drama, and Film,” in “High and Mighty Queens” of Early Modern England: Realities and Representations, ed. Carole Levin, Jo Eldridge Carney, and Debra Barrett-Graves (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 250 (240–255).

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Genevieve Bujold’s performance as Anne functioned as the definitive film version of Anne for decades, until Natalie Dormer’s performance in The Tudors took on that mantle. Bujold’s Anne is an Anne for the 1960s women’s liberation movement: she has self-determination, intelligence, agency and ambition. Richardson describes her as a “sixties’ ‘every woman,’” and Jennifer K. Lafferty writes that Bujold humanised Anne.25 In one scene, Anne cleverly lists Wolsey’s titles, allowing Henry to see for himself the power and riches that this man of God has amassed: as Katja Pilhuj writes, “Bujold’s deceptively girlish delivery” only serves to highlight Anne’s quick intelligence.26 Anne of the Thousand Days also takes up the master narrative that emerged in twentieth-century historical fiction, as described in Chaps. 7 and 8 of this book: Anne loves Henry Percy, is separated from him by the King and Wolsey, vows revenge on both, turns to ambition and is ultimately undone by that ambition. The film also features scenes that have become ubiquitous in fiction, such as the people calling Anne a whore at her coronation. While this master narrative had been concretised by the 1960s, it is likely that the film’s adoption of these tropes led to their further propagation in novels. Anne of the Thousand Days commences with Henry agonising over Anne’s guilty sentence and then flashes back to telling the story of their relationship. Our first glimpse of Bujold’s Anne has her held aloft in a dance sequence by Henry Percy, so she effectively looks down on the audience in smiling triumph. She immediately draws the attention of the King, but Henry soon discovers that Anne has no intention of becoming a discarded mistress like her sister. The first half of the movie chronicles her spirited resistance to Henry, which involves declaring to his face that he is a bad musician and poet and that she loves nothing about him. She tells her ambitious family that “I hate him only a little less than I hate Wolsey,” but when she is ordered to court, she discovers that she enjoys power.27 Halfway through the film, however, Anne declares her love for Henry, but Henry begins to lose interest in Anne when she bears him a daughter, not a son. Anne, however, finds purpose in protecting her daughter: she allows Jane Seymour (Lesley Paterson) to be brought back to court so as to 25  Richardson, “Anne of the Thousand Days,” 67; Jennifer K.  Lafferty, Anne of the Thousand Days: The Making of an Epic, 2019, 63. 26  Katja Pilhuj, “Anne of the Thousand Adaptations,” Early Modern Women 10, no. 2 (2016): 118. 27  The film script for Anne of the Thousand Days can be found at: https://www.scripts. com/script/anne_of_the_thousand_days_2930

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ensure that Elizabeth is Henry’s heir, and it is Anne who insists upon the death of Sir Thomas More (William Squire) to a reluctant Henry. Anne’s heroism is underlined when Henry, visiting her in the Tower shortly before her execution, informs that she can save her life by opting to give him a divorce and move overseas, an offer which Anne refuses because it would render Elizabeth illegitimate. The movie concludes with Anne’s prophecy of Elizabeth’s greatness echoing over a shot of the infant Elizabeth (Amanda Jane Smythe) walking sadly alone through the gardens after her mother’s execution. The movie thus looks forward to the historical truth of female rule, a comforting vision for a second-wave feminist audience. In an interview with Susan Bordo, Bujold lists the qualities that attracted her to the role of Anne Boleyn: “Independence. A healthy sense of justice. And she knew herself and was well with herself.”28 Anne, at least to Bujold, seemed to have all the attributes of a modern woman; Bujold’s view, however, is a reflection of the fact that Anne has been written that way. Bordo describes Bujold’s Anne as becoming “truer” over time, “as the generations have become less patient with passive heroines and perhaps a bit tired of the cutesy, man-focused femininity of many current female stars.”29 However, that sense that Bujold’s Anne is “true” is based not on the film’s relationship to history, as history gives us no real information about what Anne thought or felt about anything, but on the mid- to late twentieth-­ century desire for “strong” or “feisty” heroines that aligned with the political and social ideologies of second-wave feminism. That Bujold’s modern interpretation of Anne reinforces the vision of Anne that overwhelmingly dominated historical fiction of the twentieth century, too, means that audiences were likely to see Anne of the Thousand Days as presenting an authentic portrait of Anne. An Anne who could challenge and laugh at Henry, even as she faced death, was an Anne that was suited to the sensibilities of the late 1960s, and one that has arguably become even more desirable today. Following in the wake of Anne of the Thousand Days was the 1970 BBC miniseries The Six Wives of Henry VIII, in which Anne is portrayed by the Shakespearean actress Dorothy Tutin. Warnicke argues that the miniseries “present[s] a more calculating character that is obviously based on the

 Bordo, The Creation of Anne Boleyn: A New Look at England’s Most Notorious Queen, 195.  Bordo, 195.

28 29

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Sander/Chapuys model.”30 However, Tutin’s portrayal is rather more complex than suggested by Warnicke. Anne is introduced in the first episode, which tells the story of Catherine of Aragon. When we first meet Anne, she is laughing and is presented as bold, knowing and rather contemptuous of Catherine.31 However, given that episode is supposed to elicit sympathy for Catherine, such a characterisation is hardly surprising. Episode 2, which focuses on Anne’s narrative, is rather more nuanced in its portrayal of Anne. Anne is again always seen laughing, but her relationship with Henry (Keith Mitchell) is portrayed as loving and warm. However, Henry soon finds himself dissatisfied by both Anne’s failure to have a child and the fact that Anne is “less a child” than when he married her.32 The episode makes manifestly clear that Anne is not the architect of her own fate; instead, it is the petty jealousy of Lady Rochford and the machinations of Cromwell that bring her down. Unusually, Cranmer is also hostile towards Anne in this series; he accuses her of witchcraft and tells her that she has shamed them. However, the series itself does not endorse such a view of Anne. Tutin plays Anne as intelligent and warm; she defends herself ably at her trial and befriends Kingston in the Tower, for instance. The problem for Anne, as she herself notes, is that Henry turns “so easily from love to hate.” Subsequent to the airing of this series, a film adaptation, this time called Henry VIII and His Six Wives, was produced in 1972.33 Keith Mitchell reprises his role as Henry, but here Anne is portrayed by Charlotte Rampling. Rampling is the most overtly sexual Anne to appear on screen to date. In Anne’s first scene, she walks across the grounds of Hever while walking two large dogs, signalling her “wild” nature. She later placates Henry’s regrets over the execution of Thomas More by insisting that he deserved it and tells him that Catherine of Aragon and Princess Mary should be dealt with even more harshly. The film also makes much of Anne’s supposed sixth finger, with Catherine forcing Anne to unveil the finger while playing cards. This scene is one which occurs in many historical fictions, usually to signal Catherine’s jealousy of Anne, but a close-up here on Anne’s rather grotesque finger and another close-up on a mole on her neck later suggest the film actually endorses the sixteenth-century  Warnicke, “Anne Boleyn in History, Drama, and Film,” 251.  John Glenister, “The Six Wives of Henry VIII: Catherine of Aragon” (UK: BBC, 1970). 32  Naomi Capon, “The Six Wives of Henry VIII: Anne Boleyn” (UK: BBC, 1970). 33  Waris Hussein, Henry VIII and His Six Wives (UK: BBC, 1972). 30 31

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belief that these (alleged) deformities suggest something essentially malignant about Anne’s character. In Maureen Peters’s novelisation of the film, Anne is even described as having the “devil’s stigma.”34 Rather startlingly, Anne appears in blackface as the “Ethiop Queen” during the infamous pageant in which Wolsey is lampooned. As she dances, other courtiers refer to her as the “Night Crow.” Henry is disgusted with the disrespect she shows to Wolsey, and their relationship deteriorates swiftly. She is so speedily dispatched that the film moves directly from the May Day joust at which the men are arrested to the sound of a cannon signalling her execution. As the film does not allow us any scenes of Anne in distress or during her trial, the audience is not invited to feel any sympathy with her. Villainous Annes were a regular feature of historical fiction in the 1970s, with novels of this period positing that Anne’s weaponised sexuality suggests something fundamentally wrong or unnatural about her character because it was at odds with genuine, non-transactional sexuality. The film thus replicates the villain Anne model characteristic of novels of the 1970s (see Chap. 8) and is certainly the most negative film depiction of Anne before or since.

Elizabeth and Twenty-First-Century Annes While Anne did appear in the 1986 film God’s Outlaw, about the life of Willian Tyndale, there were relatively few dramatic interpretations of her story from the late 1970s to the end of the century.35 Anne, played by Oona Kirsch, is a minor character in God’s Outlaw and only appears in a few short scenes. However, the film stresses Anne’s interest in Tyndale’s ideas: she reads The Obedience of a Christian Man, explains Tyndale’s position on the role of Kings and Popes to Henry and pleads with Cromwell to save him. Later in the film, we hear Henry express displeasure over Anne’s support of Tyndale, which has the effect of suggesting that Anne’s downfall was based solely on her religious beliefs. God’s Outlaw is unusual in its emphasis on Anne’s religiosity, which is only very lightly touched upon in other screen properties, if at all. The 1998 film Elizabeth, directed by Shekhar Kapur and starring Cate Blanchett in an Academy Award–nominated performance as Queen Elizabeth I, inspired a new age of films dramatising the dramatic lives and  Maureen Peters, Henry VIII and His Six Wives (Bungay: Fontana, 1972), 82.  Tony Tew, God’s Outlaw (UK: Grenville Media, 1986).

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deaths of the Tudors. There has subsequently been a wealth of representations of Henry and Anne on screen since the turn of the twenty-first century. As Adrienne L.  Eastwood writes, the tendency of movies such as Elizabeth has been to emphasise the personal at the expense of the political. Elizabeth seems like it is moving towards the Tilbury speech as the culmination of the film, but instead, the film emphasises “the private, emotionally needy, sexually deprived woman we have come to recognise as the popular Elizabeth.”36 The tendency for films to highlight the personal is not a new one: The Private Life of Henry VIII signals in its very title its interest in the private rather than the public. What Elizabeth and its successors do is to think through the politics and ideologies of the present through the prism of the past in a more overt and self-reflexive manner. While all historical films are shaped by the time in which they are made, late twentieth and early twenty-first-century Tudor-set films are explicit about the ways in which they play with the past in order to comment on the future. Aidan Norrie, for example, reads Elizabeth as a “commentary on Britain’s religious sectarianism,” and colonialism.37 Movies and television series that depict Anne are thus more likely to self-consciously represent Anne as a modern woman in a Tudor world, a feature they have in common with twenty-first-century novels about Anne. Twenty-first-­ century Tudor film and television is also characteristically self-referential. It is just as likely to look to past adaptations of Anne’s story as it is to look to the historical record in order to shape its interpretation of her character. In other words, twenty-first-century historical film and television echo the postmodern turn in historical fiction towards a more self-consciously playful engagement with history. Peter Morgan is more well-known today for his representations of modern than Tudor queens—he wrote the 2006 film The Queen, about Elizabeth II’s reaction to the death of Princess Diana, and is the creator and writer of the Netflix series The Crown (2016–present)—but in the early 2000s, he wrote two films about the Tudor court. The Other Boleyn Girl, to which I will return shortly, was released in 2008 and was an adaptation of Philippa Gregory’s immensely popular novel (see Chap. 9). Henry VIII was made by Granada Television and was aired on ITV in the 36  Adrienne L. Eastwood, “The Secret Life of Elizabeth I,” in The English Renaissance in Popular Culture: An Age for All Time, ed. Greg Colon Semenza (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 51. 37  Aidan Norrie, “The Queen, the Bishop, the Virgin, and the Cross: Catholicism versus Protestantism in Elizabeth,” in From Medievalism to Early-Modernism: Adapting the English Past, ed. Marina Gerzic and Aidan Norrie (New York: Routledge, 2019), 233 (226–243).

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United Kingdom from 12 to 19 October 2003. The film follows Henry’s (Ray Winstone) life from the death of his father (Joss Ackland) to his own death and centres on Henry’s drive to have a son: Henry VII’s last words are, quite literally, “have a son.”38 Pete Travis, the director, has described the film as “The Godfather in tights,” and the film clearly evokes the popularity of the mafia-themed HBO television show The Sopranos at the time in its presentation of Henry as a Tudor-era mobster.39 Winstone’s Henry is equally capable of great vulnerability and random violence and aggression. As Greg Walker writes, Henry’s “monstrosity always retains that child-like emotional openness and vulnerability that invites our sympathy,” and thus the film renders Henry an anti-hero in the vein of Tony Soprano.40 Helena Bonham Carter’s Anne first meets Henry when she petitions him for permission to marry Henry Percy. However, her sly joke about the penis size of the French king—she uses her little finger to signal what the French ladies gossip about—proves too enticing for Henry, who immediately becomes obsessed with her. Anne is presented as a figure of ambition. She does not really love Henry Percy, but instead comments to her brother that Mary’s experiences as a royal mistress have taught her to value “security” over love. She responds with distaste to the king’s initial attractions, telling Henry that his demand that she go to court turns court into a prison, but soon comes to enjoy the power of being Henry’s beloved. However, the film manages to elude some of the stereotypes about ambitious women common in twentieth-century historical fiction. Bonham Carter’s Anne is ambitious because she understands the limited power that women have within the Tudor world. Anne demonstrates considerable anxiety before her marriage, asking Henry to promise her safety, and is hyper-aware that safety is conditional upon her bearing a son. She wants security not because she has an insatiable love of power, but because she knows that security can only come from an advantageous marriage. By the time Henry proposes to Anne, however, they seem to be genuinely in love, and the early days of their marriage are depicted as happy; there is even a scene in which Henry and Anne frolic happily (and  Pete Travis, Henry VIII (UK: Granada Television, 2003).  Quoted in: Parrill and Robison, The Tudors on Film and Television, 98. 40  Greg Walker, “The Sex Life of Henry VIII on Screen and in the Flesh,” in Tudorism: Historical Imagination and the Appropriation of the Sixteenth Century, ed. Tatiana C. String and Marcus Bull (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 233. 38 39

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scantily-­clad) in a lake. However, the birth of Elizabeth is the beginning of Anne’s troubles, and soon after Henry violently rapes her as she sobs. After a miscarriage, Anne’s doom is sealed, and events move quickly to her execution. Anne goes to her death bravely, refusing to bastardise Elizabeth even if it could have spared her life—a narrative event that also appears in Anne of the Thousand Days. To underline Henry’s cruelty to the women in his life, later we see him berate Jane Seymour violently for daring to ask for mercy for Robert Aske, and this outburst is depicted as having a causal relationship to her death in childbirth. Anne’s ultimate triumph comes in the final scene of the film. As Henry dies, the voiceover narration looks forward to the glorious reign of Elizabeth; despite his obsession with a male heir, it is the daughter of his clever, feisty wife who will be his most important legacy. Morgan’s adaptation of Gregory’s The Other Boleyn Girl is the second adaptation of that novel. The first is a 2003 film produced by the BBC, written and directed by Philippa Lowthorpe and starring Jodhi May as Anne.41 May’s Anne, as in the book, is scheming and ambitious, but the film portrays that ambition as being generated by her father’s need for her to replace Mary in the king’s affections. Anne is genuinely in love with Percy but is divided from him after Mary finds them in bed together. As is so often the case in historical fiction, that separation from her true love is the moment when Anne turns to ambition, which is rather crudely signified by Anne’s adoption of progressively lower-cut dresses.42 Unusually for a Tudor film, The Other Boleyn Girl features sequences where both Anne and Mary directly address the camera, which has the effect of suggesting that you are getting authentic confessional insights directly from Anne Boleyn herself. Anne looks straight at the viewer and tells us that she will never love another after Percy, and so we are invited to see her subsequent actions as the result of heartbreak and disillusionment. Two other moments break the fourth wall: Anne stares at the camera silently before her death, and Mary does the same in the final frame of the film as she plays with her family. The implication is clear: Mary has chosen love and domesticity, and so ends the film happily, while Anne’s pursuit of a loveless match has

 Philippa Lowthorpe, The Other Boleyn Girl (UK: BBC, 2003).  Susan Bordo describes the repeated “deep heaving” of Anne’s bosom throughout the film. Bordo, The Creation of Anne Boleyn: A New Look at England’s Most Notorious Queen, 198. 41 42

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doomed her. The film thus replicates the novel’s troubling postfeminist message that domesticity is the only “right” choice for a woman. However, a major deviation from the novel lies in the film’s treatment of the incest storyline. As outlined in Chap. 9, Gregory’s novel has Anne sleep with George in order to conceive a son: a prospect to which Mary responds with revulsion. In the 2003 film, Mary suggests that Anne and George sleep together, knowing that only a son will save Anne’s life. While Anne readily accedes to this request out of sheer desperation, the scene is portrayed as a last desperate attempt for the Boleyns to keep their family together and is clearly distasteful to both Anne and George. While Gregory portrays this narrative event as a signifier of Anne’s amorality, Lowthorpe’s film uses this scene to generate sympathy for Anne. That Mary is the originator of this suggestion is important, as Mary is the film’s clear moral centre and exemplar. At the end of the film, as Mary narrates the circumstances of Anne’s execution, the film flashes forward to contemporary tourists visiting the site of her execution in the Tower, further suggesting that the viewer should feel sympathy and compassion for this historic wrong. Peter Morgan’s film adaptation of The Other Boleyn Girl, directed by Justin Chadwick, was released in 2008 and boasted an all-star cast: Natalie Portman as Anne, Scarlett Johansson as Mary, Eric Bana as Henry and Mark Rylance (who would later play Cromwell in Wolf Hall) as Thomas Boleyn. The film, like the novel, goes to some length to contrast the dark, intelligent, crafty Anne with the blonde, “simple” and guileless Mary. The film opens with a shot of the young Anne, Mary and George playing in the fields, as their father comments on their divergent characters. Mary is kind, while Anne is intelligent. Like the novel upon which it is based, the film favourably contrasts Mary’s love of the country to Anne’s propensity for power politics. At one point, Henry asks Anne if she considers women equal to men, a proposition which she cleverly inverts by reconstructing the sentence so that it is women who can accept that men might be equal to them. As Llewella Burton has written, the contrasts between the sisters extend into their outfits. While Mary wears “warm red, burnt orange and gold” throughout the film, Anne wears “green and blue hues, a reflection of her colder, more ambitious nature and one prone to jealousy and greed.”43 However, the film also softens the novel’s portrayal of Anne, as 43  Llewella Burton, “Revealing Robes and Sumptuous Slashing: What Anne Boleyn Wore to The Other Boleyn Girl,” Film, Fashion and Consumption 2, no. 1 (2013): 98.

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had the 2003 adaptation before it. Anne genuinely cares for Mary and is far less successful a schemer than presented in the novel. Portman’s Anne seems to blunder from one error of judgement into another. By Anne’s wedding and coronation, any joy that she might glean from these occasions has been stripped from her by Henry’s obvious growing distaste. Incest is never consummated in this film, but unlike in the 2003 adaptation, it is Anne who suggests it and must wear the moral stain. There are many overt similarities between Morgan’s earlier Henry VIII and The Other Boleyn Girl. In the former, Anne wins Henry with a joke about King Francois’s penis size, while in the latter, Anne claims that King Francois is neither honourable nor a great man. Like the earlier film, the blocking of the trial scene in The Other Boleyn Girl emphasises Anne’s powerlessness, and her desperate attempt to talk her way out of trouble. However, while Bonham Carter’s Anne bravely walks to her execution and calmly farewells her child, Portman’s Anne weeps throughout her execution scene while she gazes at Mary, hoping for a last-minute reprieve. There are other resemblances between the two films: Bana’s Henry also rapes Anne, but while in Henry VIII, the rape scene comes after Anne and Henry’s marital bliss had dissipated, Anne and Henry’s first encounter in The Other Boleyn Girl is a violent rape. The Other Boleyn Girl never depicts Anne and Henry’s relationship as happy or even sexually satisfying. Instead, Henry is resentful of Anne’s attempts to elude his sexual advances, and so the film skips from Anne chastising Henry for his betrayal of Mary directly to Henry berating and abusing Anne. Their wedding scene features a frightened Anne and a bitter Henry, and the film accelerates so quickly towards its conclusion that the fate of Mary’s first husband is cut from the film, leaving viewers to have to work out for themselves why the seemingly still-married Mary is being proposed to by William Stafford (Eddie Redmayne).44 As with Morgan’s earlier film, The Other Boleyn Girl concludes with a triumphant shot of Elizabeth, Anne’s posthumous victory over Henry’s obsession with sons.

44  A deleted scene revealing William Carey’s death is included on the DVD edition of the film.

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The Tudors and Wolf Hall It is Michael Hirst’s The Tudors, however, that is the most significant representation of Anne in twenty-first-century film and television and, in terms of sheer screen time, the show gives us the most extended treatment of Anne’s life and death to date. The Tudors debuted in 2007 on Showtime and continued airing until 2010. Hirst also wrote the screenplay for Elizabeth (1998). As Basil Glynn has argued, The Tudors reflects a new style of historical television series, such as HBO’s series Rome (2005–07), in which the historical specificity of national pasts becom[e] secondary to a transnational televisual representation of sex, violence and bad language set in period but performed and visually rendered in a very modern manner.45

The series portrays the Henrician court as a time characterised by ruthless, often random violence and passionate sex. As Jerome de Groot argues: the show’s confidence in foregrounding sex demonstrates its self-­ consciousness in rejecting the norms of historical drama and also its historiographic investment in suggesting that Henry was not that much different from a modern celebrity.46

The Tudors is essentially a soap opera, with emphasis placed on the more salacious details of the lives of Henry VIII, his wives and the courtly circle that surrounded him. Anne Boleyn appears in only the first two seasons of the series, with her execution episode, “Destiny and Fortune,” airing in 2008.47 However, Anne Boleyn does reappear as a ghostly presence in the series finale “Death of a Monarchy,” to inform Henry of her innocence and upbraid him for his neglect of their daughter Elizabeth.48 The show was an immediate popular success, although much of the media and academic commentary 45  Basil Glynn, “The Conquests of Henry VIII: Masculinity, Sex and the National Past in The Tudors,” in Television, Sex and Society: Analysing Contemporary Representations, ed. Beth Johnson, James Aston, and Basil Glynn (New York: Bloomsbury, 2012), 161. 46  Jerome de Groot, “Slashing History: The Tudors,” in Tudorism: Historical Imagination and the Appropriation of the Sixteenth Century, ed. Tatiana C.  String and Marcus Bull (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 251. 47  Jon Amiel, The Tudors Season 2 Episode 10: “Destiny and Fortune,” 2008. 48  Ciaran Donnelly, The Tudors 4:10 “Death of a Monarchy,” 2010.

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has been rather more critical. Much of the criticism of The Tudors centres on the series’ many factual inaccuracies. The introduction to the only full-­ length critical study of the series to date declares that “its apparent promise of concern for historical accuracy is one on which four seasons and thirty-five hours of the hugely popular cable television series largely fails to deliver.”49 However, Ramona Wray has proposed an alternative way of reading the series, arguing that “in The Tudors, no single version of history is ultimate privileged: the events and transactions of the past alternately appear as assimilation, imitation and bricolage.”50 This reading emphasises how the show’s self-consciousness of itself as historical drama allows different understandings of history to be placed against each other. The series clearly knows, for example, that it is presenting a new version of Henry VIII and his wives to place against earlier interpretations, and takes pleasure in signalling to the audience its self-awareness of the very ubiquity of the narrative. Most of the marketing materials for the show playfully capitalise on the audience’s knowledge of what will happen, such as photos of Jonathan Rhys-Meyers surrounded by women whose heads have been cut off by the cropping of the photo. This Henry is sexy, young and thin and has brown hair: a deliberate challenge to our cultural memory of Henry as middle-aged, overweight and a redhead. Despite critical disagreement about the value of the series, it is undeniable that Natalie Dormer’s performance as Anne Boleyn has been extremely influential, even formative, of our contemporary understanding of Anne Boleyn. As I have argued in Chaps. 9 and 10 of this book, Dormer’s Anne Boleyn has inspired an enthusiastic Anne Boleyn fandom and shaped the representation of Anne Boleyn in a number of novels.51 Most notably, Sarah Morris’s Le Temps Viendra is dedicated to Natalie Dormer, who also launched the novel.52 The Anne Boleyn that emerges in The Tudors has 49  William B. Robison, “Introduction,” in History, Fiction, and The Tudors: Sex, Politics, Power and Artistic License in the Showtime Television Series, ed. William B. Robison (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 1. 50   Ramona Wray, “Henry’s Desperate Housewives: The Tudors, the Politics of Historiography, and the Beautiful Body of Jonathan Rhys Meyers,” in The English Renaissance in Popular Culture: An Age for All Time, ed. Greg Colon Semenza (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 40. 51  For more on The Tudors fandom, and its embrace of Natalie Dormer’s portrayal of Anne, see Stephanie Russo, “Shipping Anne/Henry: Love in Tudor Historical Romances,” in The Routledge Companion to Love, forthcoming. 52  Sarah Morris, Le Temps Viendra: A Novel of Anne Boleyn, Volume 1 (Spartan Publishing, 2012); Sarah Morris, Le Temps Viendra: A Novel of Anne Boleyn, Volume 2 (Spartan Publishing, 2013).

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much in common with third-wave feminist representations of Anne, as Natalie Dormer gives the audience an Anne who is both an ambitious seductress and an intelligent, sympathetic woman. This view of Anne has subsequently been reinforced by popular historical novels. Natalie Dormer’s star image has also been dominated by Anne Boleyn, as her performance as Margery Tyrell in Game of Thrones builds on her reputation for playing ambitious women in medievalist television dramas. Anne is initially encouraged to pursue Henry by her selfish and ambitious father (Nick Dunning) after the dissolution of Henry’s affair with Mary (Perdita Weeks) but, as she notes, “Even if he had me, who is to say he would keep me?”53 However, she is not merely a victim of her father’s machinations, and the series goes to some effort to demonstrate Anne’s agency over her fate. As she notes in a later episode, her rise to the queenship was a result of her own efforts, not those of her father.54 While Anne is in Henry’s presence earlier in the series, the King (Jonathan Rhys-­ Meyers) and Anne meet in Episode 1:3, “Wolsey, Wolsey, Wolsey!” when Anne performs in the Château Vert pageant, at which Henry takes an immediate interest in Anne.55 From there, their relationship is characterised by sexual frustration on the part of Henry, and a seemingly increased emotional commitment by Anne. The series never definitely answers the question of whether Anne truly loves Henry, but she is certainly far more emotionally involved by the end of her two-series stint on the show than might be expected at the beginning of their relationship arc. She is also innocent of all the charges levelled against her. Her downfall is depicted as resting upon many factors, including shifting political allegiances, Henry’s growing interest in Jane Seymour (Anita Briem) and her refusal to accept his affairs or to act as a conventionally submissive wife. However, it is Cromwell (James Frain) who is the ultimate architect of her fate, which the show acknowledges by having him fall to his knees and pray while Anne is being led to her execution in Episode 2:10. Natalie Dormer’s portrayal of Anne Boleyn certainly plays up her sexual appeal, and marketing of the series turns heavily on images of Dormer as Anne in a variety of extremely low-cut and provocative gowns. The front 53  Michael Hirst, “The Tudors Episode 2 Shooting Script,” in It’s Good To Be King: The Tudors (New York: Simon Spotlight Entertainment, 2007), 144. 54  Dearbhla Walsh, The Tudors 2:7 “Matters of State,” 2008. 55  Steve Shill, The Tudors, 1:3: “Wolsey, Wolsey, Wolsey!,” 2007.

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cover of a tie-in novelisation to the series, King Takes Queen, features a shot of Natalie Dormer as Anne in a dress that resembles a modern negligee, pressed up against Jonathan Rhys Meyer’s Henry, who has his hand wrapped around her throat.56 The image is one of sexual domination and control that uncomfortably anticipates, in a highly sexualised manner, Anne’s beheading. Susan Bordo writes that the “hypersexualisation” of Anne in the first series of The Tudors “inevitably reduced Anne to her familiar role as the seductive, scheming Other Woman.”57 The Tudors portrays Anne and Thomas Wyatt’s relationship as a sexual one, which Anne ends soon after Henry becomes sexually interested in her—an act which inspires Wyatt’s poem, “Wilt Thou Leave Me Thus?,” which he recites to Anne.58 The second season Anne, however, is somewhat different: “still sexy but brainy, politically engaged, a loving mother, and a committed reformist.”59 In other words, Dormer’s Anne becomes the kind of Anne that has featured heavily in twenty-first-century historical fiction, a woman who can be both politically engaged and sexually provocative. Bordo attributes this shift in Anne’s characterisation to Natalie Dormer herself. In an interview excerpted in The Creation of Anne Boleyn, Bordo recounts Dormer’s belief that after the first season “audiences would have no sympathy for her because the way she’s been written, she would be regarded as the other woman, the third wheel, that femme fatale, that bitch.”60 Dormer was clearly aware of Anne’s posthumous reputation and was evidently successful in her attempts to steer The Tudors’ characterisation of Anne away from the femme fatale framework. During the second season of the show, Anne’s intelligence is stressed, and her interest in religious reform is repeatedly emphasised. The final three episodes of the second series of the show are designed to elicit sympathy for Anne, who becomes increasingly anxious and unstable in the months preceding her execution. 56  Elizabeth Massie, The Tudors: King Takes Queen (New York: Simon Spotlight Entertainment, 2008). 57  Susan Bordo, “The Tudors, Natalie Dormer, and Our ‘Default’ Anne Boleyn,” in History, Fiction, and The Tudors: Sex, Politics, Power and Artistic License in the Showtime Television Series, ed. William B. Robison (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 83. 58  Steve Shill, The Tudors 1:3: “Wolsey, Wolsey, Wolsey!” 2007. For more on The Tudors’ depiction of Anne’s relationship with Wyatt, see Stephanie Russo, “The Poet and the Queen: Thomas Wyatt and Anne Boleyn in Historical Biofiction,” A/b: Auto/Biography Studies, forthcoming. 59  Bordo, 88. 60  Susan Bordo, The Creation of Anne Boleyn: A New Look at England’s Most Notorious Queen 216.

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Episode 2:9, “The Act of Treason,” concludes with Anne watching the execution of her brother and the other men from her window in the Tower and sobbing in despair.61 The execution scene in Episode 2:10 is staged as a great historical tragedy, with time and attention given to Anne’s bravery, and the emotional impact her death has upon all who witness it. Henry’s callousness towards the woman he claimed to love is underlined by his simultaneous consumption of a swan, an animal associated with eternal love as they are said to mate for life. While Jane Seymour is treated sympathetically in the third series of the show, here her characterisation is rather more complex, as she is depicted excitedly dressing for her betrothal while Anne dresses for her execution, clearly evoking The Private Life of Henry VIII. This juxtaposition only sharpens audience sympathies for Anne— and, potentially, hostility towards Jane. While Korda’s film used this contrast to highlight Jane’s lack of intelligence, here Jane seems to know exactly what she is doing, but is not terribly perturbed by the knowledge that she is marrying a man who has put his previous wife to death. The most significant post-Dormer film adaptation of Anne’s story is the BBC’s adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall (2009) and Bring Up the Bodies (2012), which was broadcast on BBC TWO in 2015 (for more on Mantel’s novels, see Chap. 9).62 Anne is played by Claire Foy, who would go on to portray another queen: Elizabeth II in the Netflix series The Crown. As was the case in the novels, Wolf Hall’s Anne is represented as an ambitious, unscrupulous woman who desires power above all. The first time we meet Anne, which occurs after a number of characters have gossiped about Anne’s role in Wolsey’s fall, she is rude and imperious in her behaviour towards Cromwell. Cromwell, the series’ protagonist, is extremely personally loyal to Wolsey, and therefore is hostile to Anne from the first. Foy’s performance emphasises Anne’s haughtiness and lust for power, which alienates all around her; Mary and her other ladies-in-­ waiting seem to take delight in denigrating her, either to her face or behind her back. While the series does emphasise that Anne is Cromwell’s only real competent rival, and therefore at least equal in intelligence and savvy, it is also made clear that Anne is isolated by her ambitions. While a feminist message is perhaps intended here—ambitious women are considered suspect, while ambition in men is to be expected and applauded—Wolf Hall ends up replicating stereotypes about women in power by presenting  Jon Amiel, The Tudors 2:9 “The Act of Treason,” 2008.  Peter Kosminsky, Wolf Hall (UK: BBC Worldwide, 2015).

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Anne as inherently selfish and mostly unpleasant. In an interview with the Financial Times, Peter Kosminsky, the director, comments that “the challenge playing Anne Boleyn” is “that you have to not soft-pedal the unpleasantness, the things about her personality that make her really hard to like.”63 The series, like Mantel’s novel, positions us to admire Cromwell and, therefore, distrust Anne. The final episode of Wolf Hall, “Master of Phantoms,” does go some way towards building sympathy for Anne. Foy’s performance emphasises Anne’s fear and helplessness in the face of the men who come to arrest her and at her trial. When Cromwell comes to see her in the Tower, her guard momentarily drops and she pleads with him to believe in her innocence. Her execution scene is particularly affecting, as Foy’s Anne uncontrollably shakes despite her efforts to remain stoic, while Rylance’s Cromwell is obviously emotionally affected by her violent death and the gruesome spectacle of her headless body being bundled into a humble arrow chest. As he watches, he mutters “put your hand down,” recalling his earlier conversation with her executioner about the importance of remaining still before the decapitation to avoid pain. However, the episode does also underline how Anne’s own actions lead to her downfall: she flirts with Mark Smeaton and Henry Norris and slaps Lady Rochford in the face, for instance. She also threatens Cromwell, telling him that “those who’ve been made can be unmade”; the irony, of course, is that she will be unmade. Ultimately, the series replicates the postfeminist discourse that also characterised the novel. Anne’s downfall is represented as a failure: she fails to secure the crown, fails to defeat Cromwell and is the architect of her own misfortune by behaving increasingly erratically in her final days.

Conclusion It is likely that new screen versions of Anne Boleyn will emerge throughout the twenty-first century. The second series of Starz’s series The Spanish Princess, for instance, which is based upon Philippa Gregory’s novel The Constant Princess, seems likely to feature Anne Boleyn in some capacity. Indeed, a very young Anne Boleyn appears fleetingly in the seventh episode of the series, in which she has an ironic encounter with Catherine of

63  Natalie Whittle, “Interview: Claire Foy, Anne Boleyn in ‘Wolf Hall,’” Financial Times, January 10, 2015, https://www.ft.com/content/ec554cb0-96c1-11e4-922f-00144feabdc0

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Aragon as she searches for Henry.64 New screen Annes will no doubt continue to reflect the context in which they are produced. One might expect, for instance, future Annes to be more closely engaged with the politics of the #MeToo movement, given that her narrative fits quite neatly with those parameters. So far, despite the movement towards a postmodern playfulness evident in recent television properties, Anne has only appeared in quite conventional renderings of Tudor history. Nevertheless, with the popularity of the musical Six (see the conclusion to this book), and the publication of the final volume in Mantel’s Cromwell trilogy in 2020, Anne’s popularity as a subject for film and television seems assured.

References Primary Sources Amiel, Jon. “The Tudors 2:9 The Act of Treason,” 2008a. ———. “The Tudors 2:10 Destiny and Fortune,” 2008b. Anne Boleyn. USA: Vitagraph, 1912. Barker, William G.B. Henry VIII. United Kingdom: Barker Motion Photography, 1911. Blackton, J. Stuart, and Lawrence Trimble. Cardinal Wolsey. USA: Vitagraph, 1912. Capon, Naomi. “The Six Wives of Henry VIII: Anne Boleyn.” UK: BBC, 1970. Clark, Alfred. “The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots (1895).” YouTube, 2009. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIOLsH93U1Q. Clarke, Lisa. “The Spanish Princess 1:7 A Polite Kidnapping,” 2019. Donnelly, Ciaran. “The Tudors 4:10 Death of a Monarchy,” 2010. Hirst, Michael. “The Tudors Episode 2 Shooting Script.” In It’s Good To Be King: The Tudors, 89–146. New York: Simon Spotlight Entertainment, 2007. Jarrott, Charles. Anne of the Thousand Days. United Kingdom: Hal Wallis Productions, 1969. Glenister, John. “The Six Wives of Henry VIII: Catherine of Aragon.” UK: BBC, 1970. Kosminsky, Peter. Wolf Hall. UK: BBC Worldwide, 2015. Lowthorpe, Philippa. The Other Boleyn Girl. UK: BBC, 2003. Lubitsch, Ernst. Anna Boleyn. Germany: Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-­ Stiftung, 1920. Morris, Sarah. Le Temps Viendra: A Novel of Anne Boleyn, Volume 1. Spartan Publishing, 2012.

 Lisa Clarke, The Spanish Princess, Season 1 Episode 7: “A Polite Kidnapping,” 2019.

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———. Le Temps Viendra: A Novel of Anne Boleyn, Volume 2. Spartan Publishing, 2013. Ritchie, Michael. “The Trial of Anne Boleyn.” United States of America: CBS TV, 1952. Shill, Steve. “The Tudors 1:3 Wolsey, Wolsey, Wolsey,” 2007. Sidney, George. Young Bess. United States of America: MGM, 1953. Travis, Pete. Henry VIII. UK: Granada Television, 2003. Walsh, Dearbhla. “The Tudors 2:7 Matters of State,” 2008.

Secondary Sources Bordo, Susan. The Creation of Anne Boleyn: A New Look at England’s Most Notorious Queen. Boston: Mariner Books, 2014. ———. “The Tudors, Natalie Dormer, and Our ‘Default’ Anne Boleyn.” In History, Fiction, and The Tudors: Sex, Politics, Power and Artistic License in the Showtime Television Series, edited by William B.  Robison, 77–95. New  York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Burton, Llewella. “Revealing Robes and Sumptuous Slashing: What Anne Boleyn Wore to The Other Boleyn Girl.” Film, Fashion and Consumption 2, no. 1 (2013): 91–103. Eastwood, Adrienne L. “The Secret Life of Elizabeth I.” In The English Renaissance in Popular Culture: An Age for All Time, edited by Greg Colon Semenza, 43–54. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Glynn, Basil. “The Conquests of Henry VIII: Masculinity, Sex and the National Past in The Tudors.” In Television, Sex and Society: Analysing Contemporary Representations, edited by Beth Johnson, James Aston, and Basil Glynn, 157–73. New York: Bloomsbury, 2012. Groot, Jerome de. “Slashing History: The Tudors.” In Tudorism: Historical Imagination and the Appropriation of the Sixteenth Century, edited by Tatiana C. String and Marcus Bull, 243–60. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Harper, Sue. Picturing the Past: The Rise and Fall of the British Costume Film. London: British Film Institute, 1994. Howe, Herbert. “Mary Pickford’s Favourite Stars and Films.” Photoplay, January 1924. Lafferty, Jennifer K. Anne of the Thousand Days: The Making of an Epic, 2019. Lindsay, Philip. “The Camera Turns on History.” Cinema Quarterly Autumn (1933): 10–11. Marshall, Peter. “Saints and Cinemas: A Man for All Seasons.” In Tudors and Stuarts on Film: Historical Perspectives, edited by Susan Doran and Thomas S. Freeman, 46–59. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

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Massie, Elizabeth. The Tudors: King Takes Queen. New  York: Simon Spotlight Entertainment, 2008. Melman, Billie. The Culture of History: English Uses of the Past 1800–1953. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Norrie, Aidan. “The Queen, the Bishop, the Virgin, and the Cross: Catholicism versus Protestantism in Elizabeth”. In From Medievalism to Early-Modernism: Adapting the English Past, edited by Marina Gerzic and Aidan Norrie, 226-243. New York: Routledge, 2019. Parrill, Sue, and William B. Robison. The Tudors on Film and Television. Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 2013. Peters, Maureen. Henry VIII and His Six Wives. Bungay: Fontana, 1972. Pilhuj, Katja. “Anne of the Thousand Adaptations.” Early Modern Women 10, no. 2 (2016): 115–18. Richardson, Glenn. “Anne of the Thousand Days.” In Tudors and Stuarts on Film: Historical Perspectives, edited by Susan Doran and Thomas S. Freeman, 60–74. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Robison, William B. “Introduction.” In History, Fiction, and The Tudors: Sex, Politics, Power and Artistic License in the Showtime Television Series, edited by William B. Robison, 1–25. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Russo, Stephanie. “Shipping Anne/Henry: Love in Tudor Historical Romances.” In The Routledge Companion to Love, forthcoming-a ———. “The Poet and the Queen: Thomas Wyatt and Anne Boleyn in Historical Biofiction.” A/b: Auto/Biography Studies, forthcoming 2020-b Walker, Greg. The Private Life of Henry VIII. London: I.B. Tauris, 2003. ———. “The Sex Life of Henry VIII on Screen and in the Flesh.” In Tudorism: Historical Imagination and the Appropriation of the Sixteenth Century, edited by Tatiana C.  String and Marcus Bull, 223–41. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Warnicke, Retha M. “Anne Boleyn in History, Drama, and Film.” In “High and Mighty Queens” of Early Modern England: Realities and Representations, edited by Carole Levin, Jo Eldridge Carney, and Debra Barrett-Graves, 240–55. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Wayne, Mike. “Constellating Walter Benjamin and British Cinema: A Study of The Private Life of Henry VIII.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 19, no. 3 (2002): 249–60. Whittle, Natalie. “Interview: Claire Foy, Anne Boleyn in ‘Wolf Hall.’” Financial Times, January 10, 2015. https://www.ft.com/content/ec554cb0-96c1-11e 4-922f-00144feabdc0.

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Woollacott, Angela. Race and the Modern Exotic: Three “Australian” Women on Modern Display. Clayton: Monash University Publishing, 2011. Wray, Ramona. “Henry’s Desperate Housewives: The Tudors, the Politics of Historiography, and the Beautiful Body of Jonathan Rhys Meyers.” In The English Renaissance in Popular Culture: An Age for All Time, edited by Greg Colon Semenza, 25–42. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

CHAPTER 12

Conclusion

“Sorry not sorry for what I said, I didn’t mean to hurt anyone,” sings Anne Boleyn, dressed in a short green dress, fishnet stockings and diamante-­encrusted boots. Her problem, you see, is that she has been texting a married man and “didn’t know [she] would move in with his missus.”1 But when the man who is pursuing who is the King of England, well, “what was I meant to do?”2 The lyrics come from the hit musical Six, the hit pop musical adaptation of the story of the wives of Henry VIII. Six was written by Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss and premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2017. It has since toured the United Kingdom, debuted in the United States in 2019 and is, at the time of writing, being staged at the Sydney Opera House from January to March 2020. The closest analogue to Six is Lin-­Manuel Miranda’s musical Hamilton, which uses contemporary music to tell the story of the eighteenth-century American politician Alexander Hamilton. Six is a joyous, celebratory feminist reinterpretation of the “divorced-­ beheaded-­died-divorced-beheaded-survived” narrative; the show’s tagline is “DIVORCED BEHEADED LIVE IN CONCERT.” The songs are classic pop songs, inspired by the style associated with female pop singers such as Beyoncé, Rihanna and Alicia Keys. The plot of the musical is simple: the wives compete to win the title of the wife who had to endure the 1  Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss, Six: All The Songs from the Hit Musical, Written by Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss, Arranged for Voice and Piano (London: Faber Music, 2020), 115. 2  Marlow and Moss, 116.

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worst hardships. Each wife has a solo to convince the audience that her plight was the most onerous. Anne Boleyn’s solo, “Don’t Lose UR Head,” is inspired by the musical style associated with Avril Lavigne and Lily Allen and presents her as a cheeky, rebellious woman who did not really intend to cause the chaos that she leaves in her wake, but could not really do any different in the circumstances. The musical challenges the perception that Anne was a self-aware schemer: instead, the Anne of Six does not anticipate the effects of her actions. “Don’t Lose UR Head” is also full of double-­entendres about Anne’s head and makes repeated references to Anne’s “green sleeves”—a nod to the legend that Henry wrote “Greensleeves” for Anne—and her red lipstick. Marlow and Moss are clearly aware of a whole range of mythology associated with Anne but reject some aspects of the Anne Boleyn mythos—her ambition, most notably—while retaining other aspects, such as her sexual appeal. At the end of the musical, the wives decide that competing against each other is not the way; instead, they decide to reclaim the narratives of their own lives. It is the six, they realise, who make Henry interesting, not the other way around. Six both acknowledges the real historical pain these women faced and suggests an alternative way of thinking about their stories. To replace competition amongst the queens is a vision of feminist sisterhood. Instead of lobbing insults at each other—Anne repeatedly reminds the other queens about the loss of her head—the queens band together to celebrate the fact that they each suffered at the hands of the same man. Six is tethered to its twenty-first-century moment. There are references to texting, social media profiles and, in the case of the Sydney performance that this author saw, the “HSC” (the Higher School Certificate, or the New South Wales school-leaving exams). The show is interactive and designed to make history accessible to audiences who may have very little knowledge of Henrician history. It acknowledges that history was not so kind to the wives of Henry VIII, but gives them all happy endings anyway, self-­ consciously rewriting history to make it amenable to twenty-first-century feminism. Six also encapsulates what this project is about. Anne Boleyn’s story, as we have seen time and time again, has always been filtered through the lens of the present day. Putting her in a pop musical is just the latest iteration of a tendency that began when Thomas Wyatt inscribed her into his poetry as the elusive Petrarchan mistress. Anne Boleyn’s literary afterlife is strange, compelling, rich and often unexpected. Her power to fascinate

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has never dimmed. Anne Boleyn, as Hannah Capin reminds us, can be whatever we want her to be.3 At the end of Six, the wives decide to give themselves happier endings than Henry ever offered. Anne Boleyn’s alternative vision runs as follows: Henry sent me a poem all about my green sleeves I changed a couple words put it on a sick beat The song blew their minds next minute I was signed And now I’m writing lyrics for Shakesy P.4

An Anne Boleyn singing a pop song about her “sick beats” and writing lyrics for William Shakespeare is truly an Anne Boleyn for the twenty-first century. Long live the Queen.

References Primary Sources Capin, Hannah. The Dead Queens Club. Sydney: HQ Young Adult, 2019. Marlow, Toby, and Lucy Moss. Six: All The Songs from the Hit Musical, Written by Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss, Arranged for Voice and Piano. London: Faber Music, 2020.

3 4

 Hannah Capin, The Dead Queens Club (Sydney: HQ Young Adult, 2019), 267.  Marlow and Moss, 120.



Appendix

Anne Boleyn Fiction (including plays, short stories and poetry) of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries* Compiled with the help of Sebastian Sparrevohn * While every effort has been made to provide a comprehensive list of novels in which Anne appears as a major character, some novels may have inadvertently been overlooked. Novels in which Anne appears as a minor character, such as novels about Elizabeth I in which Anne briefly appears, have been excluded. So too have novels about the other wives of Henry VIII in which Anne only briefly appears. Jessie Armstrong, My Friend Anne (1900) Elizabeth Wells Gallup, The Tragedy of Anne Boleyn by Sir Francis Bacon (1901) F.A. Mitchel, “A Prejudiced View” (c. 1904) “The Ghost of Anne Boleyn: What a Traveler Beheld At the Scaffold at Tower Hill” (1912) Mary Hastings Bradley, The Favor of Kings (1912) Reginald Drew, Anne Boleyn (1912) Olive Lethbridge and John de Stourton, The King’s Master (1912) Clemence Dane, The King Waits (1918) W.S. Pakenham-Walsh, Anne Boleyn (1921)

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APPENDIX

Benedict Fitzpatrick, Frail Anne Boleyn and Her Many Loves (1931) E. Barrington, Anne Boleyn (1932) Loyd Haberly, “Anne Boleyn” (1934) Loyd Haberly, “Fame for Thame” (1934) Edgar Lee Masters, Henry VIII and Ann Boleyn (1934) Paul Rival, The Six Wives of Henry VIII (1937) Francis Hackett, Queen Anne Boleyn (1939) Kenneth Haynes, Mistress Minx: An Episode in the Early Life of Anne Boleyn (1940) Philip Lindsay, The Queen’s Confession (1947) Maxwell Anderson, Anne of the Thousand Days (1948) Philip Lindsay, The Heart of a King (1948) Margaret Campbell Barnes, Brief Gaudy Hour (1949) Jean Plaidy, Murder Most Royal (1949) Peter Albery, Anne Boleyn (1956) Evelyn Anthony, Anne Boleyn (1957) Margaret Campbell Barnes, King’s Fool: A Notorious King, His Six Wives, and the One Man Who Knew All Their Secrets (1959) Peter Albey, The Uncommon Marriage (1960) Jane Lane, Sow the Tempest (1962) Norah Lofts, The Concubine (1963) Adrienne Kennedy, The Owl Answers (1965) Lozania Prole, The Haunted Headsman: The Shadow of a Tudor Queen (1965) Margaret Heys, Anne Boleyn (1967) Lozania Prole, The Dark-Eyed Queen (1967) Godfrey Turton, My Lord of Canterbury (1967) Maureen Peters, Anne, The Rose of Hever (1969) Edward Fenton, Anne of the Thousand Days (1970) Lozania Prole, The Two Queen Annes (1971) Maureen Peters, Henry VIII and His Six Wives (1972) Philippa Wiat, The Heir of Allington (1973) Judith Saxton, Feather Light, Diamond Bright (1974) Aileen Armitage, The Tudor Sisters (1974) Peggy Boyton, The Reluctant Mistress (1977) Victoria Allen, I, Anne Boleyn (1978) Dilys Gater, The Witch-Girl (1979) Linda-Dawn Reeve, The Early Years (1980) Philippa Carr, The Miracle at St. Bruno’s (1981)

 APPENDIX 

299

Cynthia Harrod-Eagles, The Dark Rose (1981) Linda-Dawn Reeve, The Royal Suitor (1981) Linda-Dawn Reeve, Condemned (1981) Karen Harper, The Last Boleyn (1983) Robert York, My Lord the Fox: The Secret Documents of Anthony Woodcott Concerning Elizabeth I and Anne Boleyn (1984) Margaret George, The Autobiography of Henry VIII: With Notes by His Fool, Will Somers (1986) Jean Plaidy, The Lady in the Tower: The Story of Anne Boleyn (1986) Mollie Hardwick, Blood Royal (1988) Dinah Lampitt, Sutton Place (1988) Maureen Peters, Incredible Fierce Desire (1988) Beatrice Small, Blaze Wyndham (1988) Laura Cassidy, The Black Pearl (1991) Dave and Neta Jackson, The Queen’s Smuggler (1991) Nancy Kress, “And Wild for to Hold” (1991) Barbara Kyle, The Queen’s Lady (1994) Robin Maxwell, The Secret Diary of Anne Boleyn (1997) Joanna Dessau, All or Nothing (1998) Sylvia Lover, Reap the Storm (1998) Claire Luckham, The Seduction of Anne Boleyn (1998) Thea Atkinson, Pray for Reign (1999) Lillian Stewart Carl, “A Rose with All Its Thorns” (1999) Nell Gavin, Threads: The Reincarnation of Anne Boleyn (2001) Philippa Gregory, The Other Boleyn Girl (2001) C.C. Humphreys, The French Executioner (2001) Wendy J. Dunn, Dear Heart, How Like You This? (2002) Carolyn Meyer, Doomed Queen Anne (2002) Suzannah Dunn, The Queen of Subtleties (2004) Alison Prince, Anne Boleyn and Me (2004) Eve Gold, Six: Poems (2005) Beatrice Small, The Last Heiress (2005) Laurien Gardner, A Lady Raised High: A Novel of Anne Boleyn (2006) Debbie Patterson, Head: The Musical (2006) Darcey Bonnette, Secrets of the Tudor Court (2007) Anne Gracie, The Tudors: The King, The Queen, and the Mistress (2007) Robin Maxwell, Mademoiselle Boleyn (2007) Emily Purdy, The Tudor Wife (2007) Ginger Garrett, In the Shadow of Lions (2008)

300 

APPENDIX

Jay Margrave, Luther’s Ambassadors (2008) Elizabeth Massie, The Tudors: King Takes Queen (2008) Robert Olen Butler, Hell (2009) Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall (2009) Howard Brenton, Anne Boleyn (2010) Molly Cutpurse, Alien Queens (2010) A.E. Moorat, Henry VIII: Wolfman (2010) Cinsearea S., Boleyn: Tudor Vampire (2010) Brenda Rickman Vantrease, The Heretic’s Wife (2010) Sandra Byrd, To Die For: A Novel of Anne Boleyn (2011) Jennifer Dahl, Evil’s Own Trinity (2011) Carolly Erickson, The Favoured Queen (2011) Q. Kelly, Third (2011) Raven A. Nuckols, Had the Queen Lived: An Alternative History of Anne Boleyn (2017) Robert Parry, The Arrow Chest (2011) Kate Pearce, Blood of the Rose (2011) Alison Prince, Henry VIII’s Wives (2011) JoAnn Spears, Six of One: A Tudor Riff (2011) Lyn Andrews, The Queen’s Promise (2012) Anne Clinard Barnhill, At the Mercy of the Queen: A Novel of Anne Boleyn (2012) Frances Burke, Enchantress (2012) Kate Emerson, The King’s Damsel (2012) Simone Holloway, Erotic Histories (2012) Crystal Lee, Hart Coursing: Hounding Anne Boleyn (2012) Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies (2012) Ann Nonny, The Merry Wives of Henry VIII: A Tudor Spoof Collection (2012) Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Bring Me the Head of Anne Boleyn (2012) Libby Schmais, Tudor Rules: How Anne Boleyn Helped Me Survive High School (2012) Carol Wolper, Anne of Hollywood (2012) Laura Anderson, The Boleyn King (2013) Judith Arnopp, The Kiss of the Concubine (2013) Frank Bukowski, The Six Wives of Henry VIII (2013) Juliana Gray, Anne Boleyn’s Sleeve (2013) Joe Harding, The Swordsman of Calais, Book 1: Commission (2013) Michele Kallio, Betrayal (2013) V.E. Lynne, Ambition’s Queen: A Novel of Tudor England (2013)

 APPENDIX 

301

Katherine Longshore, Tarnish (2013) Sarah Morris, Le Temps Viendra: Volume 1 (2013) Elizabeth Moss, Wolf Bride (2013) April Taylor, Court of Conspiracy (2013) Alice Warwick, Sherlock Holmes and the Spirit of Anne Boleyn (2013) Angela Warwick, Moth to the Flame: The Story of Anne Boleyn (2013) Wendy J.  Dunn, The Light in the Labyrinth: The Last Days of Anne Boleyn (2014) Charlie Fenton, Perseverance (2014) Jane Hardstaff, The Executioner’s Daughter (2014) Nicholas Jones, Mistrustful Minds (2014) Katherine Longshore, Brazen (2014) Emily Purdy, The Boleyn Pride (2014) Lacey Baldwin-Smith, In Bed with Anne Boleyn (2014) Sarah Morris, Le Temps Viendra: Volume II (2014) Kelly Stuart, The Other Side of Anne (2014) Sandra Vasoli, Je Anne Boleyn: Struck with the Dark of Love (2014) Zoe Bramley, The Lady’s Favour (2015) Dawn Ius, Anne & Henry (2015) Lesley Jepsen, The Secret (2015) Hunter S. Jones, Phoenix Rising (2015) Olivia Longueville, Between Two Kings (2015) Ruth Spacey, “Anne Boleyn” (2015) Jennifer Wilson, Kindred Spirits: Tower of London (2015) Christine Elaine Black, Anne Boleyn: Command of the King (2016) Zoe Bramley, The Boleyn Secret (2016) Zoe Bramley, The Boleyn Necklace: A Tudor Ghost Story (2016) Margaret Brazear, The Minstrel’s Lady (2016) Malyn Bromfield, Mayflowers for November (2016) Bella Chase, The Court of Boleyn (2016) G. Lawrence, La Petite Boulain (2016) G. Lawrence, The Lady Anne (2016) Catherine McCarran, Queenbreaker: Perseverance, a Novel (2016) Christina Price, The Most Happy: Bearing (2016) Sandra Vasoli, Je Anne Boleyn: Truth Endures (2016) Debra Shiveley Welch, Circle of Time (2016) Elizabeth Andrews, Anne Boleyn: The Falcon Falls in May (2017) Caroline Angus, Frailty of Human Affairs (2017) Zoe Bramley, The Spirit of Anne Boleyn: A Tudor Ghost Story (2017)

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APPENDIX

Camilla Cornish, When Love Unlocks Time (2017) Jonathon East, The Conjured Vengeance of Anne Boleyn (2017) Helen R.  Davis, The Most Happy: An Alternate History of Anne Boleyn (2017) Adrienne Dillard, The Raven’s Widow (2017) Amber Duran and Talia Johnson, Misconstrued (2017) Cora Harrison, The Cardinal’s Court (2017) Mary Hoffman, The Ravenmaster’s Boy (2017) G. Lawrence, Above All Others (2017) Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss, Six (2017) Natalia Richards, Falcon’s Rise: The Early Years of Anne Boleyn (2017) Bonnie G. Smith, The Nymph from Heaven (2017) Anne Stevens, A Falcon Falls: The Death of Queens (2017) Shelly Talcott, Fall of the House of Queens (2017) Alison Weir, Anne Boleyn: A King’s Obsession (2017) Alison Weir, “The Tower is Full of Ghosts Today” (2017) M.T. Anderson, Jennifer Donnelly, Candace Fleming, Stephanie Hemphill, Deborah Hopkinson, Linda Sue Park and Lisa Ann Sandell, Fatal Throne: The Wives of Henry VIII Tell All (2018) Caroline Angus, Shaking the Throne (2018) Zoe Bramley, The Night Stair: A Tudor Ghost Story (2018) Margaret Brazear, Ye Olde Antique Shoppe: The Anne Boleyn Necklace (2018) Margaret Brazear, For the Love of Anne: Anne Boleyn’s First Love (2018) Emma Fenton, Whore (2018) David Field, The King’s Commoner (2018) David Field, Justice for the Cardinal: Thomas Cromwell Is Out for Revenge (2018) Melody Fisher, The Wishing Bones (2018) Donna Hosie, The 48 (2018) Lucy Lancaster, Gloriana Nascent: An Alternate Tudor History (2018) G. Lawrence, The Scandal of Christendom (2018) G. Lawrence, Judge the Best (2018) Tony Riches, Brandon: Tudor Knight (2018) Alison Weir, “The Chateau of Briis: A Lesson in Love” (2018) Alison Weir, “The Grandmother’s Tale” (2018) Robert Brall, The Sparkly Dark Road of Anne Boleyn (2019) Hannah Capin, The Dead Queens Club (2019) Elizabeth Cook, Lux (2019) Barbara Gaskell Denvil, The Deception of Consequences (2019)

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Karen Heenan, Songbird (2019) Hunter S. Jones, Magic and Mystery: Tales of Tudor England (2019) E.A. Rice, 1535: A Time Travel Novel (2019) Holly-Eloise Walters, The Most Happy (2019) Seena Ahmad, “Let’s Play Dead.” Paris Review Issue 232, Spring 2020 Olivia Hayfield, Wife After Wife (2020) Hilary Mantel, The Mirror and the Light (2020) Natalia Richards, The Falcon’s Flight (2020)

Index1

A Absolutism, 50, 74, 78 Actes and Monuments (Foxe), 37, 38, 55, 134 The Acts and Monuments of the Church (Foxe), 4 Agency, 12, 13, 31, 38, 40, 51, 109, 112, 120, 122, 136, 146, 154, 156, 161–168, 215, 216, 220, 225, 229, 233, 243, 257, 262, 263, 273, 284 Ahmed, Sara, 229 Ahnert, Ruth, 34 Aikin, Lucy, 106, 108 Ainsworth, William Harrison, 11, 106, 116, 117 Albery, Peter, 170, 193, 194 Ales, Alexander, 36n57 All or Nothing (Dessau), 194 Amazon Kindle platform, 209 Anderson, Laura, 261, 262 Anderson, Maxwell, 167, 168, 272, 272n21

“And Wild for to Hold” (Kress), 248, 249 Anglorum Praelia (Ocland), 40, 40n84 Anna Bolena (Donizetti), 131 Anna Boleyn (film), 268 Ann Boleyn to Henry the Eighth: An Epistle (Whitehead), 85, 87 Anne & Henry (Ius), 242–244 Anne Boleyn (Barrington), 160, 162, 162n24 Anne Boleyn (Brenton), 233, 257 Anne Boleyn (Drew), 160 Anne Boleyn (Fielding), 133, 133n6 Anne Boleyn (film), 268 Anne Boleyn (Friedmann), 121–124 Anne Boleyn (Heys), 176 Anne Boleyn (Loftas), 198 Anne Boleyn: A Dramatic Poem (Milman), 12, 133, 134 Anne Boleyn: A Historical Drama in Five Acts (Terrell), 133, 136

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

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INDEX

Anne Boleyn: A King’s Obsession (Weir), 117n70, 225 Anne Boleyn: A New Life of England’s Tragic Queen (Denny), 230 Anne Boleyn: An Historical Romance (Thomson), 118 Anne Boleyn: An Original Historical Burlesque Extravaganza (Edwardes), 147, 148 Anne Boleyn: An Original Historical Play in Five Acts (Taylor), 133 Anne Boleyn: A Tragedy (Boker), 133, 140 Anne Boleyn: A Tragedy (Grover), 135 Anne Boleyn: A Tragedy in Five Acts (Nutt), 133, 137 Anne Boleyn: A Tragedy in Four Acts (Albery), 193 Anne Boleyn: A Tragedy in Six Acts (Tyler), 133, 142 The Anne Boleyn Files (website), 213, 222 The Anne Boleyn Papers (Norton), 21n2, 61n47 Anne Boleyn, or a Crown of Thorns (Dickinson), 12, 133, 144 Anne Boleyn, or, The Jester’s Oath (Dobson), 133 Anne Boleyn, or The Queen of May: A Play in Four Acts (Pakenham-­ Walsh), 167 Anne Boleyn’s Ghost (Archer), 255 The Anne Boleyn Society (website), 222 “Anne Boleyn to King Henry VIII” (Tollet), 85 Anne of Hollywood (Wolper), 245, 246 Anne of the Thousand Days (Anderson), 167, 168, 272 Anne of the Thousand Days (film), 15, 267 Anne of the Thousand Days (Jarrott), 272n21

The Anne-Queen’s Chronicle (Farrer), 157 “Annie Boleyn’s New Year” (Lachman), 124, 125n98 Anthony and Cleopatra (Shakespeare), 62 Antiquarianism, 101, 149 Appleford, Amy, 61n47 Archer, Liam, 255 Armitage, Aileen, 189–191 Armstrong, Jessie, 158, 161 Arnopp, Judith, 254 The Arrow Chest (Parry), 257, 258 Aske, Robert, 122, 279 Assmann, Jan, 7 Athaliah, 43, 43n106, 44, 44n107, 52 Austen, Jane, 72, 91, 96 The Autobiography of Henry VIII, With Notes by His Fool, Will Somers (George), 195 B Baillie, William M., 56, 57 Banks, John, 9, 67, 73–81, 86–88, 148 Bann, Stephen, 102 Bannet, Eve Tavor, 81, 83n50, 91n95 Baptistes, sive calumnia (Buchanan), 52 Barker, William G. B., 268 Barker-Benfield, G.J., 85, 86 Barlow, Jenna Elizabeth, 165, 170, 200, 213, 214, 217, 224 Barnes, Margaret Campbell, 154, 174, 174n66, 175, 177, 178, 196 Barneville, Marie-Catherine Le Jumel de, see d’Aulnoy, Madame Barrington, E., 160, 162, 162n24, 163, 165, 170, 178 Basinger, Jeanine, 173 Bayle, Pierre, 94

 INDEX 

Beauman, Nicole, 162, 169 Belgau-Human, Elizabeth, 44 Benger, Elizabeth, 104, 106–110, 112, 113, 119, 139, 140 Bernard, G.W., 3n5, 166 Betham, Matilda, 93 Between Two Kings (Longueville), 261 Between Two Worlds: The Story of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn – And Her Celtic Heritage (Milner), 256 Bible, 37, 120, 121, 205, 233 Biofictions, 210, 211, 217 Biographical Dictionary of Celebrated Women (Betham), 93 Biography, 1, 21, 42, 43, 53, 92–95, 93n100, 93n101, 104, 107–111, 109n33, 121, 146, 157, 168, 169, 184, 188, 198, 199, 206, 210–212, 230, 242, 255, 258 Birth date, 1 Bitch (term), 218, 223, 285 The Black Pearl (Cassidy), 196 Bloch, R. Howard, 23n4 Blood of the Rose (Pearce), 259, 260 Blood Royal (Hardwick), 194 Bluff King Hal: Or, Harlequin Anne Boleyn and the Jolly Miller of the River Dee; The Sargeant’s Wife, 147 Boker, George, 133, 140–142 Boleyn, Elizabeth (mother), 4, 205, 217 Boleyn, Mary, 176, 185, 189–191, 194, 212, 225, 254, 260 The Boleyn Bride (Purdy), 217 The Boleyn King (Anderson), 261, 262 The Boleyn Necklace: A Tudor Ghost Story (Bramley), 254 Boleyn: Tudor Vampire (S), 259, 260 Bonham Carter, Helena, 278, 281 Bonvisi, Antonio, 25 Book of Martyrs (Foxe), 4

307

Booth, Alison, 112 Bordo, Susan, 2, 7, 14, 35, 41, 73, 79, 108, 118, 139, 160, 175, 213, 220, 222, 230, 268–270, 274, 279n42, 285 Borgia, Danielle N., 227 Borham-Puyal, Miriam, 259 Boyton, Peggy, 189 Bradley, Mary Hastings, 12, 118, 158–160, 170, 178 Bramley, Zoe, 254 Brenton, Howard, 233, 257 Bridget Jones’s Diary (Fielding), 215 Brief Gaudy Hour (Barnes), 174, 196 Brigden, Susan, 27, 30 Bring Up the Bodies (Mantel), 5, 219–221, 286 Brome, Richard, 51, 65, 66 Brooke, Elizabeth, 23 Brooks, Victoria, 51, 66 Brown, Joanne, 241, 242 Brown, Laura, 77n24 Buchanan, George, 52 Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 259, 260 Bujold, Genevieve, 272–274 Bull, Marcus, 103 Bullard, Rebecca, 82, 83 Bunbury, Selina, 111, 112, 240 Burbage, James, 49 Burlesque, 12, 101, 147, 148, 269 Burnet, Gilbert, 26 Burney, Frances, 91 Burns, Robert, 102 Burstein, Miriam Elizabeth, 13, 112, 121, 135, 158, 160, 187, 191, 223, 248 Burton, Llewella, 280 Burton, Richard, 272 Bushnell, Candace, 215 Butler, Robert Olen, 258 Byrd, Sandra, 231, 232

308 

INDEX

C Calhoun-French, Diana M., 250 Cannadine, David, 10 Capin, Hannah, 15, 242, 244, 295 Cardinal Wolsey (film), 268 Carl, Lillian Stuart, 247, 248, 250 Carnell, Rachel, 82, 82n48 Carney, Jo Eldridge, 61 Caroline (queen of Brunswick), 106 Cary, Elizabeth, 8, 51–55, 63, 72 Cassidy, Laura, 196 The Castle of Otranto (Walpole), 116 Castle Rackrent (Edgewort), 114 Catherine (queen of England), 62, 117 Catherine of Aragon, 21, 27, 34, 42, 56, 59, 64 Catholic Church Boleyn’s power and, 3 depictions of, 32 Cavendish, George, 42–44, 44n110, 198 Chadwick, Justin, 280 The Chained Book (Leslie), 120, 121, 121n82 Chapuys, Eustace, 4, 21, 21n1, 21n2, 25, 61n47, 66, 139, 275 conceptions of Boleyn, 21 Chernock, Arianne, 93 Chick lit, 215, 222 Children’s novels, 120 The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, 198 Christian publishing, 14, 231 Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland (Holinshed), 55 City of Ladies (de Pizan), 93 Class politics, 195–199 Cold Steel (Shiel), 121, 123, 124 Comedy, 101, 111, 114, 116, 118, 123, 126 “A Commemoration of Queene Anne Bullayne” (Fulwell), 39

The Concubine (Lofts), 185, 186, 197–199, 231 Condemned (Reeve), 181 The Conjured Vengeance of Anne Boleyn (East), 259 Consent, 75, 184, 186, 244 The Constant Princess (Gregory), 287 Cooper, Helen, 49 Cosslett, Tess, 250 Counterfactuals, 15, 113, 116, 148, 156, 240, 261–263 Courtly love tradition, 22, 23, 23n4, 31 The Court Masque, or Richmond in the Olden Time: An Opera in Two Acts (Planche), 133 Cowie, Laura, 268 Crane, Julie, 2, 142, 171, 202, 213 The Creation of Anne Boleyn (Bordo), 7, 279n42, 285 Cromwell, Thomas, 27, 113, 122, 123, 146, 147, 170, 193, 219–221, 219n44, 228, 230, 232, 245, 262, 275, 276, 280, 284, 286–288 Cronica del Rey Enrico, 25 Crouch, Nathaniel, 81–84 The Crown (television series), 277, 286 Crown, Nick K., 50 A Crown of Thorns, or Anne Boleyn (Dickinson), 133 Cruikshank, George, 106 Czaplicka, John, 7 D A Dangerous Temptation (Kyle), 196 d’Arcens, Louise, 253, 253n50, 257n64 The Dark-Eyed Queen (Prole), 176 Darrell, Elizabeth, 28, 172 d’Aulnoy, Madame, 9, 72–81, 89, 94, 118

 INDEX 

Davis, Helen R., 262 The Days of Reformation (Robinson), 120 de Groot, Jerome, 73, 114, 120, 155, 156, 193, 199, 213, 214, 220, 248, 253, 282, 282n46 The Dead Queens Club (Capin), 15, 243, 244 De remediis utriusque fortunae (Petrarch), 27 Decadent movement, 123–124 Deception (film), 268 Defender of the Faith: A Romance (Mayhew), 121 Denny, Joanne, 230 Dessau, Joanna, 194 Devonshire Manuscript (Wyatt), 33 Dickinson, Anna, 12, 131, 133, 144–147 Dietrich, Marlene, 270 Dillard, Adrienne, 229, 230 The Divine King in England (Murray), 162 Divorced Beheaded Survived (Lindsey), 30 Dobson, R., 133, 133n7 Donizetti, 131 Doomed Queen Anne (Meyer), 241 Dormer, Natalie, 6, 222, 249, 254, 273, 283–285 Dowling, Maria, 3n5, 36, 36n58, 36n61, 37n65 Dramatic representations, 6, 12, 50 See also Victorian theatre Drew, Reginald, 160 Duke of Suffolk, 25 Duncan, Ian, 114n54 Duncan, Melanie C., 231 Dunn, Suzannah, 223, 224, 229 Duran, Amber, 245

309

E East, Jonathon, 259 Eastwood, Adrienne L., 277 E-books, 209 Edgewort, Maria, 114 The Edinburgh Review, 136 Edwardes, Conway, 147–149 Edwards, A.S.G., 44n110 Eggert, Katherine, 64, 65 “Εἰρηναρχία” (Ocland), 40 Elias, Amy J., 205 Elizabeth (film), 16, 75, 203, 276–282 Elizabethaeis (Ocland), 40 Eltis, Sos, 138, 143 The English Philosopher, or the History of Mr Cleveland (Prévost), 113 “An Epitaph on the deathe of Queene Anne Bullayne” (Fulwell), 39 Eroticism, 168–172, 174, 183–188, 215, 244, 245, 255, 258, 267, 276, 285 Escapism, 155, 247 Eugenides, Jeffrey, 204 Exclusion Crisis, 78 Execution, 2, 5, 15, 34, 35, 38, 42–44, 53, 59, 66, 78, 80, 85, 95, 105, 106, 114, 115, 120, 131, 136, 137, 141, 143, 144, 163, 170, 171, 175, 185, 189, 193, 195, 219, 220, 228, 229, 232, 253–256, 258–261, 270–272, 274–276, 279–282, 284–287 The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots (film), 267 F Fandom, 209, 222, 241, 243, 250, 283 Fanfiction, 6, 227

310 

INDEX

Fara, Patricia, 85 Farrer, Reginald, 157 The Favor of Kings (Bradley), 12, 118, 158–160, 169 Fay, Elizabeth, 102 Feather Light, Diamond Bright (Saxton), 189, 212 Female Biography (Hays), 93, 94, 96 Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture (Levy), 217 The Feminine Mystique (Freidan), 197 Feminism, 13, 164, 178, 182, 183, 192, 194, 199–204, 210, 211, 214, 216, 218, 224–226, 230, 248, 271, 274, 294 See also Women’s power Femme fatale role, 144 Fenton, Charlie, 229 Ferguson, Margaret, 52–54 Ferry, Anne, 31 Fiction biofictions, 210, 211, 217 fanfiction, 6, 227 historical fiction, 1, 6, 10–12, 27n22, 41, 42, 73, 75, 92, 101–126, 139, 142, 146, 154, 155, 159, 161, 162, 164, 170, 173, 181–183, 194, 197, 202, 205, 206, 209–234, 240–242, 245, 247, 248, 252–254, 260, 273–279, 285 science fiction, 15, 240, 247, 249, 261 Tudor fiction, 2, 241 women’s historical fiction, 173, 199 Young Adult fiction, 15, 111, 240–242 Fielding, Helen, 215 Fielding, Henry, 9 Fielding, Sarah, 9, 10, 72, 88–92, 94 Fielding, T., 133, 133n6

Fifty Shades of Grey (James), 227 Film, 15, 16, 153, 167, 169, 173–178, 203, 206, 212, 216, 267–288 Fire with Fire (Wolf), 203 The Flame and the Flower (Woodiwiss), 184, 186, 188 Flappers, 156, 163 Fletcher, John, 8, 9, 15, 50, 50n4, 51, 55–57, 55n17, 56n21, 58n29, 59–61, 61n47, 66, 67, 81, 268 The Flower of Fame (Fulwell), 39 Foakes, R.A., 57n28 Forever Amber (Winsor), 155, 176 Forrest, William, 37n65 The 48 (Hosie), 248, 249 Foxe, John, 3, 4, 35, 37, 38, 42, 55, 134 Foy, Claire, 286, 287 Freidan, Betty, 197 Friedmann, P., 121–123 Froude, James Anthony, 136–139, 145 Frye, Susan, 50n4 Fulwell, Ulpian, 39, 40 G Gainsford, Anne, 26 Gallagher, Catherine, 261 Garbo, Greta, 270 Garrett, Ginger, 233 Gater, Dilys, 196 George, Margaret, 195 “The Ghost of Anne Boleyn: What a Traveller Beheld at the Scaffold at Tower Hill” (anonymous), 255 Ghosts, 11, 15, 89, 89n82, 116, 167, 233, 240, 252–258, 260 See also Supernatural Gill, Rosalind, 214 Gilmour, Michael, 131

 INDEX 

Girl Interrupted (Kaysen), 204 Gleick, James, 249 Globe Theatre, 55, 145, 257 Glynn, Basil, 282 Glynn, Elinor, 169 The God of the Witches (Murray), 162 God’s Outlaw (film), 276 Gone with the Wind, 155, 173, 174, 176, 177 Goodhue, Elizabeth, 90, 91 Gothic mash-ups, 15, 259, 260 Gothic novels, 11, 102, 107, 113–118 “The Government of Peace” (Ocland), 40 Grahame-Smith, Seth, 259 Greenblatt, Stephen, 33 Greene, Richard Leighton, 33 Gregory, Philippa, 6, 14, 42, 189, 209, 212–221, 223, 226, 277, 279, 280, 287 influences of, 6, 209 Grey, Lady Jane, 11, 82, 106, 118, 120, 141, 263 Gristwood, Sarah, 5 Grover, Henry Montague, 133, 135, 136 “Grudge on who liste, this ys my lott” (Wyatt), 33 Guse, Peter, 253 Gutierrez, Nancy, 54n15 Gwyn, Nell, 188 H Hackett, Francis, 171 Had the Queen Lived (Nuckols), 262 Hall, Edward, 55 Hamilton (musical), 293 Hamilton, Donna B., 58n29 Hansson, Heidi, 112 Happily Ever After endings, 188 Hardwick, Mollie, 194

311

Harper, Karen, 185, 190, 215 Harpsfield, Nicholas, 25, 44 Harrier, Richard, 8n15, 35 Harrison, Rex, 167, 272n21 Harry Potter series (Rowling), 5, 198 Hattaway, Michael, 49 Hayfield, Olivia, 246 Haynes, Kenneth, 176, 177 Hays, Mary, 72, 93–96, 107 Heinecken, Dawn, 186 The Heir of Allington (Wiat), 187, 187n15, 188, 188n20 Hell (Butler), 258, 259 Henry VIII, 1, 3, 9–11, 32, 32n40, 35, 39, 41, 50, 50n4, 52, 53, 55n16, 65, 78, 104, 122, 132, 136, 148, 165, 167, 195, 206, 244, 245, 251, 282, 283, 293, 294, 297 depictions of, 32 iconography of, 32n40 Henry VIII (film), 268 Henry VIII (king of England), desire for Anne, 9 Henry VIII (Shakespeare and Fletcher), 8, 9, 15, 50, 51, 55, 56, 66, 67, 268 Henry VIII (television series), 277 Henry VIII and Ann Boleyn (Masters), 166 Henry VIII and His Six Wives (film), 275 Henry VIII: Wolfman (Moorat), 259, 260 Herbert, Henry William, 139 Herod, 44, 52–54, 54n15 Heys, Margaret, 176 Hickerson, Megan, 38, 165 Historical and Critical Dictionary (Bayle), 94

312 

INDEX

Historical fiction, 1, 11, 12, 41, 42, 73, 75, 92, 101–126, 139, 142, 146, 154, 155, 159, 161, 162, 164, 170, 173, 181–183, 194, 197, 199, 202, 205, 206, 209–234, 240–242, 245, 247, 248, 252–254, 260, 273–279, 285 representations of Boleyn in, 6, 10 Historical Tales: A Novel (anonymous), 114 “Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third” (Walpole), 63 The History of England (Austen), 96 History of England (Froude), 136 History of the Reformation (Burnet), 26 Holinshed, 40, 55 Horror, 43, 105, 117, 135, 243 Hosie, Donna, 248 Howard, Katherine, 5, 50, 106n19, 123, 193, 254 Hsu-Ming Teo, 169, 183, 221 Hudston, Sara, 131 Hughes, Helen, 155 Hui, Roland, 42, 198 Hull, E.M., 169 Hume, Robert, 77 I If waker care if sodayne pale Coolour (Wyatt), 28 Imaginary Conversations (Landor), 107, 125 “Imaginary Conversations: Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn” (Landon), 124 “In morning wyse syns daylye I increase” (Wyatt), 35

The Innocent Usurper, or the Death of the Lady Jane Grey (Banks), 77 Inside the Tudor Court: Henry VIII and His Six Wives Through the Writings of the Spanish Ambassador Eustace Chapuys (Mackay), 21n1 In the Footsteps of Anne Boleyn (Morris), 250 In the Footsteps of the Six Wives of Henry VIII (Morris), 250 In the Shadow of the Lions (Garrett), 233 Irwin, Margaret, 154 The Island Queens, or the Death of Mary Queen of Scotland (Banks), 77 “It” concept, 3 Ius, Dawn, 242, 243 Ives, Eric, 3n5, 25n8, 26n16, 27, 34, 35, 41, 63, 230 on Sanders, 41 on Shakespeare, 63 on Wyatt, 25n8, 27 on Wyatt’s poetry, 25n8 on Wyatt’s relationship with Boleyn, 25n8 J James, E.J., 227 Jameson, Anna, 107, 110–112 Jane Seymour: The Haunted Queen (Weir), 254 Jarrott, Charles, 271n21 Je Anne Boleyn series (Vasoli), 227 Jezebel, 43–45, 52 Johnson, Christopher, 72, 89 Johnson, Talia, 245 A Journey from this World to the Next (Fielding), 9, 88

 INDEX 

K Kaplan, M. Lindsay, 64, 65 Katherine (queen of England), 4 Katherine of Aragon, 9, 27, 37n65, 50, 62 Kaysen, Suzanna, 204 Keats, John, 102 Kelly, Deidre, 216 Kelly, Q., 247 Kensler, Marian, 116, 133n7, 139, 145, 147 Kindle platform, 209 King’s Fool (Barnes), 196 Kingsford, Anna, 255 King Takes Queen, 285 The Kiss of the Concubine (Arnopp), 254 Knox, John, 204 Korda, Alexander, 269, 270n16, 271, 286 Kosminsky, Peter, 287 Kress, Nancy, 248 Kucich, Greg, 109 Kyle, Barbara, 196 L “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” (Keats), 102 Lachman, H.S., 124, 125n98 Lackey, Michael, 210, 211 The Lady in the Tower (Plaidy), 163, 200, 201 Lady’s Magazine, 92 Lafayette, Marie-Madeleine de, 73 Lafferty, Jennifer K., 273 Lander, Jesse, 37 Landon, Letitia Elizabeth (L.E.L.), 107, 126 Landor, Walter Savage, 107, 124–126 Lane, Jane, 192–194, 215

313

The Last Boleyn (Harper), 185, 186, 190, 215 Lathom, Francis, 115, 115n58, 116 Latymer, William, 22, 35–38, 36n61, 37n65, 42 Laughton, Charles, 159, 269, 270 Le Temps Viendra (Morris), 15, 249–252, 283 Leahy, William, 55n16 Lee, Sophia, 113 Lehmann, Rosamond, 162 L.E.L. (Landon, Letitia Elizabeth), 107, 126 Leslie, Emma, 120 Levy, Ariel, 217 The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn (Ives), 25n8, 26n16, 36n57 The Life of Cardinal Wolsey (Cavendish), 42, 198 Life of Anne Boleigne (Wyatt), 42 Lifetime movies, 2 Light, Alison, 154, 161 Lindsay, Philip, 171, 172, 269 Lindsey, Karen, 30, 72, 164, 247 The Lion in Winter (film), 272 Lipscomb, Suzannah, 24 Lives of Celebrated Female Sovereigns and Illustrious Women (Jameson), 110 Lives of the Queens of England (Strickland), 11, 109, 109n33 Lofts, Norah, 185, 197–199, 231 Longshore, Katherine, 241, 242 Longueville, Olivia, 261, 262 “The Lost Princes: The Tower, 1536,” 256 Lowthorpe, Philippa, 279, 280 Lubitsch, Ernst, 268 Luckham, Claire, 204, 205 Ludot-Vlasak, Ronan, 141 Lukács, Georg, 211

314 

INDEX

Luther’s Ambassadors (Margrave), 233 Lynch, Andrew, 253 Lyons, Sarah Frantz, 184 Lyric poetry, 22 M MacCulloch, Diarmaid, 146 Mackay, Lauren, 21n1 Macpherson, James, 102 Mademoiselle Boleyn (Maxwell), 222, 224, 225, 231 Maitland, Edward, 255 Maitzen, Rohan, 107–109 Mandler, Peter, 104 A Man for All Seasons (film), 271, 272 Mantel, Hilary, 5, 14, 146, 218–221, 286–288 Margaret of Austria, 25, 26n16 Margrave, Jay, 233 Marguerite de Navarre, 120, 164, 224, 225, 231 Marie Antoinette, 105 Marie Antoinette (film), 270 Marlow, Toby, 293, 294 Marshall, Peter, 271 Mary Queen of Scots, 106, 113 Masters, Edgar Lee, 166 Mathew, Frank James, 121 Maxwell, Richard, 113 Maxwell, Robin, 202, 203, 203n70, 221, 224, 225, 231 Mayer, David, 133 Mayer, Robert, 71, 82, 83 Mayhew, Mickey, 14, 222 McCarran, Katherine, 216 McMullan, Gordon, 57 McRobbie, Angela, 215, 216 Mean Girls (film), 216 Medievalism, 101, 103–105, 149, 256 Melman, Billie, 105, 106, 113, 116 Melodramas, 12, 101, 131, 133, 134, 136, 149, 153, 155, 166, 177

Melusine, 219 Memoirs of Henry the Eighth of England: With the Fortunes, Fates, and Characters of His Six Wives (Herbert), 139 Memoirs of queens, Illustrious and Celebrated (Hays), 95 Memoirs of the Court of Elizabeth (Aikin), 106 Memoirs of the Life of Anne Boleyn (Benger), 104, 108 Mena, Paula de Pando, 77 ‘Merrie England’ trope, 104 #MeToo movement, 246, 288 Metrical Visions (Cavendish), 43, 44n110 Meyer, Allison Machlis, 38, 39, 55n17 Meyer, Carolyn, 241, 242 Meyer, Stephenie, 227, 259 Micheli, Linda, 59 Miller-Tomlinson, Tracey, 78, 81n44 Milman, Henry Hart, 12, 133–135, 140 Milner, Kathleen Ann, 256 Miranda, Lin-Manuel, 293 The Mirror and the Light (Mantel), 5, 219, 220 Misconstrued (Duran and Johnson), 245 Mistress Minx (Haynes), 176, 177 Mitchell, Rosemary, 118 Monarchy, significance of, 10 Monstrous Regiment, 204 Montagu, Elizabeth, 92, 92n99 Moorat, A.E., 260 Moore, Gaywyn, 62 Morgan, Peter, 277, 279–281 Morris, Sarah, 15, 249–252, 283 Moss, Lucy, 293, 294 The Most Happy: An Alternative History of Anne Boleyn (Davis), 262 Moth to the Flame (Warwick), 226

 INDEX 

Mullaney, Steven, 37 Murder Most Royal (Plaidy), 163, 165, 170, 178, 200, 201 Murray, Margaret, 162, 162n25, 198 Music, 6, 167, 204, 293 My Friend Anne (Armstrong), 158, 161 Myself My Enemy (Plaidy), 200 Mystic Events, or, The Vision of the Tapestry (Lathom), 115, 115n58, 116 N Nahin, Paul, 247 Narcissism, 23, 23n4 Nolan, Hayley, 231 Noling, Kim, 56n23, 60 Norrie, Aidan, 277 “Norris and Anne Boleyn” (Overs), 124 Norton, Elizabeth, 21n2, 61n47 Novak, Julia, 188 Novels biography and, 93, 199 rise of, 9, 71 The Novels of Elizabeth, Queen of England, Containing the History of Queen Ann of Bullen (D’Aulnoy), 74 Nuckols, Raven A., 262 Nutt, D., 133, 137–139 O Obedience of a Christian Man (Tyndale), 42, 276 Oberon, Merle, 173, 269, 270 Ocland, Christopher, 40, 40n84, 40n87 O’Hara, Scarlett (fictional character), 173–178, 184, 226, 271

315

Olden Time, 104 On the Tudor Trail (website), 222 Opera, 6, 131, 177, 282 The Other Boleyn Girl (Gregory), 14, 42, 189, 190, 209, 212, 213, 242, 277, 279–281 Overs, John, 124, 125 Owen, Susan J., 80 P Pakenham-Walsh, W.S., 167, 255 Palmer, Melvin D., 73n6 Pandosto (Greene), 63, 65 Pantomime, 101, 131, 147 Parr, Catherine, 50, 244 Parry, Robert, 257 Passion’s Reign (Harper), 185 Passivity, 12, 112, 161–168 Pearce, Kate, 260 Percy, Henry, 13, 73, 75, 76, 90, 94, 118, 119, 122, 125, 147, 148, 156, 159, 170, 174, 176, 178, 192, 209, 225, 261, 272, 273, 278, 279 Percy, Thomas, 102 Perry, Curtis, 22, 91n95 Perseverance (Fenton), 229 Petrarca, Francesco, 29, 30n33 Petrarch, 23, 27, 29–31, 144, 187, 202 Pettegrew, John, 195 Phaedra (Seneca), 34 Philips, Deborah, 182, 199 Phillips, Mark Salber, 71 Pilhuj, Katja, 273 Pizan, Christine de, 93 Plaidy, Jean, 154, 163–165, 163n30, 170, 171, 178, 200, 201, 203 Planche, J.R., 133 Plutarch, 27

316 

INDEX

Poems on Several Occasions, with Anne Boleyn to Henry VIII. An Epistle (Tollet), 85 Poetry, 8, 21–24, 23n4, 27, 29, 31, 35, 50, 55n15, 67, 85–88, 110, 134, 142, 167, 171, 187, 226, 294, 297 Pole, Reginald, 44 Pomerantz, Shauna, 216 Porten, Henny, 268 Postfeminism, 214–216, 218, 221, 223, 245 Powell, Kerry, 131 Power, 1, 3, 5, 6, 10, 12, 13, 15, 16, 23, 28, 31, 34, 38, 39, 54, 54n15, 57, 62, 65, 66, 74–77, 79, 81, 82, 87, 89, 92, 109, 111, 113, 115, 119, 124, 126, 134, 138, 140, 144, 146, 155, 156, 158–160, 162, 166, 174–176, 181–187, 190–193, 197, 199–205, 214–217, 219, 224–227, 232, 239, 244, 245, 255, 259–261, 263, 267, 271, 273, 278, 280, 286, 294 Premodern, 103, 253 Prévost, Antoine, 113 Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (Grahame-Smith), 259 The Princess of Cleves (de Lafayette), 73, 74 Princeton Union, 124 The Private Life of Henry VIII (film), 16, 159, 173, 267, 269, 270, 270n16, 277, 286 The Private Life of Henry VIII (Laughton), 16, 159, 173, 267, 269, 270, 270n16, 277, 286 Prole, Lozania, 176 Protestant martyrdom, 39 Psychological realism, 89 Purdy, Emily, 176, 217, 218

Q The Queen (Morgan), 277 The Queen and Concubine (Brome), 51, 65, 66 Queen Anne Boleyn (Hackett), 171 Queen Anne Boleyn: A Tragedy in Five Acts (Smyth), 133 Queen Bees and Wannabes (Wiseman), 216 Queenbreaker (McCarran), 216, 217 Queen Christina (film), 270 The Queen of Subtleties (Dunn), 223, 229 The Queen’s Confession (Lindsay), 171, 269 The Queen’s Lady (Kyle), 196 Queens in film, 270 Queens of England series (Plaidy), 11, 200 Quiet of Mind (Plutarch), 27 Quinn, Arthur Hobson, 140n33 Quoss-Moore, Rebecca, 57 R Rampling, Charlotte, 275 Rankin, Mark, 58 Rape, 123, 164, 170, 184–186, 217, 279, 281 The Raven’s Widow (Dillard), 229, 230 The Recess (Lee), 113 Reeve, Linda-Dawn, 181 Reformation Boleyn’s role in, 103 depictions of, 21, 32, 57, 103, 104, 109, 110, 112, 119 Regis, Pamela, 173 Reith Lectures, 5 Religion reformation and, 2, 22, 25, 27, 36, 65, 106, 122, 123, 126, 145 return of, 12, 77, 101, 230–233

 INDEX 

Reliques of Ancient English History (Percy), 102 The Reluctant Mistress (Boyton), 189, 212 Rerum in acclesia gestarum (Foxe), 37 Richardson, Glenn, 272, 273 Richmond, Hugh, 62 Rime sparse (Petrarca), 29 The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn (Warnicke), 212 The Rise and Growth of the Anglican Schism (Sanders), 4, 22, 25, 41 Roach, Joseph, 3 Robinson, Emma, 120 Roders, Dana, 220 Rogers, Rosemary, 184 Romance novels, 173, 178, 181, 183–185 Romans, 49 Romans à clef, 82 Romanticism, 102, 226 Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare), 59 “A Rose With All Its Thorns” (Carl), 247, 250 Rowley, Samuel, 50, 50n4, 55, 58 Rowling, J.K., 4 Royal Circles series (Longshore), 241 S Saint Joan (Shaw), 166 Sanders, Andrew, 117 Sanders, Nicholas, 22, 25, 42 Saxton, Judith, 189 Saxton, Laura, 190, 215, 220 The Scarlet Empress (film), 270 Scheil, Katherine West, 199, 210, 239 Schmais, Libby, 242 Schoch, Richard W., 148 Schuyler, Susan, 132 Science fiction, 15, 240, 247, 261 S, Cinsearae, 259 Scott, Walter, 114, 114n54, 117

317

Second-wave feminism, 13, 164, 178, 183, 192, 194, 201, 210, 216, 248, 271, 274 The Secret Diary of Anne Boleyn (Maxwell), 202, 203, 224, 225 Secret histories, 67, 73, 81–84, 113 The Seduction of Anne Boleyn (Luckham), Monstrous Regiment, 204, 205 Self-publishing, 14, 209 Self, writing about, 22 Selinger, Eric Murphy, 184 Seneca, 34 Seton, Anya, 154 Sex and the City (Bushnell), 215 Sexuality, 3, 4, 10, 13, 14, 16, 21, 24, 28, 41, 51, 60–62, 72, 75, 76, 89, 90, 109, 138–141, 143, 154, 163, 165, 168–172, 174, 181, 183–187, 190, 191, 215, 217, 244, 245, 255, 258, 267, 276 Seymour, Jane, 28, 50, 75, 78, 79, 83, 86, 88, 95, 117, 119, 136, 138, 140, 142, 165, 191, 221, 228, 244–246, 249, 254, 260, 263, 269, 270, 273, 279, 284, 286 Shakespeare, William, 2, 8, 9, 15, 49–51, 50n4, 55–61, 55n17, 56n21, 61n47, 63, 65–67, 81, 116n63, 131, 199, 210, 233, 239, 268, 295 constructions of Boleyn, 85 Henry VIII, 15, 51, 55, 55n17, 56, 66, 67, 268 Shaw, George Bernard, 166 Shearer, Norma, 177, 270 The Sheik (Hull), 169 Shiel, M.P., 121, 123, 124, 126 Short stories, 107, 124, 247, 255, 297 Showtime television series, 6 Shulman, Nicola, 25, 28, 32, 33, 42 on Wyatt, 25, 28, 33, 34, 42 Sinclair, May, 162

318 

INDEX

Six (musical), 6, 293–295 The Six Wives of Henry VIII (television miniseries), 274 Smeaton, Mark, 125, 162n24, 170, 187n15, 287 Smyth, George Lewis, 133 Social class, 195 Social media, 6, 210, 294 Some tyme I fled the fyre that me brent (Wyatt), 28 Somers, Baron John, 81–84, 84n58 Songs and Sonnets (Tottel), 22 “Sorry Not Sorry,” 293 Southall, Raymond, 29 Sow the Tempest (Lane), 192, 215 The Spanish Princess (television series), 287 Spongberg, Mary, 106 St. Clair, Nancy, 241, 242 Stableford, Brian, 124 Stafford, William, 186, 190, 213, 281 The Star of the Court (Bunbury), 111, 240 Stewart, Stacey A., 145, 145n60 Stone, Lawrence, 91n94 Stott, Andrew, 253 Stott, Rebecca, 143 Strategy of evasion, 51 Strickland, Agnes, 11, 107, 109, 109n33, 110, 112, 113, 139, 143, 157n9 String, Tatiana C., 103 Struck by the Dark of Love (Vasoli), 228 Summers, Montague, 115n58 Supernatural, 11, 15, 106, 116, 117, 253–260 Sutton, Dana F., 40n84, 40n87 Svitavsky, William L., 124 Sweet, Rosemary, 101 Sweet Savage Love (Rogers), 184, 188

T “Tam o’Shanter” (Burns), 102 Tarnish (Longshore), 241, 242 Taylor, Helen, 173 Taylor, Tom, 133, 140 Television, 1, 14, 15, 198, 206, 209, 212, 259, 267–288 Terrell, Francis, 133, 136–138 Third (Kelly), 247 Thomson, Katherine, 118–120, 126, 140, 149 Thomson, Patricia, 23, 27 Three Weeks (Glynn), 169 Thurston, Carol, 183, 185 Time travel narratives, 247, 247n25, 249, 252 To Die For (Byrd), 221n60, 231 Tóibín, Colm, 211 Tollet, Elizabeth, 72, 85–88, 92, 226 Tomaini, Thea, 103, 105, 141, 257 Tottel, Richard, 22 The Tower (Ainsworth), 105n17, 106, 116 “The Tower is Full of Ghosts Today” (Weir), 256 Tower of London, 11, 105, 257 The Tragedy of Mariam (Cary), 8, 51–54, 72 Transgeneric novels, 15, 239, 240 Transhistorical feelings, 253 Travis, Pete, 278 A Treatise on the Pretended Divorce between Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon (Harspfield), 44 The Trial of Anne Boleyn (television show), 272 The True Secret History of King Henry the Eighth (Somers), 84 Tudor fiction, 2, 241 Tudorism, 103–105, 117, 149

 INDEX 

Tudor Rules: How Anne Boleyn Helped Me Survive High School (Schmais), 242 The Tudors (television series), 6, 14, 16, 116, 222, 249, 254, 267, 270, 273, 282–287 The Tudor Sisters (Armitage), 189, 190, 212 A Tudor Story (Pakenham-Walsh), 167 A Tudor Story: The Return of Anne Boleyn (Pakenham-Walsh), 255 The Tudor Wife (Purdy), 176, 217 Twentieth century representations, 153, 206 Twenty-first century representations, 277, 282 Twilight series (Meyer), 259 “Two Scenes in the Life of Anna Boleyn” (L.E.L.), 107 Tyler, M.L., 133, 142–144 Tyndale, William, 42, 262, 276 U The Uncommon Marriage (Albery), 170 The Unhappy Favourite, or the Earl of Essex (Banks), 77 The Unhappy Princesses (Crouch), 82–84 The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Famelies of Lancaster and York (Hall), 55 Urban, Ken, 204, 205 V Vampire fiction, 259 Vanita, Ruth, 62 Vasoli, Sandra, 227, 228, 229n91, 230 Vertue Betray’d (Banks), 9, 67, 73, 77–81, 77n22, 148

319

Victorian theatre, 131 See also Dramatic representations A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (Wollstonecraft), 86 The Virgin Suicides (Eugenides), 204 W Walker, Greg, 27, 27n18, 95, 269n9, 270, 270n16, 278, 278n40 Wallace, Diana, 154, 155, 161, 164, 182, 200 Walpole, Horace, 63, 64n55, 116 Warnicke, Retha, 6, 6n10, 8n15, 24, 24n7, 28, 28n25, 41, 42, 42n95, 60, 60n43, 212, 212n10, 272n24, 274, 275 influence of, 6 on Sanders, 41, 42, 272n24, 275 Warwick, Angela, 226 Watkins, John, 50, 50n3, 58, 74 Watt, Stephen, 166, 166n38 Wayne, Mike, 269, 269n12 Weir, Alison, 105n17, 117n70, 212, 225, 226, 242, 254, 256 Weller, Barry, 52–54, 52n6, 53n8, 53n10 Wendall, Sarah, 223, 223n70 Westminster Abbey, or, The Days of Reformation (Robinson), 120, 121 Whelehan, Imelda, 221, 221n58 When You See Me, You Know Me (Rowley), 50, 55 Whitehead, William, 85–88, 226 “Who lyst his welthe and eas Retayne” (Wyatt), 34 “Whoso list to hunt” (Wyatt), 3n3, 8n15, 29–31, 34, 59, 61, 187 Wiat, Philippa, 187, 188n20 Wife After Wife (Hayfield), 246

320 

INDEX

Wildness, 32 Windsor Castle, 106 Windsor Castle (Ainsworth), 11, 106, 116, 117 Winsor, Kathleen, 176 The Winter’s Tale (Shakespeare), 51, 63–65 Wiseman, Rosalind, 216 Witchcraft, 4, 42, 162, 198, 275 The Witch-Girl (Gater), 196 Wittenberg, David, 247 Wolf, Naomi, 203, 203n71 Wolf Hall (Mantel), 5, 14, 146, 219, 220, 280, 282–287 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 86, 86n70, 91, 94 Wolper, Carol, 245 Women history of, 93, 126, 154 #MeToo movement, 246, 288 power and, 5, 6, 13, 16, 77, 126, 182, 224, 267 virtue and, 86 See also Feminism The Women, 173, 177 Women’s historical fiction, 173, 199 Woodiwiss, Kathleen, 184 Wotton, Henry, 55n16 Wray, Ramona, 283, 283n50 Wright, Edward, 39n82 Wyatt, George, 22, 26, 42, 43 Wyatt, Thomas, 8, 9, 21–36, 42, 50, 55n15, 59, 117, 118, 142,

144, 159, 170–172, 177, 186–188, 187n15, 202, 241, 258, 285, 295 courtly love tradition and, 22, 23 “Grudge on who liste, this ys my lott,” 33 If waker care if sodayne pale Coolour, 28 “In morning wyse syns daylye I increase,” 35 marriage of, 171, 188 relationship with Boleyn, 8, 9, 21, 22, 25–27, 29, 50 Some tyme I fled the fyre that me brent, 28 “Who lyst his welthe and eas Retayne,” 34 “Whoso list to hunt,” 29–31, 34, 59, 61, 187 Y Young, Clara Kimball, 268 Young, James Harvey, 145n59 Young Adult fiction, 15, 111, 240–242 Young Bess (film), 271 Young Royal series (Meyer), 241, 242 YouTube, 250 Z Zincke, Christian Friedrich, 92