Anne Boleyn: 500 Years of Lies by Hayley Nolan: This is not a love story. I hate to be the one to break the news, but epic love stories don’t end with one partner decapitating the other. The more we normalise and romanticise this notion the deeper down the great rabbit hole of self-deception we go.
If you’re coming to Anne’s story fresh, let me fill you in on what you’ve missed.
We’ve been sold a lie. All these years. It’s been one vamped-up story after another in a desperate bid to keep the ever-growing legend of Anne Boleyn alive. But the lies don’t add up. So many of the stories that have been spun just don’t make sense – in the media and movies, but even more shockingly, in the hallowed history books by those we’ve come to trust. I’m angry and you should be too. Anne Boleyn has been wrongly vilified for five hundred years, her truth silenced and suppressed, with no one revealing the full, uncensored evidence of this complex, convoluted and contradictory story. Until now.
After four years of rigorous and exhaustive research, the archives have begrudgingly revealed that, contrary to popular belief, Anne Boleyn was not the smarmy and smug, cold-hearted scheming seductress we’ve so often been assured she was, in everything from sixteenth-century propaganda to modern-day mass-market history. Nor was she the ruthless mistress with lofty yet empty ambition, as she is repeatedly dismissed as being in the Tudor biographies. In fact, all these ‘versions’ of Anne’s character clash spectacularly with the few fragments of evidence we actually have regarding her life: facts that rarely see the light of day because, to the irritation of writers the world over, they somewhat ruin the pantomime villain caricature they feel is necessary to sex up their dastardly Tudor plot.
Of course, the age-old story you’ll be familiar with, straight from the trusted wisdom of some distinguished historical sage, goes something like this: Anne and her father scheme to place her in the king’s path, whereupon she oozes sexuality, her wit and foreign charm seducing the hapless Henry VIII. Then, being the devious mastermind that she is, Anne plays a blinder, telling the king that she won’t be his mistress. Oh no, if he wants her . . . he’ll have to divorce his queen and marry her.
And for what?
For mindless power and selfish gain, of course; Tudor villains don’t need any more motivation than that.
But there are several years of vital information – either brushed over, dismissed or downright ignored – that happen to ruin that entire theory. For why does anyone want power? So they can sit on a throne contemplating inwardly how powerful they are? No! Power is used to put policies in place and implement change. So what deceitful plans did the power-hungry Anne Boleyn enforce as queen? Surely this is where every theory regarding her true character either gains merit or falls flat? Indeed, it does, and as you will discover within the pages of this new analysis, every single one of Anne’s royal missions had charity, education or religion at the heart of it. A true sign of a terrible trollop, if ever I saw one.
The level of censorship that has taken place over the last five centuries – and is still alive and well today, I hasten to add – will shock, disturb and baffle in equal measure. Well, I’m afraid I can’t help you with the shock (perhaps try a sip of brandy), but I can help with the confusion by providing a groundbreaking re-examination of Anne Boleyn and her entire relationship with Henry VIII – one that for the first time pieces their story together realistically, reflecting the true people we have hard evidence that they were, providing light-bulb moments for the questions historians have, so far, only managed to provide absurd and illogical answers to. As a result, I’ve found myself tackling the first Tudor biography that mixes historical fact with psychological analysis; his, I’ve discovered, is vital to finally understanding the two Tudor monarchs with whom society has had a mild obsession for several centuries now.
Already I can hear the academic reader guffawing at such a statement: we only deal with facts and evidence here, Ms Nolan!
Well, sure, if we’re talking about a study on the interaction of robots. But if we want to understand the human beings that were Anne Boleyn and Henry VIII, complete with all their seemingly irrational decisions and nonsensical actions, then we must also take into account the one thing historians tend to dismiss, and that is the screwed-up enigma of the human psyche. I mean, let’s face it, no one makes the monumental decision to divorce a queen, start an international war, relentlessly pursue an annulment for seven years and fight to change the religion of an entire country without little things like emotions coming into play. Or an alarming lack of emotion, as you will come to see in the case of Henry VIII.
Which is why you should question anyone – historian or not – who tells you that true love can end in decapitation. When similar acts of violence are carried out as terrorism around the world today they are met with an appropriate level of horror and disgust, but throw in a Tudor king and queen and suddenly it’s the most tragic love story of all time. Often it’s presented to us so subtly that we don’t even realise it’s a love story we are being sold; it’s the biographer who tells the tale of a passionate king fighting to marry his forbidden mistress, the researcher who calls Henry’s correspondence ‘love letters’, the historian who credits the religious reformation to ‘the lovers who changed history’, or the news article that cites England’s break from Rome as the grandest romantic gesture a man ever made for a woman.
However, we need to ask ourselves what the more logical truth is: that all-consuming true love can end with a man cutting his soulmate’s head off because she apparently broke his heart? Or that the two were never in love in the first place and there was something else powering their dysfunctional relationship?
For indeed there was, and if ever there was a moment in history for the truth to finally be revealed, that time is now. Our bullshit meter is at capacity. Our tolerance for being lied to, manipulated and treated as the gullible consumers who will lap up anything has well and truly hit its limit.
But perhaps the real issue the modern world has with Anne is that, far from being forced into an arranged marriage, she actively chose to pursue a political match for herself. In the case of Henry Percy, we saw her fighting for it rather than against it, and aren’t girls meant to lead from the heart and not the head? Well, Anne Boleyn wanted to take control of her own life; she pulled the strings. She wanted to make a difference in the world, and to do that she needed to forge an alliance with someone in possession of a prestigious title. If you want to understand Anne Boleyn, this needs to be seriously considered. Her choices did not make her frosty and unfeeling. They made her a progressive thinker in an oppressive world.
But maybe that’s just another female issue we have. After all, we’re allowed to look back on the men in history, on whom the king bestowed a similar power to Anne, with approval and admiration.
Didn’t he do well? Look how far he came from such humble beginnings, using his business sense, intelligence and diplomatic skills.
While Anne is seen as a social climber accused of having used what? Her sexuality. Underhand scheming. Oh, and witchcraft, apparently. Although, may I use this moment to put to rest the witchcraft rumours once and for all?
It appears we have Spanish ambassador Chapuys to thank for turning this particular court gossip into historical fact. He was to report in January that a source told him that another source told them that the king told a principal courtier (it’s a tenuous link, but stay with me) ‘that he had been seduced and forced into this second marriage by means of sortileges and charms’.
However, in terms of reliable evidence and formal accusations, having personally viewed the original trial records of Anne Boleyn, nowhere in her devastating list of charges does it state witchcraft. This was merely another rumour picked up by the negative propaganda at the time, along with the claims that she had a few outstanding parking fines.
But modern historians need to stop this sexist, double-standard analysis that has them call the self-made men shrewd for using their wit, diligence and industriousness while they imply the women are whores and sluts who used their bodies to play the men like sexual puppeteers. This warped interpretation of Anne’s actions needs to be left in the past if we want to really understand who she was and why her life unfolded the way it did.
Alas, while Anne has been labelled ‘calculating’, Henry continues to be described as a romantic who loved women, with one of our most prominent male Tudor historians stating that ‘Henry was usually a very good husband . . . he liked women – that’s why he married so many of them!’ Also, that the key aim of a documentary The Six Wives of Henry VIII was for viewers to ‘grasp the romance of history’. Oh dear. But even our female historians have fallen foul of pleading the case for Henry’s ‘romanticism’ in interviews.
Now, I hate to be pedantic about this, but we cannot call a man who murdered two of his wives ‘romantic’. Henry’s not being intimidated by strong women and making them his equal, while commendable and progressive, doesn’t cancel out or override his violence towards women. Yet he gets featured in publications such as Love Letters: Years of Romance with the obsessive letters of harassment above used as evidence of his chivalrous nature.
Indeed, in historical biographies and documentaries we see historians swooning over Henry’s letters (‘all this is the stuff of love’) with none of them in the least bit disturbed or haunted by the fact that the man who wrote those seemingly loving words would end up murdering the recipient.
Almost all media depictions exclusively sell the viewer the notion that Henry and Anne’s relationship imploded with passion; when a man loves a woman to that extent, how else is he to vent his heartbreak? As though decapitation was inevitable. In fact, one historian recently told television viewers that what happened to Anne was a terrible ‘mishap’, concluding that Henry, ‘feeling betrayed and hurt, sentenced the queen that he loved to death’.
It needs to go on record here and now that you don’t sentence the women you love to death. Also, that the word ‘romantic’ is off limits when reporting the actions of domestic violence perpetrators. And yes, ordering the death of two of your wives does indeed come under the category of domestic violence, whether committed by a king or a commoner, last week or five centuries ago. If a man can kill a woman, whatever the extenuating circumstances it was never love.
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