Anne Boleyn (1507 – ), Queen of England.
Anne grew up at the Burgundian and French courts and speaks with a hint of a French accent. Her parents are Thomas and Elizabeth Boleyn née Howard.
“You are the most sophisticated woman at Henry’s Court, with polished manners and just the suggestion of a French accent. Unlike your sister Mary, you have kept your name clean. You are elegant, reserved, self-controlled, cerebral, calculating and astute. But you are inclined to frayed nerves and shaking hands. You are quick-tempered and, like anyone under pressure, you can be highly irrational.”
Hilary Mantel, notes on characters
The story so far…
Week 2: At Austin Friars / Visitation
In 1529, George Cavendish assures Cromwell that Anne is a witch. Her uncle Norfolk says so, and she should know. Wolsey has been turfed out of York Place to make way for her, although there are no plans to make her an archbishop.
Week 3: An Occult History of Britain (Part 1)
In 1521, Anne arrives at the English court as a maid of honour to Queen Katherine. She is to be married into the Butler family in Ireland. But she is secretly betrothed to Harry Percy, heir to the Earl of Northumberland. Wolsey puts a stop to that plan, and Anne vows to bring down the cardinal. By 1527, she is the king’s mistress with her eye on becoming queen.
Week 4: An Occult History of Britain (Part 2)
The gossip is that she allows him to undress her. In the evenings, good wine keeps the chills out, and Anne, who reads the Bible, points out strong scriptural commendations to him.
We are reminded here of her strong leanings towards the Gospel and reform, as well as the grip she holds on the King of England: ‘After dark the king is sick with love’.
Week 5: Make or Mar / Three-Card Trick
Her uncle thinks she is unmarried at twenty-eight because she spends all her time reading. Thomas Howard would think that. The musician Mark Smeaton thinks she does other things. “Tom Wyatt has had her”, he gossips at Esher, and “who knows where she may turn while she is still refusing the king?”
Antonio Bonvisi, the merchant, can embellish this story for Cromwell:
It wasn’t diplomacy took him out of England. It was that she was torturing him. He no longer dared be in the same room with her. The same castle. The same country.
Week 6: Entirely Beloved Cromwell (Part 1)
Here, then, is the king’s concubine, where “the cardinal should be” at York Place. She is small, narrow and delicate. But her words and thoughts are sharp as knives. The cardinal, she complains, could not give her that “one simple thing” she wanted. So her ladies are busy stitching her new coat of arms into everything while she denies the king the one simple thing he wants.
‘Are her teeth good?’ Mercy says.
’For God’s sake, woman: when she sinks them into me, I’ll let you know.’
To Anne, Cromwell sends a dish of almond cream.
Week 7: Entirely Beloved Cromwell (Part 2)
Anne wants information. She wants to know whether they talk about her in More’s household. They don’t, Cromwell says. He would like to know why Anne has summoned him. “We like to know where you are.”
October, 1530. Norfolk: “Anne’s out for bloody murder. She wants the cardinal’s guts in a dish to feed her spaniels, and his limbs nailed over the city gates of York.”
Anne is with Cramner and talking about William Tyndale’s books. She’s shown them to the king, “marked the passages that touch on his authority.” The king is reading Tyndale! Anne says the pope “will learn his place”. A picture of her without a head has been found in her bed:
‘There is a prophecy that a queen of England will be burned. But a prophecy does not frigten me, and even if it is true, I will run the risk.’
Burned for what? you may ask. She is thin, and her cheeks are hollow. “I mean to have him.”
But not long later, Henry is telling Cromwell that she is threatening to leave him. “She says that there are other men and she is wasting her youth.”
At the farce at Hampton Court, where they drag Wolsey to hell, Anne is laughing and applauding and having the time of her life: “He has never seen her like this before: lit up, glowing.”
Week 8: The Dead Complain of Their Burial / Arrange Your Face (Part 1)
At New Year, Cromwell gives Anne silver forks and a present to pass on to the Seymour girl. Anne is delighted to relate the scandals that go down at Wolf Hall. “They could tell Boccaccio a tale, those sinners at Wolf Hall.”
When Cromwell asks her to help free John Petyt, she jokes: “My maidenhead for a grocer?” Petyt is small fry: she wants to get Tyndale home to England and Tyndale’s books to the king and the people.
Week 9: Arrange Your Face (Part 2)
Anne, we note, doesn’t seem to know Mark’s name. In the summer, we meet her dressed as Maid Marion, cursing her bow in the Greenwood with Henry as her Robin. She is spitting blood about Gardiner and wonders whether Cromwell might make a better Master Secretary. She reminds him that Little Bilney has been burned. “While we have been in the woods playing thieves.”
Later in the year, she invites Cromwell to an Advent supper. The king’s friends are there: Weston, Norris, Brereton, and her brother George Boleyn. They are her pets. “A bigger set of fools you would go far to seek.”
Afterwards, Norris tells him they are all in love with her. And jealous of each other. “A woman I could love, would be a woman in whom the king has no interest at all,” advises Cromwell.
Week 10: 'Alas, What Shall I Do For Love?' (Part 1)
The king has given Anne a bedroom at Whitehall, but the queen-to-be fails to gasp. Her father and brother are trying to control her, but she is better than them.
They think they are fixing her tactics, but she is her own best tactician, and able to think back and judge what has gone wrong; he admires anyone who can learn from mistakes.
At Easter, a friar compares her to Jezebel:
‘As I am a woman, I am the means by which sin enters this world. I am the devil’s gateway, the cursed ingress. I am the means by which Satan attacks the man, whom he was not bold enough to attack, except through me. Well that is their view of the situation.
In May, Cromwell and Anne share a moment of shared pleasure: watching Thomas More resign as Lord Chancellor.
When Anne hears that Harry Percy is claiming she is his wife, she starts “breaking up the furniture and smashing the mirrors.” A conference of Howards and Boleyns is called. Cromwell is summoned. He waits for Anne to admit that the man they need now is Wolsey. He enjoys the “silence sweet as music” and then accepts their instructions to beat in the skull of the Earl of Northumberland. “Figuratively,” of course.
Week 11: 'Alas, What Shall I Do For Love?' (Part 2) / Early Mass
1 September, 1532. She kneels before the king to become Marquess of Pembroke, a title she owns in her own right. It prepares her to be the king’s wife and queen of England. She’s planning to commandeer Katherine’s royal barge and wear Katherine’s jewels. The future is so close now; she can touch it.
She will not take an insult, now least from Charles Brandon. So Cromwell has to deal with Brandon. The old families will never treat her like a queen. It is not in their nature.
Mary Boleyn tells Cromwell that Anne’s new title has “bought Henry only the right to caress her sister’s inner thigh.”
You have to admire her; her measured exactness, her restraint. She uses her body like a soldier, conserving its resources; like one of the masters in the anatomy school at Padua, she divides it up and names every part, this my thigh, this my breat, this my tongue.
Anne has begun to say, “Cromwell is my man.” And she has chosen the new Archbishop of Canterbury: Thomas Cranmer.
In Canterbury, the Holy Maid, Elizabeth Barton calls her a heretic. “Anne shrinks against the king; against the scarlet and gold of his jacket she melts like wax.”
When the King of France interviews Cromwell, he says he “never tried” Anne Boleyn, but it is clear he thinks she is no virgin. He looks ready to “try” her at Calais, before Cromwell nudges Norfolk to step in and lead her in a dance.
Dance they do, though it bears no relation to any dance seen in any hall before this. On the duke’s part, a thundering with demon hooves; on her part, a blanched caper, one arm held like a broken wing.
Later, in their adjoining rooms, Henry and Anne quarrel and then swear oaths and then consummate those oaths. “She is in his arms,” Mary tells Cromwell, “naked as she was born. She can’t change her mind now.”
Week 12: Anna Regina (Part 1)
She is now “the hidden Queen of England.” She has married Henry in secret and is carrying his child. But she is so happy she can’t keep it a secret: so soon the whole world knows.
She wants her sister married off, presumably to keep her away from the king. So she suggests Richard Cromwell, and tells him to bring his sons to court.
In March, Cromwell brings Anne bowls for a boy. “The Italians say for a boy you have to keep warm, he tells her. Heat up your wine to heat up your blood. No cold fruit, no fish.” But Anne says it is already a boy, “and no one is to say or think otherwise.”
Anne is making a list of her enemies. Elizabeth Barton, Katherine of Aragon, her daughter the dwarf Mary, and her old governess Margaret Pole. All the Poles. And the Courtenays. “These people want me dead.” Later, Cromwell mentally adds Nicholas Carew to that list.
Week 13: Anna Regina (Part 2)
Anne is crowned queen at the start of June. She is already six months pregnant, convinced she is carrying a son and heir to the throne of England. The king loves her, but when will the country? “When this creature is out of me.”
In August, the queen is escorted to her sealed rooms at Greenwich.
When a woman withdraws to give birth the sun may be shining but the shutters of her room are closed so she can make her own weather. She is kept in the dark so she can dream. Her dreams drift her far away, from terra firma to a marshy tract of land, to a landing stage, to a river where a mist closess over the further bank, and earth and sky are inseparate; there she must embark towards life and death, a muffled figure in the stern directing the oars. In this vessel prayers are said that men never hear. Bargains are struck between a woman and her God. The river is tidal, and between one feather-stroke and the next, her tide may turn.
Week 14: Devil’s Spit / A Painter’s Eye
She gives birth to a baby girl: Elizabeth. The king does not ask after her health.
“It hardly matters, does it?” Edward Seymour says.
Jane Rochford tells Cromwell that the marriage is already stale. Both lovers look for novelty else where. Jane’s husband, George Boleyn “fetches his friends” and brings them to Anne. And Mark Smeaton is “in and out of everyone’s bedchamber.”
Thomas Wyatt is still in love with Anne. “Send me away,” he says to Cromwell.
You cannot joke with Anne these days. You cannot laugh. You must think her perfect, or she will find some way to punish you.
But Anne is soon pregnant again.
Week 15: Supremacy
Anne is unimpressed with the provisions for his death in the Act of Succession. She is carrying the Tudor heir and is on the warpath: Gardiner must go to Winchester. Thomas More must go to the Tower. She has told her aunt Lady Shelton to beat the bastard Mary if need be. At midsummer she miscarries.
Week 16: The Map of Christendom (Part 1)
Anne banishes her sister to Kent when she discovers Mary is pregnant. Anne believes it is the king’s child. “She can crawl on her knees to me. I care not. She can starve.”
If Anne were my wife, he thinks, I’d go out for the afternoon. She looks haggard, and she cannot stay still; you wouldn’t trust her near a sharp knife.
Henry tells the Cromwell household that Lady Lisle has sent Anne a little dog called Pourquoi. “When he speaks of Anne, his voice drips uxorious sentiment: like clear honey.
Week 17: The Map of Christendom (Part 2) / To Wolf Hall
She is small and white and angry. Long fingers tip to tip, bending each other back; eyes bright.
“She will have no peace till Fisher is dead, till More is dead.” She is “sick with frustration.” She is not happy with Cromwell. She suspects he not interested in a French alliance (she is right) and he says it won’t be easy to kill More (he is sort of right).
Week 18: Falcons
Anne comes with Henry on his summer progress, but she does not stay at Wolf Hall. Henry Norris is not there either, he is taking Henry’s love letter to Anne. This summer, Hans Holbein has drawn her, but she is not pleased with it. “How do you please her, these days?” At supper, Jane Seymour says we women gossip about all kinds of things, like “who is in love with the queen. Who writes her verses.”
To Edward Seymour, Cromwell says Anne is “at outs with me. I feel my head wobble on my shoulders when she stares at me hard.” She is angry because Cromwell speaks favourably of Katherine and is courteous to Lady Mary. Anne Boleyn wants both put in their place.
Week 19: Crows (Part 1)
Anne Boleyn is now thirty-four years old, an elegant woman, with a refinement that makes mere prettiness seem redundant. Once sinuous, she has become angular. She retains her dark glitter, now rubbed a little, flaking in places.
She suspects Cromwell of being too close to Chapuys and against a French alliance.
It’s not Anne who bothers me, it’s the men she collects about her.
How will Anne respond to Jane Seymour. “Raging will hardly help.” She will have to think. “And it is always a pleasure to see Anne thinking.”
At Austin Friars, Thurston provides the London gossip:
‘They saw Henry has other women and so Anne chases him around his chamber with a pair of shears, shouting she’ll geld him. Queen Katherine used to shut her eyes like wives do, but Anne’s not the same mettle and she swears he will suffer for it. So that would be a pretty revenge wouldn’t it? She cuckolds Henry to pay him back, and puts her own bastard on the throne.’
Who will the father be? Thomas Wyatt. Henry Percy. Or any of the gentlemen of the privy chamber.