Anne Boleyn
Former queen of England
Anne Boleyn (1507 – 1536), former 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.
Week 20: Crows (Part 2)
Anne sends Cromwell to Kimbolton to root out any treason in Katherine’s household. She suspects her of urging the Emperor to invade. When Cromwell returns, she rejects any plan that allows Katherine to see Chapuys or Lady Mary.
That autumn news seeps out that Anne is pregnant again, although she doesn’t look it. ‘She seems to be losing flesh, rather than losing it.’ The king is less attentive to her as she watched the king watching Jane. ‘You expect black anger… instead her face is narrow… She pulls her skirts aside when Jane passes. She huddles into herself, narrow shoulders shrinking; she looks cold as a doorstop orphan.’
Week 21: Angels
December 1535, and Anne’s dog Purkoy slips out a window and falls to its death.’ Cromwell comes to comfort her, but not offer her a new dog. She is angry because they have failed to marry Elizabeth into France. ‘It is as if I did not exist. As if my daughter had never been born. As if Katherine were still queen.’
She wants Cromwell to contrive to compromise Mary, ‘so she loses her reputation.’ Cromwell refuses: ‘That is not my aim and those are not my methods.’
‘Since my coronation there is a new England. It cannot subsist without me.’
Cromwell thinks otherwise.
'But do not threaten me, good madam. I find it uncomfortable.' She snaps, 'Your comfort is not my concern. You must study your advantage, Master Secretary. Those who are made can be unmade.' He says, 'I entirely agree.'
When Anne hears that Katherine has died, she wears yellow, ‘as she did when she first appeared at court, dancing in a masque: the year, 1522.’ It became the height of fashion then, but now it has slid down to the German brothel. ‘Does Anne know this?’
Now that Katherine is gone, Anne says she will accept Mary at court. ‘Cremuel, this is my offer, I will go no further. I am resolved to make it and then I cannot be blamed. But I do not think she will take it, and then we will both be sorry, for we are condemned to fight till the breath goes out of our bodies. She is my death, and I am hers. So tell her, I shall make sure she does not live to laugh at me after I am gone.’ Mary rejects the offer.
Week 22: The Black Book (Part 1)
January 1536. Anne’s chambers catch fire. ‘There is a prophecy that a queen of England will be burned. I did not think it meant in her own bed. It was an unattended candle. Or so one assumes.’
When Henry falls in the joust, Norfolk delivers the news to Anne. ‘I told her. I myself. My place to it. My place, am her uncle.' She falls down in a fit.
Later, news seeps out: she has miscarried. Jane Rochford speculates when it was conceived and by whom.
Just be clear, Henry says coldly, when he stands at the foot of the lady’s bed and hears this reading of events. Just be clear on this, madam. If any woman is to blame, it is the one I am looking at.
Week 23: The Black Book (Part 2)
Anne ‘has changed, all in a season. She is light, starved, she looks as she did in her days of waiting, those futile years of negotiation before he, Thomas Cromwell, came along and cut the knot.’
She spreads the prophecy that she will not bear Henry a son while Mary is alive.
You have to admire it, he says to his nephew. She is on the offensive. She is like a serpent, you do not know when she will strike. He has always rated Anne highly as a strategist. He has never believed in her as a passionate, spontaneous woman. Everything she does is calculated, like everything he does. He notes, as he has these many years, the careful deployment of her flashing eyes. He wonders what it would take to make her panic.
Week 25: The Book of Phantoms (Part 1/5)
After the row with Harry Norris, Lady Rochford reports that Anne has been seen imploring Henry and showing her daughter. Rochford lipreads/invents: “Husband, how can you doubt this is your daughter?”
Week 26: The Book of Phantoms (Part 2/5)
On 2 May, Anne is arrested. In the morning, she was betting on a tennis match. By dusk she is in the Tower. Faced with the allegations of adultery in the council chamber, she is ‘incredulous and haughty.’ When she hears the men have confessed, she burst into tears.
When they come to arrest her in her rooms, she tells Cromwell, ‘You know, I created you’ and in the barge: ‘Cremuel, you have never forgiven me for Wolsey.’ She threatens them with curse: ‘No rain will fall till I am released.
Outside the Tower, she collapses.
Something happens to Anne then, which later he will not quite understand. She seems to dissolve and slip from their grasp, from Kingston's hands and his, she seems to liquefy and elude them, and when she resolves herself once more into woman's form she is on hands and knees on the cobbles, her head thrown back, wailing.
He helps her up and she leans into him: ‘intent, complicit, ready for the next thing they will do together, which is kill her.’
Later, she asks Master Kingston where she will be lodged. When she learns she will be put in the chambers prepared for the coronation, she weeps: ‘It is too good for me.’ Call-Me believes it is an admission of guilt. Cromwell knows it is recognition of failure.
Week 28: The Book of Phantoms (Part 4/5)
Anne in the Tower. Cromwell considers what Anne will be like at fifty, ‘but of course, she will never be fifty.’ She asks to see her brother, her father, her bishops. But everyone has renounced her. Her levity unnerves Cromwell, ‘the wild distress she is keeping in check.’ She puts her hands around her throat and says: ‘I have only a little neck. It will be the work of a moment.’
Week 29: The Book of Phantoms (Part 5/5) / Spoils
The queen comes to her trial. No one will look at her now, except her uncle Thomas Howard, who presides over the court. She sits and denies everything. She is sentenced to be burned or beheaded, at the king’s pleasure. Cromwell thinks: she doesn’t yet believe this is happening.
Her marriage to Henry is annulled, so she will die a queen but not the king’s wife. She asks Cranmer whether she will go to Heaven and talks of her good works in religion these past years.
She is brought to her execution in solemn procession, wearing Katherine’s furs and a gable hood. She gives out alms from a velvet bag and looks behind her in hope of reprieve.
On the scaffold, she says a few words, ‘pray for the king, for he is a good, gentle, amiable and virtuous prince…’ And no more. She removes her hood and puts on a linen cap. Anne kneels and she is blindfolded. ‘Her lips move in prayer.’
There is a groan, one single sound from the whole crowd. Then a silence, and into that silence, a sharp sigh or a sound like a whistle through a keyhole: the body exsanguinates, and its flat little presence becomes a puddle of gore.