HISTORY: The Lady in the Tower - The Fall of Anne BoleynBy Alison Weir Jonathan Cape, 416pp. £20
IT IS difficult to avoid the Tudors these days. They pop up on cinema screens, television channels, in this year’s Man Booker-winning novel, in booksellers’ catalogues and now in this account of Anne Boleyn’s trial and execution by Alison Weir. Anne was only Henry VIII’s second wife but she had the unenviable double distinction of being the first woman to become Queen of England through an annulment and also the first to be executed. In April 1536, she was convicted of plotting with five men to murder the king and create a new dynasty. The men were decapitated by axe and, although she was initially condemned to be burned at the stake, Henry commuted the sentence to decapitation by sword. In an early example of free movement of labour within Europe the executioner of St Omer was brought over for the occasion because his English counterparts lacked the necessary experience. It was an ignominious end to a meteoric rise to fame and Anne’s failure to provide her husband with a male heir was at the root of the problem.
Henry VIII certainly had more difficulty creating lives than ending them. His marriage to Katherine of Aragon produced six pregnancies but only Mary survived. Anne Boleyn had four pregnancies with just one surviving daughter and three miscarriages, while Jane Seymour provided a much-wanted son but died in the process. The three children then compounded the problem by producing no heirs: Edward died in adolescence before he could, Mary suffered phantom pregnancies and Elizabeth never married. A son was crucial for Henry because, like all his contemporaries, he saw women as incapable of ruling. When Katherine repeatedly miscarried he convinced himself the marriage was cursed because of her previous marriage to his brother Arthur. So when negotiations with the Papacy failed, he severed links with Rome, had the marriage annulled by the new Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, and married Anne, who was already pregnant. She was no shrinking violet. Coming from a family with considerable political influence at court, she had a reputation for sexual promiscuity that may have been encouraged by a six-year stay in Paris during her youth and which did her a lot of harm at her trial. However, if Henry married her out of passion his overriding priority was a son and she delivered only a daughter and three miscarriages. Weir suggests her problems arose from a rhesus problem, causing antibody contamination through the placenta after the first successful pregnancy with Elizabeth. Whatever the medical cause, the miscarriages convinced Henry the marriage suffered from divine disapproval because of his previous affair with Anne’s sister, Mary – the “other Boleyn girl” played by Scarlett Johansson in the recent film of the same name. His physical obsession with Anne was also fading and he had struck up an affair with a Somerset girl, Jane Seymour, who had been maid-of-honour to Katherine of Aragon and loathed the Boleyn family.
When Anne’s final miscarriage came in January 1536, Henry had just been reminded of his mortality by a fall from his horse and he lost patience. His impatience need not have been fatal for Anne because Henry could have just annulled the marriage on the grounds of his affair with Mary, and tried for a legitimate male heir with Jane Seymour. What made it fatal, however, was a combination of Anne’s character and her attitude to the king’s secretary, Thomas Cromwell. As Weir shows, all contemporary accounts show her to have been an arrogant and argumentative person, who openly criticised Henry, voiced her disapproval of his affair and insulted his ministers. She was deeply unpopular at court and disliked in the country at large, leaving her poorly positioned to pick a quarrel with Cromwell. Yet that was just what she did. She had previously worked with him to encourage the spread of Protestantism in England, but in the spring of 1536 attacked his plan to use monastic lands for political patronage and criticised his attempts to negotiate an alliance with the Emperor Charles V. After she had set up her almoner, John Skip, to preach a sermon hostile to him in front of Henry, Cromwell feared for his life. Given the recent fate of Thomas More, he had little option but to go on the offensive, and quickly, and put together evidence for a charge of treason. To make the charge stick he accused her of working with five male accomplices, one of whom was her own brother, and added damning charges of incest and adultery. To rub salt in the wound, one of the adulterous affairs allegedly involved a court musician, Mark Smeaton, who was not only a foreigner but also a commoner.
Most of the book covers the ensuing trial in great detail and Weir sifts methodically through the evidence, sorting out fact from myth. Her conclusion is that most of the charges were false but that enough circumstantial evidence had been created by Anne’s demeanour and behaviour to make the case stick and the verdict inevitable.
Anne Boleyn left behind a two- year-old daughter who would explode the myth of women being incapable monarchs. Indeed, in the period since Henry’s death, the English throne has been occupied by women for almost a third of the time, and hereditary rule has been a more effective guarantee of gender equality than electoral politics.
In her own way, therefore, Anne proved more useful to the Tudors than her successor in the king’s bed, Jane Seymour, whose long-awaited son died after only five years on the throne. Yet Anne’s rise and fall also provide a fascinating insight into the nature of Tudor court politics and the character of Henry VIII, who comes out of this study, warts and all, in a very positive light. Weir is the author of several books on Tudor history and knows her sources well. She writes in an engaging way and adopts an even-handed approach to the strong personalities involved, including the Flemish executioner who showed great compassion and skill in ending her life.
Anyone who has been attracted to the Tudors through the cinema or television will enjoy making the transition from entertainment to history by reading her account.
Hugh Gough is emeritus professor of modern history at University College Dublin. He is currently completing a revised edition of his book The Terror in the French Revolution(Palgrave) and writing a history of the guillotine
