Anne Boleyn has always been my 'favorite' of the six wives.
Her story is possibly the most tragic (though none of Henry's wives had remotely
happy lives.) She was the only woman Henry VIII every truly loved -
unlike Katharine of Aragon, he chose Anne for herself. She wasn't royalty,
she didn't present him with some great alliance or fortune. Yes, he
needed a son but any number of eligible European princesses could have done
that job. He chose Anne because he genuinely loved her. His third
wife, Jane Seymour, was chosen mainly because he wanted someone as unlike
Anne Boleyn as possible; his fourth marriage was a disgraceful disaster;
his fifth - to Anne's cousin Catherine Howard - was a desperate attempt to
recapture his youth; his sixth was relatively placid but Katharine Parr was
never a grand passion. Of those five other marriages, I would say the
union to Catherine Howard was the most like the union to Anne Boleyn.
They were the only two wives he executed, and he turned on them both suddenly
and viciously, one moment attending a court function with his consort and
the next moment leaving her, alone and defenseless, to face arrest.
He was passionately attracted to both Anne and Catherine, unlike his other
wives; even his contemporaries recognized the king's purely physical lust.
But it was Anne to whom he wrote so many passionate love letters, and this
from a king who preferred to scribble in margins and dictate everything else
- his letters to Anne were in his own handd, true labors of love. Poor
Catherine, wed a decade after her cousin's execution, was a shadow of his
second wife.
It was remarked by his contemporaries that Henry only
allowed one woman to speak openly to him - Anne Boleyn. After her fall
from grace, he chose the meek Jane Seymour precisely because he wanted no
more jealous rages, no more passionate arguments, no more sharp wit and cutting
remarks. And perhaps he secretly compared Anne to her predecessor for
Katharine of Aragon was stubborn but never temperamental.
But it was Anne's vulnerability - and her acute knowledge
of it - that made her so temperamental. She lived, and would die, at
Henry's whim. She knew this and so it was impossible for her to be
complacent or content, or perhaps even happy. This vulnerability, which
became increasingly neurotic as Henry's passion cooled, renders her story
more tragic. Across the span of four centuries, she is not the shrewish
commoner whose nagging and wanton behavior led to her death. Instead,
she emerges as a lonely, conflicted young woman who was smart, ambitious,
and passionate - and unfortunate enough to catch the eye of Henry VIII, a
middle-aged monarch tiring of his older wife, a king ripe for a new adventure.
In this case, the adventure was his first great love affair. Circumstances
collided; he found a woman he was physically and emotionally attracted to,
falling in love so deeply and openly that people said, and he later claimed,
she had bewitched him.
Henry VIII always preferred to raise his great ministers
from the lower ranks. In such cases they were completely dependent on
him. Certainly he didn't choose Anne in the beginning because he knew
she would be defenseless against him (no powerful foreign allies or family
to protect her, unlike Katharine of Aragon or Princess Mary); but, in the
end, when he had tired of her, he knew he could destroy her completely.
The totality of his rejection was awful to witness, as even Anne's enemies
admitted. The marriage was annulled for reasons too secret to be released,
their child Elizabeth bastardized, Anne's badge removed from churches and
homes.... She hoped he would simply send her to a convent. He
could have done so and some of his advisors urged it. But he chose
to kill her. It is in those final months of her life, miscarrying the
longed-for son, desperately trying to keep Henry's favor, surrounded by enemies
and rumors of witchcraft, that Anne's plight becomes almost unbearably tragic.
Of course, students of history know she eventually triumphed
- albeit in an unforeseen way. Her ddaughter became the great Elizabeth
I, last monarch of the Tudor dynasty. Elizabeth rarely mentioned her
mother but she had learned much from her parents; she never married, never
sought the continuation of her dynasty. In the end, she left the throne
to the hated Stuarts, the Scottish cousins Henry VIII had deliberately excluded
from the line of succession. The irony? Henry's desperate attempts
to have a son and secure the Tudor dynasty - his many marriages and their
attendant tragedies - had the opposite effect of what he had intended. His
last surviving child chose to avoid marriage altogether and end the Tudor
line.
an opinionated rambling from Marilee