That woman again

The meteoric rise and swift fall of Anne Boleyn, she of the thousand days, has gripped the imagination even of sober-minded academic historians, Eric Ives describing it as ‘the most romantic, the most scandalous tragedy in English history’. Much of the fascination derives from the fact that the evidence is confusing, and no explanation appears to reconcile all contradictions. Even her contemporaries could not agree about her. Was she a delicate beauty, as Sir Thomas Wyatt’s poetry suggests, and as she herself insinuated in her allusion to her long slender neck ever so convenient for the headsman? Or was she only moderately attractive, as some foreign diplomats reported in their dispatches home? Did she even have a disfiguring sixth finger or at least some sort of slight deformity on one of her hands? Was she demure and pious, hugely charitable to the poor, as the martyrologist John Foxe would claim in the next generation? Or was she a calculating vixen, no better than Henry’s concubine, as the imperial ambassador Eustace Chapuys inevitably called her? Can she be understood apart from her predecessor Catherine of Aragon, and did the final drama play itself out in the reigns of their two daughters Mary and Elizabeth? Is she, in other words, the mother of the English reformed church or the arch-heretic, a modern-day Jezebel, as the English recusants would later view her?

When Eric Ives published his massively researched and carefully documented Anne Boleyn in 1986 one might have assumed that most of the contradictions would have been resolved, or at least the last word would have been spoken.