The Undying fascination of Anne Boleyn by Mary Hoffman

If you put "Anne Boleyn" into a search engine, you get over two million results. Do the same on Amazon and you get over six hundred book titles. She plays a starring role in the two Man Booker Prize-winning novels of Hilary Mantel, which are being dramatised both by the RSC (where she is being played by Lydia Leonard) and on television (as yet casting not announced).

Welsh National Opera currently runs a Tudors season containing Donizetti's Anna Bolena. On Facebook there are pages called On the Tudor Trail and The Tudor Library, the latter listing over fifty current fiction and non-fiction titles about Henry Vlll's second wife, who died 477 years ago. Claire Ridgway runs a site called The Anne Boleyn Files which minutely examines every detail of Anne's brief and eventful life.

It is as if we still can't quite believe in that sequence of events from January to May 1536 that changed the world's view of Henry from handsome, golden, chivalric prince to bloated, bloodthirsty tyrant. As Hilary Mantel says, "we argue over her, we pity and admire and revile her, we reinvent her in every generation" (Guardian 11.5.2012)

(And I have just reinvented and killed her again in my latest novel).

Shown on BBC2 this May, The Last days of Anne Boleyn, presented by Dan Jones, pitted historians David Starkey and Susannah Lipscomb against novelists Hilary Mantel and Philippa Gregory. Anne was guilty as charged, she was totally innocent, she slept with her brother (Gregory), she swore before God on what she believed to be her last morning that she had done none of the things she was charged with (Mantel).

With such a wash of interest in the woman who was Queen for only three years, you would think it impossible for anyone to come up with a new angle but Sarah Morris and Natalie Grueninger have achieved it in their book In the Footsteps of Anne Boleyn. These are the writers who run the On the Tudor Trail page on Facebook, the latter also having a site with the same name and the former one for her own fiction and non-fiction writing on "England's most iconic Queen Consort."

Divided into sections Early Life; The Courting Years; Anne the Queen; The 1535 Progress; Boleyn Treasures, the book is meticulously researched and well illustrated, with a Boleyn Family Tree and six maps.

After Hans Holbein

The Tower of London features in Anne the Queen because the Queen's Lodgings in the Royal Palace (no longer extant) were completely re-decorated for Anne's Coronation. But in that same section, the writers dispel several myths about her execution, which didn't take place where the memorial now stands on Tower Green.

The White Tower at the Tower of London.

Anne Boleyn was almost certainly born at Blickling Hall in Norfolk, but that house has been altered several times in the intervening centuries.

You can more easily imagine yourself in Anne's shoes at Hever Castle.

Hever Castle, the Boleyns' family seat

Anne went to Belgium when she was about twelve, to serve in the court of Margaret of Austria and was later in France, where as a teenager she learned to dance, to play musical instruments and generally behave like a Court lady. something that served her both well and badly later on in life.

The authors have tracked down all sorts of places associated with Anne Boleyn and visited most of them themselves, even though Grueninger lives in Australia. From Windsor to the Field of Cloth of Gold, Eltham Palace to Notre Dame, they have left no stone unturned in the search for locations where Anne is known or believed to have spent time. It is as thorough as it it is fascinating.

(I recommend reading this book alongside the late Eric Ives' excellent biography, The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn.)

 

The Hole in the Wall by H.M. Castor

Thisbe by John William Waterhouse (1909)
(via Wikimedia Commons - public domain)

Twenty-something years ago, when I was an undergraduate, I was lucky enough to play Hermia in a touring production of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It was great fun, but by far my favourite part of each performance was sitting on stage in Act V and watching the mechanicals’ performance of their play-within-a-play, Pyramus and Thisbe. (The story in its original form is a tragic one but, as Shakespeare intended, the mechanicals in this production made it eye-wateringly hilarious.)

Pyramus and Thisbe live on either side of a party wall, and – since their love is forbidden in Montague-and-Capulet style – they rely on a hole in that wall through which to communicate.

Snout, as Wall:

In this same interlude it doth befall

That I – one Snout by name – present a wall.

And such a wall as I would have you think

That had in it a crannied hole or chink,

Through which the lovers, Pyramus and Thisbe,

Did whisper often, very secretly.

(A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act V Scene I)

I wonder if it’s my fond memories of Snout and this chink that led to my attention being snagged by another hole in the wall – a real one – mentioned in an ambassador’s dispatch dated December 1533. Here, we are deep in the period of Henry VIII’s ‘Great Matter’: Henry has married Anne Boleyn, while Catherine of Aragon – his spurned and determinedly resistant first wife – has been forced to live in exile from the court. Now the Duke of Suffolk has been sent to Catherine to order her to move to what she considers a less salubrious house. She refuses. Eustace Chapuys, the Imperial ambassador, recounts what follows:

The Commissioners [Suffolk and his colleagues] remained six days at the place, that they might lock the house door and take away the keys, also that they might hear whether the Queen [Catherine], through the dismissal of her servants, the threats and the manifold bad treatment she was undergoing would not change her mind; but seeing her constant and unmovable, they caused all the baggage to be packed, got litters and hackneys ready, and made other preparations for the journey. The Queen, however, on the morning of that day, locked herself up in her room; and when the Commissioners came to fetch her, she spoke to them through a hole in the wall, and said, “If you wish to take me with you, you must break down the door.” But they dared not…

(Translation of despatch dated 27^th December 1533, emphasis mine. Calendar of State Papers Spain, Dec. 1533.)

This hole in the wall has, in the past, puzzled me slightly. Today, a hole in a wall would be an alarming thing – a sign of a major structural problem, perhaps, and certainly something unusual. Though Catherine considered her accommodation unbefitting for her status, it must be said that her standards were of the highest – she was still living in some state, and this was not a tumbledown or semi-derelict house. Hence my puzzlement. But then – oh joy! – I came across a book containing what amounts to nearly a whole chapter on holes in walls: Locating Privacy in Tudor London by Lena Cowen Orlin. And I discovered that holes in walls were a much greater feature of Tudor life than I had imagined.

Locating Privacy is a brilliant book and its analysis of what the concept of privacy meant in this period is fascinating. The very act of seeking privacy, for example, could be seen as sinister. Life was lived cheek by jowl with one’s fellows, whether because of crowded housing conditions (for those of lower status) or because of the convention of being attended by servants at all times (for those of higher status). The mutual surveillance that resulted was seen to a certain extent as natural and even desirable.

To many… privacy seemed a menace to public well-being. It threatened to deprive people of knowledge to which they thought they were entitled and about which they felt a sense of social responsibility. From this point of view, peepholes are significant not only as evidence of failed construction techniques, poor materials, bad repair, or accidental effects, but also as instruments of resistance. They restored the old communal conventions of shared knowledge and mutual surveillance. Any newly erected boundary could be breached by a defiant chink or cranny.

(Locating Privacy in Tudor London, Orlin, p.192.)

Partitions between different living spaces, Orlin shows, were often intended to be markers of boundaries rather than providers of privacy. In the overcrowded, subdivided, many-tenanted London houses occupied by the working classes, any desire for privacy might be overshadowed by other, more pressing concerns – such how to avoid having your neighbour’s waste-water channel flowing directly through your bedroom, or how to live with the problem that the communal cesspit could only be emptied by its contents being carried through your living quarters.

Orlin cites numerous recorded instances in which, to see into a neighbour’s house, a person had to do no more than lift a painted cloth. Even in less jam-packed situations, Orlin shows that internal walls were often insubstantial, no thicker than wainscoting, and that the flexibility this gave was seen as an advantage when tenancy arrangements changed.

Some peepholes might, straightforwardly, be key or latch holes. Wattle-and-daub walls and half-timbered walls might lose lumps of clay, and cracks and holes could of course be due to subsidence, poor construction or nearby building work.

In other cases, timber for partitions had knotholes, or had been recycled from other places and was often “pocked with peepholes” made by old nails and such like. Timber partitions might warp or shrink. And sometimes partitions were on purpose not built right up to a chimney, for fear that the timber would catch fire; a cloth would be used to cover the gap. Other gaps in walls were made specifically to carry waste water through a building to the outside – cases were known where these openings were big enough for burglars to get in through them, or apprentices (keen on escape from their masters) to get out.

In grand houses, too, holes might be included on purpose in a wall’s construction. An enclosed gallery running along the upper part of a great hall (an enclosed version of a minstrels’ gallery, in effect) was often provided with squints into the larger room below. Sometimes, the desire for a symmetrical pattern of windows on the house’s façade – designed without accommodating the interior floorplan of what might be an older building behind it – resulted in a window being placed just where an interior wall abutted the facade. In such a case, so that the interior wall was not visible from the outside slicing the window in half, the interior wall might be made to stop short of the window, creating a gap big enough to put your head through from one chamber to another. Another reason for a purpose-built gap in the wall might well be to let in light to an inner chamber or passageway.

Squint in the screen at St Peter's Church, Cassington, Oxfordshire
Photo copyright John Salmon
via Wikimedia Commons, license under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license

In this context, the common pre-Reformation practice of having squint-holes in a church’s rood screen to enable kneeling worshippers to see the elevated host takes on a different feel: what seems to us now perhaps an odd way of overcoming this spatial problem, back then must have seemed absolutely normal – just another instance of a hole in a partition. And we can see just how normal this idea was from a legal case presented to an ecclesiastical court in the early seventeenth century, involving accusations of adultery. The witnesses were asked:

Was the door or window open? Or did he or she see such acts through any hole or open place of the wall? How many open places or holes were there in the wall? How big was such place where he or she peeped…?

(Locating Privacy in Tudor London, Orlin, p.190.)

Sadly there is no way of knowing precisely what kind of hole in the wall it was through which Catherine of Aragon communicated her defiance to the Duke of Suffolk in December 1533. But Lena Cowen Orlin’s excellent book has made me realise that this mode of communication, though perhaps unusual for a queen, was unlikely to be a novel idea either to readers of Chapuys’ dispatch or, indeed, to Elizabethan audiences watching ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’.

Bottom, as Pyramus:

I see a voice. Now will I to the chink

To spy an I can hear my Thisbe’s face.

*

Professor Eric Ives (1931-2012)

Prof. Eric Ives (left), with (l-r) Nicola Shulman,  Brother Peter
(a resident of the Lord Leycester Hospital, Warwick) and me

I would just like to say how saddened I was to hear of the death, in September, of Prof. Eric Ives, at the age of 81 (read an obituary here). Acclaimed by David Starkey as the author of the best academic biography of Anne Boleyn, Prof. Ives had the gift of writing both accessible and deeply scholarly works. His The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn is utterly brilliant, and I would also highly recommend the controversial and fascinating Lady Jane Grey: a Tudor Mystery, and The Reformation Experience, the latter published only this June. I had the great good fortune in May this year to take part in an event in Warwick chaired by Prof. Ives – the first time I had met this longstanding scholar-hero of mine. I was nervous beforehand about giving a talk in his presence, but he made the evening a delight: he was extraordinarily generous and friendly, and a skilful chair to boot. What a lovely man – as well as a great expert – the world of Tudor history study has lost. May the books he has left behind be appreciated for many generations to come.




H.M. Castor's novel VIII - a new take on the life of Henry VIII - is published by Templar in the UK, by Penguin in Australia, and will be published by Simon & Schuster in the US in 2013. It is currently longlisted for the Carnegie Medal and the UK Literary Association Book Award.

H.M. Castor's website is here.

AGES OF MEMORY by H.M. Castor

I’ve just completed a two-week tour to mark the publication of the paperback edition of my Tudor novel VIII. It took me to all sorts of places – Ipswich & Bramhall, Oxford & Hampton Court – and among them was my old childhood stamping ground of Leamington Spa & Warwick, neighbouring towns that have spread so close to one another that, as Eric Morecambe used to say, you can’t see the join. Here, Keith & Frances Smith, the lovely owners of the independent bookshops ‘Warwick Books’ and ‘Kenilworth Books’ (see their website) arranged for me to speak at an evening event alongside Nicola Shulman and Prof. Eric Ives, at the most wonderful venue imaginable…


'These deep eyes were now surveying them, slow and solemn, but very penetrating... One felt as if there was an enormous well behind them, filled up with ages of memory and long, slow, steady thinking; but their surface was sparkling with the present...' J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers

The week before last, early on the Wednesday evening, a taxi deposited me outside an ancient building in the town of Warwick. I walked up to the imposing gate. Since it was well past 5 o’clock, a notice beside the gate said ‘Closed’ but, feeling rather Alice-in-Wonderland-ish, I thought I should try the door anyway. I turned the giant handle (above) and stepped inside. 

The gate from the inside

I had come to speak at an event in this most august of venues: the Lord Leycester Hospital in Warwick.

Alone inside the gateway, I hesitated. As anyone who has had the misfortune to wait for a train with me would confidently predict, I was early. No one else was in sight. What should I do? Ah, what? Loiter, of course! Loiter and look about me and feel the privilege of spending some time alone in this flabbergastingly gorgeous place.

The Westgate of Warwick (left), with chantry chapel above, and The Lord Leycester Hospital (right)

The Hospital’s own website (here) offers this potted history:

The Lord Leycester Hospital is not now, and has never been a medical establishment. The word hospital is used in its ancient sense meaning "a charitable institution for the housing and maintenance of the needy, infirm or aged".

The Hospital is an historic group of timber-framed buildings dating mainly from the late 14th Century clustered round the Norman gateway into Warwick with its 12th Century Chantry Chapel above it. Hidden behind the ancient buildings is the tiny but delightful Master's Garden.

For nearly 200 years it was the home of Warwick's mediaeval Guilds. In the reign of Queen Elizabeth I it became a place of retirement for old warriors. So it remains today as an independent charity providing a home for ex-Servicemen and their wives.

I loitered my way into the galleried courtyard, passing beneath this bear and ragged staff – an emblem that has been associated with the Earls of Warwick since at least the 14^th century, and was used by Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, favourite of Elizabeth I (whose father & brother were Earls of Warwick). It was Dudley who, having bought these buildings in 1571, set them up as a home for aged or injured soldiers.

Inside the courtyard, on the façade of the Master’s house, I spotted other bears standing guard along with a marvellous bristling porcupine (the porcupine was an emblem of the Sidney family, who were linked by marriage with the Dudleys).

The Master of the Hospital himself, Lt. Col. Gerald Lesinski, soon emerged from the door you can see on the left above. He would have been well within his rights if he'd asked me brusquely what I thought I was doing, peering at his house after closing time… but, on the contrary, he was all graciousness & generosity. He had, he told me, just been looking through the Hospital’s guest book and had found Oscar Wilde’s signature. “I knew we had Dickens and Darwin,” he said, “but I didn’t realise we had Wilde too!”

Oscar Wilde… Dickens… Darwin… I looked at the buildings about me with fresh eyes. The Lord Leycester, I reflected, is not only a medieval place, a Tudor place… it has been a Victorian place too. And a Georgian one, and an Edwardian and an everything-in-between-and-since.

Of course, you simply cannot stand here without thinking of the past in some fashion. But often I tend to think of the past in slices, rather than taking in the scale of the whole it… So, I look at these buildings and automatically estimate when they were built… and then, a few moments later, I try to picture them during my favourite period, the 16^th century.

And in so doing, I tend not to think of the sheer length of time the buildings have stood here and all that has happened in that time - the enormous well these buildings represent, filled up with ages of memory.

A short time later, as I looked across the street from the Lord Leycester, instead of defining the (wonderfully wonky) half-timbered building opposite (above) solely by the era in which it was built, I thought instead about all the changes it must have seen, and how it had stood there while the brick houses that you can just make out on the right were being constructed. And I realised that I’ve often looked at rows of buildings of different dates as if they were simply different cakes lined up in a cake shop window: this is 14^th century flavour, this is 18^th century flavour…

...instead of recognising that the 14^th century one is a building that, perhaps, stood alone before it acquired neighbours - or perhaps had other, different neighbours and stood solid even as they were demolished and replacements built.


It’s rather like a child’s view of the people around them, i.e. Granny happens to be a wrinkly person whose job is to be my grandmother, rather than Granny has seen so much! She was my age once, and then my mum's age too, and has lived through so many more days & years than me…

Now I began to think: the Lord Leycester Hospital buildings are medieval & stood here as the Wars of the Roses raged... but they stood here during the Civil War too – and during the Napoleonic Wars and the Russian Revolution and the Blitz. I began to think: these buildings were lived in by soldiers who fought in the Crimea, and on the Somme (perhaps). These buildings have seen all those days and months, those decades and centuries, and they will be here – I very much hope – when I am in my grave.

How easy it is to forget the accumulated weight of the past! If people’s life experience shone out of the tops of their heads like the light of Dickens’ Ghost of Christmas Past, the elderly’s would shine tallest & brightest… (for an illustration of the ghost, see here).

In the same way, the life experience (if I can put it that way) of these buildings is awe-inspiringly huge. And they have been significant not just at the time of their 'birth', but in each period they have 'lived' through. It is not only the new buildings of any period that give the flavour of that time. Just as in Henry VIII’s inventory there are treasured old items (devotional objects that belonged to his mother or grandmother, for example, or a sword used by Henry V) as well as items from Henry's time, so too the people of each period have inhabited, used, loved (or hated) old buildings, as well as modern ones.

When the Lord Leycester Hospital itself was ‘modern’, there would have been ‘old’ buildings in Warwick, of course. Over the centuries, as the Hospital has stood firm, buildings around it have come and gone. The idea plays in my mind like a time-lapse film – like this intriguing film from 1901 (credited as the first time-lapse film, in fact) which records the demolishing of a theatre in New York (it runs first in reverse, so that the theatre seems to be being built): see the film here.

Note the beady-eyed white pigeon!

Add to all this another layer: in the Lord Leycester Hospital, for me, the sweep of history is riffle-shuffled with my own personal memories.

For example, I love the Great Hall where that evening’s event took place – & where once, as the Master told me, James I sat down to dine (they still have the chair he sat in!). I love it for its marvellous beamed roof & higgledy-piggledy lattice windows…

… but I also love it because it was the venue, 23 years ago, for the Ruby Wedding celebration for my very dear great-uncle & great-aunt, Gordon & Lucy Southeard, and I could not possibly spend a moment in that room without thinking of Lucy (who still lives in Warwick) and without remembering Gordon - a remarkable, lovely and much missed man.

Uncle Gordon & Auntie Lucy (wearing red button-holes)
 in the Great Hall 

Try to hold your attention wide, taking in all that sweep of time, and it’s as if a pack of cards is being shuffled - what you see is: now that day, now this, now – in your mind’s eye – James I, now Oscar Wilde, now (for me) Uncle Gordon… now the astonishing kaleidoscope of every moment, great and small, that this building must hold in its memory:

How many people have stood in that dark doorway on the right (above), over the centuries? For how many people has the Lord Leycester Hospital been an old friend, a part of their lives, a place past which they have walked daily?

Never mind Oscar Wilde or Robert Dudley, what about the ordinary people of Warwick who knew it in, say, the 1720s, or the 1830s, or the 1940s?

That Wednesday visit turned into a wonderful evening, and I must end this post with some book recommendations. My fellow-speaker was Nicola Shulman, author of Graven with Diamonds, which is an audacious, erudite & superbly entertaining new analysis of the poems of Thomas Wyatt, and the uses to which they were put within the claustrophobic inner circle of Henry VIII’s court.

The chair for the evening was Prof. Eric Ives, author of an absolutely brilliant biography (the biography, I'm tempted to say) of Anne Boleyn - The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn. Prof. Ives is also the author of (amongst other things) a fascinating analysis of the rise & fall of Lady Jane Grey: Lady Jane Grey - A Tudor Mystery. And – to be published this June – a book on the Reformation that I can’t wait to read: The Reformation Experience. See details of all 3 titles here.

(l-r) Prof. Eric Ives, Nicola Shulman, Brother Peter, me

Here we are at the steps to the chantry chapel alongside Brother Peter, one of the Hospital’s residents.

Thank you to Keith & Frances Smith of Warwick Books for arranging & supporting the evening, and to the Master for welcoming us so warmly!

The Lord Leycester Hospital is open to visitors all year round and can be contacted about hosting events (including weddings) through its website here. It relies on visitor fees to keep it going and is an independent charity well worth supporting!

H.M. Castor's novel VIII - a new take on the life of Henry VIII - is published by Templar in the UK and by Penguin in Australia. It is now available in paperback, hardback & ebook format.

H.M. Castor's website is here.