The Creation of Anne Boleyn by Susan Bordo Read Free Book Online

http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=87961 .
54. Weir 2011, 73.
55. Ibid., 76.
56. The works from which I quote in this chapter are all “popular” histories and novels. Among more scholarly works, there are many that are more sensitive to the social context—including gender inequities—that constrained and condemned Anne. Among these are (in publication order) Retha Warnicke’s The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn (1989), Antonia Fraser’s The Wives of Henry VIII (1994), Eric Ives’s The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn (2004), Joanna Denny’s Anne Boleyn (2004), David Loades’s The Six Wives of Henry VIII (2009; revised from 2004), and Suzannah Lipscomb’s The Year That Changed Henry VIII (2009).
57. Bernard 2010, 192.
58. Ibid., 185. Bernard also cites all those who had called Anne a “whore” during her lifetime and suggests it would be unreasonable to suppose that all of this was pure slander, based only on hostility toward Anne. “Would any woman who had won the king . . . have been dismissed as a whore?” (Bernard 2010, 184.) The answer to that—and it’s hardly as preposterous as Bernard makes it out to be, given Anne’s nonroyal status and the popularity of Katherine of Aragon—seems to have been a resounding yes. Anne did not have many genuflectors to her queenly status (except on formal occasions, when Henry was watching, or in the coerced signatures to his oaths and decrees); up until the end, there was a critical mass who didn’t even see her as a legitimate queen. But Bernard chooses instead to take the “where there’s smoke, there’s fire” approach to the gossip about Anne via a series of “suppose that”s and “could have”s, beginning with the unfounded premise (“for the sake of argument,” he says) that the dates given, at her trial, for the adulteries, were “broadly correct.”
Anne would then have committed adultery with Henry Norris in October/November 1533 and with William Brereton in November 1533, just after what was for Henry the disappointment that Anne’s child born in September was a daughter rather than the hoped-for son and heir, and just after Henry’s interest in another lady had provoked Anne, if Chapuys is to be believed. Anne was then accused of having committed adultery with Mark Smeaton in April/May 1534 and with Sir Francis Weston in May/June 1534. If Anne was indeed pregnant in those months, that would be highly improbable; but suppose Anne knew that she was not pregnant, but experiencing a phantom pregnancy, then maybe such affairs could be seen as an attempt to become pregnant by someone else. And Anne’s alleged incest with her brother in November/December 1535 could just be seen as an ever more desperate attempt at pregnancy: and an early miscarriage in January could be seen as her body’s swift rejection of an unnatural pregnancy. (Bernard 2010, 188)
All these “could have”s and “maybe”s—some of them, such as the phantom pregnancy and the desire for intercourse with another so shortly after Elizabeth’s birth (out of jealous vengeance, Bernard suggests), seemingly pulled out of thin air—make Bernard’s purportedly scholarly study sound more like the closing statements of a particularly sleazy lawyer.
59. Hull and Alberge 2010.
60. Marshall n.d.
61. Hull and Alberge 2010.
62. Erickson 2011.
63. Mantel 2009, 317.
64. Ibid., 287.
65. Ibid., 137.
66. Ibid., 317.
67. Mantel 2013, 304.
68. Ibid., 345.
69. Ibid., 409
70. See page 101 for discussion of this incident.
71. Clapp 2010.
72. Billington 2010.
73. Bermingham 2011.
74. Dowell 2010.
75. Ridgway 2011.
76. Broadbent 2010.
77. Billington 2010.
78. Letts 2010.
79. Williams 2011.
80. Howard Brenton, interview with author, London, England, July 30, 2010.
81. Ibid.
82. Paglia 1991, 13.
83. Melissa Mazza, October 10, 2011, comment on The Creation of Anne Boleyn Facebook page, accessed October 15, 2011, www.facebook.com/thecreationofanneboleyn .
84. The Real Housewives of Atlanta ,