Anne Boleyn: Fatal Attractions (review)

For over twenty years, Professor Bernard has been offering, in a series of published articles, a critical view of accepted accounts of Anne Boleyn. This book draws his analysis together in a portrait that attempts to demolish the views promoted by historians such as Eric Ives and Retha Warnicke that make Boleyn an important player in the process by which a Protestant church became established in England.

His approach is to re-examine the commonly used surviving primary sources, arguing that most of them are too slight or too ambiguous to support the edifice that has been constructed on them. At the same time, he promotes other material usually regarded as unreliable to a more important position. He dismisses Sanders's admittedly late story of Anne's miscarriage of 'a shapeless mass of flesh' as 'too vague' (p. 127), while accepting the accounts of the imperial ambassador, Eustace Chapuys, whose reliability is usually questioned. He puts considerable weight on the account in Lancelot de Carles's French poem Epistre contenant la process criminal faict contra Anna Boullant d'Angleterre although he does not discuss the variants in the manuscripts of the poem, the literary conventions it employs, or the audience for which it was written.

This is mainly because, in Bernard's view, Henry was the one in control of developments at this and every other time. It was not Anne who resisted his sexual advances for so long but Henry who restrained himself because of his anxiety to have a legitimate heir. Bernard's evaluation of events seems in some cases to be influenced by his own underlying concepts of human behaviour. If his overall argument is convincing it will require historians interested in the position and power of women in the period to reassess their understanding of their ability to act independently at the highest levels of society.

Paradoxically perhaps, Bernard also argues that Anne's behaviour with other men at court at the least went 'far beyond the formal conventions' (p. 162) and seeks to demonstrate 'his hunch' (p. 192) that she was probably guilty of the crimes of which she was convicted. His approach is to invite the reader to 'imagine Anne ... enjoying relationships with her courtier servants that went far beyond the contemporary conventions of courtly love, the platonic gallant courtship of married women' (p. 187).

In the plethora of studies of Anne Boleyn it is useful to have one that challenges the canonical interpretation but Bernard's rereading of the sources, ambiguous as they are, does not in the end produce a clinching argument.