HUNTING THE FALCON

Sympathetic new look at Henry VIII's second wife, her ambition to share power, and her impact on international relations.

Historians Guy and Fox cite new sources and heightened interest in Anne Boleyn as the reasons for another examination of her brief life. The authors offer more nuance than the traditional view of Anne as a scheming temptress who would not sleep with Henry until he arranged the divorce from Catherine of Aragon and married her. Anne hailed from an upwardly mobile clan: Her father, Thomas, a leading diplomat, “had no scruples about using his children to achieve wealth and power for the family,” and younger brother George held key, lucrative positions in Henry’s court. Anne was schooled in France as a teenager, serving as one of the demoiselles of Francis I’s wife Queen Claude. When she returned to serve Queen Catherine, Anne was considered a Francophile with decidedly French manners and customs. This would not serve to her benefit at the English court as Britain inched toward alliance with the Hapsburg emperor Charles. When a son by Catherine was not forthcoming, and after an affair with Anne’s older sister, Mary, Henry decided on slim, lively Anne as the “love of his life.” She managed to hold him at bay until he broke with Rome in 1534, becoming an increasingly divisive figure at court as the long, winding negotiations over his divorce dragged on. Anne “envisaged a mouldbreaking role for herself” as Henry’s co-regnant, but competition and jealousy undermined her. Still, write the authors, she “would enlarge the role of queen,” before her failure to produce a son led the insecure Henry to demand that Thomas Cromwell supply ammunition to rid himself of her. Though she died young, Guy and Fox hail Anne as a woman “exercising authority in a deeply patriarchal world,” and “she stands proudly in the pantheon of history alongside her daughter, Elizabeth.”

A tragic historical tale delineated with admirable elucidation.