Anne Boleyn: Fatal Attractions [Hardcover]

Bernard's revisionary view of Anne Boleyn revolves around three arguments:

a) that Anne wasn't particularly religious and had little to do with the Reformation;
b) that it was Henry who withheld from a full sexual relationship with Anne for five or so years until they could be decently married;
c) that Anne really did sleep with the five men with whom she was accused of committing adultery, including her brother.

It has to be said that the evidence to support these positions is a little fragile, to say the least, so this book is primarily based in interpretation.

I don't know enough about the religious context to accept or fully reject the first point. But that it was Henry who refused to sleep with Anne for about five years doesn't feel convincing. Bernard suggests that Henry was so concerned about only having sex within marriage so that any children would be free from the stain of illegitimacy - but that assumes that from the moment he saw Anne, Henry knew that he wanted to marry her. His letters to Anne (from the late 20s) as well as his previous and later behaviour with other women don't really support this. Henry, as king of England, doesn't appear to have been a man used to or even wanting to restrain any of his appetites, and on Anne's first arrival at the English court she was just another attractive girl for him to consume. Why would he then hold himself back?

The third proposition that Anne really was stupid enough to commit serial adultery in the face of the public court equally doesn't really stand up, in my view. Bernard's `evidence' here is a single poem written after the events. To believe this, we would also have to believe that Anne took her first lover, Mark Smeaton, just a month after having given birth to Elizabeth in 1533. Apart from the physical issues here, the argument relies on the idea that the marriage was already faulty: but Henry seems to have been delighted with baby Elizabeth, even though she wasn't the male heir he required. Anne was only about 26 or so at this point, and there was no indication that she wouldn't go on to have more children, including the desperately-wanted boy. So why would she, mere weeks after having given birth, sleep with Smeaton?

As for the idea that Anne committed incest with her brother and got pregnant - we're now in Philippa Gregory territory. Bernard suggests that she was so desperate for another child that she slept with her brother, and then the child was spontaneously aborted because of its `unnatural' provenance. No evidence to support this, other than the trial accusations.

So this is worth reading for its revisionary approach: Bernard is, of course, right to assert that we shouldn't take `history' as a given, that we should still interrogate the records. I simply don't find his arguments convincing, lacking, as they do, evidence for his suppositions.

This is a book with `talks back' to previous scholarship, particularly Ives (The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn: The Most Happy), and Warnicke (The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn: Family Politics at the Court of Henry VIII), so it's not really a book for anyone wanting to take their first steps into this period: it assumes we know the story and the literature to date.

It's also not a particularly well-written book in terms of prose style; it feels a bit jagged and rough to me, perhaps the result of lots of editing and cutting.

So this is definitely worth a read, but I'm afraid it didn't convince me at all.

Having read many books about Anne Boleyn I was looking forward to this as it promised to be 'a groundbreaking new biography'... but there was no new material, only the same stuff with the author's personal interpretation which was, indeed, different. Having expressed his disagreement with others' interpretations (including Eric Ives and Retha Warnicke) seemingly because of their overuse of such phrases as 'maybe...' and 'It was possibly...' Professor Bernard follows with his own version, full of 'Let us imagine...' and 'It would surely have been...'.

Although there is an extensive set of notes and bibliography, the author relies heavily on two sources - the letters of the Imperial Ambassador, Eustache Chapuys, and a poem by Lancelot de Carles. We know that Chapuys was extremely antagonistic to Anne but I'm not aware of de Carles' attitude. The output of each seems to have been swallowed whole and regurgitated here by Bernard.

The discussion of portraits was shallow and the suggestion that the well-known picture of Anne (used on the book jacket) is really of Henry's sister Mary is laughable. For a good in-depth discussion of the Anne portraits, read Eric Ives's version.

Bernard finishes his last chapter 'Was Anne Guilty?' with the following:

'...And so it remains my own hunch that Anne had indeed committed adultery...'

Sorry, Professor, not good enough, as I'm sure you would tell your students.

I had imagined that this book would uncover some interesting new "evidence" that would challenge our version of events. Written a kind of investigative journalism style it is interesting and entertaining to read and certainly it is good mental excercise to have old truths challenged but ultimately many of his arguments are fairly farfetched and purely speculative. There simply is no really new "evidence" We have to live with the simple fact that given that most of the material about Anne's trial was destroyed in the Elizabethan age and is 500 years old anyway our knowledge of the facts is limited. I also got the feeling that this could have been written as an essay but has been strung out as far as possible to fill a book.
Worth reading definitely but not a "groundbreaking biography"