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ANNE
BOLEYN: An Excerpt from Five Women of the English Reformation
By Paul Zahl
Anne Boleyn was twenty-six years old when she became Queen of
England. She was twenty-nine when she was executed for treason
against the King….
Anne was educated in France from the age of six. Her seven
years in the royal courts of Burgundy, Flanders, Amboise (and
Cloux, where Leonardo da Vinci served the French king), and
Paris gave her a delight in the French language; an extremely
cosmopolitan exposure to Renaissance classicism and also fashion
— for it is proven beyond a doubt that she forever after loved
fine clothes and jewelry; and a strong, living link to a
heritage she had in common with most of her sisters in the
English Reformation. This heritage was the French connection, a
Reforming tendency which existed at the highest level of the
French nobility….
The Reformation insight, which was justification by grace
through faith and the consequent disenchantment with the
Catholic church, was to come to Anne, and thus to Queen Anne,
from a French Bible, from French commentaries on Scripture, and
from the anti-establishment, Reformist poetry of Clément Marot.
The French connection was not unmediated, insofar as Anne never
knew Marguerite de Navarre as Reformer, nor was she old enough
to comprehend the issues involved during the period she lived in
France as a very young child. But Anne’s delight in the French
language made the works she began to receive as gifts later on
as a young adult, entirely accessible and also pleasant to her.
Anne received the Reformation, in other words, partly because
she understood its third principal language, its first language
being Latin and its second being Greek. English is the fourth
language of Reformation literature. The earliest Reformation
works in English were translations of Luther from his German and
Latin.
Anne Boleyn’s story intersects with that of Henry Tudor at
the point that King Henry began to be impatient with the
inability of his first wife, Katherine of Aragon, to produce a
male heir. Although she was not regarded as a beauty by her
contemporaries, Anne’s inward confidence and outward vivacity
caught the king’s eye on hunting excursions during which her
family sought to put themselves forward for royal preferment.
Around the beginning of Lent 1526, Henry began to go after
Anne. The following winter he decided on a divorce from
Katherine. The story of his divorce and the nation-shaking
events that led to his marriage to Anne on January 24 or 25,
1533 (she had become pregnant) is well known and quite complex.
Anne’s coronation as Queen of England took place on Whitsunday (i.e., Pentecost),
June 1, 1533.
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The Reformation
insight, which was justification by grace through
faith, was to come to Anne, and thus to Queen Anne. |
Anne Boleyn was executed on Friday, April 19, 1536. The
length of her reign, just under three years, has inspired the
nickname, “Anne of the Thousand Days.” During this period she
gave birth to a daughter, Elizabeth, who was later declared a
bastard both under English law — the ruling was reversed later
when circumstances changed — and also under Roman Catholic
church law. The second ruling was never reversed. It fortified
the pope’s declaration that Anne’s daughter was entirely
illegitimate as Queen of England and therefore the legitimate
target of a fatwah.
During her thousand days, Anne, supported by like-minded
Reformers such as Thomas Cromwell at court and Thomas Cranmer
within the church, presided over the Reformation of the Church
of England. Anne, leaning on Henry, fomented a policy of
dissolving all the monasteries, although she also worked
actively towards the use of the riches and lands thus
expropriated for the relief of the poor. There is
incontrovertible evidence of this. At the same time, many nobles
who stood to gain from the Dissolution resented Anne’s claims on
expropriated property for the relief of the destitute. This
resentment probably led in part to widespread support for the
coup d’état that crushed her.
Anne also secured, again through Henry — as her good works
were almost always achieved from and through her husband’s
authority—the appointment of several evangelical bishops and
deans for the newly independent Church of England. Anne was also
patron to Protestant publishers and writers, who were able to
become extremely prolific during this Protestant period of royal
policy. Thus Anne sought to convince Henry that William Tyndale,
the outlaw Bible translator and “Lutheran” theologian, was the
king’s supporter and friend. That was basically true, in any
event.
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During her
thousand days, Anne, supported by like-minded
Reformers, presided over the Reformation of the
Church of England. |
For reasons that have never become clear, Thomas Cromwell,
who was by theological conviction and government policy a
supporter of Anne’s and of the Protestant party’s goals at
court, turned on her, with seeming suddenness, in the early
months of 1536. He later told the Hapsburg ambassador to England
that he, Cromwell, had engineered the coup: the false charges of adultery
against Anne; the charges of collusion with her brother, Lord
Rochford; the startling speed of their arrest and trial; the
“evidence” presented to King Henry as well as the “witnesses”;
the engineered trials — everything! Cromwell’s motives have
never been understood. Possibly he thought to avert Henry’s
suspicion of himself by setting the king on to Anne.
In any event, Anne denied all the charges at the trial, as
did Rochford her brother. She carried herself with affecting poise
right up to the moment of her death. At that moment she spoke
earnestly, but without grievance, of the faith in which she was
to die. Cranmer met with her as confessor and chaplain the day
before her execution. We will never know what passed between
them, although we do have Cranmer’s letter to Henry, the most
difficult of his career, defending Anne as best he could. He had
been kept sedulously in the dark, right up to the last minute,
concerning the accusations and their sources. His painful yet
brilliant letter managed at the same time to defend Anne, to
submit no less absolutely to the king’s judgment, and to speak
for the Reformed Religion that Anne
herself had demonstratively backed.
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She carried
herself with affecting poise right up to the moment
of her death. At that moment she spoke earnestly,
but without grievance, of the faith in which she was
to die. |
Anne died meekly but gave away nothing. She was then
completely
erased from the record. It became as if she had never lived. The
value of her achievement only began to be understood after her
daughter Elizabeth became queen twenty-five years later. It was
then that John Foxe, the Protestant chronicler, was able to tell
Anne’s story, at least as he and many of her contemporaries had
grasped it at the time.
What sort of person was Anne? What was her inward life like?
We cannot really know. We have windows into Anne Askew’s
spiritedness, into Katharine Parr’s penitence and prescience,
into Jane Grey’s “back talking” in the face of danger, and into
Catherine Willoughby’s desperation at being excluded from court
and thus from influence by Elizabeth I.
Anne Boleyn’s temperament and personal qualities, on the
other hand, have to be deduced from a few bits of written
evidence, such as the lists of her fabulous wardrobe and the
fact that she sent back one of her infant Elizabeth’s caps three
times to the designer at Greenwich until it was just so. We also
have her unflappable, firm “No!” to every charge that was laid
publicly against her at the trial.
But what was really in her mind? How did she really regard
her husband? What did she say to Cranmer the day before she died
—in an appointment that lasted two hours? And how did she regard
herself as she laid her head on the block that Friday? There is
no way to know. Of her theology, however, of her specific
commitments in Christianity, we know a good deal….
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It is not always realized that Anne and her
supporters were destructive out of a consuming
desire to redirect the nation's piety away from
works, and towards love, in order to inspire works. |
The formal principle of Anne’s reign was: “Burn down the
Mission” (Elton John). In other words, get rid of the externals
that support the opposite material principle, the principle of
gaining God’s affirmation by deeds of veneration and visible
devotion.
It is not always realized that Anne and Thomas Cromwell and
Thomas Cranmer and their supporters and associates were
destructive out of a consuming desire to redirect the nation’s
piety away from works, and towards love, in order to inspire
works. On this theological/ideological foundation, Anne stood
foursquare with all the “Lutherans” of her age.
The evangelical or Protestant position in the early years of
the Reformation emphasized the inwardness of true religion (St.
Matthew 15:17-20; St. Mark 7:14-23) in opposition to outward or
“formal” religion. The material principle of the Reformation, I
repeat, was the essence or substance of this: justification (by
grace) through faith. The formal principle of the Reformation
was the outward or visible form taken by the material principle:
the husk in distinction to the kernel. Thus Scripture alone (sola
Scriptura) is the formal principle of the Reformation, while
its material principle is God’s grace (sola gratia)
responded to by means of faith (sola fide).
Anne’s religion is well expressed through the Ecclesiastes
commentary. It is perfectly summarized in the verse from St.
John’s Gospel imprinted on the back binding of her French Bible.
That verse, from its late first-century source, speaks for the
entire primavera moment of the Reformation spring: The law has
given way to grace. “Lo, the winter is past, . . . the flowers
appear on the earth, the time of singing has come” (Song of
Solomon 2:11, 12)….
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As a queen, Anne understood her providential
mission to be this: to bring the Reformation to
England. In fact it was through Anne that the New
Religion entered England. |
Anne did not see herself principally as a Christian martyr.
She saw herself as a person who had gambled with very high
stakes and lost. But as queen, Anne understood her providential
mission to be this: to bring the Reformation to England and
employ every single instance of patronage and influence to that
end. Her self-confidence and bearing aided the Protestant cause
immeasurably. In fact it was through Anne that the New Religion
entered England.
Yet in the end Anne became a victim, and her life was tragic.
This excerpt is taken
from Paul F.M. Zahl, Five Women of the English Reformation. ©
2001, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, Grand Rapids,
Michigan. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, all rights
reserved. |
Paul Zahl
