The Boleyn King

By Laura AndersonBallantine Books, 2013

Bring Up the Bodies

By Hilary MantelPicador paperback, 2013Debut novelist Laura Anderson begins The Boleyn King with a scene well-known to fans of Tudor history and even better-known to readers of Tudor historical fiction: Anne Boleyn, her marriage to King Henry VIII grown fractious and brittle, is in labor, trying to give birth to her third child. The first was Elizabeth, a healthy birth but a girl, not the boy Henry had hoped for when he divorced his wife of twenty years, Queen Katherine of Aragon. The second, conceived shortly after Elizabeth’s birth, was miscarried after four months. Henry sees the third as his last chance with his new wife, and at the start of Anderson’s novel, Anne knows that all too well:

But Henry already had a daughter. He had not divorced the popular Catherine of Aragon, defied the Holy Roman Emperor, and wrested control of the Church from papal hands in order to have a second daughter. He needed a son. A son Anne had been meant to give him. She had already failed not once but twice: there had been a boy a year after Elizabeth … a boy who never even breathed.

Only the date of the scene is not January of 1536 but late June, and Anderson’s Anne is not miscarrying – she’s delivering a healthy baby boy. This is the dramatically charged moment on which Anderson’s engaging novel pivots: that Anne Boleyn ultimately succeeded in giving Henry the male heir he so desperately wanted. It’s a heady hypothetical, since the stakes were impossibly high for Anne going into 1536: not only had she given Henry no son, but Henry’s eye was beginning to wander to the other ladies at court, including the willowy Jane Seymour.In reality, Anne lost everything. She miscarried a boy in January, she was arrested on charges of treason and adultery at the beginning of May, and on May 19 she was beheaded. Henry married Jane Seymour on May 30, and she gave him Edward, the living male heir he’d been seeking. It was only Edward’s untimely death, followed by his half-sister Mary’s untimely death, that allowed Anne’s daughter Elizabeth to ascend the throne. In his play about Henry, Shakespeare could look back at Elizabeth’s birth with the complacency of hindsight, putting into his Archbishop Cranmer’s mouth words of happy prophecy for the baby girl: “In her days every man shall eat in safety/Under his own vine what he plants, and sing/The merry songs of peace to all his neighbours.” The ecstatic Cranmer tells his assemblage that “Peace, plenty, love, truth, terror” were “the servants to this chosen infant.”In such hagiography, the ends justify the miscarriages, and Anne’s subsequent failed pregnancies, not to mention her trial and execution, are seen as mere preludes to Gloriana. Recent Tudor historical fiction has tended to be less obsequious and more obstetric, and the wrenching details of Anne’s final pregnancy are lingered over like a hot tray of sweetmeats. Anderson’s debut currently shares bookstore table-space with the paperback release of one of the most famous Tudor novels ever written, Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies, in which Henry’s Master Secretary Thomas Cromwell wryly notices just how irresistible that fateful miscarriage is. “You know what it’s like when a cart overturns in the street? Everybody you meet has witnessed it,” he observes:

People will tell him, ‘I was there, I was there when Anne broke off her talk, I was there when she put down her book, her sewing, her lute, I was there when she broke off her merriment at the thought of Katherine lowered into the ground. I saw her face change. I saw her ladies close about her. I saw them sweep her to her chamber and bolt the door, and I saw the trail of blood left on the ground as she walked.’

“We need not believe that,” he continues, but readers have to believe something, and the thought of hard, haughty Anne brought down by her own arrogance – or desperation, as readers of Phlippa Gregory’s The Other Boleyn Girl will vividly recall – has a symmetry to it that’s neatly deceptive.  In Bring Up the Bodies Mantel briefly plays with the idea of eliciting some sympathy for Anne, at least in Cromwell’s imagining:

He himself thought Anne cold, a woman who took her maidenhead to market and sold it for the best price. But this coldness – that was before she was wed. Before Henry heaved himself on top of her, and off again, and she was left, after he had stumbled back to his own apartments, with the bobbing circles of candlelight on the ceiling, the murmurs of her women, the basin of warm water and the cloth: and Lady Rochford’s voice as she scrubs herself, ‘Careful, madam, do not wash away a Prince of Wales.’

But it doesn’t last long – the arachnid, contaminating presence of Lady Rochford is like a warning sign that sympathy can’t take root here. When Anne snarls at Cromwell that he is a commoner and that commoners can be both made and unmade, he tells her the fact is duly noted, secretly recalling the origins of the Boleyns. Her doom is prescribed, and yet such is Mantel’s storytelling skill that the reader hurtles through Bring Up the Bodies in complete suspense. This is that most famous of all Tudor tales, the downfall of Anne Boleyn, and yet it feels so raw that when one character expresses his dazed bewilderment, we share a measure of it ourselves:

I thought that he loved her. I thought there was no estrangement between them, up until the last. I am forced to think I don’t know anything. Not about men. Not about women. Not about my faith, nor the faith of others.

That confusion is wiped away in The Boleyn King, although it’s quickly replaced with others. In Anderson’s tale, Anne’s baby William is born healthy. A few years later Henry VIII dies (offstage, as it were: the novel jumps from 1536 to 1553) and a regency council is set up to run the country until young William can come of age. The council features several prominent noblemen of the era, including the Howard family led by the Duke of Norfolk and the grasping Seymour family with its ambitious brothers Thomas and Edward; the head of the council is Anne Boleyn’s brother George, Lord Rochford, now Lord Protector until William reaches his 18th birthday, which is only a few months away when the book’s action commences.The backdrop is familiar and yet eerily different. Anne, barred from the regency council, has become an ineffectual stage-mother. Princess Mary, forever a potential focal point for Catholic resistance, is kept under close watch and not allowed to marry. In the first half of Anderson’s book, she’s given a very pleasing complexity that she's often lacking in Tudor fiction (although virtually never lacking it in Tudor films, oddly enough):

A handsome woman, with the erect bearing of royalty and the stamp of Henry in her features. Not as beautiful as William, not as alluring as Elizabeth – but no one who saw her could doubt that she was the descendant of many kings and queens. Minuette always felt sorry for Mary until she was with her, and then pity unbearably offensive. Mary did not want pity. Mary wanted her due.

William’s older sister Elizabeth is cerebral and poised, and William himself is far more Boleyn than Tudor, at least in appearance: he’s sleek, dark, attractive but not bluff. He and Elizabeth must deal with pressing crowds of courtiers, scheming groups of councilors, bubbling religious resentment on the home front, and the looming threat of an alliance between France and Spain against England.Fortunately, they have some help, and it takes the form of something neither Henry nor Anne Boleyn ever had: abidingly close honest friends. Genevieve Antoinette Wyatt, nicknamed Minuette, has grown up with Elizabeth in Anne’s household and is far more like a sister than a lady-in-waiting. Likewise William has grown up with and sometimes idolized the slightly older Dominic Courtenay, a dashing soldier and courtier on whom William relies for the unaffected council of a brother:

Don’t you know that’s why I value you? Because you I can always trust to speak honestly – even when you shouldn’t. That’s more than I can say for any of my councilors. They speak what they think I want to hear, or only as much as they want me to know.

Dominic, in his turn, is fully aware of the prodigy William is shaping up to be. William is naturally the dominant figure in this quartet of close friends, and when he takes the field against a French army on the Continent, Dominic gets to watch first-hand the legendary limitless Tudor capacity for what’s now known as multi-tasking:

Dominic ducked inside the tent where Northumberland and Sussex were engaged in their daily reports. William sat at a table, reading and signing letters and apparently not listening at all. Dominic knew that was an illusion. William was quite capable of doing ten things at once and still recalling word for word any conversation held in his hearing.

William, Elizabeth, Minuette, and Dominic face a host of challenges, from the villainous Howard family to a mysterious document called “The Penitent’s Confession” that purports to offer proof of William’s illegitimacy, and Anderson skillfully deepens these challenges with one that’s unexpected: as all four young people reach adulthood, Dominic and William simultaneously begin to fall in love with Minuette. The Boleyn King handles this element of star-crossed romance with a bare minimum of schmaltz – indeed, Minuette’s conflicted mess of emotions for both her close friends is adeptly drawn – and the plotlines of war and intrigue are equally well done. The reader is made to care a good deal about what will happen to our central foursome in the rest of the promised trilogy.But the mention of that trilogy will also remind those readers of Wolf Hall and this latest paperback, Bring Up the Bodies, since Mantel’s Cromwell books are also part of a projected trilogy. And that reminder prompts a perhaps uncomfortable question for The Boleyn King: where’s Cromwell? Anderson’s King Henry VIII dies around 1540, leaving a healthy heir, a dowager queen, a fledgling new state church, and a council ruled by the landed families of the realm. The intrigues that follow mostly arise from William – now crowned Henry IX – vying for power with those landed families. But what about the quintessential Tudor power-broker? Cromwell isn’t mentioned, nor are any of the other new-made up-and-coming courtiers and officials who formed an integral part of Henry VIII’s government. It’s the ultimate implausibility: we’re asked to believe that all the rival factions of William’s council simply swallowed their differences and governed effectively for nearly two decades, when the Tudors – and before them the Lancastrians – were famous for how poorly they respected regencies. Government operative political fixers like Cromwell would have been the only means foppish George Boleyn would have had to retain his authority for so long in the face of such opposition, but those operatives aren’t there. Instead, the nobility handles everything itself. It’s an oddly Tory decision for a writer who currently lives in Massachusetts.After the execution of Anne Boleyn, Mantel’s Cromwell expects a dark, bleak, violent time might be headed for England:

A phrase runs through his head – was it Thomas More’s? – ‘the peace of the hen coop when the fox has run home’. He sees the scattered carcasses, some killed with one snap of the jaw, the rest bitten and shredded as the fox whirls and snaps in panic as the hens flap about him, as he spins around and deals death; the remnants then to be sluiced away, the mulch of scarlet feathers plastered over the floor and walls.

Anne Boleyn doesn’t survive the events of The Boleyn King, although no French executioner is involved in this alternate-history version of the story. But our quartet of young stars – two royals and their two best friends – still have plenty of snapping jaws to avoid, both at home and abroad. Anderson doesn’t address the fact that Anne’s third pregnancy is actually far from the most pivotal ‘what if’ in Tudor history – after all, the main things it affected were the lives and political fortunes of two families and five women. No, the truly pivotal birth happened in 1511, when Queen Catherine gave birth to a healthy baby boy and the proud father called him Henry and all England celebrated. That baby boy died a month later, but if he’d lived, far more than two families and some ambitious women would have been affected; the whole Western world would have been spared the Reformation and would have gone down unrecognizable paths.Those paths would very likely have led to peace, plenty, love, and truth. But terror sells.____Steve Donoghue is a writer and reader living in Boston with his dogs. He’s recently reviewed books for The Washington Post, The National, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, Historical Novel Review Online, and The Quarterly Conversation. He is the Managing Editor of Open Letters Monthly, and hosts one of its blogs, Stevereads.