(© Unknown Artist – The National Portrait Gallery)
Sometimes it can be hard to judge a person’s impact on history. Their stories are too well known; too well trodden to allow new thoughts or perspectives to bloom. Anne Boleyn has been written on, thought on, commented on and debated on arguably more than any other woman in English history. One way to shine new light on that well worn path is to ask - what if?
What If…Anne had never married Henry?
Anne’s formative years were spent in the courts of France and Burgundy. In Burgundy, she acted as maid of honour to Margaret of Austria, whose refined court was a glittering place of learning, art and music. When Mary Tudor, Henry VIII’s sister, married King Louis XII of France, Anne was sent to join Mary’s household in Abbeville in 1514. Whilst Mary was soon widowed, scandalously quickly marrying the dashing Charles Brandon and returning to England, Anne remained at the French court, serving Queen Claude of France. These early years spent amongst thinkers, painters, musicians, scientists and artists gave Anne an education that even modern day university students could envy.
When her father, Thomas Boleyn, did recall her from the French court, it was not as a part of some Machiavellian scheme by the Boleyns to place her before the King. In 1522, when Anne came home from France, the King was embarking on his relationship with another Boleyn girl – Mary, Anne’s sister. Anne had been brought home with a marriage in mind, but it was not to the King.
Across the Irish sea, a dispute was rumbling over the inheritance of the earldom of Ormond. It was a vast earldom, rich and beautiful. When Thomas Butler, the 7th earl, had died in 1515, he had left no male heirs and now his grandsons – the Butlers and the Boleyns – were squabbling over the land and the title. When the Butlers squabbled, they tended to bring down all around them so it was in the interest of all to settle the dispute. Cardinal Wolsey, the King’s advisor, proposed a marriage between the Butler boy and a Boleyn girl – the two great grandchildren of the 7th earl – ending the dispute in a balanced and fair way.
James Butler, the proposed groom, was handsome and only a few years older than Anne. He had served Henry VIII in battle against the French and was a member of Wolsey’s household, who noted him as being “wise and discreet”. It is tempting to imagine that the Butler/Boleyn match would have been very successful; they were well suited in status, intelligence, looks and temperament. The marriage would also have been politically astute, bringing some semblance of calm to a corner of Ireland.
(© Portrait study by Hans Holbein the Younger, c. 1533)
It is not known why the marriage negotiations stalled. Anne Boleyn did have a flirtation with Henry Percy, another gentleman of Wolsey’s household, during this time, and was sent home to Hever in disgrace. Whilst this cemented her lifelong hatred of Wolsey, it would not have been enough to have ended negotiations for such a pertinent marriage with Butler. In the end, Henry VIII settled the dispute over the earldom by rewarding it to Thomas Boleyn in 1528, by which time Henry and Anne had embarked on their journey to the altar.
Had Anne and Butler married, whilst Anne lived almost a Queen in Ireland with her handsome husband and their many sons (Butler would father seven children, all sons, with his wife Joan Fitzgerald), what would have become of Henry, and of England?
Henry desperately wanted a son; of that we are certain. What is less certain is did Henry break from the Roman Catholic Church to divorce Catherine of Aragon for a son, or for Anne?
I believe it is the latter. Anne was Henry’s first real love – not a woman he was simply fond of, whom he could play the white knight to and who was the perfect dutiful wife, as Catherine was. Anne was passionate, fiery, intelligent – she challenged him and told him no and demanded more of him for the first time in his life. For the first time in his life, Henry was in real, uncompromising love.
Without Anne’s Reformist views and her ever pushing Henry towards a break from Rome, there is little doubt Henry would have remained a good Roman Catholic, loyal to the Pope, however angry he made him. Without Anne’s vitriolic hatred of Wolsey, and her campaign to bring him down, it is unlikely Henry would have parted from his capable advisor; certainly not in his youthful years. Without the fall of Wolsey, there is no rise of Thomas Cromwell and Thomas Cranmer with their own Reformist views. There is no Reformation. The monasteries stay standing – at least, until Edward VI’s reign.
Because Edward VI could still have been born and reigned. Catherine of Aragon was dead by the time Henry married Jane Seymour. Jane was a lady in waiting for Catherine of Aragon, and just as she was the perfect balm to the burns he suffered from his passionate love for Anne, so too could she have been the perfect companion to a widowed and bereaved King.
Catherine and Henry’s relationship had not soured in 1522, when Anne would have married Butler. It is completely conceivable that Catherine and Henry would have continued in friendship till her death. He may still have had Wolsey investigate the possibility of a divorce, but once the Pope refused to grant it, without the needling of the Boleyn faction the matter most likely would have been left. Henry Fitzroy, the King’s illegitimate son from his relationship with Elizabeth Blount, another of Catherine’s ladies in waiting, would still have been poised as a potential male heir, and maybe Henry, without the hope of a divorce, would have been more ready and able to accept Mary as his heir.
© Lucas Horenbout - Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Richmond and Somerset (1519-36)
It is a version of history which removes Elizabeth I from the British timeline. Without Elizabeth, Mary I’s crown would have passed to the 16 year old Mary Stuart (later known as Mary, Queen of Scots) who married the French dauphin months before Mary I’s death. She would be widowed two years later, and then have returned to ‘united’ England and Scotland as their queen. Whether she would have been as politically savvy in the role of an unmarried Queen as Elizabeth I is highly debatable, and Britain’s future would have been very different.
What If…Anne Boleyn had had a son?
When Henry and Anne’s first child, Elizabeth, was a daughter, and not the longed for son for whom Henry had cast the country asunder from the Roman Catholic Church, he is said to have remarked that by God’s grace, sons would follow. Anne did fall pregnant again in late 1535, but would tragically miscarry the baby boy in January 1536. It was said “she has miscarried of her saviour”, and the baby’s death marked the end for Anne and her family. This is because in the fall of the Boleyns, the earldom of Ormond was stripped from Thomas Boleyn and passed to James Butler, making him the 9th Earl of Ormond without the marriage Wolsey had proposed with Anne.
But what if that baby had lived?
The child would have been ten years old when Henry died in January 1547. Too young to rule on his own, Anne would have been Regent and a council of Boleyn family members and supporters would have advised him. I have no doubt that Anne would have made both an excellent Boy Mum and an extraordinary Regent. Her years spent abroad with Margaret of Austria and Claude of France had taught her all she would have needed. If we think Margaret Beaufort or Margaret of Anjou had been powerful King’s Mothers, Anne would have taken her place easily alongside them in terms of intelligence, political savvy, ferocity, and power wielded with little mercy.
Herein would lie the danger.
Throughout her life, Anne had a talent for making enemies, and with a mere child on the throne, would her enemies have used this moment to rise against her?
They would not have risen against her son, as the only other claimants to the throne were female, and without the examples of Mary I and Elizabeth I, this would have remained a cause for concern. But Anne could have seen herself struck down, if her son did not have the power and influence to save her. When the counsel moved against Edward Seymour during Edward VI’s regency, the young king was not able to save the person who had been the closest person he had to a parental figure.
Would Anne have met the same downfall?
With Henry and Anne’s son on the throne, and his elder sister Elizabeth married to Robert Dudley and acting as his advisor, a golden era almost as glittering as the reign of Elizabeth I’s could have been possible. I certainly would not have bet against him.
What If…Anne had been given a real trial?
Anne’s trial for treason was a show trial. The executioner had been sent for before she even stood in the dock. When he saw the crimes that she was accused of, even Eustace Chapuys, the fervently anti-Boleyn Spanish ambassador, could not believe the charges – and he was a man ready to think the worst of Anne. It is now nearly completely accepted that Anne was innocent of the charges. She may have had a quick tongue, said things she regretted and which could be misconstrued, and had a talent for enraging people, but she was not an adulterer and she did not look for the King’s death.
On 12th May 1536, the four men accused of adultery with Anne were found guilty of the charge and sentenced to death. Anne’s own trial came three days later, and one does not need a law degree to argue that it was impossible for her to have any form of fair trial now her co-accused had been found guilty. Despite the evident mental anguish and distress Anne exhibited during her arrest, and the fact it was now clear she would be found guilty, if indeed there had ever been a chance it would be otherwise, at her trial she was calm and collected. She carried herself with courage and with the dignity of a Queen.
Both she and George had spoken well at their trials. Had the trials been real, their simple defense that they were evidently not in certain places when various crimes they are said to have committed took place would have seen the case dropped immediately.
If Anne had been found not guilty, but the relationship between her and Henry had deteriorated so much he still wanted to be rid of her, he may have placed her under house arrest. Henry II, Henry’s nine-time great grandfather, had imprisoned his wife Eleanor of Aquitaine centuries earlier, leaving him free to indulge in affairs and without the fear she would stir up his sons to rise against him again. Henry VIII could have followed a similar example. He could even do as he had done with his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, and send the queen to live, poorly provisioned, in a selection of houses so damp and unhealthy that her demise was almost assured. A fate as deadly as the scaffold. Truth and justice did not matter. If the king wanted her gone, Anne would have died, one way or another.
***
If Henry and Anne had not met, and Henry had not fallen completely and passionately in love with her, the pages of history read differently for a while, but the time converges, as it always does.
If Anne had lived the life of an Irish countess, a queen of her own court in all but name, Henry would likely still have looked for a second wife to give him a male heir. But the Great Matter, the Reformation, the lives lost in the cause, would never have happened. At least, not until his son’s reign when perhaps they would have been all the more brutal for being brought about by religious beliefs rather than Henry’s own pragmatic break with Rome. Anne was the spark that set it all ablaze.
Without Anne, it is unlikely there would have been the six wives, and our knowledge of women’s history in the sixteenth century would have been so much poorer.
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