Adrienne Dillard reviews a new biography of Charles I

Leanda de Lisle's first book, After Elizabeth, was a fascinating account of the dying days of the Tudor dynasty and the subsequent transfer of power to the Scottish ruling house. Now, after best-selling accounts of the Grey and Tudor families, de Lisle has returned to the Stuarts, with a biography of King Charles I, the autocratic monarch whose reign ended in civil war, his execution, and the temporary abolition of the British monarchy. With new research from previously unused private documents and a focus on Charles's marriage to the unpopular French princess, Henrietta Maria, this biography is already garnering interest and applause amongst fans of royal and political biographies. 

The White King is released today in the United States and it is available through Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Its British release date is on 11th January. I am delighted to host this review of The White King by American novelist Adrienne Dillard, who is the author of two novels set at the Tudor court - Cor Rotto, inspired by the life of Elizabeth I's cousin, Katherine Carey, and The Raven's Widow, based on the life of Catherine Howard's confidante Jane, Lady Rochford. 

The Martyr King: Adrienne Dillard's review of Leanda de Lisle's "The White King"

As a Tudor historian, it is nearly impossible to review works set during the time period without seeing the content through the jaundiced lens of your own biases.  More often than not, there is room for multiple interpretations of the documented evidence, but it can be hard to overcome the instinctual gut-reaction humans experience when faced with an opinion that differs from one they wholeheartedly embrace about historical figures they have come to cherish.  That uncomfortableness is invaluable when we seek academic growth, but it makes reading for pleasure a challenge.  Thankfully, I had few preconceived notions about England’s first Caroline king, and when I was offered the opportunity to review the latest take on his life, I leapt at the chance.  Few things can compare to the joy I feel when introduced to a new historical subject and this beautifully crafted biography did not disappoint.

The subtitle of Leanda De Lisle’s The White King calls the monarch a traitor, murderer, and martyr, but upon completion of the book, I have come away with the impression that the only fitting descriptor used is martyr.  The other titles seem far too subjective for this oft-misunderstood king.

Though Charles’ reign came many years after the death of the ginger-haired tyrant at the head of the Tudor court, the spectre of Henry VIII looms large throughout this biography.  His reign and personality are held against those of Charles I to show how vastly different they were and just how much the world had changed in the intervening years.  The charges of tyranny lodged against the latter monarch pale in comparison to the actual tyranny perpetrated by Henry VIII and his children, yet none of their reigns ended with the humiliation of the scaffold, as Charles’ did.  Even more striking are the parallels De Lisle makes with our current political climate – where “populism meets religious justifications for violence” and “the rise of demagogues, who whip up mobs by feeding off ethnic and religious hatreds.”

De Lisle brings the figures surrounding Charles I to life with the strident confidence that accompanies the historian who fully understand their subject.  All of their graces and foibles are fully explored; their ever-changing allegiances reported without a hint of sentimentality.  If their motivations are not revealed in the primary sources, they are left unexplained here, preserving the jarring atmosphere Charles must have felt during his reign.  Even the most historically savvy reader is never quite certain where loyalties lie or how often the tides will turn.  In the hands of a less experienced historian these twists would be rendered into a confusing mess, but De Lisle deftly navigates the murky waters with expert precision.

My favorite part of The White King was the focus on Robert and Henry Rich and their cousin, Lady Lucy Carlisle. Having spent the better part of the last decade researching Catherine Carey, Lady Knollys, it was refreshing to see the role her descendants played during this tumultuous time in English history. The fealty they showed their monarch was far from the devotional loyalty Lady Knollys was known for in her lifetime, but the Puritan proclivities of their great-grandfather, Francis, remained un-diluted. I often found myself wondering what their grandmother, Lettice, would have thought of their intrigues. Lady Carlisle appears the most like her ancestor. Like Lettice, she even bore an uncanny resemblance to the queen she served.

I thoroughly enjoyed De Lisle’s inclusion of the correspondence between the king and his wife, Henrietta Maria, recently unearthed from the Belvoir archives.  Through their words, the unjust depictions of the queen fall apart at the seams, and Henrietta Maria is finally given the recognition she deserves.  The emphasis on Charles family life is most touching here.  The love and devotion they showed to him speaks volumes about his character.

A well-written and impeccably researched biography, The White King seeks not to revise the history of England’s Civil Wars, but uncover the truth hidden beneath the grime of centuries of propaganda and myth.

December edition of "Tudor Life"

Keith Michell as Henry VIII and Jane Asher as Queen Jane Seymour (1972)

The December edition of Tudor Life magazine, for members of the Tudor Society, is out. Sadly, the Australian actor Keith Michell, famous for his three on-screen performance as Henry VIII, passed away less than two weeks ago, which makes Roland Hui's article on Michell's work in Henry VIII and his Six Wives (1972) all the more poignant. Along with articles on piracy in Tudor England, the theory of the "little Ice Age", a review of a new study of Mary I, short stories, profiles of houses belonging to Anne of Cleves, banquets and carols, the magazine was also thrilled to host a wonderful piece of satire from Professor Susan Bordo, author of The Creation of Anne Boleyn. I am so pleased to post the excerpt from She, Anne, which formed the banner piece for this month's edition. The story is dedicated by the author to author Sue Grafton and Oscar-nominated actress, Genevieve Bujold.

Author’s note: In July 2015, Sue Grafton, author of the Kinsey Millhone mysteries, was interviewed in The New York Times. When asked about her favorite reading, she replied that she “has trouble passing up books about Anne Boleyn. I keep hoping for a different ending. So far, no luck.’ (New York Times, July 16, 2015, “By the Book”)

She, Anne, sits musing about preparations for the execution they say is to come in the morning.  She is troubled at the prospect that her bit of an extra fingernail, which has been gestating like a deformed fetus in the imaginations of her enemies, growing larger and more disfiguring each day, would be exposed for all as she spread her arms for the executioner’s well-timed blow.  She ponders which highly fashionable French execution robe would cover it most effectively.  “Looking good is the best revenge,” she cackled to herself (cackling being a human sound especially beloved by witches,) revealing as she did so small, feral teeth that she longed to put to best use by piercing the robust neck of her husband’s chief counselor TC.  Then she sighed, remembering that her days as a living body were soon to be over.  She can already feel her fictional self ascending, her teeth becoming sharper, her hair blacker, her motives meaner.  There were compensations, of course. She was pleased to note that her sallow skin and moles would disappear and she would grow more beautiful over the coming centuries.  Eventually, perhaps, even the sixth finger would disappear.

Interrupting her musings, a visitor to her Tower rooms!  Was it her jailer, Mr. Kingston, come to blather some more about the skill of her executioner? (French—of course he was skilled! Kingston himself--an idiot who doesn’t know a joke when he hears it.) Was it Cranmer, come to make her an offer of life in a convent should she agree to renounce her daughter Elizabeth’s claim to the throne? Cranmer was a dear man, but didn’t he know she, Anne, was a goggle-eyed whore who would as soon chop her own head off with a dull English hatchet as spend the rest of her life without a man to suck on her slender toes?  Is it Elizabeth, come to pose for a painting of a tearful parting from her martyred mother?  Is it her sister Mary, that simpering do-gooder (then again, might she be gulled into asking Henry to pardon her)? Perhaps it is TC himself, and they can together converse about the 21^st century alchemy that would transform him, Cromwell (She never calls him “Cremuel”; sometimes “Crumb” but never “Cremuel”), from unscrupulous factotum to a warm and dryly witty man for all seasons?  (Or was that TM?  It is so difficult to keep the Thomas’s straight as they mutate, along with Anne herself, over the centuries!) 

No.  The visitor is the beloved husband himself, come to make the offer of life “for old times’ sake.” He wants to marry again, they all know that.  But he is a fool if he thinks her daughter’s rights can be bought that cheaply. And—ah! —He also wants to know if the charges are true.  Has she, Anne, really been unfaithful to him? Henry appears bleary-eyed, as though he has been on a bender; he is speaking oddly, bellowing with eyes raised to heaven, much like a preacher or a travelling actor from the north, come to court to tell tales of Arthur and Guinevere. Anne, recalling those tales, is tempted to make an argument with herself: Guinevere was queen, Guinevere was condemned, Guinevere was saved.  Perhaps she, too….? 

No.  She, Anne, is not fooled by the poetic, impassioned performance of her husband (who also seems to have lost a bit of weight since her arrest.) She knows that future re-tellings will often make her look about anxiously as she walks to the scaffold, hoping for the savior/messenger, but she does not expect her husband to issue a last-minute pardon.  She knows too that the future will often make her colder, meaner, and more grasping than she is, but rarely will it fathom her intelligence.  She has “wit,” they always say.  But she, Anne, this Anne, has more than wit, and she knows how to conjure a real curse.  “Take it to your grave,” she tells him, excited and flushed by the perfect extravagance of her lie, “I was unfaithful to you with half your court.” Henry, who cannot bear to feel his mind waver—it isn’t Kingly or manly—does not now know what to believe.  Impotent with rage, he slaps her.  She hardly cares about the sting of the slap; she faces far worse in the morrow. Actually, it is quite a delectable moment, even more soul satisfying than when, barely a breath later really, in eternal time, she will see that snake TC with his head finally off his shoulders.  As for Henry, she cannot resist a final thrust, knowing it will stir the souls of later generations, with a persuasion beyond mere fact. “But Elizabeth is yours! And will rule an England far greater than any you could have built!” Henry’s expression is worth the coming blood on the scaffold.  

She, Anne, wishes she could do better than this for Sue Grafton.  Alas, there are some things—very few—that biographers and novelists cannot tinker with.  Whore, martyr, sister from hell, exploited innocent, ambitious predator, sexual temptress, religious reformer, rebel girl—she, Anne, can see her many strange future selves displayed before her, as she awaits the hour of her execution.  Fingers, moles, skin, swellings, teeth, nipples—up for grabs. The head, however, must come off.  She, Anne, is as sorry about this as you are. But think on this, as you count the books on your shelf:  Who, of all Henry’s wives, has lived the longest?  Ha!

Professor Bordo holds the Otis A. Singletary Chair in the Humanities at the University of Kentucky and she is the author of many well-known books and articles, most recently The Creation of Anne Boleyn: A New Look at England’s Most Notorious Queen, available both in U.S. and U.K. editions.

"George Boleyn" competition winner!

Congratulations to Eliza Nastou, who was the winner of our George Boleyn competition. She has won a signed copy of Claire Ridgway and Clare Cherry's new book George Boleyn: Tudor Poet, Courtier and Diplomat by correctly answering the question that actress Natalie Dormer, who played George Boleyn's sister Anne in The Tudors, is currently playing Margaery Tyrell in HBO's Game of Thrones.

"Laughing at gilded butterflies"

This week, I have written a guest article for Claire Ridgway's The Anne Boleyn Files, about how Tudor, medieval and Baroque history influenced my two novels.

You can access it here and please take the time to read it, if you can; it was great fun to write.

The fifteenth anniversary of a very special book

Last month saw the fifteenth anniversary and the twenty-fourth printing of Robin Maxwell's magnificent debut novel, The Secret Diary of Anne Boleyn. Out with a brand spanking new cover, with, I believe, a coloured-up version of Merle Oberon from 1933's The Private Life of Henry VIII, Secret Diary was the first novel I ever read about Anne Boleyn. It, and Anne of the Thousand Days, helped give me the interest in sixteenth century history that led on to much wider reading as a child and teenager, and from there to my admissions essay to Oxford (on Anne Boleyn's date of birth), my interview for a place there and the modules I took during  my first semester.

The novel takes the form, unsurprisingly, of a diary that the character of Anne keeps intermittently over the span of her fifteen-year career at the English court. However, the novel also has a dual storyline about Anne's daughter, Elizabeth, who is now all grown up and queen-regnant of England and Ireland. Shortly after coming to the throne, Elizabeth is visited by an elderly gentlewoman who was once a lady-in-waiting to Queen Anne Boleyn and kept the queen's diary after she was killed. With the political environment now slightly safer, Lady Matilda thinks it's the right time to hand the diary over to Anne's next of kin - Queen Elizabeth. Elizabeth, who has very little memory of her mother, therefore reads about Anne's extraordinary journey as she is trying to navigate her own.

The great international success of The Secret Diary of Anne Boleyn is a tribute to the skills of its author, Robin Maxwell, who wrote this lovely guest article about it on The Anne Boleyn Files, hosted by Claire Ridgway.

I recommend both the article and the novel.

Anne Boleyn's pregnancies: stress or sorrow?

Claire Ridgway, whose new book On This Day in Tudor History is out next month (very excited), gives her take on the debate about Anne Boleyn's pregnancies. What happened in 1534 and 1536 when Queen Anne allegedly miscarried? Were the pregnancies all that they seemed or was one the result of hysterical stress. 

You can read Claire's excellent article on them by clicking here.

Obituary: Professor Eric W. Ives (1931 - 2012)

Meeting people who are gifted, bright and talented is always a pleasure and one I had always wanted to hear was Eric Ives - or Professor Eric William Ives, O.B.E., Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Birmingham. Eric Ives was a giant of Tudor history; his work included a short biography of Henry VIII, a political study of Lady Jane Grey's time as queen, a study of how faction influenced government in the 1500s, several studies of legal history in the sixteenth century, forensic examinations of Henry VIII's last will and testament, studies of courtiers in Anne Boleyn's circle and a co-written study of the history of Birmingham's university. His last book, The Reformation Experience, was an examination of what it was like to live through the Reformation and, unlike many works written today, it was marginally more sympathetic to the Protestant community. (Ives was, himself, a devout Christian.)

However, it was for his work on Henry VIII's second wife, Anne Boleyn, that Eric Ives was best known. He first became interested in her when he was writing about the career of Sir William Brereton, a sixteenth century networking politico who was executed in 1536 for being Anne's adulterous lover. Ives' research into Brereton showed that it was practically impossible that Brereton was ever romantically involved with the queen, which led to the question of why he died for that crime. The result was a seven year academic investigation into Anne's life, which produced the acclaimed biography Anne Boleyn, in 1986. Reflecting on it later, Ives said, "I have sometimes described Anne Boleyn as the third woman in my life, after my immediate family, and it is true that once she interests you, fascination grows, as it did for men at the time".

Anne Boleyn rapidly became seen as a kind of bible by Tudor history aficionados and the standard text on Anne Boleyn's life and historical importance. There were detractors, of course - and Ives ended up in a ferocious academic spat with Professor George Bernard and with Professor Retha Warnicke. Warnicke rebutted with her book, The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn: Family politics at the court of Henry VIII, published in Cambridge (Ives was published in Oxford) in 1989. She argued that Ives's account of Anne's death was too political and that Anne had been the victim of sixteenth century gender prejudices, stirred up by the disastrous end to her final pregnancy. Even less convincingly was Bernard's rejoinder, Anne Boleyn: Fatal attractions, published by Yale in 2010, which argued that Ives was wrong to see Anne as innocent, because she must have done something wrong for Henry VIII to treat her so badly. (See my review of Bernard's book, here.) In 2004, Ives re-issued and re-updated his original book on Anne, producing The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn: The Most Happy. He revised some of his original findings, but stuck to his conclusion that Anne was "the most influential and important queen consort this country has ever had. Indeed, Anne deserves to be a feminist icon, a woman in a society which was, above all else, male-dominated, who broke through the glass ceiling by sheer character and initiative." Whether one agree with Ives or not, his biography of Anne was so comprehensive that it became the standard reference point on any and all subject pertaining to Anne Boleyn and the politics of the 1520s - her date of birth, her childhood education, the lives of her parents and siblings,  the nature of her early romantic relationships, the reliability of Catholic sources against her, the chronology of Henry VIII's obsession with her, her personality, the downfall of Cardinal Wolsey, factional politics, the rise of Thomas Cromwell, the Break with Rome, which (if any) of her portraits were authentic, her appearance, the date of her marriage, the nature of her married life, her political influence, her charity, her wealth, her artistic patronage, her ladies in waiting, her influence on the church, her sense of Christianity, foreign policy in her lifetime and, above all, why she ended her life in such a tragic and bloody way. 

So, when I was invited to speak and co-host the 2012 Anne Boleyn Experience, a luxury holiday operated by History Tours of Great Britain, I was very, very excited to hear that one of the other speakers would be Eric Ives. I gave my talk on life in the queen's household on the Monday and Professor Ives was due to speak on the Tuesday, about Anne's downfall in 1536 and who was to blame. (It was Ives's controversial theory that Thomas Cromwell had far more to do with it than Henry himself and that Cromwell essentially framed Anne in order to stop her from ending his career.) It was therefore a surreal, and tragic, experience to be sitting in Anne Boleyn's family home when I heard the news that a man who had devoted decades of his life to studying her had passed away at the age of eighty-one. 

Eric Ives was an erudite, thorough and brilliant historian. His mind was as sharp as his writing and he helped keep history interesting, whilst also dismissing many of its sillier legends. Apart from the Tudor court, his other interests included the history of law and the development of higher education in Britain. He nurtured and supervised many of the best minds in the next generation of historians and in 2001, he was made a member of the Order of the British Empire by Her Majesty the Queen, in recognition for his services to history. A regular contributor to the BBC History Magazine and History Today, Professor Ives had sadly lost his wife, Ruth, a few years ago; he is survived by his daughter, Susan, and his son, John. 

Ives's passing has been greatly regretted by his colleagues. Dr. Suzannah Lipscomb, author of the book 1536, said, "Professor Eric Ives's death is a sudden and profound loss to the historical community. He was a brilliant historian and one of the leading lights of Tudor history: his work on Anne Boleyn and Lady Jane Grey is unsurpassed (and I say this even as one who disagreed with him on some points of interpretation!). It is deeply sad that The Reformation Experience will be his last book. But, even more importantly, he is also an exceptionally warm, kind, generous and courteous man. He will be greatly missed."

I never did get to hear Eric Ives speak, but I have his books and his wonderful, clever, written words. 

January 25th, 1533: Anne Boleyn's wedding day?

Anne Boleyn is Henry VIII's most famous wife and she was crowned queen in a magnificent ceremony that fused medieval pageantry with political propaganda, spectacle and royal extravagance. However, the details of Henry and Anne's actual marriage are less well-known and considerable confusion surrounds when, where and by whom they were joined together as man and wife.

The traditional version of events, and one oft-repeated in biographies and textbooks, is that they were married on this day in 1533 - the twenty-fifth of January. The story goes something like this: after nearly six years of abstaining from sexual relations until she could be certain it would lead to marriage, Anne Boleyn finally allowed Henry VIII into her bed sometime around November 1532. The couple first slept together at the end of a state visit to Calais, on the voyage back across the Channel or, at the latest possible date, in Dover Castle shortly after their return to England. For years, Henry had been stuck in interminable battles with Rome and Spain to try and divorce his post-menopausal Spanish queen, Katherine of Aragon. Now, with the backing of the English clergy and the French monarchy apparently within her grasp, Anne Boleyn at last felt confident enough to abandon her much-vaunted moral principles and have sex with the man she'd famously been saying "no" to since 1527. Whether she did this because she finally felt secure in her position as queen-to-be or because she planned to use her sexuality to manipulate Henry into speeding up his plan to break with Rome for her sake is still a matter of debate. Either way, some time around Christmas or New Year, Anne must have realised that her new found sex life has resulted in pregnancy. Panicked at the prospect of his longed-for heir being born out of wedlock, Henry rushed ahead to make Anne his wife, by fair means or foul. In the pre-dawn darkness he, Anne and a few of their closest confidantes gathered in a small chapel in Anne's splendid new palace at Whitehall and were secretly married, either by the future Bishop of Lichfield or by the future Archbishop of Dublin. With this secret, bigamous marriage ceremony carried out, Henry could then proceed to shamelessly bully the English episcopacy until it made his union with Anne legal, after the fact, in May. Anne was then crowned in June and gave birth to the future Elizabeth I in September, who had been a surprise guest of sorts at her parents' furtive wedding nine months earlier.

This is the version of events that most students of British history, and a fair number of actual historians, all know. But is it credible? Some kind of wedding ceremony probably did take place at Whitehall on January 25th 1533. However, almost everything else about this traditional version of events invites questions when looked at more closely. Psychologically, historically and even biologically, there are major flaws in the idea that Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn commenced a sexual relationship in November 1532, conceived a child in December 1532 and were married in January 1533. Whilst such a timeline is undoubtedly of great use to those historians who wish to present Anne either as a manipulative Jezebel who withheld her sexual favours only out of pragmatism rather than morality, or as a feminist icon who boldly used every weapon at her disposal, even her own body, to ensure political victory, it is unfortunately riddled with holes and improbabilities. 

The first problem is circumstantial. It's a question of probability and it's bugged some of Anne's more recent biographers. In 2004, Professor E.W. Ives hit this problem on the head in his book The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn, when he asked: "Is it likely, given the obstacles still in the way of any marriage, that Henry would abandon five years of heroic chastity and chance a son by Anne being born illegitimate? Suppose the pope refused to accept Cranmer? And why should Anne agree, even if Henry did now want to take the risk?" Put simply: why should Anne have taken the great risk of sacrificing her virginity in November, when she had already waited so long for a wedding ring? The second problem is one of basic human biology and it blows apart the myth that Henry and Anne's marriage was prompted by Anne's sudden discovery that she was pregnant with Elizabeth.

The future Elizabeth I entered the world at Greenwich Palace on September 7th, 1533, less than nine months after her parents' apparent marriage at Whitehall. If we assume that she had the normal nine months in the womb, then she was conceived sometime around the first week of December, probably within the first fortnight or so of her parents' starting their sexual relationship with one another. However, there is some evidence from the ceremonies surrounding Elizabeth's birth that she was actually conceived slightly later that than - probably around new year's. And if she wasn't, it was still her mother's belief that Elizabeth had been conceived in January. 

Royal etiquette demanded that a pregnant queen "take to her chamber", isolating herself from male company and the world outside for a month or a month and a half prior to her child's birth. Queen Anne, however, took to her chamber a mere ten days before Elizabeth's birth in September. This means either that Elizabeth was born anywhere between three and five weeks prematurely or that her mother and her mother's servants had miscalculated when they first guessed the date of her conception. Let us, for the sake of argument, assume the latter for the time being. If Anne and her women had miscalculated, which was perfectly possible given the vagaries of sixteenth century medicine, then it follows that by taking to her chamber at the end of August, Anne was expecting a delivery at the end of September. This means she and those around her assumed she had first fallen pregnant at the end of December or the beginning of January. Anne may very well have actually fallen pregnant sometime before that, but if she assumed her baby would be born in late September or early October, then it seems highly unlikely that she could have suspected she was pregnant as early as the third week of January and the theory that her pregnancy became a motivating factor for her marriage ceremony thus becomes a good deal less convincing.

What about the argument that Elizabeth I was a premature baby? Well, such an idea is certainly possible. However, it doesn't change the circumstances of what happened on January 25th. Whether Anne miscounted or whether Elizabeth was actually born three to five weeks early, the point remains that it is practically impossible that in the days leading up to January 25th, Anne Boleyn suddenly realised she was pregnant and, armed with this certainty, Henry rushed into a secret and possibly illegal marriage ceremony with her at Whitehall.

If we assume that pregnancy was not the reason for the royal wedding in 1533, what of the timeline that has Henry and Anne's relationship being consummated two months earlier in mid-November? Whether Anne miscalculated or Elizabeth arrived early, it's almost certain that she was conceived before January 25th, just not far enough before for it to be the reason for the wedding date. Given that, we must accept that sometime around the second or third week of November, Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn finally slept together and that they continued to have a normal, active sex life, which resulted in their daughter's conception in either late December or early-to-mid January. How then do we explain the glaring psychological improbability that Anne and Henry embarked on sexual intercourse, pre-marriage, when they had already waited so long?

The answer to the problem comes from two sixteenth century accounts, both of which have radically different interpretations of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn - Edward Hall's loyalist Chronicle and the vituperative account of the break with Rome by the Jesuit priest, Father Nicholas Sander. Both of them suggest a different date for the royal wedding - November 14th 1532, over two months before the traditionally-given date. Hall wrote, "The king, after his return [from the state visit], married privily the Lady Anne Boleyn on Saint Erkenwald's Day, which marriage was kept so secret that very few knew of it, till she was great with child, at Easter". Sander, who characterised Henry as an incestuous monster and Anne an heretical witch, had no reason for supporting the view that they waited until marriage before sleeping together or that Elizabeth I, whom Sander loathed beyond all reason, had been conceived in wedlock, unless he believed it to be true. 

If Henry and Anne were married on November 14th 1532, then it is most likely that they were married in Dover Castle, within a day or so of their return from France. Hall and Sander agree on almost nothing in their accounts, but the fact that the usually well-informed Hall and habitually misleading Sander both pinpoint November 14th as the date of the marriage, makes it hard to ignore. Particularly when one considers that it is by accepting this date that we can resolve all the other "problems" with Henry's second marriage - namely the psychological problem of believing Anne Boleyn would risk sex before marriage and the confusing timetable of Elizabeth I's birth.

What then of the other service - the one which took place on January 25th at Whitehall? Well, a ceremony of sorts took place, which leaves us with the apparent problem of two wedding services. However, in the sixteenth century, two ceremonies, even two weddings, were not necessarily so unusual. Eric Ives concludes that there was some kind of commitment ceremony in November, quite possibly a binding pre-contract, a watertight legal declaration of intent to marry each other. After such a ceremony had taken place, sixteenth century canon law stated that it was permissible for the couple to commence sexual intercourse with one another - a murky stipulation which meant all engagements were treated with suspicion in future brides. (It was on grounds of pre-contract that Henry VIII's subsequent marriages to Anne of Cleves and Catherine Howard were declared invalid.) With the pre-contract formally ratified in November, Henry and Anne began sleeping together, conceived Elizabeth and the full nuptial Mass took place at Whitehall on January 25th. David Starkey has a slightly different take on events and cites medieval royal etiquette to explain the mystery of the two wedding dates. When kings or princes married foreign princesses, it was customary for there to be a proxy service in that bride's own homeland or right after she landed in her new country. This was what had happened with Katherine of Aragon when she married Arthur Tudor in 1501 and the future Henrietta-Maria of France when she married Charles I in 1625. Anne had been brought up in France and Starkey therefore argues, "Anne had been doing her research. She had already ... informed herself widely on the debate about the Divorce. Now she wanted to make sure that her own title as Queen was unimpeachable. This meant that everything would have to be done in the proper form set out in the bible of ceremony known as The Royal Book ... It was these stipulations, at least as much as the pressure of contemporary events, which governed Anne and Henry's actions over the next few months... The circumstances of the Calais interview reinforced all this. She had re-entered the world of the French Court; she had danced with the French King and talked privately with him. Now she was sailing to English soil where soon she would be crowned. It was just as The Royal Book prescribed. What more natural therefore than to marry Henry as soon as they landed?" Henry and Anne would then have a second marriage service at a later date, just as foreign royal brides of the Middle Ages had done.

Whether Anne was following contemporary sexual etiquette in having a pre-contract ceremony binding her to Henry or an actual marriage in imitation of medieval royal etiquette is impossible to know for certain. Given that several candidates were later suggested as the priest who had married the couple, I am inclined to believe that there were two actual marriage services with two different priests, but that is pure speculation and guess-work. What is clear is that the general timeline of Henry and Anne's relationship, and the final five months preceding England's Break with Rome, is wrong - both in chronology and in interpretation. To recap: -

November 1532 - Henry and Anne begin sexual relations with one another

December 1532 - Anne conceives Elizabeth

Early January 1533 - Anne realises she is pregnant

January 25th 1533 - Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn are secretly married at Whitehall Palace

Easter 1533 - Anne is publicly proclaimed Queen

June 1533 - Anne's coronation

September 7th 1533 - Birth of Elizabeth I at Greenwich

However, looked at anew it becomes clear that Anne's pregnancy, which is often given as the main (if not sole) motivating factor for the date of her wedding, in fact played absolutely zero role in her rise to the throne. Anne was following custom, not panicking about biology, on January 25th 1533. What happened between 1532 and 1533 when Anne went from aristocrat to queen is difficult to say with absolute certainty, but the overwhelming weight of the frustratingly circumstantial evidence would all suggest to my mind that things actually happened in this general order: -

November 1532 - Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn's official visit to Calais and France

November 14th 1532 - The couple are either married to one another or commit to a binding pre-contract at Dover Castle. Sexual relations begin.

Early January 1533 - Anne falls pregnant with the future Elizabeth I

January 25th 1533 - Henry and Anne undergo their second service at Whitehall - either the wedding promised by the pre-contract back in November or the second wedding Mass mandated by royal etiquette. Owing to the well-publicised letters of the diplomat Eustace Chapuys, who knew only about this service and was widely published by enthusiastic historians centuries later, it is later assumed that this was the only service the couple underwent to legalise their matrimony.

February 1533 - Anne begins to suspect she is pregnant.

Easter 1533 - Anne is publicly proclaimed as queen.

June 1533 - Anne's coronation.

Late August 1533 - Anne takes to her chamber

September 7th 1533 - Birth of Elizabeth I.

History Tours of Britain

I am very excited to announce that from Saturday June 9th to Friday June 15th 2012, I will be leading The Executed Queens Tour, a luxury history-themed holiday organised by the fantastic History Tours of Britain. The holiday will take a group of twenty history enthusiasts around southern England in luxury accommodation to visit sites associated with the four royal women whose lives ended violently in sixteenth-century England - Anne Boleyn, Catherine Howard, Lady Jane Grey and Mary, Queen of Scots. The six-night holiday costs between £2,100 and £2,600, which is all-inclusive (excluding flights.) We'll be visiting the site of the battle of Bosworth, where the Tudor dynasty first came to power in 1485; Sheffield Manor Lodge (said to be haunted by the ghost of Mary, Queen of Scots); the Tower of London, the legendary fortress where the Crown Jewels are housed today and where Anne, Catherine and Jane all ended their lives, and Hampton Court, the most spectacular surviving Tudor palace, where Catherine Howard was first arrested in 1541. Most excitingly of all (for me, anyway!) we'll also be visiting and staying in Hever Castle in Kent (above), the stunningly pretty castle where Anne Boleyn spent her childhood and where she may very well have been born, too.

Anne Boleyn was the second wife of King Henry VIII and the mother of Elizabeth I. The daughter of the heir-presumptive to the Irish earldom of Ormonde, she has been described by historians either as "the pretty face of the Reformation" or "the English Reformation's historical prime cause number one." One of the most significant queen-consorts in European history, her life and career ended in an unimaginably grotesque miscarriage of justice when she was condemned to death on false charges of adultery, incest and high treason in 1536. Catherine Howard was Anne Boleyn's first cousin and Henry VIII's fifth wife. Nearly young enough to be Henry's granddaughter by contemporary standards, poor Catherine was executed whilst probably still a teenager in 1542 after evidence that she had been inappropriately involved with Sir Thomas Culpepper was taken as proof that she was an adulteress. Her lover, her secretary and her favourite lady-in-waiting were executed along with her. Lady Jane Grey, a fiery Protestant born into the English royal family as Henry VIII's great-niece, became famous as "the nine day queen" after she was used to try and prevent the succession of her Catholic cousin, Mary Tudor, in 1553. The plot failed and Jane was arrested. Offered the chance to live if she converted to Catholicism, Jane refused and she was beheaded at the age of seventeen. The last of the "executed queens," Mary, Queen of Scots, was as famous in Catholic circles as Jane was in Protestantism. Born in 1542, she became the ruler of Scotland when her father died when she was only six days old. Brought up in France by her mother's relatives, she was said to be the most spectacularly beautiful princess of her generation. However, her life began to fall apart when her first husband, the King of France, died as a young man. She went back to Scotland, where she found herself a stranger at odds with the violent sectarianism of the Presbyterian revolution. Forced off her throne after seven years which saw the mysterious murder of her bisexual husband and her notoriously unpopular marriage to the man many people thought had murdered him, Mary fled to England, where she was placed under house arrest by her cousin, Queen Elizabeth. Numerous Catholic plots aimed to murder Elizabeth and put Mary on the throne in her place. How far Mary was involved in these is still a matter of historical debate. She was executed on Elizabeth's reluctant orders in 1587, after nineteen years in England.

For the lucky guests tracing these women's tragic stories, we'll be staying first in Coombe Abbey, a luxury hotel incorporating a twelfth-century Cistercian monastery and an Elizabethan manor house and then the tour will be moving on to have exclusive use of the Astor wing of Hever itself, giving them private access to the Boleyn family home. There, I'll be giving a talk on Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard and discussing my recent dissertation for Queen's University, Belfast on Catherine's household and ladies-in-waiting. The tour's other guest speaker will be Professor John Guy, fellow of Clare College, Cambridge, and author of My Heart is My Own: the life of Mary Queen of Scots, A Daughter's Love: Thomas and Margaret More, The Tudors and Tudor England. He is also the husband of writer Julia Fox, author of Jane Boleyn: the infamous Lady Rochford. 

For more information, please contact the tour by visiting The Anne Boleyn Files, e-mailing info@historytoursofbritain.com or visiting the tours' website here.

It's a very exciting opportunity and I absolutely can't wait to be involved!

For this blog's accounts of the executions of the four women, click on the links below: -

For Anne Boleyn's execution on May 19th, 1536 - click here.

For Catherine Howard's execution on February 13th, 1542 - click here.

For Lady Jane Grey's execution on February 12th, 1554 - click here.

And for Mary, Queen of Scots's execution on February 8th, 1587 - click here.

My interview in THE IRISH TIMES

My interview with THE SUNDAY TIMES was published in July 2011. The interview is by Pavel Barter, the photograph by Kelvin Boyes.

"A BOY WHO'S DOWN WITH THE MEAN GIRLS"

Friends trashed his idea for a bitchy teen-fiction novel set in Belfast, but Gareth Russell's savagely witty debut wins out in the popularity stakes, says Pavel Barter.

When Gareth Russell said he wanted to write a novel about wealthy high-school kids in Belfast, everyone told him to wise up. Spoilt debutantes, popping into Victoria Square shopping centre for a spot of retail therapy, getting manicures, wearing Ralph Lauren, and sipping martinis at high-society functions? Not images you associate with Belfast.

The negativity bothered him. "Parents of friends told me that nobody would ever publish a book about being popular or a socialite set in Belfast," he says. "If it's not about the potato famine, the Titanic or the Troubles, no one cares. I thought, 'We'll see.' There is so much more to Belfast than  lot of literature and cinema has shown. It was great to set a comedy here. You can have craic in Belfast that you couldn't in New York, Miami, London or LA."

So Russell ignored the naysayers and the setting proved ideal. Popular, the 24-year-old's debut, is set in the fictional Mount Olivet Grammar School, on Belfast's Malone Park, a real-life private avenue. Sitting in the bar of the Europa hotel, the writer takes a gulp of Evian, and wonders if he should send the city's upwardly mobile princesses a thank-you note for providing his inspiration.

Cliques are commonplace in Northern Irish schools, Russell explains. An Oxford graduate, he is co-directing a stage adaptation for Belfast's Belvoir Players Studio, to be staged in early September. The cast includes Imogen ("the hot one"), Kerry ("she has Daddy's credit card") and queen bee, Meredith ("the one who'll kill you as you sleep"). With their token male pal Cameron, these filthy-rich beauty queens undergo rivalries, tantrums and faux emotional breakdowns. Popularity is considered the key to happiness; weakness is preyed upon. It's a ruthless social hierarchy, similar to prison, only with Marie Antoinette-themed parties and Gucci handbags.

In most high-school movies, prom queens are either villains or a plot device to teach the protagonist the error of her ways. This was the case in Mean Girls, which starred Lindsay Lohan, while in Clueless and The Breakfast Club the rich girls are vain yet good-natured at heart. In Popular, on the other hand, the characters are unrepentantly egotistical and superficial, owing more to reality fares such as The Hills, Perez Hilton blogs and Paris Hilton.

Russell has an affection for his characters, but understands if the reader loathes them. "There are times when I'm talking about the characters and people look at me with horror," he laughs. "Meredith and Imogen have their own fans, which, in a way, is a devastating reflection on [today's] morality."

His characters were created as a reaction to the political correctness that has crept into high-school fiction. "Glee went further down the line of feeling it had to tick every box," he says. "I wanted to write someone like Meredith who could say the things a lot of us secretly wish we could get away with. She's not particularly interested in what boys think of her. Meredith is much more interested in what girls think of her. She is a woman's woman."

Russell was inspired to create such an unapologetically savage character after reading a Julie Burchill article in which the journalist mourned the passing of the classic Hollywood bitch. "One of my favourite books is Gone with the Wind. You're not supposed to like Scarlett O'Hara at all because she's a husband-stealing, gold-digging, social-climbing hound," he says.

What Popular lacks in redeemable characters, it makes up for in humour. The writer excels at capturing the ability of teenagers to coin expressions and venomous put-downs. Case in point: "I hate her hair... It looks like someone stuck pubic hair on top of a potato." Popular's characters are routinely cruel, but the writer insists there is a difference between bitchiness and being a bully. It's also one of the few Irish teen novels to deal with gay themes, in the form of Cameron's awakening homosexuality.

Some of the incidences in Popular are gleaned from Russell's own experiences as a student in Downpatrick, but the story is not entirely autobiographical. It's as much influence by his history studies at Oxford University and his interest in Tudor history; Anne Boleyn, the second wife of Henry VIII, in particular. "There is a steel-butterfly element to her personality that I warm to," says Russell "In a strange way, she influenced Popular [by being] a good example of you can be bitchy without being evil. I liked the pageantry [of the Tudors] and their self-awareness. They knew everyone was watching them. They believed God was watching them. I found that an interesting idea: how would you live if you thought you were being watched all the time? It's Big Brother, with a change of purgatory at the end. It was a cauldron of big personalities and a society that valued outward appearance more than anything else."

At Oxford, Russell directed and wrote plays, including The Audacity of Ideas, set on the eve of the French Revolution. This experience spurred him to pen Popular after he graduated in 2008. The author received 17 rejection letters from agents before he hit gold. Penguin signed him for two books, and he hopes to write a third.

Russell plans to write a biography of Boleyn in a few years' time. "There is a popular version of her as the femme fatale, and a more recent academic trend to see her as incredibly political, like a 16th-century Margaret Thatcher. I don't think that's something she would have recognised. I'm trying to focus more on her position as a daughter of the aristocracy who had been trained to be pleasing, quick-witted, elegant, charming, but I don't think she was a social climber or a rabid politico."

There is a tactical decision to writing Popular now. The memories are fresh and a few years from now his insights may no longer be relevant. The unrepentant narcissism of these characters still feels like a stumbling block, however. Is there any merit in this lifestyle for teenagers? "It's totally vacuous," he admits. And is popularity really all that important? "No." He takes another sip of water. "In the grand scheme of things, the core clique in Popular are not going to damage your health. They're not promoting drugs or rampant sex [but] the scars they might leave on your confidence are another thing."

Bret Easton Ellis wrote his first book, Less Than Zero, about a similarly spoilt and cloistered gang. It became a grim tale of prostitution, drug addiction and snuff movies. Russell wants to keep a comedic tone - this is fiction for young adults - but plans on visiting darker places in the sequel. "Yes, there's the vacuousness, fabulousness and frivolity, but you have to acknowledge that schemes, rules and intrigues will eventually take their toll on the people doing them," he says.

"Nobody can control gossip. It's a liberated demon. There's no way that you can write a high-school book and not show that sometimes it can turn into the most awful experience imaginable."

Popular is out now from Penguin. 
British and European customers can purchase it here.
Australian readers can purchase here. Borders New Zealand also sells Popular.
Canadian and American readers can purchase here.
South African readers can purchase here.

The Other Boleyn Boy?: Did Anne Boleyn have another brother?

Anne Boleyn is known to have been one of at least five siblings and whilst her elder brother and sister, George and Mary, grew into adulthood, it has always been assumed that her two other brothers, Thomas and Henry, died as children. Now, however, the historian Alison Weir is arguing in her new biography Mary Boleyn that, in fact, Thomas lived into early adulthood and died in 1520 - by which point his eldest sister, Mary, was already married, George was at court and Anne was completing her education in France. Weir's conclusions is based on the fact that the brass cross added to young Thomas's grave in Saint John the Baptist Church in Penshurst was not added until 1520, thus suggesting that Thomas in fact lived until either his late teens or early twenties before dying. 

However, Claire Ridgway at The Anne Boleyn Files has been hunting down the mystery of "the lost Boleyns" and isn't convinced. Instead, she argues that the traditional version of events which claims that only Mary, George and Anne lived to maturity is correct. You can click here to access Claire's full investigation into the mystery of the missing Boleyns, but her thought-provoking conclusion is that all the evidence which suggests young Thomas lived until 1520 is based on evidence that has either been misinterpreted or non-existent. Like a lot of Tudor history, unfortunately.

March 26th, 1533: Anne Boleyn's first public appearance as Queen

"High flying, adored
What happens now, where do you go from here?
For someone on top of the world
The view is not exactly clear
A shame you did it all at twenty-six.
There are no mysteries now;
Nothing can thrill you, no-one fulfill you.

High flying, adored
I hope you come to terms with boredom.
So famous so easily, so soon
It's not the wisest thing to be!

You won't care if they love you,
It's been done before.
You'll despair if they hate you
You'll be drained of all energy
All the young who've made it would agree."

- High Flying, Adored from the musical Evita by Andrew Lloyd Weber and Tim Rice (1976)

"And the king loved her more than all the women, and she had favour and kindness before him above all the women, and he set the royal crown on her head, and made her queen instead of Vasthi. And he commanded a magnificent feast to be prepared for all the princes, and for his servants, for the marriage and wedding of Esther. And he gave rest to all the provinces, and bestowed gifts according to princely magnificence."

- The Book of Esther, Chapter II

There are moments in our lives so momentous and which we have waited for so long that when they finally happen, it is difficult to believe it. For Anne Boleyn, the twenty-sixth day of March in 1533 must have been one such day. After six years of waiting, of being the King's love but not his wife, first lady but not queen, and after months of secretly being a married woman, she was at long last to be publicly presented as Queen of England and Lady of Ireland. At the same time, throughout the kingdom, she would be publicly prayed for in church services as a member of the royal family for the first time. 

To Anne Boleyn's increasingly providentialist mind, what was happening today was unquestionably God's Will. A few years earlier, a Venetian diplomat in London had been taken aback by the depth of Anne's certainty in regarding her elevation as divinely ordained. That was not too unusual, however, in a society which was apt to see the hand of God directly involved in most things; Anne's fascination with the story of the Biblical queen Esther was slightly more idiosyncratic. To Anne and her supporters, the parallels seemed self-evident: a young virgin is chosen by a mighty monarch from amongst his own subjects to replace his haughty and arrogant foreign queen. Later in her career, when Anne's luck had changed, she was to draw great comfort (and perhaps far too much inspiration) from the story of Esther's valiant struggle against the corrupt politics of her husband's chief minister, Haman. 

How long Anne had been married before she and Henry reached the decision that it was time to publicly present her is still a matter of debate. The usual date given for their marriage is January 25th of that year, but strong evidence from both sides of the aisle places their marriage to the Feast of Saint Erkenwald, meaning November 14th of the previous year. Whether it was the more traditional January date or the more likely November service, the news had been kept secret until the King and his advisers could be sure of securing a positive, or at the very least an obedient, reception to Anne's first official appearance as Katherine's replacement. Why March 26th was chosen is equally uncertain, although pragmatism could very well have played a part in the decision. Anne was, by now, two months pregnant with the future Queen Elizabeth and the government could have wanted to make sure that she was presented as the King's consort before she began to show a baby bump - although that may be reading too much into things; given the inexactitude of Tudor medicine it's very possible that Anne herself did not yet know that she was pregnant with her first baby. 

A more probable reason to explain why March 26th was picked was because it was Paschaltide. It was the holiest of seasons in the Christian liturgical calendar and the High Mass being celebrated at Court that day would have been attended by almost anybody and everybody who mattered in the Tudor polity. Easter was also the traditional season of new beginnings and, only the day before, England had technically marked the beginning of the new legal calendar year which, prior to 1752, began on the Feast of the Annunciation (March 25th.) In terms of symbolism, there could hardly have been a better occasion to unveil Anne for the first time as queen consort.

As Anne entered the chapel at her husband's side, there was no hint of nerves. She was serenely confident, at least on the outside. An audience was never something Anne Boleyn had a problem with. Who knows what she was really feeling as she stepped into a room packed not only with people who had worked feverishly to make this day possible, but also with people who had worked with equal vigour to prevent it. Eustace Chapuys, the Spanish ambassador to London, remarked that upon seeing Anne occupying the Queen's chair at Mass, the assembled courtiers did not know whether "to laugh or cry." Chapuys, however, was not present and he got his information from the Marchioness of Exeter, who emphatically was on the "cry" side of the debate. The ambassadors from France and Milan reported a much more positive reaction from Henry's courtiers, many of whom were either personally in favour of Anne's elevation or simply relieved that all the confusion of the past few years had (apparently) been quelled. 

Always conscious of the power of the visual, no-one could deny that Anne Boleyn looked every inch the queen as she swept majestically through the rainbow coloured puddles of light created by the stained glass windows. Her ears, head, throat, wrists, waist and fingers glittered with pieces hand-picked by the queen from the royal jewel collection and she wore an elaborately pleated gown of golden silk, specially made for the occasion and seeded with diamonds and pearls. As she processed through the bowing crowds and clouds of incense, she was followed by sixty immaculately dressed maids of honour, headed by her beautiful young cousin, Lady Mary Howard, who had the honour of carrying the Queen's train. 

Reaching her seat, Anne Boleyn sank into a deep curtsey as the officiating priest began the Mass with the blessing of the altar. A few moments later, head bowed, she spoke aloud with the congregation her first public words as Queen of England: "Sicut erat in princípio, et nunc, et semper, et in sæcula sæculórum. Amen." Given the appalling gradient of tragedy which was soon to overtake her but the comfort she would find in religion during it, those words were all at once cruelly ironic and deeply appropriate. 

NB. 'Sicut erat in princípio, et nunc, et semper, et in sæcula sæculórum. Amen,' translates from liturgical Latin into modern English as, 'As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.'