Virtual Grub Street: Gossip as History: Anne Boleyn, Part 1.

In This Series:

Gossip as History: Anne Boleyn, Part 1
Gossip as History: The Murder of Amy Robsart.
Gossip as History: Figure Flingers, Poisoners and Shrovetide Plays.
Gossip as History: The Letters of John Chamberlain.

Histories written hundreds of years after events can, nevertheless, be exceptional at sorting through the confusion of pre-modern documents and getting to the truth of matters. In the process, however, they can fail to recognize the major role that rumor and gossip often played in events and their after-effects.

Sometime shortly after 1543, the Greek traveler Nicander Nucius arrived on the shores of England. He was an educated man who had suffered reverses of some sort in his own country and decided to seek opportunities elsewhere. Among other adventures, he had served in the 1533 special embassy from Emperor Charles V to the Sultan Suleiman in Constantinople.

The embassy was headed by Gerard Veltwick of Ravestein, who seems to have been a personal acquaintance. Another special embassy lead by Veltwick, still served by Nucius, presented its credentials to the council of Henry VIII some ten years later, after his marriage to Catherine Parr.

There can be little doubt, then, that Nucius kept company largely with educated administrators of the the Court. These were surely the companions who informed him of so much that he dutifully recorded in his diary. They did not talk at all like a history text, of course. They were Tudors through and through, colorful in their descriptions and opinionated.

Among the topics they discussed was Anne Boleyn who “happened to be stored with general learning, and those sciences common to us, and subtle in arguing; but yet, as it appeared, reprehensible in conduct, since, with the connivance of her mother, she had an illicit intercourse with her own brother, through a desire of having children, as she had none from Henry.”[1] Nearly ten years had passed but Boleyn remained a popular subject of conversation. The talking points of Henry’s partisans, explaining why her execution was justified were adhered to in conversation. They had become established facts.

This is more than just gossip, I submit. It is a vital part of the historical record. Courtiers and administrators actions were affected not as much by what we find in the history books as by persistent shaping of consensual reality through conversation often only vaguely related to truth.

The execution of a Queen being a shocking act, far reaching in its effects, it was essential (and delightfully lurid as so much gossip is) for the King to act only on what he had seen with his own eyes.

Such a thing, therefore, having come to the King's knowledge, and he being desirous of beholding the fact with his own eyes, became a spectator of the detestable crime.

The King secretly observed them having incestual sex. There needed be no issue of the veracity of witnesses. He had seen it with his own eyes.

Having been observed in flagrante delicto, she immediately and fully confessed.

She replied as follows : "That I have thus acted towards your bed, my Lord, I can no longer deny; but acknowledge that these things are true. For the crime, being very great, does not admit of defence. I am convicted of being incestuous, and an adultress. Inflict what punishment you please on me,…”

There could be no doubt of the crime. She confessed and virtually called down the punishment upon herself. The King’s picked jury was in no position to do anything else but to return a verdict of “guilty” and pass the just punishment.

It was by no means only after Anne Boleyn was dead that she became the subject of gossip. Eustace Chapuis, ambassador from Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, to the English Court, during the marriage controversy is the main source of information about the intrigues surrounding it. He was diligent in recruiting sources in the English court for which reason his information was often correct. Nevertheless, his information was rumor and gossip and susceptible to exaggeration and outright fiction.

Information also came from the Emperor’s agents in Rome such as Giovan Antonio Muxetula. However smitten the King was with Anne Boleyn, Muxetula’s report that, having angered her he went abjectly to her parents and “implored them with tears in his eyes to appease her wrath”[2] seems a bit out of character. It is, however, a romantic story and surely the hearts of the ladies at court were all aflutter to hear it and hurried to repeat the tale until it made its way to the Holy City.

The allies of Queen Catherine — the greatest among them being the Emperor — were surely all aflutter themselves to read in a letter from Chapuis, a few days before Christmas, in 1531, that “It is reported that the Lady [Anne] has had a miscarriage.”[3] Of course, Anne Boleyn’s entire leverage for becoming Queen was that she would not sleep with the King until they were married. Had she done so, she would instantly have become just another mistress and history would have turned out quite differently.

Chapuis scooped the other professional gossips, and the vast majority of the English, on the other hand, when the diplomatic pouch held a letter to the Emperor explaining that “not later than a week ago” Anne “wrote a letter to her principal friend and favourite here… bidding her get ready against this journey”[4] to the Cloth of Gold meeting, in Calais. It was considered fact that Henry VIII would not make such a blunder nor the French King Francois I countenance such a thing. But Chapuis had witnessed the rich new gowns arriving and the jewels being transferred from Queen Catherine. His gossip with Anne’s BFF left him confident on the point.

The King and Anne constantly lived crammed together with hundreds of courtiers and servants. They could not help but avidly exchange observations upon the clues regarding the state of the relationship at any point. Sometimes they guessed right. Often they built titillating fictions from what they saw. Regardless, it is all an essential part of a complete historical picture.

[1] Nucius, Nicander. The Second Book of the Travels of Nicander Nucius of Corcyra (c. 1550). J. A. Cramer, tr. Camden Society (1841). 45-7.

[2] Letters, Despatches, and State Papers, Relating to the Negotiations Between England and Spain, Preserved in the Archives at Simancas and Elsewhere. Vol. 4, Pt. 2 (1531-1533). Jan. 23, 1531. 37.

[3] Ibid., Dec. 21, 1531. 335.

[4] Ibid., Aug. 26, 1532. 495.