Tradition credits King Solomon with the comment that ‘of the making of books there is no end’. Of nothing is that more true than books about Anne Boleyn. In 2008 came two new biographies – Elizabeth Norton's Anne Boleyn: Henry VIII's obsession, and Alison Weir's Lady in the Tower – to say nothing of Suzannah Lipscomb's excellent 1536. In 2010 imaginative fiction tackled Anne's early life in France (Robert Maxwell, Mademoiselle Boleyn) and Howard Brenton's Anne Boleyn was a sell-out when premiered at the Globe Theatre. Now George Bernard has come up with Anne Boleyn: fatal attractions, and no doubt Anne will figure significantly in David Starkey's forthcoming biography: Henry VIII (part II).

So what new has Bernard to offer? Not a great deal for those familiar with the literature. The book restates, at greater length, hypotheses advanced in the early 1990s, indeed sometimes it does show signs of age.Footnote ¹ Essentially it is an attempt to demolish the picture of Anne which I and others drew, and this makes the book determinedly negative and hard for a reader unfamiliar with the views being attacked.Footnote ² The one new element is that he has been able to make direct use of the letters of Eustace Chapuys, Charles v's ambassador in London (now at Vienna). This has long been desirable – an edition of the whole correspondence is much needed – but the principal conclusion from Bernard's work is that the various PRO calendars of a century ago were well done.

Readers of this Journal will be drawn to Bernard's substantial discussion of Anne's religion. He repeats his long-held view that the queen's reputation as a reformer was manufactured in the reign of Elizabeth, principally by John Foxe and William Latymer who were concerned to put pressure on Anne's daughter to promote a more Protestant regime (pp. 92–5). That Foxe and Latymer were aware that Anne's story had a current relevance is beyond question, so too her Catholic critics, but compelling evidence from Anne's own lifetime puts her reputation as a reformer equally beyond question.

A good starting point is a manuscript treatise on letter-writing – ‘Vng Petit Traicte en Francoys’ (which Bernard appears not to have consulted). The author, Louis de Brun, dedicated this to Anne at the start of 1531 and gives the earliest first-hand account of her personal religious practice:

Since the purpose of a dedication was to secure reward, de Brun could not have risked this personal observation unless (a) it was true and (b) Anne was open about her commitment to the Bible and her interest in the Pauline letters. After all, the writing of St Paul was the Semtex of the Reformation.

Where then can Anne be placed religiously? Bernard objects to the label ‘evangelical’ which most historians use to describe her today. ‘More [than interest in the Bible] is needed convincingly to make Anne out as an “evangelical” if by evangelical is meant someone who was opening the floodgates to the ideas of Martin Luther or Huldrych Zwingli, the fathers of what became known as protestantism’ (p. 97). But the term ‘evangelical’ is used today precisely to avoid the stale old confessional pigeonholes: Lutheran, Zwinglian, Calvinist, Catholic, Protestant. As long ago as 1957 Lucien Febvre warned us to see the early years of the Reformation as a period of ‘magnificent religious anarchy’.Footnote ⁴ Research since has massively endorsed his dictum. Late medieval Europe was in the grip of one of the religious revivals characteristic of Christianity. In country after country there is evidence of men and women who sought a more personal Christocentric experience. Sometimes this took forms which may later appear quintessentially Catholic, such as devotion to the Holy Name or the Five Wounds or to Corpus Christi. It is equally evident in an enthusiasm for the Bible in the vernacular which became a hall-mark of Protestantism.Yet initially Thomas More approved of the controlled distribution of the Bible in English.Footnote ⁵ Erasmus expected More to welcome the Ninety-Five Theses and it was More whom he probably had in mind when in May 1519 he told Luther that ‘You have many in England who think the best of your writing, and amongst them are some great men.’Footnote ⁶ The ground on which men and women could be justified before God was an unresolved issue, regularly debated in universities. St Augustine's total rejection of any role for the individual was the view of a minority, but not a negligible one.Footnote ⁷ Reginald Pole experienced a spiritual crisis and became convinced of justification by faith, and his circle was responsible for the hugely popular tract known as the Beneficio di Christo, published in 1543. Taken in significant measure from Calvin's Institutes, reputedly it sold 40,000 copies in the Venetian Republic alone.Footnote ⁸ In the first half of the sixteenth century committed Christians were not either round pegs or square pegs.

George Bernard sometimes shows awareness of this anarchy but he persists in attacking the Aunt Sally of ‘the case for Anne as evangelical or a proto-protestant’ (pp. 103, 115, 117–18, 124). An evangelical is not a ‘proto-Protestant’ unless we are going to say that someone like Cranmer (or even Pole) was a proto-Protestant in the 1530s. In the English context, historians use the term ‘evangelical’ simply to describe an individual who is sympathetic to an agenda of real spiritual experience, the priority of faith, access to the Bible, and reform of abuses and superstition.Footnote ⁹ Significantly this was the religious emphasis in the court of Queen Claude of France where Anne served between 1514 and 1521 and, as de Brun has told us, Anne's taste was for religious literature in French. Claude's household was much influenced by reform (as also the entourage of her sister-in-law Marguerite of Navarre).Footnote ¹⁰ The leading figure in that reform was Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples. His Commentary on the Epistles of St Paul, published in 1512, abandoned the established way of interpreting Scripture through allegory, tropology and anagogy in favour of the literal sense understood through the guidance of the Holy Spirit.Footnote ¹¹ In successive works he moved steadily to the conviction that for a Christian the Bible was the only authority, not Scripture as interpreted by the faith of the Church.Footnote ¹² In 1523 the introduction to his translation of the Gospels into French would claim ‘that men and their doctrines are nothing, except insofar as they are corroborated and confirmed by the word of God’.Footnote ¹³ As well as this Reformation principle of sola scriptura, Lefèvre taught justification by faith long before Luther. His 1512 commentary on St Paul's Epistle to the Romans explicitly stated that it is impossible for men ‘to be saved of themselves and their good works’.Footnote ¹⁴ Human effort has no part in justification:

With Anne spending her teenage years in this atmosphere, it can hardly be accidental that among her surviving books is a personal manuscript text of Lefevre's Épistres et évangiles pour les cinquante et deux sepmaines de l'an, each passage accompanied by an explanatory homily.Footnote ¹⁶ The homilies were reformed, through and through: ‘not a father of the church, not a holy exegete, not a doctor [of the church] is mentioned, [Lefevre] makes an absolute distinction between the bible and tradition’.Footnote ¹⁷ The Paris theologians claimed to find forty-eight errors in the book, most of them damnable heresies, including justification by faith alone and a denial that good works are necessary for salvation.Footnote ¹⁸ Anne's own manuscript retains the bible readings in French but the commentary is in English. Professionally copied and illuminated, it had been translated by her brother George, Lord Rochford, and was presented to Anne in the autumn or winter of 1532–3.Footnote ¹⁹ George was a keen reformer – Chapuys hated being escorted by him because he insisted on discussing religion – and the dedication specifically says that he was responding to a ‘commandment’ from Anne.Footnote ²⁰ What is more, the actual copy of the 1530–2 Alençon edition, which George used for the translation, is known to have been already available at court.Footnote ²¹ Thus for Anne to call for an additional copy and a personal one at that, must mean that the Épistres et évangiles had a special significance for her. Even more lavish was her manuscript copy of a French reformist commentary on the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes. It was again a French/English hybrid attributable to Rochford, and justification by faith comes through loud and clear:

And the commentary is careful to guard against the accusation that the doctrine of justification by faith alone undermines morality – a charge which Henry viii would always make:

It is, however, important to qualify the parameters of this early French reform. Lefèvre remained throughout persona grata with Francis i and Marguerite of Navarre, and the crucial difference between the acceptable Lefèvre and the unacceptable Luther was that his homilies ‘were in no way intended to be schismatic’.Footnote ²³ On the key issue of Christ's presence in the eucharist, he seems to have believed this was true materially: ‘The appropriation of his body and blood is the most profound uniting of Christ with those who receive him and the closest binding of his ineffable love to us.’Footnote ²⁴

Anne's insistence on having access to the sacrament when she was in the Tower is not, therefore, proof that she was no evangelical (as Bernard thinks, p. 107). Like Lefèvre, Cranmer would then have accepted the host as the ‘body of Christ’. Bernard also lays stress (pp. 106–7) on the report that, in the Tower, Anne said ‘I shal be in heaven, for I have done mony gud dedys in my days’, interpreting this as a clear repudiation of the doctrine of justification by faith.Footnote ²⁵ But no orthodox Christian would ever have said such a thing. Only a heretic would claim justification by works alone. What is more, conventional belief would have anticipated purgatory, not heaven. The remark is, however, fully intelligible in the light of the reformed distinction between ‘justification’ and what became known as ‘sanctification’ (i.e. good works which all reformers agreed was the response to being justified by faith). As Lefèvre wrote: ‘Whoever sows in the spirit, that is to say who does the works of the spirit, he will receive life eternal in his spirit. Thus now, while we have time to sow, let us sow in the spirit and do good … and without doubt we will receive in opportune time a good and full harvest in life eternal to the glory of the eternal father.’Footnote ²⁶

If Anne Boleyn's religion belongs in the context of early French reform – and we know that until the final catastrophe she was continuing to collect religious works from France – what influence did she exert?Footnote ²⁷ That, too, Bernard, seeks to minimise. He even suggests that, if a true evangelical, Anne would have secured changes in the coronation service (p. 107). The whole reason for the traditional ceremony was, of course, to demonstrate that Anne was in the direct line of legitimate queens consort. As Edward Baynton, her vice-chamberlain, wrote to her brother, it was performed ‘honourably … as ever was, if all old and ancient men say true’.Footnote ²⁸ So what is the evidence which Bernard will have none of? In 1528 a heretical cell was discovered in Cardinal's College, Oxford. Anne intervened with Wolsey on behalf of one of the principal accused and she would later appoint William Betts, another of those involved, as her chaplain.Footnote ²⁹ In 1534 (when Tyndale's New Testament was still banned) she moved to have Richard Herman readmitted to the house of the English merchants at Antwerp from which he had been expelled ‘only for that, that still like a good Christian man did both with his goods and policy, to his great hurt and hinderance in this world, help the setting forth of the New Testament in English’.Footnote ³⁰ In the same year she presented Edward Crome to the London living of St Mary Aldermary, a man who had twice been forced to recant heretical opinions.Footnote ³¹ Matthew Parker, Elizabeth's first archbishop, was another of Anne's chaplains and she appointed him as dean of the college of Stoke by Clare which he proceeded to reform with Anne as the new founder.Footnote ³² Several reformist bishops had links to her. She was the patron of William Barlow, lent money to Latimer and Shaxton and clearly had ties with Edward Foxe, as is evident to this day in the profusion of her monogram and badge which decorates the organ screen of King's College, Cambridge.Footnote ³³ Anne's support for reform was known in France, and the Latin verses of the reformer Nicholas Bourbon (Borbonius) make it clear that he took refuge with Anne from the attentions of church authorities in Paris.Footnote ³⁴ In 1538 Etienne Dolet, the Lyons printer (and future martyr), included in his epigrams one on Anne's death entitled Reginae utopiae falso adulterii crimine damnatae et capite mulctatae epitaphium, punning on the ambiguity of ou-topos (no place) and eu-topos (happy place).Footnote ³⁵ Cranmer's famous letter to Henry after Anne's arrest has

Nicholas Shaxton wrote to Cromwell urging him to be as active in promoting ‘the honour of God and his holy word than when the late queen was alive and often incited you thereto’.Footnote ³⁷ Why should the two bishops write as they did if Anne had not actively supported the evangelical cause? All in all, the evidence in Anne's own lifetime for her reformist credentials (and there is moreFootnote ³⁸), reminds one of the saying that ‘if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck’.

Bernard appears to fear that if Anne is allowed any influence, it will undermine his thesis that Henry was the architect of the Reformation. But it is hard to see how Anne Boleyn, or for that matter Cranmer and Cromwell could occupy the positions that they did without having some influence. Even the mouse-like Jane Seymour tried to intervene on behalf of the monasteries.Footnote ³⁹ Modern research on leadership points to the authority which comes with status, charisma and the ability to reward and coerce – all of which Henry had in plenty – but also to the potential importance of access to expert knowledge, intimate support and information.Footnote ⁴⁰ As I wrote in 1991, ‘there is no contradiction between a dominant Henry and a Henry dependent on others for information and advice’.Footnote ⁴¹ The pope can speak ex cathedra but does anyone imagine that he does so entirely on his own initiative?

With hindsight I regret that when in 1972 I reopened the issue of Anne's fall, I used the term ‘faction’.Footnote ⁴² I envisaged this as an organic and fluid phenomenon and did not appreciate how entrenched was the assumption that faction is necessarily organised and political. It would have avoided much misunderstanding if I had used some such ugly neologism as ‘unstructured interest group’. Such groups can and commonly do exist in any kind of organisation, and certainly at the Tudor court in 1536. Chapuys tells us so, and he was a professional observer of court life and had good sources.Footnote ⁴³ There is no reason to reject ex hypothesi his report that a group of courtiers wanted to see Anne removed. Indeed some of them reappear in the summer, pressing for the rehabilitation of Princess Mary.Footnote ⁴⁴

Bernard's rejection of the role of interest groups in 1536 is revealing. He refers to ‘the factional historians’ claim of an active, intriguing manipulating conservative ‘Aragonese’ faction' (p. 139). These ‘factional historians’ are a construct of his imagination. A number of historians believe that interest groups were involved in 1536, but they differ as to how, and their views have been refined and changed over time. Bernard quotes from whichever writer and date suits his purpose and so creates a chimera. He is also anything but subtle. He says that ‘there is nothing to support the notion of the Poles and Exeter as in any sense political leaders in 1536’ (p. 137); ‘nothing in the sources justify seeing Carew as an active political figure, a leader of a faction’ (p. 138). He concludes that it is ‘hard to detect a conservative party in the ascendant, certainly not one becoming so powerful that Thomas Cromwell would have found it imperative to join with it’ (p. 141). And he is of course right; it would be both wrong and anachronistic to talk of ‘political leaders' or ‘a conservative party’. Influence was individual, but people could and did think alike and work together: ‘gyff good attendaunce by youre selph and other of your frendes aboute the Kyng’.Footnote ⁴⁵ Influence called for diplomacy: lobbying at an opportune moment, silence or a raised eyebrow, a comment, suggestion or recommendation moderately expressed. It still does.

Central to Bernard's position is his refusal to accept that Cromwell engineered Anne's destruction, even though the minister told Chapuys that he had done so.Footnote ⁴⁶ Bernard glosses this as diplomatic double-talk as he does whenever Chapuys's evidence is inconvenient (pp. 143–6). For the seeds of Anne's destruction by Cromwell we have to start with her closeness to Henry.Footnote ⁴⁷ That was an asset to the minister so long as he was on good terms with Anne, but if the two were to clash, it might impede or even jeopardise his position. In the late spring of 1536 a clash did occur. The evidence for this is the sermon delivered by Anne's almoner, John Skip, in the royal chapel on Passion Sunday 2 April. It caused almost a riot and resulted in Skip being hauled before the council and forced to explain himself.Footnote ⁴⁸

The text was John viii. 46, ‘Which of you can convict me of sin’, and Skip took ‘me’ as applying to the clergy and ‘you’ to his lay hearers. He is unlikely to have spoken without Anne's support and Bernard wants us to see the sermon as further evidence that the queen was no evangelical. In particular he points to the sermon's endorsement of ‘the little ceremonies of the church’ – holy water, holy bread and the like – and concludes that ‘Skip's stance was that of a conservative trying to block change’ (p. 121). But Skip defended the ceremonies as symbols, not because they had apotropaic powers. That is exactly what the ninth of the Ten Articles would say three months later, an article which Bernard himself asserted in 2005 ‘reflects the king's attitudes and in particular his determination to purify religion’.Footnote ⁴⁹ Thus he must accept that far from being ‘a conservative trying to block change’, Skip (and Anne) was endorsing reform as far as Henry would allow. Skip also said that if ceremonies were abused the king would be right to suppress them – effectively a marker for further reform.Footnote ⁵⁰

What Bernard underestimates is the key passage in the sermon which attacked Cromwell personally. This used the Old Testament story of how Esther, wife of the Persian king, Ahasuerus, forestalled a massacre of the Jews which had been planned by Haman, his chief minister.Footnote ⁵¹ In the Vulgate, Haman's motive is antisemitism, and he offers 10,000 talents to pay ‘for the archers’, an offer that the king refuses. Skip, however, deliberately altered this to make Haman promise Ahasuerus a huge cash gain from the intended genocide which the king then says he could keep.Footnote ⁵² This made Haman ‘moyche moire crueler upon [the Jews] bycause he perceved that he should have the x^M talenttes hym selff’.Footnote ⁵³ Skip was preaching two weeks after the Commons had passed the bill dissolving the smaller monasteries (and before the royal assent). The chief minister targeting the Jews, i.e. the clergy, can only be Cromwell, and the alteration to the story specifically implied that he was attacking the monasteries to line his own pockets.Footnote ⁵⁴ And ‘the good woman (which this ientill king Assuerus loved verey well and putt his truste in by cause he knewe that she was ever his frynde)’ who gave ‘contrary cownsell’? Everyone in the chapel that day knew that this was Anne Boleyn and that Skip was speaking for her.Footnote ⁵⁵

Linking the sermon and the bill to abolish the smaller monasteries explains why Skip preached as he did. Why otherwise gratuitously attack Henry's counsellors? Skip complained about parliament innovating, but the dissolution bill was the only measure passed in the session which could cause ‘growigging of the people’.Footnote ⁵⁶ Skip said that a king's ‘counsell nowadays will move hym no otherwise vnto ony thinges butt as they see hym disposed & inclined to the same’, and few in the chapel could have been unaware of counsellors going along with the king's determination to cut back the wealth of the Church.Footnote ⁵⁷ Skip insinuated that royal advisers were motivated by the hope of ‘gyftes’ and ‘promocions’ and attacked the wholesale denigration of the clergy by laymen who had their eyes on church wealth.Footnote ⁵⁸ This was less than a month after the Compendium Compertorum scandal sheet had swung opinion in parliament against the monasteries, and petitions seeking grants of the abbey lands were already arriving.Footnote ⁵⁹

Cromwell knew what a break with Anne could mean. He had kept the desperate letter that Cardinal Wolsey had written to him six years earlier: ‘if the displeasure of my lady Anne be somewhat assuaged as I pray God the same may be, then it should [be devised] that by some convenient mean she be further laboured [for] this the only help and remedy. All possible means [must be attempted for the] attaining of her favour’.Footnote ⁶⁰ Chapuys, in fact, says that Cromwell did try to ameliorate the dissolution but incurred Henry's anger.Footnote ⁶¹ This left the minister facing the possibility of Anne becoming ‘a contynuall serpentyn ennemeye abought the kyng’.Footnote ⁶² Moreover, since the positive message in Skip's sermon had been the need to strengthen education, the minister may well have anticipated a future in which Anne impeded his efforts to satisfy the king's desire for money, by pressing Henry to save and reform some of the condemned monasteries on the model of Stoke by Clare.Footnote ⁶³ Indeed she had already secured exemption for the universities from the payment of first fruits and tenths.Footnote ⁶⁴ In 1546 Henry's last wife, Katherine Parr would similarly intervene successfully to help save the colleges of the two universities from being plundered by the king and his courtiers.Footnote ⁶⁵

The remainder of this book argues, as the dust jacket says, ‘that the allegations of adultery that led to Anne's execution in the Tower could be close to the truth’. This is what will sell the book. In brief, Bernard's method is to take evidence which he accepts appears to be in Anne's favour, and construct alternative interpretations one after another. For example, if the queen was not where episodes of adultery were alleged to have occurred, perhaps the dates ‘were chosen by informed guesswork rather than because there was any concrete evidence at all’ (p. 166). Later we have ‘let us imagine’ seven times in one paragraph, followed by ‘let us for the sake of argument, suppose that the dates given were correct’ (pp. 187–8). We also are told that ‘nothing is more difficult in historical study than imagining evidence that does not survive, not least since such efforts at imagination are by definition unverifiable’ (p. 170). This reminds me of Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld: ‘Reports that say something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are … known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don't know we don't know.’Footnote ⁶⁶

Bernard writes as he does to justify the weight that he continues to place on the narrative poem by Lancelot de Carles, the future bishop of Riez, completed in London a fortnight after Anne's execution.Footnote ⁶⁷ Henry viii himself described the author as ‘oon Carle … being attendant and neer about the ambassador’, which places the origin of the piece squarely in the French embassy.Footnote ⁶⁸ It is, thus, hardly surprising that de Carles's account is in outline congruent with what Cromwell circulated on the diplomatic network.Footnote ⁶⁹ Bernard nevertheless believes that ‘if the accounts given by de Carles and Cromwell roughly agree, that might be simply because they expressed what they thought was the truth’ (p. 158). But the issue is not what each thought, but what information each had access to. Cromwell's reports were deliberately brief and refused to go into detail.Footnote ⁷⁰ De Carles relied on ‘the accounts that many have given me’, and what his version adds is the court gossip that the principal information against Anne was supplied by her friend, the countess of Worcester.Footnote ⁷¹ De Carles amplifies this with dialogue between the countess and her brother Sir Antony Brown describing Anne's alleged behaviour, and between Brown and the king. Since those conversations took place in private, what the poem reports can only be literary construction; after all, as Henry said, de Carles was writing ‘in form of a tragedye’.Footnote ⁷² The poem claims that the king was told how Anne

Even allowing for poetic exaggeration, a nymphomaniac Anne is hardly credible. Are we to believe that her condition suddenly developed in the second half of April 1536, or had she been conducting a successful subterfuge for years? In fact, the protocol of the Tudor court made it impossible for a queen to take a lover without assistance, and no woman was ever accused of abetting misconduct by Anne – in contrast to Lady Rochford who was arrested and executed for assisting Katherine Howard.Footnote ⁷⁴ What is more, there is nothing to corroborate de Carles's dialogue, indeed the reverse. According to John Spelman, one of the trial judges, ‘this matter was disclosed by a woman called Lady Wingfield who was a servant of the queen and shared the same tendencies. And suddenly the said Wingfield became ill and a little time before her death she showed the matter’.Footnote ⁷⁵ At one time Lady Wingfield certainly did serve Anne, but January 1534 is the last time that she is known to have been alive.Footnote ⁷⁶ Bernard (p. 218) suggests that perhaps Spelman ‘intended to write “the Lady Worcester”’. However when the judge died in 1546, the countess was still very much alive.Footnote ⁷⁷

Given that the more salacious material recounted by de Carles lacks corroboration, it seems probable that what came out of the interrogation of the countess and Anne's other ladies were tales of ‘pastime in the queen's chamber’.Footnote ⁷⁸ Anne was expected to preside over the game of courtly love, a lady desired by all but possessed by Henry alone. But the frisson in flirtation is that it can be dangerous, and Anne's own remarks in the Tower show that the game had recently become more febrile than normal.Footnote ⁷⁹ She even accused Norris of waiting for the king to die so that he could marry her, and then, apparently realising how bad that sounded, told him to go to her almoner and take an oath that she was a good woman.Footnote ⁸⁰ It was this exchange which was twisted into ‘conspiring the king's death’ and so provided evidence of high treason. Contrary to common belief, Anne Boleyn was not executed for adultery – that was a sin, not a crime.Footnote ⁸¹ What Spelman called ‘the evidence of bawdy and lechery’ was nothing but a smokescreen to blanket the accused.Footnote ⁸²

Science is said to proceed from obituary to obituary. So does history, but Anne Boleyn: fatal attractions will not, as George Bernard intends, bury the reformist and innocent Anne Boleyn.