Royal Women Done Wrong ~ (Part 1)
PBS’s Marie Antoinette got me thinking. As the latest take on the life of the doomed — albeit sensationally fashionable queen — it was compulsory viewing for someone with my entertainment and literary tastes. After all, in addition to watching The Tudors (Showtime, 2007–2010), The Borgias (2011- 2013), Becoming Elizabeth (Starz, 2022), and The Serpent Queen (Starz, 2023), I have obediently devoured their literary counterparts, starting with the entirety of Alison Weir’s Six Tudor Queen series (Penguin Random House). From there I read Paul Strathern’s The Borgias: Power and Fortune (Pegasus Books), Julia Fox’s Jane Boleyn: The True Story of the Infamous Lady, Hayley Nolan’s Anne Boleyn: 500 Years of Lies, Leonie Frieda’s Catherine de Medici: Renaissance Queen of France, and reread Antonia Fraser’s Marie Antoinette: The Journey (Anchor). Fraser’s book became the inspiration for Sophia Coppola’s 2006 film, Marie Antoinette presenting her life amid a bricolage of SweeTarts colors and Baroque ostentation.
What can I say? The worlds of Renaissance and Baroque royalty have always piqued my interest, both in historical and fictionalized form. As a historian-writer hybrid whose early training was in screenwriting and whose first jobs were as an assistant and story editor in Hollywood, I actually understand and appreciate the allure of fictionalizing history, of adding an artistic slant that projects a theme via visuals, fashion, accelerated timing and a bevy of other narrative, cinematic techniques. I also understand the necessity of abbreviating a character’s life. (Who wants to sit through a 10 hour epic about anyone, regardless of their fame?) As a fiction writer, I also understand the allure of writing about a queen or king using first-person narration, delving many fathoms deep into psyches long since silenced.
So, after I binged the PBS series, I — unlike the genre’s more fussier critics — decided that it was a clever retelling, almost daredevil thanks to the ominous, quasi-psychedelic dreams that Marie Antoinette suffers as she flails beneath the surface of an oppressive courtly world that fails to rattle the bars of its own gilded cage. It is an ersatz biography, skewing some historical details, but nevertheless excavating the suffocating and exhilaration of its pink-cheeked, ill-fated heroine who is often depicted in an ‘if you can’t beat ‘em’, join ‘em’ character arc, becoming intoxicated on the bedizened world she neither escaped nor revolutionized.
On the heels of this binge, I immediately reread Fraser’s biography of the Austrian archduchess turned French queen that Coppola relied on, and, from there, the rabbit hole gaped wide open. Before long I was rereading Jane Boleyn: The True Story of the Infamous Lady by Julia Fox, one of the few texts that attempt to explore this elusive figure whose shadowy character belies the fact that she was always within sighing proximity to the crown. Then I delved into new territory, reading Hayley Nolan’s Anne Boleyn: 500 Years of Lies. In case the title doesn’t give it away, this biography is unique with its postmodern feminist lens, (one easily recognized by fans of the musical Six Wives).
What I discovered in reviewing my reading log and viewing history was that I am among the historians who gravitate towards biographies of women whom I am convinced society and the jaded world of entertainment have maligned in some way, shape or form; either intentionally or simply for dramatic effect.
Jane Boleyn: Did she or Didn’t She?
Jane Boleyn: The True Story of the Infamous Lady Rochford is ideal for ‘Tudorphiles’ (if that’s not yet a word, then it should be), whose enthusiasm for the meteoric rise and slow denouement of the Tudor clan will be sated in this excavation of one of the family’s more ambiguous side characters. In the introduction, author Julia Fox puts the entire book in context by comparing Parker’s status with that of her fellow royal woman. Though married to George Boleyn, a key figure in the Boleyn trinity of up-and-coming children, his wife has often remained a character regulated to the opaque sidelines, save in film or television adaptation, (besides The Tudors, there is Hilary Mantel’s 2009 Wolf Hall among others). When she does appear, it is as a vicious and scorned wife whose myopic goal is to take down her husband and the Boleyns in general.
In referring to the birth of Mary Tudor, the lone surviving child that Henry VIII and Katherine would have, Fox laments “What use was she in a masculine age when prowess on the battlefield could decide the success or ruins of a dynasty?” (xviii). The ups and downs of the woman who would become Viscountess Rochford was, indeed, defined by the idea of being useful to her family or not. There is nothing about personal ambition or dreams of glory; Rochford’s life is buttressed and buffeted by how she could be useful to her family. Nothing else mattered. With that as the guiding thesis, Fox makes the argument that Jane’s supposed betrayal of the Boleyns is not only unsupported, but downright ridiculous. One of the pivotal arguments that might have sealed George’s fate was when he read aloud a missive that detailed the king’s rumored impotence. Fox makes the point that, in doing so, George shared private information from his wife, and that “it is Jane who has been betrayed. She had told George what Anne had confided to her about HEnry’s sexual inadequacies but it a private Conversation between husband and wife, even it she had confessed to it when interrogated, is not the same as inventing malicious tales to bring down the Boleyns. She was not a tale-teller” (313).
She supports this by keeping references to Jane in the context of the Boleyn family, making her a significant supporting character in their world. When Anne, Thomas and George recognize that Jane Seymour is more than just a fling, Jane joins them in their trepidations. When the book segues from the fall of Anne Boleyn and George to the aftermath, Fox titles the section “Carving a Career”, prefacing it with the dismal realization that Jane’s widowhood would be atypical. “No sympathy would be offered and any tears would be shed in private. It must be as though George had never been born. Jane was on her own.” (198). Gossip and innuendo might have painted Jane as the vicious and maligned wife, but, the truth is far more layered.
Anne Boleyn: Girls Just Wanna Be Left Alone
Rather than try to sell its readers on the idea that Henry’s frenzied pursuit of Anne was done so out of love, Hayley Nolan delivers a narrative more on par with Six Wives. It is scathing, matter-of-fact and devoid of the romance. Nolan makes it clear that, when Anne fled the court after Henry’s initial advances, she fled. She was not playing the coquette, not trying to lure Henry to her with a come-hither coax of the fingers. She was a predecessor of the Me Too movement, a heroine more than a vixen, one that Nolan links to Meghan Markle in terms of rapacious scrutiny where cruelty seems to be the point.
The introduction is succinct, razoring through the gossip and going to straight to the heart of the matter with the title “Can You Handle The Truth?”. That unto itself is as much a question as an accusation, for the truth, as Nolan points out, has been out there for roughly 500 years, but public appetite has been sated with juicy gossip over oblique truth. Nolan goes on to declare:
“We’ve been sold a lie. All these years. It’s been one vamped-up story after another in a desperate bid to keep the ever-growing legend of Anne Boleyn alive. But the lies don’t add up. So many of the stories that have been spun just don’t make sense — in the media and movies, but even more shocking, in the hallowed history books by those we’ve come to trust.”
In some ways, Nolan stands out as the James W. Loewen of the Tudor landscape. (Author of Lies My Teacher Told Me.) She knows what information we’ve been given and she knows what rumors have been spread ad nauseam. Their stories are being rectified and there is an audience for that editorializing. So, does this mean that these women are finding getting their due, or does it simply mean that their tragedies and triumphs are still fodder for the public imagination, no matter what version we are being given? Their stories are still marred by gossip and innuendo, and there are never enough primary sources to prove every historiographical alteration. But the mere fact that we are willing to revisit these women instead of giving them the curt titles of ‘saint’, ‘sinner’, ‘vixen’, etc., says as much about us as it does them.
