Anne Boleyn's Imaginary Stepmother (low class and scandalous)

 

Elizabeth Howard Boleyn?

 

The Concubine by Norah Lofts  published 1963

The Lady in the Tower by Jean Plaidy  published 1989

The Lives of the Queens of England by Agnes Strickland published during the 1840s

 

I’ve just been reading a novel about the life of Anne Boleyn: The Concubine by Norah Lofts. I read it after blogfriend Constance/CLM mentioned it in the comments to this post:

Childhood reading and intellectual freedom

…and I intend to do another post on the book itself this week.

But first – something odd arose in the book. It is a work of fiction, and obviously there are imagined conversations, thoughts, and characters (more to come on all this). But I was very struck by the fact that in the book, Anne Boleyn’s mother Elizabeth has died when Anne was a young girl. Her father Thomas has remarried: his new wife is a woman of lower social class. She is warm and helpful to her stepchildren, and in return they love her.

Now this was a surprise, because it seems well-attested that Thomas and Elizabeth Boleyn stayed married until they died, a year apart, a few years after Anne was executed. (It’s always satisfying that Anne's sister Mary Boleyn thus inherited everything, though she did not survive much longer, dying in 1543.)

But then it got proper interesting: I decided to flick through Jean Plaidy’s Boleyn book, Lady in the Tower, and stap me if she doesn’t have the same story: dead mother, beloved downmarket stepmother. (Plaidy the other great queen of Royal historical fiction). I thought perhaps I had dug up some Lady Novelist Plagiarism Scandal, but no, though the explanation was still a good story.

There was a monumental Victorian work called The Lives of the Queens of England, written by Agnes Strickland (helped by her sister Elizabeth) and published in many volumes through the 1840s. Norah Lofts makes it plain that she is following Strickland – she quotes from The Lives frequently in the  chapter headings – and it doesn’t take long to see that Jean Plaidy is doing the same, and mentions Strickland in her bibliography. Large sections of both the modern books are flat-out dramatizations of Strickland’s version of the story. They are not limited to Strickland of course, as they are writing much longer versions. Strickland has all the Queens to do in her monster book.

Anne Boleyn as pictured in the 1840s

Anyway, Strickland was certain that Elizabeth Boleyn died when her children were young: apparently this was either a mistake in a historical document, or her own misinterpretation of the doc (I couldn’t find a way to see the original source) – probably a reference to a sister who did die at the relevant  time. Then, seeing references to a mother later in Anne’s life, Strickland assumed there must have been a stepmother.

Then there is a really weird leap. Strickland’s evidence for her being of low social class is as follows:

it is certain that Anne’s stepmother was a Norfolk woman of humble origin, and it has been observed that queen Elizabeth was connected, in consequence of this second marriage of her grandfather, with numerous families in Norfolk, of a mean station in that county.

This is a reference to Elizabeth being annoyed by approaches from Norfolk types claiming a connection and asking for money.

But, if you look at the original of this claim – in an 1830s book of anecdotes by William J Thoms – what it actually says is this:

Queen Elizabeth had numerous maternal relations, and many of them among the inferior gentry (particularly in Norfolk), an inconvenience which arose from her father having selected for his second consort a subject of no very elevated extraction, whilst the blood of the Boleynes was widely diffused by the intermarriages of numerous junior branches.

It surely means that it was Elizabeth’s father, ie Henry VIII,  who married beneath himself, not her grandfather, and Strickland misunderstood. Particularly ironic when it is generally thought that Anne’s one and only mother was of higher class than her father, being one of the Howards, the family of the Dukes of Norfolk.

illo from Strickland, based on a famous portrait of Anne Boleyn

One of the long-standing but unsourced rumours about Elizabeth Boleyn was that she too had been a mistress of Henry VIII, like her daughter Mary (Anne of course not his mistress, only wife) and it was even mentioned as a possibility that he was Anne’s father. Strickland is horrified by that idea:

It was not till long after the grave had closed over lady Boleyn, that the malignant spirit of party attempted to fling an absurd scandal on her memory, by pretending that Anne Boleyn was the offspring of her amours with the king during the absence of Sir Thomas Boleyn on an embassy to France. But, independently of the fact that Sir Thomas Boleyn was not ambassador to France till many years after the birth of all his children, Heniy VIII. was a boy under the care of his tutors at the period of Anne’s birth.

 

 and now she goes completely off-piste:

If there was any truth in the scandalous tales touching the intimacy between Henry VIII. and the lady Boleyn, the second wife of Sir Thomas, not the mother of Anne, must have been the person indicated.

It seems hard to blame an imaginary woman.

Strickland’s book is serious, detailed and obviously carefully researched, but this was definitely an error. There was no stepmother  - but if there had been then the claim that Queen Elizabeth was connected to all kinds of humble Norfolk families is pushing it a bit, when it was her stepmother, and not a blood relation. Fanciful.

However I feel Strickland is unlucky in that more than 150 years later busybodies like me can pedantically examine her words and check back on her original resources using only a laptop. (I am not, of course, the only person to have noticed this)

Strickland is so sure of her ground that she offers this amendment to a historical record, a letter to Cardinal Wolsey about Anne:

“my lady her mother [stepmother] desired me to send unto your grace, to desire your grace to bestow a morsel of tunny upon her.”

The error became widely repeated, but modern historians say there is no justification for this whatsoever, and there are clear records of Elizabeth Boleyn’s actual death in 1538.

It IS a bit of a shocker because I always say that young women (particularly) learn their basic history from these books: they enable them to get an order o events and a rough idea of dates into their head. [In Jean Plaidy’s much earlier book featuring Anne, Murder Most Royal in 1949, there is no mention of a stepmother, but there is almost no mention of any mother for Anne, and it’s the same  in  her The King’s Secret Matter, which focuses on Katherine of Aragon but has Anne as a character.]

The awful David Starkey was very rude about female historians: always a pity to give him more ammo. But Agnes Strickland seems to have been in general a very careful writer. She was opinionated, but then they all are, and particularly David Starkey.

I hugely enjoyed tracking this down. And I guess it shows that we will never get tired of reading about Anne Boleyn.

More on Norah Lofts coming soon…

Very hard to find a usable and reliable picture of Elizabeth Boleyn. The top one is often said to be Catherine Howard (Henry VIII’s fifth wife) but sometimes attributed as Elizabeth Howrd. She does look too old to be Catherine, who was very young when she was executed.

Illos of Anne from the Strickland book.